Losing our Dignity: How Secularized Medicine is Undermining Fundamental Human Equality

by Charles Camosy

There is perhaps no more important value than fundamental human equality. And yet, despite large percentages of people affirming the value, the resources available to explain and defend the basis for such equality are few and far between. In his newest book Charles Camosy provides a thoughtful defense of human dignity.

Telling personal stories like those of Jahi McMath, Terri Schiavo, and Alfie Evans, Camosy, a noted bioethicist and theologian, uses an engaging style to show how the influence of secularized medicine is undermining fundamental human equality in the broader culture. And in a disturbing final chapter, Camosy sounds the alarm about the next population to fall if we stay on our current trajectory: dozens of millions of human beings with dementia.

Heeding this alarm, Camosy argues, means doing two things. First, making urgent and genuine attempts to dialogue with a secularized culture which cannot see how it is undermining one of its most foundational values. Second, religious communities which hold the Imago Dei sacred must mobilize their existing institutions (and create new ones) to care for a new set of human beings our throwaway culture may deem non-persons.

Genres: Health, Nonfiction, Medicine

224 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2021

Reviews

[Gina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Granola

This book should have an index!

[Jerry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Losing Dignity is about the sanctity of life…the universal quality of holiness, sacredness of life. Herein, Professor Camosy describes the conflict between those who choose to sustain the seemingly hopelessly infirm until they pass naturally and those who choose to accelerate death because they deem viable life ended. Camosy’s perspective is Christian, faith-based and the other vision is best described by Professor Mattias Desmet as a mechanistic-based vision “in which man is reduced to a biological organism” disregarding his humanity. Also, Camosy argues the mechanistic rationale used to see the hopelessly infirm as other than worthy of continued care is also applied to unwanted babies in the womb; same premise. Here, Camosy is supported by the late British journalist, Malcom Muggeridge, who wrote that legalized abortion “turns hospitals into abattoirs wherein unborn children and the ailing old are systematically murdered.” This book will remain with you, in your subconsciousness as you live your daily, healthy life and in your consciousness when you confront your passing or that of those you love.