As such, they were characteristic beliefs of the dominant culture of Europe for many centuries and seemed to many, who reflected on them, rationally defensible. Confronted by this particular native witness, many of you may feel inclined to adopt the characteristic posture of the sceptical anthropologist, for whom native beliefs are never to be taken at their face value. The 15 minutes allotted to me provides insufficient opportunity to put a case for taking them seriously. The most fundamental belief of the Christian is that the world has been created by God and exists in a relationship of fundamental dependence on God. The world, and human beings in particular, have been created for a purpose.
Human happiness depends on our achievement of that goal.
Because we are equipped by nature with the radical capacity to develop those abilities which are the precondition of our recognising and freely accepting God's offer of friendship, human nature as such possesses a great dignity. But we cannot make good sense of the acquisition of those abilities without assuming an active capacity to acquire them, inherent in the individual from the outset - in other words, from conception. The dignity which is proper to our nature is what grounds our equality in dignity as human beings. This equality in dignity is in turn the basis of our possession of fundamental human rights. The most elementary of those rights is the right not to be unjustly killed.