Forgotten humanity

Dorothy Sayers clearly describes what happens when we forget that people are individual human beings made in the image of God. We are not clones. We are not the Borg. We are not data points to be placed on a bell curve and judged accordingly. God is not a statistician or a manufacturer who churns out copies of a limited set of models over and over again. He is Creator, God, and Father who has fashioned mankind out of His infinite creativity. I think her words are applicable, not just to my country but to the church as well. What have we lost because we have forgotten what it means to be human and to treat others as human beings too?

What is repugnant to every human being is to be reckoned always as a member of a class and not as an individual person. A certain amount of classification is, of course, necessary for practical purposes…What is unreasonable and irritating is to assume all one's tastes and preferences have to be conditioned by the class to which one belongs...

To oppose one class perpetually to another - young against old, manual labour against brain worker, rich against poor, woman against man - is to split the foundations of the State; and if the cleavage runs too deep, there remains no remedy but force and dictatorship. If you wish to preserve a free democracy, you must base it not on class and categories; for this will land you in the totalitarian State, where no one may not act or think except as the member of a category. You must base it upon the individual Tom, Dick, and Harry, and the individual Jack and Jill - in fact, upon you and me.

Are Women Human?, Dorothy L. Sayers, Eerdmans, 1971, pp. 19-20, 36.