I think he would say the pope could enter into an interreligious dialogue, a popular euphemism that I think Tracy would agree almost never means what it says.

A couple of questions: regarding those with a flawed consciousness, who will or cannot cooperate, choose to harm, or use up a lot of resources, how does someone with a mental disability fit in? They may not be necessarily harmful but they may have limited ability to cooperate (produce like our work oriented society expects) and they do often require more resources than the average person due to their special needs. Are their lives still worth preserving? This is why I find utilitarianism dangerous. In fact, didn’t Hitler begin his holocaust with this special needs population by arguing that they could not pull their own weight and Germany could save a lot of money by eliminating them along with their costly needs (plus, he argued that they were living miserable lives anyway so they were better off dead in the long run).
Secondly, in the evolution of humankind, one thing the Church did campaign to bring to an end was the practice of human sacrifice wherever the Church encountered it (as with the Celts and the Aztecs). Wouldn’t a relativistic view allow such a practice to continue based upon the preferences of a particular culture, or was the Church taking an objective approach by saying that harming life wherever it is done is inhuman and objectively wrong?

Sounds exactly like what I am saying. Life is one; we are instances of life taking material form. Humans in particular (though not necessarily exclusively) are instances of life progressing through material form to the point of becoming conscious. This is a two-edged sword. We can mistakenly identify individual consciousness as individual life, use it to make the finite self as big and real as we can and cause untold destruction; or we can see the transitive nature of our finitude as a beginning stage in the evolution of consciousness as a collective property of life and thus transcend finitude, which is my understanding of Teilhard’s Omega point. It is another kind of birth, a conscious Big Bang perhaps.

Unity is immanent. We can/will experience it anytime we don’t block it out. Caught with our guard down, we might have a breakthrough. I think the most common way is “seeing through the eyes of another,” a wonderfully twisted phrase. That seeing is a hair’s breadth away from realizing that we can only see through other eyes if we are behind them, if we are the other. I think it happens all the time, we make little connections, something jars us, but I get an image of poking a hole from inside something like a self-sealing tire. The way out lasts only until the wall closes back up. And the stronger the sense of self, the quicker it repairs the holes. Conversely, the more attention you pay to those jarring moments – Scrooge and the ghost of the future or Romero and his priests being killed – the slower it closes back up.

Thanks for leaving a comment. It’s great to know that this can be stumbled upon.

Can finite beings, which have to protect themselves in order to remain as finite beings, achieve through their finitude and mutual dependence a willingness to give themselves to one another, to conceive and to act for the good of the whole? Keiji Nishitani describes a feeling that all of us, not just human beings, but all living things, are living from the same life, like leaves on a single tree. Each soul is life itself, taking some particular form, whether human, animal, or plant. He calls this a “sympathetic affinity” among the living, indicating a unity deeper than our everyday superficial relations.