Law, medicine, and religion: towards a dialogue and a partnership in biomedical technology and decision making.

Law and ethical standards are not subjects of research and discovery; they are the fruits of slow evolutionary processes. The law does not search out as do science and medicine; it reacts to social needs and demands. Law is not an end in itself-it is a tool, a means. 1 The truths contained in religious doctrines are after all so distorted and systematically disguised that the mass of humanity cannot recognize them as truth. Sigmund Freud 2 Religions, philosophies, arts, the social forms of primitive and historic man, prime discoveries in science and technology, the very dreams that blister sleep, boil up from the basic, magic ring of myth ... symbols of mythology are not manufactured; they cannot be ordered, invented, or permanently suppressed. They are spontaneous productions of the psyche, and each bears within it, undamaged, the germ power of its source.