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Good Morning Archbishop George Carey has put the cat among the pigeons roosting above the chamber of the General Synod. Just a few miles from this studio in York, where today history will be made as the Synod votes again on women bishops, the thunder has been stolen. George Carey’s change of mind is set to hover around the headlines until the House of Lords debates Assisted Dying on Friday. The former and present Archbishops have used strong words in the battle for public opinion. There’s a pantheon of moral principles at stake but two stand out – the sanctity of life and the freedom to choose. But what happens when two moral principles collide? If you take the Bible as a whole its attitude to life is relative. In the Old Testament murder merits the death penalty. Albeit to uphold the value of life. But human life is not such an absolute that it cannot be disposed of. See for example the taking of life in a just war. The Bible also reveals a God who exercises choice and makes humanity in his image with a similar freedom to choose. That is an absolute. But, of course, there are consequences to all our choices. When it comes to choosing what is right or wrong we look at three things, the intention, the nature of the act and its consequences. Now on both sides of the argument the intention is to ensure dying with dignity. And if the act of taking life is morally relative then we are left with examining the consequences. If the law does change patients will be able to end their own anguish, but the world of the patient will change forever. The relationship with the doctor will hold a new possibility – that they’re there with a power to take life as well as to save it. The relationship with the carer will change as the patient knows that they have the power to release them from their obligations. And the patients’ relationship with themselves will change as they try to weigh their worth in the dusk of their lives. Yet consideration of these consequences will not anaesthetise the distress for those who go slowly and painfully through the valley of the shadow of death. And who among the people of faith has not sometimes prayed that God would hasten the death of a dying loved one. I have. So it’s no surprise that over a 100 peers have signed up to speak on Friday. It’ll probably be the House of Lords at its best.