The Prison of Moral Judgements

The majority of people live immersed in a world of moral judgments. They like talking about other people expressing an explicit or implicit judgment of them. “This man is good.” “That man I don’t trust.” “She is really hiding something.” “It is good – or bad – to be a cynic.” “She acted unprofessionally.” Read on…

The March of Equal Rights

This week it was announced that Scotland, Vietnam and New Zealand are beginning the walk towards equal rights for all sexualities to be married. The Catholic and Anglican Churches of England are in full rout, barely able to take a stand for more than days at a time. President Obama of the US has come out in support of equal marriages as state after state brings their laws up to date. What began with a leak in the wall of Church-lead prejudice in the Netherlands has turned into a tidal wave as the Christian Churches fold yet again. Read on…

The Secular Conscience

I recently attended a talk by Austin Dacey, of New York’s Center For Inquiry. He has a Doctorate in Applied Ethics and Social Philosophy. His book, The Secular Conscience – Why Belief Belongs in Public Life, was published in 2008 and has received wide attention. Dacey began with a Bible reading: the story of God commanding Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac. Abraham prepared to obey. Isaac was saved in the nick of time by an angel who said, “Never … Read on…

“Is faith necessary for ethics?”

Last night I participated in a debate on this topic, at a local college; there were representatives of five different religions, and I spoke for the humanist viewpoint. Here is my opening statement: The French scientist Laplace wrote a book about planetary physics; and Napoleon asked him why it didn’t mention God. Laplace replied, “Sir, I have no need of that hypothesis.” We humans get morality first from our human nature, developed through biological evolution, and second, from our thinking … Read on…

Francis Fukuyama: Why Civilization Is not Going to Hell

Francis Fukuyama’s 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man, taught me a lot about the world. In 1999, he authored The Great Disruption. This refers to the current, and third, major discontinuity in humanity’s way of life. The first was the emergence of agriculture; second, the Industrial Revolution; and now, transition to a more highly technological, “information society.” Each entails social disruption. Fukuyama sought to assess those consequences of our current civilizational upheaval. He recognizes a lot … Read on…

God is my co-pilot

PBS ran a program posing (inter alia) the question, “Where was God on 9/11?” The answer: God was in the cockpits of those planes. He was, indeed, the hijackers’ co-pilot. What they did, they did for God. You might argue that theirs was a perversion of religious faith. But people have been thusly arguing for millennia over who’s got the real truth, while religious zealots have tortured and murdered millions upon millions, century upon century, often in service to those … Read on…