Posts
Why Are
You Not Evil? A Humanist Perspective on Ethics.
A Discourse given at the Northwoods
Unitarian Universalist Society by The Reverent Ross Hamilton Henry on July 16,
2006]
Reading
# 1 From The End of Faith by Sam Harris, Subtitled Religion Terror and the
Future of Reason.
A kernel of truth lurks
at the heart of religion because spiritual experience, ethical behavior, and
strong communities are essential for human happiness. And yet, our religious
traditions are intellectually defunct and politically ruinous.
While spiritual experience is clearly a
natural propensity of the human mind, we need not believe anything on
insufficient evidence to actualize it. Clearly, it must be possible to bring
reason, spirituality, and ethics together in our thinking about the world. This
would be the beginning of a rational approach to our deepest personal concerns.
It would also be the end of faith. …
No myths need be embraced for us to
commune with the profundity of our circumstances. No personal god need be
worshipped for us to live in awe at the beauty and immensity of creation. No
tribal fictions need be rehearsed for us to realize, one fine day, that we do,
in fact, love our neighbors, that our happiness is inextricable from their own,
and that our interdependence demands that people everywhere be given the
opportunity to flourish.
The days of our religious identities are
clearly numbered. Whether the days of civilization itself are numbered would
seem to depend, rather too much, on how soon we realize this.[i]
Reading
# 2
Epictitus
the former Greek slave turned philosopher said:
Every matter
has two handles, only one of which will bear taking hold of. If thy brother sin
against thee, lay not hold of the matter by this, that he has sinned against
thee. But rather, lay hold of it by this, that he is thy brother, thy born
mate; and if you do so you will have taken hold of the handle that will bear
handling.[ii]
Why Are
You Not Evil? A Humanist Perspective on Ethics.
OPENING
WORDS: I was asked to speak to you today on the subject of ETHICS and was
pressed for a title for my talk a couple of weeks ago. So, I chose the title,
“Why Are You Not Evil?” considering that if you include the word ETHICS in the
title of a talk, most people start to fall asleep immediately, I thought this
would make a snapper title. Most people find Evil more interesting than
Ethics.
I would also like to add in these opening
remarks that I am a Humanist Minister and the words you hear this morning are
from a non-theistic perspective. I think that most people realize, when they
enter the doors of a Unitarian Universalist church that they are likely to
encounter some unorthodox views.
That is going to happen today.
However, nothing that I say is meant to
insult or denigrate anyone’s strongly held beliefs nor am I hostile to people
who hold theistic beliefs. I realize that there are many good people who are
theists and there are many whose ethics are almost identical to my own except
for that one difference of opinion on the ultimate source of those ethics.
Many people do not realize that some of
the world’s major religions such as Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism do not
have, belief in a god as part of their ethical system. Doubt or skepticism or
atheism, is a respectable tradition that has existed since the dawn of history.
I realize that it may seem odd to some,
that a person who does not believe in god would be asked to speak from the
pulpit of a Church; however, I believe that just because Atheists do not
believe in god does not mean that we cannot be religious, in the most liberal
sense of that word.
My Oxford American dictionary defines
religion as the Quest for the Values of the ideal life. My Funk and Wagnalls
says that Religion is the attitudes constituting man’s relation ship with the
powers and principles of the Universe. I consider myself a secular religious
Humanist under these definitions, for my Humanist ethical journey requires that
I search for those values and relate to those principles. I base my search on
my observations of the natural world and believe that the word supernatural is
a contradiction in terms. The Natural World encompasses all that is.
Of course, we all love a good story. I am
a great fan of Mythology and of science fiction and I frequently enter into
that state that Samuel Taylor Coleridge called the willing suspension of
disbelief, in order to enjoy the fanciful world of the human imagination. I
remind myself once the adventure of imagination is over, that it is time to,
once again, begin to deal with events in the world of reality. So I un-suspend
my disbelief and reactivate my skepticism concerning claims of miraculous
supernatural events like time travel, spoon bending, sawing people in half,
walking on water, virgin births, and resurrections from the dead. My ethics
requires that I encourage others to do so as well and to remind people of the
comment of a famous Unitarian, P.T. Barnum. He said, “There’s a sucker born
every minute.” The lesson in this is don’t be one.
The philosopher David Hume has said that
once a thing has actually happened in the real world, it can no longer be
considered supernatural. It must then be reclassified as natural. Of course,
many things are reported to have happened that actually never happened. And
there are many wonderful things that happen every day that seem almost
miraculous: the birth of a child, a beautiful sunrise and the dawning of each
new day, these things are wonderful, but are all governed by the mundane miracle
of the existence of our universe and the discoverable laws that govern its
functioning. Carl Sagan has said that the greatest mystery of all is this: Why
is there something rather than nothing? This is a mystery that neither science
nor religion is likely to ever explain completely.
SERMON
BEGINS HERE
This talk is about Ethics of the
non-theistic variety, the kind that Humanists and most other Unitarian
Universalists follow, where, as Kurt Vonnegut has said, we try to be decent
human beings without the fear of punishment or hope of reward after we are
dead.
Of course, there is not enough time in a
Sunday morning service to give an exhaustive course on Ethics. Millions of
words have been dedicated to that topic by thousands of philosophers and
pundits. But, here are a few condensed ideas from some of those who have
written on the topic.
Urakagina, probably the world’s first
philosopher was an ancient king of Babylon around 5,000 years ago. The oldest
Ethical admonition on record is something he inscribed on a stone pillar: “It is the duty of the strong to protect the
weak.” This is something we do not see much of in our current
administration with tax cuts for the wealthy and automatic pay raises for a
congress that resists raising the minimum wage to a level that will give
workers a living wage in this economy.
Among the Ancient Greeks, there is Euclid
of Megara, who lived back in the 300’s BCE. He wrote the textbook on Plane
Geometry that is still in use today. He formed the Megarian School of
philosophy and said that although “the good” may be called wisdom, god, or
reason it is all one. “Good,” he
said, “is the final secret of the
universe, which can only be revealed by logical inquiry.”
Spinoza in 1674 said: “The good that we should seek for others is
the good that we desire for ourselves.” He was, in fact, a pantheist, who
identified the universe itself as an infinite sacred substance, which he
equated with the idea of God as ‘that
which there is nothing greater than.’ However, he did not believe that this
substance could be petitioned to aid individual human beings. He is perhaps one
of the most ethical men who ever lived. He was always tolerant toward his
fellow beings who were not so tolerant toward him. His own Jewish community
excommunicated him and forbade his fellow Jews to speak to him. Yet, he made
this statement:
“I
have made a ceaseless effort not to
ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions but to understand them.”
Although he was offered grants of money and
honored positions by royalty on several occasions, he turned them all down,
realizing that to accept them meant that he would not be free to express his
own opinions. He preferred to continue to make his living as a lens grinder and
to speak his mind and express his philosophy honestly. The world of philosophy
is much richer because of that. Albert Einstein was a great fan of
Spinoza.
Ambrose Bierce in the late 1800s said, “To pray is to ask that the laws of the
universe be annulled on behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.”
Many people make the assumption, in this
multi-ethnic, multi-religious nation, that if you are not a Christian, you are
immoral and if your ethics are not based on belief in the traditional concept
of a creator god who answers prayers and intervenes in the world on behalf of
his petitioners you are evil.
My thesis is this: I have not found this to
be true.
We Humanists and most of us Unitarian
Universalists refute that unwarranted, baseless and intolerant assumption.
Arthur C. Clarke said, “One of the
greatest tragedies of human history is the hijacking of morality by religion.”
He thought that, although supernatural
religion may have had a function in the past in enforcing good behavior on
primitive people the association is now counterproductive. “Yet,” he says, “at
the very moment when the two ideas should be decoupled, sanctimonious nitwits
are calling for a return to morals based on supernatural beliefs.”
Many people also put forward the claim
that this is a Christian nation and that the founding fathers and founding
mothers of these United States were all Christians. Therefore, they believe
that our Ethics should be based on the teachings of the bible and in particular,
on the 10 Commandments. Many see no problem in posting them in our government
buildings and having our government in effect endorse one particular religious
sect over all others. This myth of the U.S. as a Christian nation is another
mistaken assumption.
The founding fathers of
our nation were not Bible-believing Christians; they were deists. Deism is a
philosophical belief that was widely accepted by the colonial intelligentsia at
the time of the American Revolution. Its major tenets included belief in human
reason as a reliable means of solving social and political problems and belief
in a deity who created a universe that operated by natural law. They believed
that the god of the Deists created the universe and then left it to operate on
its own. This deistic god, did not intervene to alter natural phenomena; it
gave no supernatural revelations to human agents…
Deists did not believe in the virgin
birth, the divinity of or the resurrection of Jesus, the efficacy of prayer,
the miracles of the Bible, or that the bible was divinely inspired. These
beliefs were forcefully articulated by Thomas Paine in” The
Age of Reason” Other important founding
fathers that espoused Deism were George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin
Franklin, Ethan Allen, James Madison, and James Monroe.[iii]
John Adams was a Unitarian.
Fundamentalist Christians are currently
working overtime to convince the American public that the founding fathers
intended to establish this country on biblical principles; history simply does
not support their view. The men mentioned above were in no sense
Bible-believing Christians. Thomas Jefferson, in fact, was fiercely
anti-cleric. In a letter to Horatio Spafford in 1814, Jefferson said, "In
every country and every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is
always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for
protection of his own. It is easier to acquire wealth and power by this
combination than by deserving them, and to effect this, they have perverted the
purest religion ever preached to man into mystery and jargon.[iv]
We are once again, in this country, in
midst of an age where the alliance of Priest and Despot, or rather Preacher and
Politician has been forged.
Ethics has taken a back seat to ‘Politics-as-usual,’
and the fundamentalist allies of the party in power are claiming that their
ideas of morality should determine the values of our nation.
The philosopher C. S. Peirce has pointed
out a subtle difference between the concepts of Ethics and of Morality.
“We all know what Morality is,” he said. “It is believing what you
were brought up to believe.
Conservatism is thinking what you were brought up to think, not
trusting one's own reasoning powers. Hence, Morality is Conservatism.
To be a moral human is
to obey the traditional maxims of your community without hesitation or
discussion.”
Therefore, ethics is,
by the definition of these moralists, immoral. For Ethics requires that truth
claims be subjected to the tests of reason & logic.
The question I am
addressing here today is this: is it ethical to remain silent, out of some sort
of misguided idea that all religions are sacred and thus not open to normal
criticism even when they promote nonsensical views of reality and sometimes
even advocate hateful and intolerant doctrines.
My ethics reject the
idea that anyone’s religion is sacrosanct and should be above criticism. I
agree with the philosopher Daniel Dennett who says in his latest book,
“Breaking the Spell,” that it is time that we begin to examine religion as a
natural phenomenon.
Here are his words:
It is high
time that we subject religion, as a global phenomenon, to the most intensive
multidisciplinary research we can muster, calling on the best minds on the
planet. Why? Because religion is too important for us to remain ignorant about.
It affects not just our social, political, and economic conflicts, but the very
meaning we find in our lives. For this very reason, it is imperative that we
learn as much as we can about it.
Religious extremists
are attacking the secular institutions that are the basis of our democracy with
the stated goal of changing our Secular Democracy into a Theocracy. My
Humanistic ethics requires me to speak out against those who would tear down
the wall of separation that Thomas Jefferson and the founders of our nation
erected. Our nations chief executive continues to erode this sacred principle
of church state separation by distributing our tax dollars to the religious
organizations that he sees as his political base?
Some people ask, what harm is there in being deluded about reality or believing in a supernatural being who, we are assured,
has a plan for our lives so that we don’t have to have a plan. “What is the
harm,” they say, “as long as it provides comfort to those who hold those
beliefs.”
Here are a few ethical reasons why I believe there is harm:
1. It wastes time & money.
2. It diverts attention and resources away from possible realistic
solutions to real human problems.
3. It fosters distrust of science by discouraging healthy
essential skepticism.
4. It undercuts the desirable modernization of cultures.
5. It sustains immaturity.
6. It falsely imputes expertise to charlatans, like John Edward
who claims to speak to dead people, and Pat Robertson who claims to speak for
god.
7. It inhibits the practice of logical thinking.
8. It Encourages fraud.
9. It Overvalues triviality.[v]
I believe that our ethics require us to
begin to develop educational systems that teach critical thinking skill to our
children that will help them to achieve the maturity of mind necessary to be
able to see beyond these naive beliefs that now permeate our culture.
I am currently the chair of the recruiting
committee for The Humanist Institute. Over the past 3 years, they have sent me
to three or four conventions per year to enlist students in that Secular
Seminary. We have now graduated over 100 Humanist leaders who are now out there
in the world in leadership positions in their communities preaching the gospel
of Humanism to a world that desperately needs that message in these troubled
times.
This summer I was absent from Northwoods
for several Sundays attending the American Humanist Association Conference in
Tampa Florida, the Unitarian Universalist Association General Assembly in St.
Louis and I have just returned from the American Ethical Union Assembly in
Chicago. The A.E.U. is a nontheistic religious society that bases its religion
on Ethics. While I was there, in Chicago, I gathered some material on the topic
I am speaking on today. Each of the three organizations I mentioned above has a
list of statements that expresses the ethical principles by which they operate.
The AHA has its Humanist Manifesto; The UUA has its Seven Principles, which I
am sure you have all committed to memory so I do not have to cite them here.
But I would like to take a moment here at the closing to mention something
Felix Adler, the Ethical Union founder, called the supreme Ethical rule. Here
it is:
“We are committed
To elicit the best in oneself and in others by drawing out the unique
difference that constitutes each self.”
Their
by-words are “DEED BEFORE CREED.”
Here are some
of their core values stated in plain language for their young people:
*ETHICS IS MY
RELIGION.
*EVERY PERSON
IS IMPORTANT AND UNIQUE.
*I CAN LEARN
FROM EVERYONE.
*I AM PART OF
THIS EARTH; I CHERISH IT AND ALL THE LIFE UPON IT.
*I LEARN FROM
THE WORLD AROUND ME BY USING MY SENSES, MY MIND, AND MY FEELINGS.
*I AM A
MEMBER OF THE WORLD COMMUNITY, WHICH DEPENDS ON THE COOPERATION OF ALL PEOPLE
FOR PEACE AND JUSTICE.
*I CAN LEARN
FROM THE PAST TO BUILD FOR THE FUTURE.
* I AM FREE
TO QUESTION.
* I AM FREE
TO CHOOSE WHAT I BELIEVE.
* I ACCEPT
RESPONSIBILITY FOR MY CHOICES AND ACTIONS.
* I STRIVE TO
LIVE MY VALUES.
These final words are FROM JENNIFER
MICHAEL HECHT’S BOOK- DOUBT: A HISTORY. I think that they provide us with a
truly ethical perspective from the standpoint of skepticism.
. “The religions are all beautiful and
horrible, filled with feasts, sacrifices, miracles, wars, songs, lamentations,
stained glass, onion matzos, and intense communal joy…. The religions have also
been the energy behind much generosity, compassion and bravery. The story of
doubt, however, has all this too. It also has a relationship to the truth that
is rigorous and sober–… and it prizes this approach to truth above the delights
of belief. Doubt has its own version of comforts and challenges. From doubt’s
beginnings, it has advised that if you create your own desires and model them
after what you actually experience, you can be happy.
Accept that we are animals, but ones
with special problems, and that the
world is natural…. Devote yourself
to wisdom, self-knowledge, friends, family, and give some attention to community,
money, politics, and pleasure. Know that none of it brings happiness all that
consistently. It’s best to stay agile, to keep an open mind…. In a funny way, the one thing you can
really count on is doubt. Expect change. Accept death. Enjoy life. As Marcus Aurelius explained, the brains that
got you through the troubles you have had so far will get you through any
troubles yet to come.[vi]
CLOSING WORDS: G.K. Chesterton said the
mark of a good religion is if you can make a joke about it. So I will close with
the great skeptic Voltaire’ closing joke. When on his deathbed he was
admonished by a priest to renounce Satan and all his minions. Voltaire replied:
“Now, now my good man, this is no time to be making enemies.”
We living humans can and do love the idea of ethical heroes of thought
like Euclid, Spinoza, and Einstein, and heroes of compassion like Buddha and
Jesus of Nazareth. But Buddha and Jesus of Nazareth can no longer love you;
they died, one in old age, one killed cruelly by unjust men. However, your
fellow human beings, humanists who live among you in the mundane universe,
whose intention is to make the concrete world a good and loving community for
all humans, can, and many of them do love you. They do fervently intend that
outcome and do arduously work toward that end.
[i] The End of Faith, Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason. 2004
[ii] Epictetus,
Encheiridion, verse 43, Old father translation.
[iii] From an essay by Ferrell Till on the Internet Infidels web page.
[iv] Ibid Ferrell Till
[v] Robert Tapp, Dean of The Humanist Institute
[vi] From Doubt, A History by Jennifer Michael Hecht. P.493
