Ethical Overdrive

"This is how we know who the children of God are

and who the children of the devil are:

Anyone who does not do what is right is not God's child"

~1 John 3:10

People all over the world have different ideas about different religions or whether there is even any place for any of them. And I don't think it is really possible to diminish those differences much, because this debate about what the very center of existence is about is at the crossroads of extremely powerful and conflicting desires and impulses. It's a battlefield.

Think about it: millions of people out there are trying to define what your entire existence is really about, and that definition may not be one you like. It may be one you hate. I may dislike atheists defining me as chemicals in a pointless universe; atheists might hate theists for saying that if they don't believe in God they are basically frakked; I may hate capitalists defining me as little more than a market and a consumer and a source of dollars to be extracted; Hindus and Buddhists hating on Muslims and vice versa - the more critical the issue, the more it goes to the very pith of our existence, the more vehemently people will fight about it.

It may say something about politics as a quasi-religion that something of that vehemence has infected our politics as well. Lots of people are indifferent to religion but not at all to politics. Perhaps this is the ultimate degeneration of religion, that it becomes mere politics. Even to the irreligious, whatever they think is the point of existence is de-facto their religion. Nobody escapes from religion in this broadest sense, because nobody escapes making decisions about what is important in life and those decisions are based on beliefs.

So this ideological conflict about the point of life and the human person is a battleground of great ferocity. What is also clearly true is that there are good and bad theists and good and bad atheists, good and bad Hindus and good and bad Muslims, and that whether a person is relatively a good or bad person is not well predicted by what they believe. Gandhi is rightly viewed by many as a moral example, but he was an indifferent Hindu. He kind of did his own thing. His murderer was a member of a Hindu nationalist party. Almost everyone can also think of examples of Christian leaders who can say the most absolutely hateful evil things and justify them with cherry-picked quotes from the Bible, even if what they say is clearly (to almost anyone else) contrary to Jesus' own teaching.

What this suggests is that while beliefs about the ultimate meaning of existence are of an almost infinite variety, the spectrum of ethics is not nearly as wide. You can roughly divide people into these three categories:

1.) The committed ethical
(those with very high internal resistance to acting unethically, extremely high personal standards.)

2.) The committed unethical
(people who positively like acting unethically especially if they think they will benefit.)

3.) A big swath of people in between
(people with varying degrees of resistance to acting unethically.)

And while there are limits to reasoning out religion and a wide variety of starting assumptions, few such limits exist as to ethics. One need only accept in common a very few basic principles in order to start reasoning together on a common basis. So that even if you disagree, your disagreement is measured to the same standard because you agree with the same fundamental assertions.

I believe in valuing and respecting all life,
that all living things have inherent value 

Notice that this declaration does not require a specific religious belief, even if it might be best supported by a religious belief. There are probably plenty of atheists who would be willing to agree with this statement, and even if they do not agree with it ideologically, they act as if they DO agree with it when they in fact treat living things with respect. The purely ethical commandments (as versus the religious commandments) of the Ten Commandments can be derived either partially or entirely from this one sentence. A person who acts in a manner contrary to this statement is an evil person.

To me, my faith in G-d is the most important thing in my life, there is no close second. It may not, however, be something I can likely convince anyone else to agree with me about. We do not stand on common ground, we stand on a ground of irreducible division. Debates on ethics, on the other hand, start from things we all have in common or rather beliefs which all people of good will share by the nature of being a person of good will. It is possible for these people of good will to reason together towards a logical conclusion, assuming that all participants are willing to agree that the pursuit of the Good and of right action is a higher priority than personal advantage and selfishness.

This, finding common ground in ethics, may in fact be a point of leverage to finding common ground in religion as well. But whether it is or not, it is surely more profitable to start looking for ways to bring things together rather than always tearing them apart in ideological or political conflict. What is ethical is what is good, and very few people will say point-blank that they believe in being evil. That might not be much of a foundation for a better world, but it is at least some foundation.

But of course, the statement above about the value of all life is fundamentally a religious statement even if it is widely accepted by people of many religions or none. Ethics is still founded on religion, but not necessarily my religion or your religion but a vague fundamental consensus on good and evil and that it is important to be the one and not the other.