Hello,
yesterday one of the people of your organization doing outreach at Broad and High asked “if you say the laws shouldn’t be based on religion, then what should they be based on?”
At the time I answered the laws should be based on “human, secular values.” But it would be more accurate to say the laws and customs of societies should be based on empathy and compassion which are found in all religions and cultures as well as in non-religious philosophies.
By contrast religious dogma is not universal (whether it pertains to the belief in a virgin birth (Christianity) or justifications for caste (Hinduism). Religion pits one group, nation, or civilization against another.
One of the aims of religion is the attempt to dominate another culture or defend one culture from domination by another. Islamic fundamentalism is at least partly the result of the attempt among Arabs to resist Western imperialism.
Of course secular ideology, such as political systems of thought, also leave a trail of suffering. It’s not only religion that has a bloody, pain-filled track record of grotesque hypocrisy, (whether the religion in question is Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and so on.)
But, religion involves a degree of certainity among adherents usually greater than what’s common among people fighting political or other secular causes. The extra degree of certainity among people fighting a religious cause might impede the ability to build reconciliation and intensify fanatacism and intolerance.
There is a better way : a global value system based on love, and put into practice thru systems of knowledge based on rational thought. That, not religious or political fundamentalism, is the solution to the flaws of modernity as well as the problem of Western imperialism and unaccountable capitalism.
Like Christianity and other major religions, Islam doesn’t seem up to the task of being a framework with which human beings can lovingly address the social and ecological challenges that threaten our quality of life and our survival as a species.
Though Christian fundamentalism (allied with the concentration of political and economic power) threatens the United States, maybe one sign of hope is that Islamic, Jewish, and Christian fundamentalists won’t forge common ground anytime soon in pursuit of theocracy.
At least in the long run, morality based on a non-religious and scientific understanding of empathy and compassion may gain wider currency as a viable philosophical framework for meeting the challenges we face on our abused planet. Imagine a world in which the majority of human beings look to the Hindu Shastras, the Buddhist Sutras, the Bible, and the Koran as mythical sources of inspiration, not the infallible and immutable word of a god or gods.
Acknowledging our shared humanity,
Tom Over
betterecology.wordpress.com 