Credo

[mdlbear]

This post is derived from a comment I made to this post, which in turn refers to this rant about people who use "Christian" as shorthand for "Right-wing Christian fundamentalists who want to tear down the separation of Church and State and legislate their version of morality". It's certainly incorrect to do so, but you have to admit it's shorter. I try to use "religious right", but sometimes I forget.

What I have problems with is the idea that you have to have faith in something supernatural in order to behave decently toward your fellow humans -- that faith is somehow a prerequisite for morality. I have even more problems with the idea that some particular bag of unsupported beliefs is the only valid one, and that people should be forced to follow that bag's version of morality for their own good. There seem to be a lot of people in the Bush administration and the Republican party who share that idea, and the Republicans have gone to great lengths to encourage (rather than to correct) these people in order to make them their power base. So, with a different bag, do the Islamic terrorists. Going back in history we find a whole host of other horrors, which I will not enumerate here.

I'm an agnostic. I have a secular Jewish family background and long-standing Pagan leanings, but way down deep I believe, like the Buddha before me, that questions about how many deities there are and what, if anything, may be their involvement in human existance, are ultimately unanswerable. I believe that you have to behave decently toward other people regardless of what answers you, and they, have found for those questions.

I believe that ritual, prayer, and meditation are useful tools, and can have an effect whether or not there is any supernatural being paying attention at the other end of the line.

As comforting as it would be to believe in life after death, I have seen no evidence for it. I believe that it would be evil to mistreat someone in this life in the belief that "it will all come out right" in the next one. That leads to the kind of "the end justifies the means" thinking behind the Spanish Inquisition, the Salem witch trials, and the more recent abuses in Abu Ghuraib.

I believe that people should be judged as good or evil by their actions, not their beliefs or lack of them, and that a jury of twelve rational people can usually be counted on to tell the difference.

I believe that I could go on almost indefinitely in this vein, but that I will be late for work if I do.

Comments

[mrlogic.livejournal.com]

Beautifully put, Steve...I almost completely agree.

[jilara.livejournal.com]

Ditto what he said. I tend to say things like "morality is a convenient system of rules for people who don't care to judge issues on their own merit." I regard it as quite separate from ethics. I think we're pretty much on the same page.