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27 Dec 09

Defending The Faith, And Morality, Of NonBelievers : NPR

www.npr.org/...story.php - Preview

interview ethics humanism religion morality

23 Aug 09

Truth, hope and light | New Humanist

newhumanist.org.uk/2092 - Preview

morality humanism ethics politics

But to dismiss the Right's appeal to moral values is to forget what it offers. However shabbily its partisans may behave, they offer a public conception of goodness the Left forgot how to defend.
The Left, by contrast, has deflated the concepts themselves. Most of the voices willing to speak in universal moral terms at all now consider themselves conservative.
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- The Right also lacks something that may be even more important than what it has: namely, embarrassment. Its partisans may abuse words like evil and hero, but they aren't afraid to take them in their mouths. Wary of simplification, and even more wary of kitsch, the Left tends to reject not only words like true or noble, but words like legitimate and progress which were meant to replace them. If used at all, they are subject to quotation marks to put distance between the speaker and her language - in the ultimate postmodern gesture to ensure that nobody takes anything very seriously at all.
- we have moral needs
- the need to express reverence and the need to express outrage, the need to reject euphemism and cant and call things by their proper names
- They include the need to see our own lives as stories with meaning - meanings we impose on the world, a crucial source of human dignity - without which we hold our lives to be worthless.
- while moral needs may be furthered by religion, it is not what keeps them alive. Rather, morality is grounded in the structure of reason itself.
- Moral inquiry and political activism start where reasons are missing.
- there are roots in the Bible, for believers, and in the epics of Homer, for secular readers, which reached their best expression in the much-maligned Enlightenment
- We must take back the Enlightenment from the clichés that surround it: that the Enlightenment held human nature to be benevolent and progress inevitable, faith to be a worn-out answer to the questions of the past and technology a solution to all the problems of the future. In fact, no era was more aware of the existence of evil, no era took more care in probing human limits and bounds.
- The Enlightenment took aim not at reverence but at idolatry and superstition; it never believed that progress is necessary, only that it is possible.
- Rejections of the Enlightenment result in premodern nostalgia or postmodern suspicion; where Enlightenment is at issue, modernity is at stake. A defence of the Enlightenment is a defence of the modern world, along with all its possibilities for self-criticism and transformation. If you're committed to Enlightenment, you are committed to understanding the world in order to improve it. Twenty-first century Enlightenment must extend the work of the 18th by pointing out new dangers to freedom of thought within our own culture as well as without it, and extend social justice by expanding older attacks on injustice.
- Scepticism and tolerance will not take us very far; while it's possible they may prevent harm, it's unlikely that they can inspire anyone to do good.
- human beings have equal rights to happiness on earth
- the commitment to reason - not as opposed to passion, which was as riotous during the 18th century as at any other period, but as opposed to blind authority and superstition
- reverence for Creation is a form of gratitude, and a sign of humility: whatever you think made the world, you had better remember it wasn't you
- Hope, a fourth Enlightenment value, is what drives all the others, but it is not the same as optimism. Hope is not a statement of fact but a foundation of action: if you think everything has been getting worse since the old days, you are unlikely to do much to stop the decline.