TNQ | Troythulu’s Noontide Query
As a former Seventh-Day Adventist, I drew my moral principles from religion until I came to see their source, dogmatic scriptural authority, as absolutist, and now consider much of Old Testament ‘morality’ wrong and outdated. We’ve made real moral progress as a species since the Bronze Age of the Middle East over the past 3,000 years.
In my experience, I found much of scriptural morality associated strongly with feelings of anxiety over the most trivial shortcomings and, yes, you guessed it — fear of Hell…
After looking around a bit and being disappointed each time I looked, it hit me that there was no way I was going to have authentic, non-arbitrary ethical or moral values from any sort of faith-based authoritarian belief system or doctrines, so after the futility of looking for a new religion, I eventually stopped believing in faith as a path to valid knowledge and started more closely examining my supposed justifications for believing what I do, looking into more philosophically-based theories of ethics.
And so it goes…
I finally settled on humanist philosophy as just the right fit, and it stuck with me ever since as a guide for proper behavior toward both other humans and other species.
So here’s the pop question–
From what source or sources do you draw the sense of morality and ethical duty in your life?
TNQ is a daily question that I pose to you, my readers, and please, do feel free to comment — I’m not an ogre. As per the title, TNQ is published each weekday at 12:00 PM
Posted on Thursday, 12:00, March 25, 2010, in Troythulu's Queries and tagged Noontide Query, Query, Question, Questioning, Questions. Bookmark the permalink. 1 Comment.
I was raised Southern Baptist and really didn’t question the church until college. Then it was so much things I learned in college, as problems within the church at the time, that convinced me that I no longer fit the organized church. The events occuring at the time in the SBC and what I had been taught, didn’t add up. So, although I don’t have much use for the organized church today, I do still follow alot of what I was taught by my parents even today. Most of the basics, ex: the 10 commandments, really make alot of sense when thought about logically. Another test I use is: Is this action/inaction going to impact on another person/being/critter/plant in a positive or negative way? Is it of any importance? That question may seem a little odd, but I use it to separate three classes I use, sometimes rather arbitrarily. Is it another equal being, a majestic plant/animal , or is it a utility object/food? Like life itself, the way I consider things doesn’t translate well into a set of “rules”, every event is different, and I consider all events one by one.
Carl