h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I would like to quote a little from a lecture with the above title delivered in 1992 by Professor Sir Hermann Bondi. It is quite relevant to this question...


...when people suggest that our ethics derives from Christian ethics then I can look at the period of undoubted Christian monopoly of faith and power. It was distinguished by with-burning, chasing heretics to the death, of the worst kind of so-called justice. These were periods when children were hanged for petty theft...

...[some] may come back and say 'Look these weren't really Christians', which is ... not that Christianity has been tried and failed but that it has been found difficult and not been tried. ... how can it be claimed that our ethics is derived from Christianity when it is explicitly denied that Christian ethics was ever practised?

People now claim tolerance as a Christian virtue, but 300 years ago you would have been in dire trouble if you had claimed that... And so it is not that there is any absolute foundation for Christian morality. On the contrary, it has changed out of recognition, and to suggest ours is too relativist and too liable to change with time is to forget all of Christian history.

The question then arises of what are the roots of our modern ethics? ... I suggest that it is the gradual growth of humanist attitudes going back to people like Locke and Hume and Voltaire and Thomas Paine. ... gradually led Christianity to change its ethics in a manner in which we find relatively few areas of potential disagreement.

I would like to posit the notion that Christianity was originally humanistic in tone.
What people, starting with Saul of Tarsus, have done with it in the meantime has corrupted it.
I'm not a churchgoer, by the way, but I figure that any historically significant 'prophet' with a positive and understanding world-view should be taken seriously. Whether it's Christ, or Buddha, or Confucius, or Aristotle, we can see a common theme.

Isn't religion, any religion, supposed to show us 'the way' to live in harmony as a civilisation?

Christ's Golden Rule has equivalents, and indeed antecedents, in other religions.
It's far easier to 'Do unto others...' with righteousness and honour, than to keep all the 'thou shalt nots...' in order.
The formula is so simple that it's ofttimes overlooked.
Too many fundamentalist and charismatic church 'leaders' have emphasised guilt, shame, fear, and anger to keep their congregations in line. These are negative spiritual states, which in my view are totally antithetical to individual growth.

Hmmm...I'd better stop, before this turns into a rant.



foolish mortal

You both have interesting points.

Mostly, though, I'm just posting here to state an interesting version of the "Golden Rule" that I read somewhere, but don't know where.

"Do unto your inferiors as you would have your superiors do unto you."