Religion & Ethics: Content from Across the ABC




Date/Time 13 Feb 2016 11:35:18am
He believes governments must not mandate prayer. That schools and parents are the ones best able to determine these things. What is concerning today is mandated secularism, a religious view of life, based on the belief in the absence of intrinsic moral principles in the world, transcendent order and orderer. Something impossible for most people to believe. MLK was writing in a very different time and context. What concerns me here is the idea that there exists neutrality in a debate about ultimate things. That ethics classes are somehow non-dogmatic (without authority). Nancy, authority is unavoidable. Who determines how and what is taught? which first principles are accepted? A child cannot do this work on their own, nor can a country expect each generation to establish a religious and philosophical tradition from scratch. Natural philosophy (science) is taught authoritatively, students aren't asked to work out how plants grow, or how digestion works by themselves.

On the possibility of completely objectifying one's own moral self knowledge.
[Kolakowski The Presence of Myth p.25]
"You must know that nothing is good or evil, but I am teaching you that some things are good and some are evil, in order to induce in you conditioned reflexes which are useful for the maintenance of solidarity in communal life which is neither good nor evil but must be seen as good."

The outcome is thus:

"The natural social self defense against education so conceived (that is an education which gives up authority or employs authority while at the same time proclaiming its fictitiousness) is understandable. Since an effective inheritance of values is always the work of authority, and every act of emancipation from authority may arise only in the name of values absorbed thanks to authority, a scientistic upbringing is therefore an absurd utopia."