Category Archives: Ethics
Eleven Year Old Granddaughter Asks about Donald Trump
Her mom’s reply: My 11 year old asked me why people (Donald Trump) were saying we should deport all immigrants, Hispanic and Muslim, why he wanted to start a database or have people wear numbers, why he thinks we should close our borders to an entire race/culture, why he said such angry and ugly words about people. She said ‘a lot of my friends wear scarves on their heads. They are not bad people, they are nice and my friends’. I have tried to explain to her what’s going on. I have told her both sides. That bad people have done horrific things in the name of a perverted view of a religion. That those things keep on happening all over the world. She has seen some of the news coverage about it. She, in her 11 year old head, is trying to understand something none of us will ever understand. She also immediately understood something I think all of us should.
Let’s step back for a moment everyone. Step back and truly listen to what’s being said right now. Hate is rampant and being applauded. This has all gone too far. Do we not remember the holocaust? What’s happening in our country right now, is the beginning. Yes, there are people (monsters) who pervert a religion to justify killing innocents as there always have been. This is not new, nor is it confined to a disgusting perversion of the Muslim faith. Yes, we DO need to do something about it. No, we don’t need to incite fear and hatred.
My 11 year old understands this. Why can’t adults? After I explained, as impartially as possible, which I will admit was difficult for me, why Trump (and others) were saying the things that they are, she looked at me and in all her 11 year old wisdom asked quietly ‘isn’t that what Hitler did?’ She, as a babe, understands the ramification of what is being said. She has little 11 year old friends who are scared because they wear a headscarf or go to the mosque. She sees their fear and hurts for them. Isn’t about time we, as adults, took a page from her book of wisdom and say ‘this is enough! We will defend the innocent, but we will not do it by punishing the innocent!’
My heart hurts and my brain is tired. Please stop this hate. Stop applauding it and spreading it. Stop before it’s too late to bring this freight train of bigotry and racism to a halt.
From Monkeys to Jesus: Has Humanity Made the Leap from Monkey Yet?
I read about a Psychology 101 behavior experiment today that raises some interesting questions.
You start with a cage containing four monkeys, and inside the cage you hang a banana on a string, and then you place a set of stairs under the banana.
Before long a monkey will go to the stairs and climb toward the banana.
You then spray ALL the monkeys with cold water.
After a while, another monkey makes an attempt. As soon as he touches the stairs, you spray ALL the monkeys with cold water.
Pretty soon, when another monkey tries to climb the stairs, the other monkeys will try to prevent it.
Now, put away the cold water. Remove one monkey from the cage and replace it with a new monkey. The new monkey sees the banana and attempts to climb the stairs. To his shock, ALL of the other monkeys beat the crap out of him. After another attempt and attack, he knows that if he tries to climb the stairs he will be assaulted.
Next, remove another of the original four monkeys, replacing it with a new monkey. The newcomer goes to the stairs and is attacked. The previous newcomer takes part in the punishment – with enthusiasm — because he is now part of the “team.”
Then, replace a third original monkey with a new monkey, followed by the fourth. Every time the newest monkey takes to the stairs, he is attacked.
Now, the monkeys that are beating him up have no idea why they were not permitted to climb the stairs. Neither do they know why they are participating in the beating of the newest monkey. Having replaced all of the original monkeys, none of the remaining monkeys will have ever been sprayed with cold water. Nevertheless, not one of the monkeys will try to climb the stairway for the banana.
Why, you ask? Because in their minds, that is the way it has always been!
My thoughts on this.
Unfortunately this is true of many, if not most, of us human beings. We don’t seem to have made the leap from monkeys.
This is why I so admire the human aspect of Jesus. He responded to the challenge to outgrow his prejudices and even his convictions about the limits of his ministry. It was painful (we see him weep as he has to accept that the people he loved and thought he could save from their blindness reject him). Over and over we see him change and grow beyond both the limits and misunderstandings of his traditional religion, beyond his own followers, his era and even beyond his own previous assumptions. Often the challenges to His traditional religious attitudes and limits come from disreputable sources: women, gentiles, Samaritans, the military of the hated conqueror, sinners, and the sick.
That kind of openness is pure grace! And that’s what it takes to become fully human.
A cartoon on Facebook along with my recent immersion in the history of the Cathars while traveling in South Western France resonated powerfully for me along with the story of animal behavior.
The cartoon showed a Knight riding a horse and holding a flag with a cross emblazoned on it while leading long lines of armed soldiers. One of the soldiers says to the man next to him, ” I hear it’s because we’re right and they’re wrong.”
The Cathars were people who began to question some of the priorities and beliefs within the Christian Church of the 13th century. After failed attempts to convince them of the error or their ways, Pope Innocent III with the support of the armies of the King of France mounted a crusade aimed at completely eliminating the Cathars. It took many battles and involved burning down cathedrals while the Cathars seeking sanctuary were inside them and burning thousands of others at the stake. Some pious Catholics attempted to save their Cathar neighbors and friends and were ruthlessly wiped out along with them.
Who do you think were Christ like in this scenario?
Blog Challenge: What is an Object that Has Meaning for You? Letter from Albert Einstein
At the age of seventy-eight very few objects have any meaning at all for me. My husband and I have downsized twice, ending up in an apartment so that we don’t have to worry even about inside repairs. Most things we have managed to find room for here are simply practical. So, I tried to think of what I would try to save in case of fire.
Many years ago when our house was threatened by fire, I loaded up our station wagon with my husband’s suits so he could continue to work, our large collection of family photo albums and several paintings I had done. By now, I’ve given most of my paintings to my children and the albums are being left in storage for them to sort out and divide. The truth is, I’ve always been focused on the future and my main interest has been in ideas that can help humanity survive and evolve.
The only object in our house that couldn’t be replaced and that has implications for the future of humanity is a letter signed by Albert Einstein in 1947 to my father, Ralph S. O’Leary, who was an award winning newspaper reporter at that time.
Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists
Trustees: Albert Einstein, Chairman; Harold C. Urey, Vice-Chairman; Hans A. Bethe; T.R. Hogness; Philip Morse; Linus Pauling; Leo Szilard; V. F. Weisskopf
Dear Friend:
Through the release of atomic energy, our generation has brought into the world the most revolutionary force since prehistoric man’s discovery of fire. This basic power of the universe cannot be fitted into the outmoded concept of narrow nationalisms. For there is no secret and there is no defense; there is no possibility of control except through the aroused understanding and insistence of the peoples of the world.
We scientists recognize our inescapable responsibility to carry to our fellow citizens an understanding of the simple facts of atomic energy and their implications for society. In this lies our only security and our only hope – we believe that an informed citizenry will act for life and not for death.
We need $1,000,000 for this great educational task. Sustained by faith in man’s ability to control his destiny by exercise of reason, we have pledged all our strength and our knowledge to this work. I do not hesitate to call upon you to help.
Faithfully yours,
A. Einstein.
Perhaps this can be a reminder to a world of proliferating nuclear arms from the very men whose brilliance brought them into the world, but who recognized their own responsibility for their danger to humanity.
Sometimes the USA Gets it Right – Finally
The Supreme court of the United States has, in one paragraph, made the perfect statement about love, equality and dignity: “No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family. In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were. As some of the petitioners in these cases demonstrate, marriage embodies a love that may endure even past death. It would misunderstand these men and women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage. Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfilment for themselves. Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization’s oldest institutions. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right.
Smart or Intelligent? Moral or Ethical? Religious or Spiritual?
Due to a bad case of writer’s block, I am reblogging more old posts.
11:27am
Being smart and being intelligent are different in practice. Being smart is more about the present moment and the practical, being intelligent is about learning from the past, so humanity can live both free and humanely in the future.
Morals and ethics are different also. Morals are about not doing evil, while ethics are about not achieving reasonable goals evilly. Morals are immediate and personal. Ethics are long term and social.
Ethics question whether an end, particularly the goal of our personal happiness, justifies means that hurt people and that set precedents for corrupting society.
In trying to pass down values for a changing world, I want to challenge my descendants:
1. Morals: Don’t do it if you don’t want those you care about to read it on the front page or see it on U-tube.
2. Ethics: Don’t do it if everyone else also doing it will make…
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Can Misuse of Free Speech Be Considered Use of a Deadly Weapon?
In the 1950s our home in Houston, Texas was bombed, because my newspaper editor father had endorsed the first African American candidate running for a position on the local school board. Though no one was injured, as a teenager it was terrifying to feel so vulnerable to a hatred I couldn’t understand. So, I am certainly not an advocate for terrorism. And as both the daughter of one newspaper editor and the mother of another, I am a strong supporter of freedom of the press, but not of a press without a conscience.
Words can be as inflammatory as bombs, as most revolutions have proven. Certainly sarcasm and ridicule are generally recognized as deadly for peaceful relationships, whether personal or political.
The violence involving the newspaper Charlie Hebdo in France seems almost a chicken and egg situation with both sides shooting from the hip at anything they don’t like. We tend to applaud the revolutions seeking democracy, violent or not, because we understand them. Other than the Irish, most of us don’t understand the ones that use a religious excuse for violence as a way out of being helpless as a minority.
So much of the violence in the world, even genocide, grows out of a long and painful history of conflict, that is only known up close and personally by the participants. The rest of us only see the resulting boiling over of centuries of equally shared hate filled interactions.
I certainly don’t know the solution, but in my eighty-two years as an American, I’ve been taught to fear, and thus hate, the Germans, the Japanese, the Italians, the North Koreans, the Russians, the Chinese Communists, the North Vietnamese, the Pot Pol Cambodians, the Communist Cubans, Al Qaeda, the KKK and more.
Though I accepted America’s excuse of shortening World War Two by dropping atomic bombs on two civilian Japanese cities that resulted in at least 250,000 civilian casualties, from much of the world’s view, Harry Truman could be grouped with Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot as a mass murderer of the innocent.
How do we begin to break the unending cycles of fear and hate that perpetuate violence?
I oppose violence in any form, including vindictive, abusive, ridiculing, hate filled and irresponsible writing, cartooning or speech. Again, I wholeheartedly support the right of free speech, but not freedom from conscience or responsibility. Ridicule is not an effective response to any threat. It is self-serving egotism. It simply pours fuel on the fire.
Pouring fuel on the fires of hate and fear, however we do it, is not only immoral, it is self-defeating. Every one of us is called to become a peacemaker in whatever way we can. There are no winners in wars. Violence of any kind kills our souls.
What If It Only Takes Ten More People Becoming A Little More Loving to Change the World?
I have been reading and learning a lot about forgiveness. We all have different proclivities for how we handle anger and hurt. Recently a blog post about our responses to horrifying acts of terrorism against innocent children challenged me to explore the polarities of love and anger and forgiveness.
I’m not sure about this, but some scriptures and some experiences I have had myself make me suspect that forgiving someone has healing power not only for ourselves, but for the offending person. And here’s the freaky part: it can happen concretely simultaneously across great distances without being communicated. I can’t prove it. I have not read anything much about it, but I have had some minor, but thought provoking, experiences.
Also, years ago, I read a small book called “The Hundredth Monkey” which had some research statistics that claimed that monkeys on separate islands and continents can suddenly simultaneously learn new “human” kinds of skills. Their conclusion was that when a certain level of a population of a species acquire a new trait or ability, it somehow triggers a leap in the species across the world. And the author’s hope was that if we as individuals became peaceful, eventually the critical number of our species would bring about world wide peace.
I kind of liked the idea and shared it with friends, but my logical self was very dubious. And since statistical studies such as this can seldom control all the variables, I took this with a grain of salt. Until recently when driving, I hesitated to start across an intersection when the light turned green because more and more people are running lights right after they turn red. And sure enough someone did. In the last four or five years I have observed a steady increase in this disturbing phenomena.
Something clicked for me today. Is this a negative example of the “hundredth monkey” theory?
Again, as David Hume taught, cause and effect are almost impossible to prove, which is why we measure statistical probability. But even a remote possibility that our own small struggle to become more loving, forgiving, peaceable people might have a lot more significance for the larger scheme of things would be reason enough to expend more serious time and effort on that project!
Most of us reach a point in our lives where we recognize that we cannot change others, we may can facilitate their attempts to change, but we can’t make anyone want to change and we can’t magically change them even when they seek change. It’s a helpless feeling and tends to make us feel pretty hopeless about things like drug addiction, terrorism and war, and the gross inequality of resources and standard of living across our planet. And even when we are consciously on a Spiritual journey putting time and effort into becoming more loving, forgiving, and peaceful, there are times it hardly seems worth the struggle, if we are managing at least to avoid breaking the big “TEN” in case there really are a heaven and a hell.
What if it matters a lot more than we can imagine for us to clean up our only mildly toxic act: our cursing bad drivers, keeping people out of our lane when they have ignored the warning that theirs is closed further down the road, turning people against one another through gossip, holding grudges, spending a major part of the rest of our lives seeking vengeance under the name of justice for real harms done us or those we love, or even just blaming everyone else for our own failures?
I tried to teach my children to judge the effect of their actions by the age old excuse, “Everybody else is doing it.” What will the world become like if everyone else does what you are doing? What will hotels have to charge if every person steals a towel or a pillow? What will driving anywhere be like if everyone drives like it’s a race to beat out all the others?
Or maybe even more pertinent, perhaps everyone not doing the same things you are not doing. Not offering help to someone that hurt our feelings, not reaching across differences, not sharing from our abundance because we assume the worst of others. Not picking up trash. Often we simply ignore our sins of omission.
The infamous butterfly fluttering on the other side of the world isn’t making a moral choice, but we do each make numerous moral choices as to what we do or neglect to do each day.
What if it only takes ten more truly loving people to change the world? Not by their accomplishments, but by their love, forgiveness, and peace? Will you and I be one of that ten?
Abortion: Do We Choose Law or Love?
Expecting others, who are very different from ourselves and our families and who may live in much harsher environments without the emotional and physical support we have, to make the same hard choices we might make is not even just, never-the-less loving.
This week I voted against Amendment 1 which was to allow Tennessee to write its own stricter laws on abortion.
The following paragraph is from my daughter-in-law who chose to give birth to a wonderful child that she and our son and all our family have loved and nurtured and delighted in for over a decade, even though an ultra sound early in her pregnancy showed that the baby had a serious disability. These are not the words of a woman who chose abortion when she could have.
“Imagine you have a 13 year old daughter. Now imagine that she has been raped or molested and that act of violence resulted in pregnancy. Now imagine sitting in a clinic with her while she is made to watch videos on embryonic growth that are filled with anti-abortion propaganda. All of it intended to make her feel guilt over her decision and change her mind. Just think of how she is being violated all over again because at 13 she cannot bear to carry a child, because at 13 her life would be doomed due to no fault of her own. Imagine it. That’s what Tennesseans voted for last night: victimizing victims.”
Having been in high school and college during the nineteen-fifties, I’ve lived through one cultural extreme to the other: the first being absolutely no abortion, social/religious rejection of unmarried pregnant women, and strongly recommended institutionalization of children born with defects.
To be honest, fear of pregnancy and all that would come with it were the deterrents for me not having sexual relations before marriage, not morality. I simply wasn’t pure or mature enough to be spiritually motivated. I also lived a very protected life and wasn’t aware of women being raped. Being a devout coward, the cultural taboos were a protection for me.
But in the intervening years, I have learned that a surprising number of my many women friends gave up babies in those times. Now, some are reuniting with their “lost” children. I have also had the shock of knowing Christian women who have been raped through absolutely no fault of their own. And I have been the confidant of way too many Christian middle-class women who were molested or violently raped as children by authority figures, some of them close family and supposedly Christian. And I assume this wouldn’t even approximate the number of young girls raped among the economically underprivileged.
However, I find the reality, that society now considers sex just a physical experience on the same moral level as bowel movements and that abortion is used as another form of birth control, totally unacceptable.
This is not as simple an issue as both sides want to make it.
The slippery slope of when an embryo becomes a human being has no clear cut answer. The question of whether defective human beings are of such value that others must sacrifice the quality of their lives to nurture and protect them is also a serious and difficult issue, including the question of who is capable of taking that challenge on. The problem is that those having to make these choices are not all the same. They were not all protected, they are not all intelligent, they are not even all adults, or emotionally stable, they may or may not have been taught the spiritual value of sacrifice, never-the-less the finer points of theology, and their financial situations vary drastically.
This is not an even playing field.
If we want to see the issue as black and white and applicable to all Americans, regardless of whether they believe in a particular religious moral code that calls abortion murder, we are going to have to be consistent about killing as a moral option. Is killing ever moral? When? Why?
Is it moral to send our children by the thousands to kill and be killed fighting in places we have no legal and a very doubtful moral right to invade? Our current response to fear of others in the world is simply to bomb them, killing the innocent along with those we judge as guilty. Is a Syrian child of less value than an American embryo? In a democracy the government represents the people. You and I are as responsible as our leaders and those that aim the bombs.
Can we risk killing those found guilty of killing others within our own society, knowing the statistics on the innocent people that have been sent to their death by our system of justice? Is the jury morally responsible in those cases?
Is it moral to kill in self-defense? Can we morally kill in defense of our property? Are jewels and computers and televisions worth killing a human being who is possibly capable of repentance?
Can we allow people to take their own lives? Can we allow dying people to choose how they die?
Regardless of how we believe we personally would choose, we need to look deep within ourselves, imagining those vulnerable ones we love being the child or person facing these decisions. It’s not just an impersonal theological issue. Do we have the right to make these kinds of decisions for people we know nothing about and that we take no responsibility for the consequences we are insisting on forcing on them?
