Saturday, November 14, 2009
Universal values?
Bob Abernathy, a host of a PBS program, "Religion and Ethics NewsWeekly," and a former NBC correspondent, gathered, with William Bole, interviews from the program into a book, The Life of Meaning. Abernathy, a member of the Cleveland Park Congregational Church, attended a meeting of the book club there last week and explained that they included an interview with Rushworth Kidder; president of the Institute for Global Ethics in Camden, Maine; because they wanted to emphasize that a non-religious person could be ethical. The title of the chapter is "The Good, without God." Rushworth comments that world survey work produces five universal values: honesty, responsibility, respect, fairness and compassion. Readers, would you add to or subtract from this list? Would the list be sufficient to remove the ethnic and religious violence plaguing the world?
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I would add a sense of largeness to this list. Largeness in the sense that the good individual sees himself as part of a larger self needing to be the good steward of his family, community and country.
ReplyDeleteI would enlarge the last comment view to include being a good steward to those with whom an individual becomes connected, including those beyond immediate family, community and even country.
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