111 / Religion and ethics
Two articles in the paper (SMH) deal with faith and ethics. Phillip Coorey reported on a meeting in Melbourne where guest speaker John Howard said, "the Judaeo-Christian ethics has been the most profound moral … influence in this country" … and "Australian society is losing something when we don't recognise the important role of religion. " But how are morale and ethics in our - or any secular society, or any society, for that matter - reliant on religion?
On the front cover today, archbishop Peter Jensen argues
against the introduction of ethics classes in public schools; he says, “without
a religious component (in school education) public schools will cease to be
inclusive of all children.” How so? Ethics classes would do the opposite, as
they embrace all beliefs, religious and secular.
It is arrogant in the extreme for the Religious Right
to claim ethics can only be found in religion. It could be argued that - when
one looks at the problems religions have burdened society with over the
centuries - ethics are available predominantly outside of religions and that if religious people are ethically and morally
inclined, they are so in spite of religion, not because of it. The moral fibre
of a society - and ours is no exception - stems from people’s desire to do the
right thing, not from some scurrilous belief in God's son having arisen from the dead. Or, even more pertinently, God telling us what to do or not.
A case in point is this story from the U.S. …
Decency v free speech: grieving
father goes to Supreme Court to fight weirdos of the Westboro church
Some nights Albert Snyder wakes up
at 3am. Other nights he doesn't sleep at all, tormented by thoughts of the
hateful signs carried by a fundamentalist church outside his Marine son's
funeral.
"Thank God for Dead Soldiers."
"You're Going to Hell."
Hundreds of grieving families have
been targeted by the Westboro Baptist Church, which believes military deaths
are the work of a wrathful God who punishes the United States for tolerating
homosexuality.
Most mourners try to ignore the
taunts. But Mr Snyder couldn't let it go. He became the first to sue the church
to halt the demonstrations and he's pursued the group further than anyone else.
Now, more than four years after his
son died in a Humvee accident in Iraq, Mr Snyder's legal battle is headed to
the Supreme Court. And his tireless efforts have drawn support from across the
country, including a wave of donations after he was ordered to pay the church's
court costs - a $US16,500 judgment that the congregation plans to use for more
protests.
Lance Corporal Matthew Snyder, 20,
was not gay. But for the Westboro church, any dead soldier is fair game. Pastor
Fred Phelps oversees a congregation of 70 to 80 members - mostly his children
and grandchildren. They consider themselves prophets, and they insist the nation
is doomed.
As Mr Snyder sees it, Westboro isn't
engaging in constitutionally protected speech when it pickets funerals. He
argues that Mr Phelps and his followers are disrupting private assemblies and
harassing people at their most vulnerable - behaviour that's an incitement to
violence.
"This is more than free speech. This is
like yelling, 'Fire!' in a crowded theatre. Somebody's going to get hurt,"
Mr Snyder said, his voice rising and eyes welling with tears.