For a little while now I've been stumbling around the web. That's not to say that I've been aimlessly wandering through the vast expanse of the electronic jungle, but rather that I've joined StumbleUpon and have been using it to navigate. One neat thing, aside from the system's ability to learn what kinds of sites you like or don't like, is the ability of friends to send you their stumbles as well.
One of my brothers shared a wonderful stumble with me today. It was a short video clip featuring Dewey of the sitcom "Malcolm in the Middle" from godlessAmerican.org, a site dedicated to providing agnostics, atheists, freethinkers, secular humanists, or other non-religious people "who wish to participate with a voice, a strategy, a vehicle in promoting the policies we embrace." To see what they do, and what policies they embrace, visit them yourself.
In this short clip, Dewey manages to come pretty close to summing up my views on ethics without religion. He gets the essential argument that we need not worry about some imagined and unseen, larger-than-life being up in the sky in order to live ethically. Indeed, worrying about it may not only prove futile, but may distract us from simply living life with as much kindness and decency as possible. While suggesting that we can live ethically without theism, and may be freer to focus on living well without it, Dewey leaves the question of the existence of god alone. And he does not provide any indication as to how we can determine what is decent, kind, and ultimately ethical. But then he is a mere child.
We as adults should certainly be able to leave behind childish things and stand on our own feet. It may not always be easy to determine what is ethical in a complex world. It requires much reflection, much questioning, much analysis and attention to detail, and above all, it requires that we learn to extend ourselves, to imagine ourselves in place of another. In other words, it requires the practice of compassion. It requires not faith, but imagination, this ability, and though it is instinctual, it is capable of refinement. All of these abilities, these skills, like any other, are focused and sharpened with experience. The more we do it, the better we become at it.
I think we are, as the great satirist Jonathan Swift put it, rationis capax, capable of reason. It is unfortunate that this ability so often is relegated to a subordinate position. Most of humanity continues, especially in the realm of ethics, to join Homer Simpson in asking, 'Can't someone else do it?"
