Posted: Oct 31, 2013 7:45 pm
Nora_Leonard wrote:You're right. But in my opinion it is best that they are bundled here, as because then that very question can arise: yes, you've got these ethical teachings in religion, but you've also got them outside of religious tradition. I.e. the question of right and wrong is not simply a religious question.
So have moral/ethical/philosophical education which might refer as an aside to what various brands and sub-brands of religions say on an issue (and also to what believers actually seem to do).
Ethics/morality might be something religions talk about (even if effectively only in terms of statements of divine authority rather than argument), but ethics/morality are not the property of religions, nor should education suggest that they are.
Nora_Leonard wrote:tolman wrote:
Claims of justification for moral/ethical positions which fundamentally reduce to 'god says so' or 'a claimed prophet claimed god said so' seem to have little merit when it comes to someone constructing a framework for moral reasoning, since the positions of any alleged deity on any particular issue could be quite arbitrary yet supposedly not open to question or in need of meaningful justification.
Well it wouldn't be RE in the modern understanding of the subject if students were taught that the only valid arbiter of moral decision making was on the basis of whether "god said so" or not!
But that is effectively what many religions seem to teach.
As far as Christian ethics/morality goes, what could RE lessons say apart from listing all manner of conflicting official positions from one or other brand, and then saying that people either follow dogma without thinking, or choose a morality for themselves with greater or lesser amounts of justification by post-hoc rationalisation and cherry-picking?
Now, I'd be the last to say that the morality/ethics of particular Christians would necessarily be worse as a result of thinking for themselves rather than swallowing dogma, but I would wonder to what extent their personal morality was really arguable as being 'Christian' rather than essentially personal.