The Table

Conversation Meeting Place, Date & Time: Sunday, 11/17/2024 @ 6:30 PM – Black Walnut Cafe, Coppell, TX.

In the last post we examined three worldviews as portrayed in the movie Forest Gump. There are many others. Here we examine another.

In a recent post on Vox’s, “Your Mileage May Vary,” advice column a woman pregnant with first child writes,

“…I’m worried that I don’t know how to instill morality in a kid if they don’t have a scaffolding for it. Should I raise my child as a Christian even though I don’t actually believe in Christianity anymore, and just let the kid figure it out over time? Or can you get the positive effects of being raised in a religion without actually being raised in a religion?“

Sigal Samuel, senior reporter for Vox’s Future Perfect and co-host of the Future Perfect podcast responds,

“To put my cards on the table: I do not believe you need religion to live a moral life. I’m sure you know this, too, because if you think about all your friends and colleagues, you’ll probably find that a bunch of them are very good, kind people who were raised secular. They are all existence proofs that a person can be good without God.”

Before joining Vox, Sigal Samuel was the religion editor at the Atlantic, and from with the woman’s question as a starting point she launches into a lengthy dissertation on the history of the secular humanist worldview. The whole post is worth a read.

In one sense, Samuel’s response is largely correct — as long as there is, first, an agreement on what is “good.” Without a solid point of reference, what is “good” is mere opinion. What you consider “good” others may consider bad or inconsequential, and vice versa. Religion isn’t just a husk around an ethical set of values which can be discarded. It provides the foundation and justification for those values. So, no, in another sense the two cannot be separated.

Second, there is a larger issue beyond simply defining what’s “good” — the ability to actually do it.

This goes back to the Greek philosopher’s idea that people were bad because of their ignorance about what was “The Good”. Ethics was a matter of education; people need to be taught what was “good.”

The apostle Paul disagreed. Knowledge isn’t the problem. I know what good is, I just can’t do it.

Conversation Starters

• Rather than referring to Christianity as the “foundation” for her morality, the woman referred to having a “scaffolding” for constructing her child’s morality. It seems a rather odd way to put it. What do you think she meant by that?
• From the Wikipedia article, “Secular humanism posits that human beings are capable of being ethical and moral without religion or belief in a deity. It does not, however, assume that humans are either inherently good or evil, nor does it present humans as being superior to nature. Rather, the humanist life stance emphasizes the unique responsibility facing humanity and the ethical consequences of human decisions.” From what was outlined above, how would you respond?

References For Further Inquiry