our moral compass: which way to true north?
A popular book these days on how we think – and why we think the way
we do – is The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and
Religion by Jonathan Haidt. As a professional psychologist he offers a lot of
good and useful insights into how we get so entrenched in our positions –
religious and political – that we tend not to listen to other points of view or
look for common ground.
His psychology/sociology jargon gets a bit tedious at times. But what
diminishes Haidt’s perspective is his self-proclaimed identity as a “new
atheist. ” Everything for him flows from reason and science; God and religion
are dismissed as unhealthy delusions. His “new atheism” asserts that “religion
is the root of most evil” and is the primary cause of war, genocide, terrorism
and the oppression of women. He scorns religious beliefs that “bind and blind”
and are really just an excuse for building community.
Indeed, a lot of evil has been perpetrated in the name of religion throughout
history, but that is from man’s own perversions, not religion itself. We know
that all evil comes from hell, not from faith in God. Religion does not advocate
war, genocide, terrorism and the oppression of women.
So Haidt’s concept is flawed from the outset. He sees morality in simplistic
terms of harm and fairness – defined, of course, by “science and reason.” We
see morality as much more than that, and rooted in spiritual principles.
For a traditional Christian perspective, consider Dr. William Bennett,
author of The Book of Virtues and other well-respected books on values and
history. In The Moral Compass – Stories for Life’s Journey he says the basic
assumption of the book “is that much of life is a moral and spiritual journey,
and that we undertake it . . . to find our way morally and spiritually.”
We can’t do this, he says, with vague values defined by subjective ideals.
Instead, we must raise our children “as moral and spiritual beings by offering
them unequivocal, reliable standards of right and wrong, noble and base, just
and unjust.”
New Church doctrine and New Church education go a step further. The
distinctiveness of the Academy Secondary Schools and Bryn Athyn College
stands out immediately in their commitment to enhancing the civil, moral and
spiritual lives of students and developing both a moral and spiritual conscience.
In his seminal book on New Church teaching, Education for Use, the Rt.
Rev. Willard D. Pendleton said that “the frightening realities of the world” –
which have only become more frightening since this was first written in 1957
– “emphasize the need for an educational system which recognizes that the
ultimate welfare of society is dependent upon the cultivation of a moral and
spiritual conscience in the individual.”
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