Tenth International Conference on Religion & Spirituality in Society

Abstract

Our paper addresses global ethics for the faithful and argues for a practical effort for religious institutions to help improve world ethics. For the past few decades, the Parliament of World Religions has addressed the topic of global ethics. It has concluded that religious global ethics is impossible with the exception of one built upon the Golden Rule as it is the only common fundamental value among the world’s religions. As developed by such great philosophers such as Bertram Russell, moral relativism is a key concern in our paper. Briefly stated, it maintains that for rational thinkers, ethics is merely emotive and essentially nonsense. Fortunately for us, his colleague—Ludwig Wittgenstein—said that rational ethical argument was possible among people who shared a common fundamental value or values. In a 2019 book, we noted that ethics needs to be understood in the context of human consciousness. People, who have an egocentric consciousness, think ethically in terms of their pleasure or pain. Not surprisingly, many common ethical problems are closely associated with egocentric thinkers and less associated with altruistic thinkers. For our purposes, the fact that people can morally develop through training and education is important. If world religions took on the task of teaching the Golden Rule, with all of its moral implications, the ethical impact on the world would be remarkable. Ideally, that education would be a common curriculum centered on consciousness and addressed to the children in the world’s temples, synagogues, mosques, and churches.