Is ethics that clear? ...

Monday, May 14, 2012. What is my ethics? What is guiding my behaviour? What is guiding my words, my thoughts, my emotions, my decisions, my actions?

How to behave? …

We live in a world with a lot of freedom. But it is also a world full of conflicting ideas about how to behave. Partly, we live in a delicate balance in western societies. We try to balance freedom and justice. We try to balance economy and ecology. We try to balance freedom of choice for the individual and rules to support society as a whole.

There are some of us who think that they know exactly how one should behave. It is interesting enough that this belief is on very different branches of our society. The religions right thinks they know how ethics should be, but also “the alternatives” or “green movement”, and the communist or left parties. There are those who think that you are not allowed to have an opinion, at least not one particular about one of their key issues.

For a while it seemed that society will not care - but I think the big debates about ethics will come back. They are natural, and currently they are only suppressed by ignorance of a particular type. And also, these issues are important for every one of us, making decisions!

The Bible is full of advice …

A while ago I went through the New Testament and marked all parts of it where advice with respect to our behaviour is given with a red text marker. I marked all encouraging parts green and everything about the holy spirit in yellow. That was quite interesting. I realised how many passages there are about the holy spirit, but also how many ethical advice is there.

I think it is interesting that the New Testament has so much to say about very concrete points of our life. It seems necessary to say that much. On the one hand, there is a big emphasis on the freedom, which God gives to us. He saves us. He dies for our sins. He wants us to be free! But then, it seems necessary to help us to live that freedom. He does not want us to be drawn back into the dirty things - those he calles “darkness”.

The longer I deal intensively with “behaviour” or “ethics”, the more involved things get. It is an interesting topic, strongly interwoven with all parts of social activity and with strategic issues as well - how to reach things … Do you want to know more? (Roland Potthast) ... more texts