How about a sermon
for this Sunday? Since I am an ordained minister, and an atheist,
I'll offer a secular one. I believe that sermons can be good. They
can be motivational, since they are meant to be food for thought. So,
I say we should be good to each other. How many of you would consider
yourselves to be Humanists?
The nature of the
ethical and moral philosophy of Humanism is that we must be concerned
about the suffering of all people. The basis for our Humanist morals
and ethics is solely the consideration of the well-being of others.
Life is too short. There is all too abundant sources of misery, pain,
illness and abuse, and all too many of us endure these things. All of
us suffer to some degree, from some thing or another. Surely, if we
can think of our own struggles, our own suffering, we can understand
the need to not cause more for other people? It should be easy for us
to think of when we wished for someone to help us in our times of
need. And so, it should be easy to realize the need to help others in
their times of hardship. But, we also reject the outdated and
irrelevant claims to morality that so many religions proclaim to
hold. We must question the motivations, effects, and uselessness of
such religious claims to morality.
The fact is,
religious claims to morality are: a few coincidentally good, most
irrelevant and some even quite immoral and harmful. For instance,
it's easy for Humanists to agree that murder, theft and lying are
immoral acts. The harm these acts cause to humans is well understood.
When we are concerned with lessening the suffering of all people, we
quickly come to the conclusion that murder, theft and lying are
inherently wrong. We can easily understand that they are immoral if
you consider deliberately causing suffering to be immoral. But, what
about saying that homosexuality is a “sin”? Many religious people
believe the simple natural being of someone feeling attraction and
love for another person of the same sex and same orientation is
supposedly wrong, or immoral. Yet, there is not one singular reason
of even slight validity that can be shown to be relevant. Just
because you might think it wrong to be gay does not in any way mean
that it causes harm to other people. There is simply no tangible
evidence, no arguable rationale, no conceivable way to claim that one
person's sexual orientation really has anything to do with the
suffering of other people.
The best the
religious can do is to argue that they believe that gay people will
go to hell for being the who they are. But, this requires proof to
support the belief. This requires the evidence that no religious
person has ever been able to produce in thousands of years. However,
it is quite clear, and there is plenty of evidence, to show that
acting on this myth-based belief is extraordinarily harmful to
humanity. In fact, realizing that religion does harm to people, that
it actually causes suffering, a Humanist must be inclined to speak
out against it. It is the religion that drives people to oppose so
forcefully the equality of rights for people who love each other, but
happen to be of the same sex. The religious are motivated by their
unfounded and invasive beliefs to fight against people for nothing
more than those people not matching the ideal of the religious
people. They are instructed by their religion to impose on others
against their victims' wills what they think is good, but for which
they cannot show a legitimate argument for suffering. And this means
the religiously-motivated are actually causing the harm and suffering
that we Humanists find immoral. There are, of course, plenty of other
examples. But, that should suffice for this point.
I also believe we
should consider what morals and ethics have to do with one's honor.
Fundamentally, there is honor is doing good. There is also dishonor
in doing harm. This means that religiously-motivated people who
impose their beliefs, which are not concerned with actual tangible
human suffering, they are dishonoring themselves. While those who are
only concerned with helping to eliminate suffering, based on tangible
and actual evidence, they are motivated honorably. Why do you help
people in need? If you do so because you wish to alleviate their
suffering, then you are improving your honor. If you do so because
you are told to do that, then you do not improve your honor. If you
help, but believe you will be rewarded, even in some imagined
afterlife, and avoid punishment thereby in that same afterlife, then
you do yourself no honor. Such a reason is not selfless, but quite
selfish. A desire to gain some reward, like heaven, or even an
Earthly reward, cannot be an honorable motivation to help. One can
only gain honor by helping others, if one's reason is solely that one
understands suffering and wishes to end that suffering for others.
So, I say that we
should all be exceptionally kind to each other. Be generous, be
respectful, be thoughtful, be helpful, be compassionate, because that
is the right thing to do. For there is a bounty of honor, only when
you do not deliberately seek such honor. I say help others, because
it helps them. Be a Humanist. Be human and humane toward others.
Being a Humanist is not merely the honorable thing to do, but it is
the human thing to do. One who fails to be a Humanist, is short of
being fully human.
Copyright © 2014,
Joshua Michail
All Rights Reserved.
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