Background

Perhaps before I reflect on some ethical issues, I should give a few indicators of sentiments that have informed my position with regards to the post modernist world that rather simplistically abdicates responsibility for ethical deliberation. The Princeton sociologist, Robert Wuthnow has said of his fellow Americans, though it could have been said of any other first world society: that they piece together their faith like a patch work quilt. In his book, Choosing the Good, Dennis Hollinger also makes the telling comment that Church members increasingly focus on experience, as opposed to coherent systems of meaning, and borrow from traditions that are frequently at odds with their own community's tradition. He quotes Alasdair MacIntyre from After Virtue who accurately referred to the current cultural state of moral discourse as emotivism. Hollinger goes on to deal with 2 of the most thorny irritants: the Great Virtue of Tolerance and what he terms the Triumph of the Therapeutic. The reason I mention this is that I have found it almost impossible to discuss any contemporary moral issue within society without first addressing these two insiduous and bankrupt notions that are the fallback for the great mass of the unthinking. Their usefulness extends only as a response to the equally imbecilic cover-all, antithetical little gem so favoured by - though not exclusive to - those with a fundamentalist bent: 'What would Jesus do?'
And so it has been my experience that those most viciously critical of the fundamentalist Christians and their 'ilk' are themsleves the most fundamentalist examples of walking, talking post modernist cliches.
I will deal with the first issue of Tolerance in my next blog.