Ethical Decision-Making
How do we make decisions in hard cases? Sometimes situations present choices between clearly identifiable rights and wrongs. But sometimes choices are between competing values which both have a tug on our sense of what is right and good. Or sometimes the only choices available to us are choices with negative consequences.
This morning Gretta Vosper looks at one mode of ethical exploration – the debate – then tries it out on the congregation. She speaks of Melvin Tolson, a professor at Wiley College, who groomed champion debating teams. Successful debating demands a suspension of personal commitment – you must be prepared to think on either side of an argument. Gretta divides the congregation in half and asks each side of the sanctuary to take a side in the “Lord’s Prayer in the Provincial Legislature” controversy. Watch what happens. You’ll see just how difficult it is for people to speak to a view for which they have no personal commitment.
Here’s the Word, on Mother’s Day
May 10, 2008 04:30 AM
Gretta Vosper
Special to the Star
This is an edited excerpt of a sermon Rev. Gretta Vosper is preparing to deliver at West Hill United Church on Mother’s Day.
While looking for some catchy quote to put on the church sign board, we found that the options covered the entire spectrum from the truly saccharine to the thick and chewy. One, as it turns out, is being used down the street at an obviously evangelical church. It reads, “If evolution really works, how come mothers only have two hands?”
I think I’m going to adapt that for our sign: “If there is such a thing as intelligent design, how come mothers only have two hands?” When you think about it, the latter one is the better question.
Read the rest of Gretta Vosper’s article …
Pay Attention!
Gretta Vosper tells of her encounter with Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass. Pullman, who openly describes himself as an atheist, has created a world which testifies to the death of god yet continues to have about it a numinous quality. But it raises the question: without god, can we still enjoy a notion of the transcendent in our world view? The philosopher, Anthony Simon Laden, offers an answer to this through his essay “Transcendence without God: On Atheism and Invisibility” which uses a notion of attentiveness that he finds in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. (Read about this on Mark Vernon’s blog.) Perhaps those of us who are not atheists but who nevertheless have less traditional apprehensions of the divine should be attentive to Laden.