Dropsafe

by Alec Muffett

Ethics 2.0

Rachel (for it is she) posted a long comment / summary regards the Ethics questionnaire she gave me:

As she who has the Ethics tutorial tonight with this questionnaire and it’s friends I share a few personal and general thoughts in case any one is faintly interested.

Alec also found New York Times http://tinyurl.com/2jqgoc which I found immensely useful especially the first few pages. I decided that the questionnaire looked at moral rationalisation rather than reasoning and wondered particularly if lifestyle is replacing faith ref: “people tend to align their moralization to their lifestyles”.

I then discovered Church Times article this week by Lord Harries (ex Bish of Oxford) that you won’t be able to access but looked at the question of If God is the source of morality for Christians, how, then, do they reach a common mind with the secular world?

More generally I was asked whether I can draw general conclusions from the different answers I got to the questionnaire. Very few is the answer. however 4/6 cited parents as their gratest moral influence, including the Chrsitians. Alec was obviously one of the exceptions given what he added in review, but as an ‘interested observer’ of his life for the last 20 years (scary thought) I would suggest that his Father (much missed as he is) was the greatest influence on generating his independant spirit and viewpoints etc., because that was Dr M’s way of doing things. He wanted people to think for themselves and ask awkward questions before making up their own minds, or at least that’s how he came over to me.

The only people that really gave me an ‘essay’ about the relevance of the Church to non-attenders were the non-attenders – which doesn’t say much for the evangelical attitudes of my Christian friends. They tended to be more concerned with things like sex before marriage – and saw that (surprisingly?) as a grey area that was situation dependent (for example sex should be supported for older people in widowhood relationships or between couples where at least one party is going to war).

I wonder however how much my interest in the results is based on voyerism – being interested in how my friends think, rather than in the usefulness of a rather badly designed questionnaire.
Btw – don’t worry Clive, I’d still ask him for a character ref… he knows I speed too. In fact possibly more than he does, although usually because I’ve not clue as to the limit because I’m thinking of something else, or trying to keep something in my head until I can write it down!

Thanks Alec for taking part!

I am particularly intrigued by the “grey areas” and the rationalisation thereof.

Not to mention how many of the respondents were approaching being (or had been) “older people in widowhood relationships or between couples where at least one party is going to war”.

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Comments

2 responses to “Ethics 2.0”

  1. JC

    Does widowhood include its poor relation, divorce?

    Reply
  2. rac

    OK – the grey areas of sex before marriage – the rationalisation (and this isn’t mine) went like this – that it depends on the age and situation of the cople: basically young Christians should not lose the opportunito to live by God’s best way of loving if that is what they profess to believe in. There is then the debate as to whether the loss of the ‘sex taboo’ contributes to the quantity of broken families and whether this contributes to the ‘poor start in life’ that many children experience.

    The men going to war idea revolved around the “chance to pass on their genes” arguement – perhaps a generational viewpoint – but still perhaps valid. It doesn’t work quite as well for our serving women however, though I wonder about the “while you are alive to experience it” arguement.

    Apparently marriage in later years for widow(ers) can involve loss of pension support, and I know it can complicate a will, but the latter can be overcome with a good lawyer (my father has one, I know this is true). This in my view would be true for older divorcees as well – and my respondent was ambivalent about younger couples who following a divorce may need to live with a future partner before marraige to help test the waters, heal the wounds and find trust again.

    Talking with our tutor (a young married curate) last night he thinks there are very few people that enter marriage today, even in Church or as Christians who have not had sex before marriage. He doesn’t see this as a problem – as he put it, that’s what God’s grace is for!

    For the record, of the 6 respondents I had, one was a widow over 70 another a widower of 60 starting a new relationship, another a Christian in her 60’s. The rest were between 39 and 50 variously. It was simply those friends who I could get to do it.

    It was not designed to be scientific, however one of my fellow students is a prof market researcher (and single dad) and is using his own firm to undertake a more numerous and more carefully assessed survey – results in a couple of weeks.

    My respondents were reckoned to be the most intersting by my collegues…particularly noted was Alec’s comments about story, which were reflected in our course notes which say that post-modernism challenges the Churches claims that the Christan story is ‘the big picture’ but that this does not mean that Christians themselves ave to abandon their understanding of God’s purposes and salvation. A paradox is noted in taht despite rejection of ‘metanarrative’, post modernism has rediscovered story as a way of talking about truth and reality – people stories are now used widely in extrinsic arguement for example the Moral Maze on R4 this week on organ donation: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/religion/moralmaze.shtml

    Another of my respondents talked about the teachings of the church needing strong leadership for them to be taken seriously and made relevant. I would add these leaders also need to be seen to ‘do as they say’. The respondent in question notes:
    “Crudely the Church of England has not had many lateley, however the Archbishop of York may prove to be a notable exception!”

    To which my response is “Amen, Praise the Lord,” and that of my tutorial was “Sentamu for Canterbury – please!”

    You might like to read Matthew 5:21-26 and know that I now have to write a sermon for Sunday on that passage… timely but tricky. Thanks for reading.

    Reply

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