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Some Thoughts On Constructing a Global Ethics Through Western Religion

There will not likely ever be "one religion for the world." But what role can religions play in the construction of a Global Ethics? Religions have always been carriers and shapers of cultural ethics, and each one offers a set of ethics which guides its followers and can be shared with the rest of the world. It is probably not true that "if people just followed their religions, no problems would exist in the world," (no major religion has any real ethics on ecology, for example, and this issue is fast becoming a serious ethical dilemma for the entire world. Certainly it means that each religion will have to rethink its definitions of nature and its ecological ethical requirements. And no "major" religion has an acceptable ethics with regard to women even now.) It means that religions all have to "think globally" in a different way than they have before, i.e., religious colonialism must become a thing of the past.

Here are some points I see as important to constructing a religious foundation for Global Ethics. The first question to ask is not "what is ethics" but rather, "Is ethics part of Nature itself?" This leads to the next obvious questions, what is an ethos? Who makes ethics? Is there (or can there be) a global ethics? And finally, "What role can religions play in this enterprise?" And since you need a world picture to create your ethos, "Can science serve as a common cosmology?" I am of the opinion that a science-generated cosmology is one which could be universally acceptable since it is externally generated and belongs to no particular tradition, and would obviate competition among the religions for cosmological dominance.

There remain the universal problems of transcendentalism versus pantheism, a dualistic view versus a monistic view, and the question of transformation of consciousness as necessary to a transformation of ethos. In that regard I note the (particularly Western) objectification of Nature as a problem in developing an ethics of ecology for example. Here I suggest daring step back to premodern beliefs about the universe as reverential, evolutionary, participatory, as unfinished, and as "home". One can see how the two "competing" Western views of science and religion are at odds in this regard: the Cosmos as "cooked", according to Scriptures, and the Cosmos as always becoming, according to Science. Perhaps this is what is at the heart of the old argument about evolution

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