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Every human being is born with inherent, inalienable rights to control of their own body.
Justice has long arm.
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No source entered for Contribution #6588
If your understanding of the divine made you kinder, more empathetic, and impelled you to express sympathy in concrete acts of loving-kindness, this was good theology. But if your notion of God made you unkind, belligerent, cruel, of self-righteous, or if it led you to kill in God's name, it was bad theology.
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Source type: Book
The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness
http://
Contribution #6512
[Under A Cruel Star ] taught me to be less interested in competing labels - Democrat or Republican, black or white, gay or straight, Christian or Jew, Muslim or Hindu - than in a far more essential pairing: humane or inhumane. [It] taught me that the good - those who act out of compassion, decency, kindness, consideration, and even a recklessly arrogant love of life - are better than the great.
A believer is actually not a true follower of his faith though he claims so. He follows many religions through the windows of culture, norms, and conventions howsoever they may be narrow.
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No source entered for Contribution #6449
The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge. Without 'ethical culture' there is no salvation for humanity.
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No source entered for Contribution #6447
My own experience and development deepen every day my conviction that our moral progress may be measured by the degree in which we sympathize with individual suffering and individual joy.
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No source entered for Contribution #6432
We couldn't enjoy the freedom of driving if there weren't rules of the road, or of eating, if there weren't food safety rules. Really, every sort of human activity - from bed-making to baseball-playing - involves rules.
We can also celebrate that, unlike many human-made rules open to endless debate, nature offers us nonarbitrary, infallible guidelines. Could we see that certainty not as a restriction, but as a relief?
And we can ask, what rules do people love? Those that make sense to us because we can see how they serve us, and those we feel respect us because the rule-makers are listening to us.
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Source type: Website
Truthout
Mark Karlin
"
Frances Moore Lappé on Creating an Ecology of Hope"
http://www.truth-out.org/node/10659
Viewed on December 26, 2011
Contribution #6384
That action is best which accomplishes the greatest happiness for the greatest numbers.
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No source entered for Contribution #6368
Religion has taught us unnecessarily to love some less and hate others more: we love our fellow believers unnecessarily and hate others equally unnecessarily.
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No source entered for Contribution #6344
Religion is a typical type of cogwheel where followers assemble together for two purposes: to run their own tempo and stop others’.
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No source entered for Contribution #6343
Those who commit sin do not think sin sin. So there is no sin at all because all commit sin at least once in their lifetime.
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No source entered for Contribution #6335
Believers have a strong faith in the fact that there is no God; otherwise they would not have indulged themselves in any sin.
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No source entered for Contribution #6334
Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it.
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No source entered for Contribution #6322
We are living in a period of commerical globalization. What we really need is spiritual globalization.
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Charter for Compassion - trailer
Contribution #6282
If you want to make peace with your enemy, you have to work with your enemy. Then he becomes your partner.
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No source entered for Contribution #6152
Be grateful for and celebrate the beauty in all things because beauty is everywhere; and ignore all limitations and boundaries wherever they are found, because they are illusion.
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly."
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No source entered for Contribution #5871
"Having seen his own self as the Self, he becomes selfless and in virtue of selflessness he is to be conceived as unconditioned. This is the highest mystery, betokening emancipation; through selflessness he has no part in pleasure or pain, but achieves absoluteness."
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No source entered for Contribution #5845
“The first peace, which is the most important, is that which comes within the souls of men when they realize their relationship, their oneness with the universe and all its powers, and when they realize that at the center of the universe dwells Wakan-Tanka, and that this center is really everywhere, it is within each of us. This is the real peace, and the others are but reflections of this. The second peace is that which is made between two individuals, and the third is that which is made between two nations. But above all you should understand that there can never be peace between nations until there is first known that true peace, which, as I have often said, is within the souls of men.”
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No source entered for Contribution #5744
“Even the humblest mammal’s strong sexual, parental, and social instincts give rise to ‘do unto others as yourself’ and ‘love thy neighbor as thyself’.”
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No source entered for Contribution #5733
“Partake of this sacred mystery: to take the place of others, giving them his own.”
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No source entered for Contribution #5732
“Loosen the bonds of discursive thought. Extend the circle of caring. Cease armoring against suffering. Wish for others the same happiness you wish for yourself. Be a tender-minded steward of creation.”
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No source entered for Contribution #5713
“Cowardice asks the question- Is it safe? Expediency asks the question- Is it politic? Vanity asks the question- Is it popular? But conscience asks the question- Is it right? And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular; but one must take it because it is right.” (Martin Luther King Jr.)
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No source entered for Contribution #5712
“There is no path to peace- Peace is the path.”
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No source entered for Contribution #5693
“…the universe is an emanation of mind. As human consciousness evolves in an accelerated spiral, we are being compelled to realize that our minds are manifesting reality to an ever-increasing extent- our collective shadow-projections of wasteful technologies, wars, and weaponry reflect subtler interior regions of our psyche and the discordant deceptions in our intimate relationships. If this interpretation is valid, it forces upon us a concomitant responsibility, a grave burden.”
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No source entered for Contribution #5570
“…the materialism of modern civilization is paradoxically founded on a hatred of materiality, a goal-oriented desire to obliterate all natural limits through technology, imposing an abstract grid over nature.”
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No source entered for Contribution #5553
“Steadfast benevolence, sustained by the wisdom that anything other than benevolence is painful, protects the mind from all afflictions.”
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No source entered for Contribution #5543
“Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connected.”
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No source entered for Contribution #5486
“What we now want is closer contact and better understanding between individuals and communities all over the earth, and the elimination of egoism and pride…Peace can only come as a natural consequence of universal enlightenment.”
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No source entered for Contribution #5483
“Never do anything against conscience, even if the state demands it.”
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No source entered for Contribution #5475
“A human being is part of a whole called by us ‘the universe’, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
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No source entered for Contribution #5474
“I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ. The materialism of affluent Christian countries appears to contradict the claims of Jesus Christ that say it is not possible to worship both Mammon and God at the same time.”
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No source entered for Contribution #5443
I hold that, the more helpless a creature, the more entitled it is protection by man from the cruelty of man.
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No source entered for Contribution #5441
“Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains.”
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No source entered for Contribution #5440
“By ‘nationalism’ I mean first of all the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions and tens of millions of people can be confidently labeled ‘good’ or ‘bad’…By ‘patriotism’ I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be best in the world but has no wish to force on other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power.”
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No source entered for Contribution #5438
“So long as all is ordered for attack, and that alone, leaders will instinctively increase the number of enemies that they may give their followers something to do.”
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No source entered for Contribution #5431
“The arts of power and its minions are the same in all countries and in all ages. It makes its victim; denounces it; and excites the public odium and the public hatred, to conceal its own abuses and encroachments.”
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No source entered for Contribution #5361
“I learned the lesson that great men cultivate love, and that only little men cherish a spirit of hatred. I learned that assistance given to the weak makes the one who gives it strong; and that oppression of the unfortunate makes one weak.”
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No source entered for Contribution #5359
“Quality tends to fan out like waves. The Quality job he didn’t think anyone was going to see was seen, and the person who feels it is a little bit better because of it, and is likely to pass that feeling onto others, and in that way the Quality tends to keep going.”
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No source entered for Contribution #5338
“The most moral activity of all is the creation of space for life to move around.”
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No source entered for Contribution #5318
“The planting of trees is the least self-centered of all that we do. It is a purer act of faith than the procreation of children.”
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No source entered for Contribution #5275
“You cannot begin to preserve any species of animal unless you preserve the habitat in which it dwells. Disturb or destroy that habitat and you will exterminate the species as surely as if you had shot it. So conservation means that you have to preserve forest and grassland, river and lake, even the sea itself. This is not only vital for the preservation of animal life generally, but for the future existence of man himself- a point that seems to escape many people.”
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No source entered for Contribution #5254
“A dreaded society is not a civilized society. The most progressive and powerful society in the civilized sense, is a society which has recognized its ethos, and come to terms with the past and the present, with religion and science. With modernism and mysticism, with materialism and spirituality; a society free of tension, a society rich in culture. Such a society cannot come with hocus-pocus formulas and with fraud. It has to flow from the depth of a divine search.”
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No source entered for Contribution #5253
“We must face problems which do not lend themselves to easy or quick or permanent solutions. And we must face the fact that the United States is neither omnipotent nor omniscient, that we are only six percent of the world population, that we cannot impose our will upon the other ninety-four percent of mankind, that we cannot right every wrong or reverse each adversity, and that therefore there cannot be an American solution to every world problem.”
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No source entered for Contribution #5232
“Out beyond ideas of right doing and wrong doing, there is a field. I will meet you there.”
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No source entered for Contribution #5217
“Just practice good, do good for others, without thinking or making yourself known so that you may gain reward. Really bring benefit to others, gaining nothing for yourself. This is the primary requisite for breaking free of attachments to the Self.”
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No source entered for Contribution #5213
“Our sufferings have taught us that no nation is sufficient unto itself, and that our prosperity depends in the long run, not upon the failures of our neighbors but their successes.”
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No source entered for Contribution #5190
“The world we live in is driven not solely by mindless physical forces but, more crucially, by subjective human values. Human values become the underlying key to world change.”
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No source entered for Contribution #5188
“If you have men who will exclude any of God’s creatures from the shelter of compassion and joy and pity, you will have men who will deal likewise with their fellow man.”
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No source entered for Contribution #5103
“The prevailing tendency to regard all the marked distinctions of human character as innate, and in the main indelible, and to ignore the irresistible proofs that by far the greater part of those differences, whether between individuals, races, or sexes are such as not only might but naturally would be produced by differences in circumstances, is one of the chief hinderances to the rational treatment of great social questions, and one of the greatest stumbling blocks to human improvement.”
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No source entered for Contribution #5097
In nature there are neither rewards nor punishments; there are consequences.
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No source entered for Contribution #5083
“The exclusion of true esoteric religion has been the business of the State since ancient times. At first this was done via the establishment of the popular idealism of exoteric religious institutions in league with the State. But in modern times the same process is done by the strategic exclusion of conventional religious cultism, mystical idealism, and higher evolutionary Wisdom from the mechanisms of popular culture.”
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No source entered for Contribution #5071
“Competitive individualism militates against the experience of community, and that lack of community is a centrally important factor in contemporaneous anxiety.”
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No source entered for Contribution #5041
“In dwelling, live close to the ground. In thinking, keep to the simple. In conflict, be fair and generous. In governing, don’t try to control. In work, do what you enjoy. In family life, be completely present.”
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No source entered for Contribution #4980
“This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to anyone who asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God…”
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No source entered for Contribution #4975
“Things derive their being and nature by mutual dependence and are nothing in themselves.”
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No source entered for Contribution #4945
If we did a good act merely from the love of God and a belief that it is pleasing to Him, whence arises the morality of the Atheist? It is idle to say, as some do, that no such thing exists. We have the same evidence of the fact as of most of those we act on, to wit: their own affirmations, and their reasonings in support of them. I have observed, indeed, generally, that while in Protestant countries the defections from the Platonic Christianity of the priests is to Deism, in Catholic countries they are to Atheism. Diderot, D'Alembert, D'Holbach, Condorcet, are known to have been among the most virtuous of men. Their virtue, then, must have had some other foundation than love of God.
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No source entered for Contribution #4706
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were. Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
Throughout history, fairly arbitrary lines drawn on maps have determined who prospers and who needs, who eats and who starves, who attacks and who is attacked, who lives long and who dies young. Oh, we have been slaves to those lines for so long...."
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No source entered for Contribution #4430
I've learned that you shouldn't go through life with a catcher's mitts on both hands. You need to be able to throw something back.
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No source entered for Contribution #4389
Men rarely (if ever) managed to dream up a god superior to themselves. Most gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child.
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No source entered for Contribution #4333
The diversity in the human family should be the cause of love and harmony, as it is in music where many different notes blend together in the making of a perfect chord.
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No source entered for Contribution #4277
All men -- whether they go by the name of Americans or Russians or Chinese or British or Malayans or Indians or Africans -- have obligations to one another that transcend their obligations to their sovereign societies.
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No source entered for Contribution #4200
A bifurcation of loyalties that requires religious to put canon law above civil law and moral law puts us in a situation where the keepers of religion may themselves become one of the greatest dangers to the credibility -- and the morality -- of the church itself.
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Source type: Periodical
National Catholic Reporter
Divided Loyalties: An Incredible Situation
http://
Contribution #3903
Every religion emphasizes human improvement, love, respect for others, sharing other people's suffering. On these lines every religion had more or less the same viewpoint and the same goal.
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No source entered for Contribution #3805
Do your little bit of good where you are;it's those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world.
The day we stop killing off our own species, our world will become a book with no more torn pages.
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Source type: Website
Voiced Education Project
Zoe Taylor, McClure Middle School, Seattle, WA
"
Imagining the Color of Peace"
http://www.voiceseducation.org
Viewed on November 23, 2009
Contribution #3641
The breakdown of the world's ecology is causing a shift in environmental sensibilities tantamount to a second Copernican revolution . . . In the second Copernican revolution we may be forced to abandon the even more self-aggrandizing belief that we are the center of the moral universe and have a special, privileged status in the biosphere--anthropocentrism.
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No source entered for Contribution #3630
Secure in whom we are, rooted in one particular tradition or none at all, we have no reason to fear discovering God in the truth and wisdom of many traditions. Love casts out fear inviting us into happiness for all people and Creation.
Courage to be who you are is the cousin of loving the Divine, yourself and others.
We were born to unite with our fellow men, and to join in community with the human race.
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No source entered for Contribution #3550
The earth is ready, the time is ripe, for the authoritative expression of the feminine as well as the masculine interpretation of that common social consensus which is slowly writing justice in the State and fraternity in the social order.
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No source entered for Contribution #3548
The strongest bond of human sympathy outside the family relation should be one uniting working people of all nations and tongues and kindreds.
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No source entered for Contribution #3547
I am convinced that we must commit ourselves to the view that a universal ethics is possible, and that we ought to seek to understand it and define it. It is a staggering idea, and one that on casual thought seems preposterous. Yet there is no way out. We now understand how tendentious our beliefs about the world and the nature of human experience truly are, and how dependent we have become on tales from the past. At some level we all know this. At the same time, our species wants to believe in something, some natural order, and it is the job of modern science to help figure out how that order should be characterized.
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Source type: Book
The Ethical Brain
Page 178
Published by Dana Press
, New York
, 2005
http://
Contribution #3520
Whenever you possibly can, do good to those who need it.
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Source type: Book
Good News Bible
Page Proverbs 3:27
http://
Contribution #3423
Grant others the same rights as you claim for yourself.
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Source type: Book
Dresden Edition of the 12 Volume's of the teachings of Robert G. Ingersoll
Page ?
Published by ?
, Dresden, N.Y.
, 1922 (?)
http://Amazon
Contribution #3403
An enlightened society is one where all people - the rich and the poor, the literate and the illiterate, the black and the white, men and women - live happily as children of the same Lord. Thus experiencing the brotherhood of men under the fatherhood of God.
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From the discourses of Rev. Pandurang Shastri Athavale
Contribution #3394
Universal brotherhood under the fatherhood of God.
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From the discourses of Rev. Pandurang Shastri Athavale
Contribution #3373
Why does everyone take for granted that we don't learn to grow arms, but rather, are designed to grow arms? Similarly, we should conclude that in the case of the development of moral systems; there's a biological endowment which in effect requires us to develop a system of moral judgment and a theory of justice, if you like, that in fact has detailed applicability over an enormous range.
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No source entered for Contribution #3159
Man was destined for society. His morality, therefore, was to be formed to this object. He was endowed with a sense of right and wrong merely relative to this. This sense is as much a part of his nature, as the sense of hearing, seeing, feeling; it is the true foundation of morality . . . The moral sense, or conscience , is as much a part of man as his leg or arm. It is given to all human beings in a stronger or weaker degree, as force of members is given to them in a greater or lesser degree. It may be strengthened by exercise, as may any particular limb of the body.
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Source type: Book
The Papers of Thomas Jefferson
by J. P. Boyd
Page ME 6:257, Paper 12:15. Letter to Peter Carr, Aug 10
Published in 1787/1955
http://cited in Moral Minds, by Marc Hauser
Contribution #3161
Many are really virtuous who cannot explain what virtue is . . . But the powers themselves in reality perform their several operations with sufficient constancy and uniformity in persons of good health whatever their opinions be about them . . .
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Source type: Book
Illustrations on the Moral Sense
Page preface
Published by Harvard University Press
, Cambridge, MA, USA
, 1728/1971
http://ref. in Marc Hauser, Moral Minds
Contribution #3163
Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need, but not every man's greed.
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Contribution #3131
Mr. J.S. Mill speaks, in his celebrated work, "Utilitarianism," of the social feelings as a "powerful natural sentiment," and as "the natural basis of sentiment for utilitarian morality," but on the previous page he says, "if, as is my own belief, the moral feelings are not innate, but acquired, they are not for that reason less natural." It is with hesitation that I venture to differ from so profound a thinker, but it can hardly be disputed that the social feelings are instinctive or innate in the lower animals; and why should they not be so in man?
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Source type: Book
The Descent of Man
Page Vol 1, page 71
Published in 1871
http://
Contribution #3040
A moral being is one who is capable of reflecting on his past actions and their motives - of approving of some and disapproving of others.
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No source entered for Contribution #3029
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.
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Source type: Periodical
The New York Times
http://
Contribution #2902
Let us contemplate the one simple nature of that peaceful unity which joins all things to itself and to each other, preserving them in their distinctiveness and yet linking them together in a universal and unconfused alliance.
--Many Voices / One Truth / Spirit of the World
(Because) the notion of absolute truth is difficult to sustain outside the context of religion, ethical conduct is not something we engage in because it is somehow right in itself but because, like ourselves, all others desire to be happy and to avoid suffering. Given that this is a natural disposition, shared by all, it follows that each individual has a right to pursue this goal. Accordingly, I suggest that one of the things which determines whether an act is ethical or not is its effect on others' experience or expectation of happiness.
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Source type: Book
Ethics for the New Millenium
Page 28
Published by Riverhead Books
, New York
, 1999
http://
Contribution #2784
Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. Wikis give us a place where anyone who is kind, thoughtful and intelligent can come and join us in building a better and more rational world.
There are a whole lot of religious people in America, including the majority of Democrats. When we abandon the field of religious discourse—when we ignore the debate about what it means to be a good Christian or Muslim or Jew; when we discuss religion only in the negative sense of where or how it should not be practiced, rather than in the positive sense of what it tells us about our obligations toward one another; when we shy away from religious venues and religious broadcasts because we assume that we will be unwelcome—others will fill the vacuum. And those who do are likely to be those with the most insular views of faith, or who cynically use religion to justify partisan ends.
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Source type: Book
Audacity of Hope
http://
Contribution #2533
What you should say to outsiders is that a Christian has neither more nor less rights in our Association than an atheist. When our platform becomes too narrow for people of all creeds and of no creeds, I myself shall not stand upon it. (on women's suffrage)
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No source entered for Contribution #2428
My call for a spiritual revolution is not a call for a religious revolution. Nor is it a reference to a way of life that is somehow otherworldly, still less to something magical or mysterious. Rather it is a call for a radical reorientation away from our habitual preoccupation with self. It is a call to turn toward the wider community of beings with whom we are connected, and for conduct which recognizes others' interests alongside our own.
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Source type: Book
Ethics for the New Millenium
Page 13-14
Published by Riverhead Books
, New York
, 1999
http://
Contribution #2395
Western liberal humanism is not something that comes naturally to us: like an appreciation of art or poetry, it has to be cultivated. Humanism is itself a religion without God—not all religions, of course, are theistic. Our ethical secular ideal has it's own disciplines of mind and heart and gives people the means of finding faith in the ultimate meaning of human life that were once provided by the more conventional religions.
Throughout the nineteenth century the True, the Good, and the Beautiful preserved their precarious existence in the minds of earnest atheists. But their very earnestness was their undoing, since it made it possible for them to stop at a halfway house. Pragmatists explained that Truth is what it pays to believe. Historians of morals reduced the Good to a matter of tribal custom. Beauty was abolished by the artists in a revolt against the insipidities of a philistine epoch and in a mood of fury in which satisfaction is to be derived only from what hurts. And so the world was swept clear not only of God as a person but of God's essence as an ideal to which man owed an ideal allegiance; while the individual, as a result of crude and uncritical interpretation of sound doctrines, was left without any defense against social pressure.
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No source entered for Contribution #1783
Our problems are not solved
by physical force,
by hatred,
by war
Our problems are solved
by loving kindness
by gentleness,
by joy
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Source type: Book
Heart of a Buddha
Published by Amitabha Publications
, Temple City, CA
, 2003
http://
Contribution #1456
All ancient books which have once been called sacred by man, will have their lasting place in the history of mankind, and those who possess the courage, the perseverance, and the self-denial of the true miner, and of the true scholar, will find even in the darkest and dustiest shafts what they are seeking for,--real nuggets of thought, and precious jewels of faith and hope.
In the past, the respect people had for religion meant that ethical practice was maintained through a majority following one religion or another. But this is no longer the case. We must therefore find some other way of establishing basic ethical principles.
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Source type: Book
Ethics for the New Millennium
by Dalai Lama
Page 20
http://
Contribution #1366
...it becomes clear that, given our diversity, no single religion satisfies all humanity. ... And since the majority does not practice religion, I am concerned to try to find a way to serve all humanity without appealing to religious faith.
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Source type: Book
Ethics for the New Millennium
by 14th Dalai Lama
Page 20
http://
Contribution #1365
I want to show that there are indeed some universal ethical principles which could help everyone to achieve the happiness we all aspire to.
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Source type: Book
Ethics for the New Millennium
by 14th Dalai Lama
Page 22
http://
Contribution #1364
The
love of one's country is a splendid thing. But why should love stop at the
border?
Perhaps only when people can enjoy their differences as a
resource of cultural enrichment do they become truly
civilized.
My call for a spiritual revolution is thus not a call for a religious
revolution. Nor is it a reference to a way of life that is somehow
other-worldly, still less to something magical or mysterious. Rather, it is a
call for a radical re-orientation away from our habitual preoccupation with
self towards concern for the wider community of beings with whom we are
connected, and for conduct which recognizes others interests alongside our
own.
Life, when fully lived under a variety of cultural conditions, can be euphoric and optimistic; it can be a joy to experience and a wonder to behold.
The great fault of all ethics hitherto has been that they believed themselves to have to deal only with the relations of man to man. In reality, however, the question is what is his attitude to the world and all life that comes within his reach. A man is ethical only when life, as such, is sacred to him, and that of plants and animals as that of his fellow men, and when he devotes himself helpfully to all life that is in need of help. Only the universal ethic of the feeling of responsibility in an ever-widening sphere for all that livesonly that ethic can be founded in thought. The ethic of Reverence for Life, therefore, comprehends within itself everything that can be described as love, devotion, and sympathy whether in suffering, joy, or effort.
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Source type: Website
Albert Schweitzer
Viewed on April 13, 2008
Contribution #638
What does universal ethics look like in a person?
(1 response)
