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I believe some of the impetus for this sermon came from an interaction I had with my mother some years ago. The interaction to which I refer occurred after I had spent three years in a Unitarian Universalist seminary, a year internship at a Unitarian Universalist church, and was ordained a Unitarian Universalist minister. All of which I believed would have given my mother enough time to understand that my religious beliefs were not traditional—enough time to figure out that I was no longer a Presbyterian. But I was wrong.

Actually the incident was but a brief digression in the middle of a larger conversation. I can't remember how the subject came up but I do remember telling my mother, as if I was reminding her, that I was not a Christian. I thought this was quite obvious to her, but to my surprise she turned abruptly towards me with a look of panic on her face and said something like, "What? You are not a Christian?" No, that can't be—what about becoming bad—how can you stay good?"

I was taken aback by this. I was taken aback by the realization that after all this time my mother didn't understand what I was about. I was taken aback by the fact that she had known me for 30 plus years but I suddenly became suspect because I said I was not a Christian. And I was taken back by yet again running into the mind set which challenges my integrity, my ethical standing, because I am not part of the dominant faith. A mindset that says, in this culture at least, if you admit to not being Christian then that is tantamount to admitting you have no moral underpinnings.
But this is a reality. In some people’s minds morality and traditional religion are so linked that it is assumed that one cannot be moral without being a believer. The word Christian is often seen as synonymous with good. A Christian upbringing means one's childhood was full of good moral shaping. A Christian woman or man is one who is very ethical and carrying.
So when one admits to being different, then one becomes suspect. A rallying cry against atheists is that they are immoral. The classic attack question is, "Would you want your child taught by an atheist?" Or you don't even have deviate that far--to some people all you need do is be a different variety of Christian, or a Jew, or a Muslim. To some anyone who is not of their faith is morally suspect.

I bring up this issue because I am tired of bumping my head against this notion--this notion that one has to hold a traditional religious belief with all its various mythology to be considered a moral person. I am tired of being suspect because I hold a different understanding of the forces that underlie our lives. So the point I want to make today is that morality can very well spring from other sources. It is my belief that it has deeper roots than any of the traditional myths that underlie the various religions. It is my belief that morality exists without myth or theology.

First let us start with an understanding of morality. According to the dictionary morality is concerned with right and wrong behavior--it is a system of principles outlining right and wrong behavior. I personally would modify that to read morality is a system of principles outlining right and wrong relationship, but either one captures the essence.

Now traditional religions have ascribed the basis of these ethical systems to a source beyond the human sphere--to a supernatural being. For instance, according to Jewish tradition their God, Yahweh, gave Moses the 10 commandments. As the story goes, Moses climbs the mountain top, gets the tablets from God then brings them back to the Hebrews--clearly a case of god given ethics. Some of the other Judaic laws also came from divine revelation, and the rest from further human interpretation of earlier god given laws. Christianity draws on the Judaic tradition but adds the ethics attributed to Jesus the Son of God. The Christian moral system is based on the principles that were woven into the Jesus story. Similarly the same is true for Muslims, Bahais, Hindu and so on. In these faiths being a good Muslim, Baha’i, or Jew means in part that one follows the relational principles given to us through the central figures in these faiths.

Being true to these ethics is of course not an easy thing to do considering how lofty they are and how very fallible are we. This is true for all faiths. To help us follow the right path, though, the various divine powers of each traditional faith promise us a couple of things. They promise us rewards in this life and after death if we believe in the story and follow a set of moral principles, and they promise us punishment here and in the afterlife if we deviate from them. This promise of reward and threat of punishment, along with a deep love for God, is supposedly what keeps us unruly humans in line. Take this away and there is nothing standing between us and our evil nature. Hence the fear of those who remove themselves from the traditional religions. Hence distrust of those who hold a different theology. Distrust because in those cases it is believed that when the yoke that keeps us in line is removed we become uncontrollable.

This point about non-traditional faiths being suspect is used in the movie "Dragnet" starring Dan Akroyd and Tom Hanks. This film is a spoof on the old Dragnet TV show. In this movie the good guys were battling against a group who called themselves the P.A.G.A.N.s. We all know that pagans are those outside the Christian religion, but in addition in the movie P.A.G.A.N. was an acronym for People Against Good And Niceness. Of course this comes from a Dan Akroyd comedy, but it is not too far off the mark of what a good many people believe. Significant numbers believe that people outside the traditional faiths are tainted with immorality.

And this goes for all of us gathered in this room. Because you are Unitarian Universalists or attending a UU church, according to some people you are morally suspect, if not considered downright evil. In some areas of this country, your participation in this community might affect your chances of being elected to a public office or seeking certain jobs. I have had clergy gatherings in this building when some ministers have refused to attend because they are convinced we are Satan’s church.

Clearly in many people's minds, the connection between theology and morality is a strong one. But I say that this connection is superficial. I say the roots of our morality have little to do with our mythology and much to do with our human experience. For this reason I believe there is such a thing as a natural ethic that arises out of our existence, and this is the basis of our moral systems.

Now from my perspective an understanding of morality based on natural ethic begins with relationship. It notices that morality becomes an issue only when things are in mutual relationship. By mutual I mean a relationship in which the well being of each is dependent upon the other. We humans being the social animals that we are group together for our mutual benefit, but this has required us to create a set of principles to guide our relationship with each other. We realize that without some governing principles, which we agree to uphold, we could not construct the society that we have. Without morality there would be chaos and our lives would be diminished.

So over thousands of years we figured this out. It didn't come from somewhere else—some mythical figure. Using our brains we figured out what common principles had to exist to retain a basic order. And we are not alone in this. Other animals as well have evolved similar behaviors--other animals have developed their own ethics of sort. The wolves for one. They have evolved certain behavior patterns that enhance their social nature. One example might be that wolves don't fight to the death to settle disputes within their community. In such contests they avoid using their canines. In a sense, they too have developed a system of ethics. But we don't claim that the wolves behave this way because they were given stone tablets with the 10 commandments written on them.

And just as we have evolved as a species, and evolved culturally, so have our ethics evolved. Morality has changed to some degree as our human situation has changed. The ethics of a human living in a small tribe 5,000 years ago are probably different than those espoused in our current culture of global interdependence. For instance it is recorded that in times past Eskimo sons had to kill their parents when they became a liability to the family--that was the ethical thing to do to preserve the community. That certainly is not the ethic of today. Situations change, and so do our specific ethics. But they all arise from our human existence.

All this is pretty well summarized by the historians Will and Ariel Durant in their volume called the Age Of Faith. They wrote:
"Humankind in the jungle or hunting stage had to be greedy--to seek food eagerly and gorge themselves zealously-because, when food came, they could not be sure when it would come again. They had to be sexually sensitive, often promiscuous because a high death rate compelled a high birth rate; every woman had to be made a mother whenever possible, and the function of the male was to be always in heat. He had to be pugnacious, ever ready to fight for food or mate. Vices were once virtues, indispensable to survival.

But when humans found that the best means of survival, for individual as well as species, was social organization, they expanded the hunting pack into a system of social order in which the instincts once so useful in the hunting stage had to be checked at every turn to make society possible. Ethically every civilization is a balance and tension between the jungle instincts of humans and the inhibitions of a moral code. The instincts without the inhibitions would end civilization; the inhibitions without the instincts would end life.

In the task of moderating human violence, promiscuity, and greed, certain instincts, chiefly social, took the lead, and provided a biological basis for civilization. Parental love, in beast and man, created the natural social order of the family. Parental authority transmitted a life-saving code of social conduct to the individualistic child. . Love of approval bent the ego to the will of the group. Custom and imitation guided the adolescent, now and then, into ways sanctioned by the trial-and-error experience of the race.

The Church believed that these natural or secular sources of morality could not suffice to control the impulses that preserved life in the jungle but destroy order in society. Those impulses are too strong to be deterred by any human authority that cannot be everywhere at once with awesome police power. A moral code bitterly uncongenial to the flesh must bear the seal of a supernatural origin if it is to be obeyed. And those divine commandments must be supported not only by praise and honor bestowed for obeying them, nor only by disgrace and penalties imposed for violating them, but also by the hope of heaven for unrequited virtue, and the fear of hell for unpunished sins."

So the origins of our ethics do not come from the supernatural realm, but rather the natural world. Our morals are an outgrowth of Natural Law--natural law "which holds that there are certain principles of right and wrong which human beings through diligent use of reason can discover and apply in the creation of a just society."(Kenneth Woodward) It is natural law that one doesn't become sexually involved with their children; it is a natural law that one doesn't beat up family, friends or neighbors; it is a natural law that we care for the less fortunate. Multiply these notions by 10,000 and you have our moral code. All based on the natural laws of relationship--all based on real human needs and conditions.

M. Scott Peck, who is a psychiatrist and author, gives an example of this process of ethics development in his book entitled "the Road Less Traveled". He tells the story of a man he worked with who had little sensitivity towards women and generally treated them as sex objects. This man, who I will call Stan, saw Peck in personal and group therapy. On one occasion a woman in the therapy group was telling her story of being attacked and raped. The entire group was very compassionate and supportive, except Stan who asked the woman if she had enjoyed the experience.

Later in personal therapy Peck confronted Stan on what he had done and his attitude in general about women. Stan showed no remorse or any inkling of understanding what all the hubbub was about. Peck knew he had to somehow bring the issue home, to somehow get Stan to see the situation from the other side.

What Peck used was the strong affection Stan had for his children one of them a daughter. The next time that Stan spoke of women in a degrading manner, Peck brought his daughter into the discussion. He explained that if we all followed Stan's attitude about women, that his daughter is then fair game to any man who wants to rape her. This made Stan stop in his tracks. Through his daughter Stan could experience the violence in his attitude. This made the issue much more personal. This made him see the need for a moral system that discourages such behavior, because he now had an investment in maintaining a certain order. This man grew ethically because he saw the need in his life for certain inhibitions on people's behavior.

Not everyone has developed this sense of mutuality that is required to participate in a moral system. Partly this is due to maturity that allows us to be less self-centered. But there is also a group called socio or psychopaths. These are people who for some reason don't have a clear understanding of what it means to be in mutual relationship. For this reason they have no sense of morals and thus end up in a parasitic role versus a symbiotic role in our society. Sociopaths are those who can kill, swindle, steal, or lie and have no sense of remorse, no inkling that what they did was wrong. That is what is so terrifying about such individuals--they don't play by the rules and that undermines our sense of security. If a sociopath enters our lives--all hell breaks loose. And I don't mean just in the sense of murder, but more frequently it's the lies and deceptions that create chaos.

Now I don't want to imply that the reason I act morally is because I am devoted to Natural Law. Even though intellectually I know that our ethics come from a realization of our interdependence, my basic motivation to act morally often lies elsewhere. What governs my behavior frequently is fear of punishment and anticipation of reward. I am a step above the sociopath because I have a sense of wrong and right and this guides my behavior, but I am still a long way from obtaining enlightenment or sainthood. Just like in our legal system, the laws might be derived from a set of grand principles like those in the Constitution or Declaration of Independence, but day-to-day governance is based on negative and positive reinforcement. That is the way many of us operate until the rewards of being moral are in themselves sufficient reinforcement.

And all that I describe about the natural ethic has parallels in the ethical systems based on the traditional myths. Those systems have their rewards and punishments, they have their socio-paths--it is just that the source of their morality is different than mine. I don't find fault with that. In some respects it doesn't matter what the source is because most of us come up with the same principles. You could take any of these ethical systems lop off the source of the ethics, stick on another and few people would notice any change in the principles. The vast similarities are the result of the commonalities in the human existence. In some ways it doesn't matter what source you ascribe your ethics to.

It does matter though when religious chauvinism prevents one from recognizing the value in another. It is not an either or situation. Natural Law, Judaic Law, Muslim Law, and Hindu Law can all coexist and support each other if there is mutual recognition and respect. It is the chauvinism that I speak against. It is the added burden that such prejudice puts on our lives which needs to be challenged.

I am glad for you if you believe that Yahweh gave Moses the 10 Commandments, or Brahma the ethics of the Sutras, or Allah the Islamic Law. I bow in respect of this, and encourage you to be faithful to those laws. But this does not diminish my belief in a natural ethic--in a moral system grounded in our very being. Mother, Father, sister, brother, neighbor, boss, passer-by-on the street--know that even though my faith is different than yours I can love just as deeply and care just as much as any other human being. Understand this so we can continue our efforts together to bring peace, justice and joy to the world.

©1991 Rev. Daniel S. Brosier