When is the last time that someone has written anything new.Is there any original thought or just a regurgitation of past.History repeating itself.
As we watch the evening news is the human race getting better?Locally or globally.Where does thought originate?What great strides in humanity have been made since the establishment of the Ethical Society of Saint Louis 120 years ago.Who inspires people.Who is the leader in truth?Basically true would be what?Does what inspires or depresses me have the same effect on others?Should it?Is it reality or fiction?If truth makes anyone feel left out then must there be something wrong with it?Can we who are lost lead other lost to be found?Pathetic,yes,sublime rarely.When is the last time that someone has written anything new?

What you have described is a journey of faith. Prayerfully exploring why we exist, God makes revelations to us like he did Peter when Peter realized Jesus is the Christ. Truth is revealed. God (god) bless you, Kate.

What has changed in the last 120 years?

We can start with (many are US-centric):
Women getting the right to vote
Antibiotics
vaccinations
Mixed marriage moving from meaning 2 denomination to being not even notable when it is 2 races.
Women getting the right to own property.
End of segregation.
The Civil Rights movement.
Effective birth control.
Sanitation systems

We may not be perfect, but in a general sense, humanity does make strides in improving justice.

Simian

And despite all the advances, our depravity widens.

It greatly depends on what the writer is writing and why. Absolute truth can have very personal engagements with it. No one can claim complete objectivity, and engaging with truth can very much look like a writer understanding the event he is writing about (assuming an historical writer).

But if truth is community consensus, or what we make it… that has disturbing implications for societies with dramatically different ethical foundations (Nazi Germany, Pol Pot, to name a couple obvious ones). If there is no truth apart from our jacked-up perspectives, what reason or standard do we have to critique ANY truth at all? I’ve heard this referred to as a “free-floating morality” by people such as Alvin Plantinga…

I think I would gravitate to something like this on the surface, but I find myself disturbed once I test it outside of my cultural or societal context.

The Adler quote resonates, thank you for sharing. It’s noteworthy that the quote inspires both humanists, like Kate and me, and believers, like davel (”What you have described is a journey of faith …”).

Which is a comment, perhaps, on the variety of human perspectives.

What the writer has shared is called inquiry. It is a never ending process to continue to peel back the layers of our own self applied inauthenticity.

Our purpose is not hidden or kept from us to be discovered, it is declared by us. Our integrity in our word and our commitment in ongingly unburdening ourselves of the stories we put in place to avoid our responsibility in who we say we are will determine if it works or not.

As said in another comment, we are not discovering ourselves anew as much as constantly engaged in the process of removing the inauthenticities we put in place to support being right at the cost of our own integrity.

In short we have the thought, we own the thought, the thought is ours. Any confusion about it is ourselves not wanting to be responsible for it.

A romantic image of each of us collectively being on a journey to discover ourselves and humanity is just that.

Humanism asserts that man is his own god, in control of his own destiny. Humans, however, did not and do not design or create themselves. They cannot control when they are born or when they will die. Humanism is merely making man out to be his own god, master of his own world and destiny, while rejecting God. It’s merely a form of self-centeredness and idolatry according to Christianity (and my own beliefs).

I recently read the book A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah. When you consider the atrocities men commit, men who think they are masters of their own worlds, men who have no god but themselves, men who seek only their own power– you certainly cannot elevate such creatures to a divine level, and I would argue it is dangerous to do so. Furthermore, it is equally dangerous to say that those people are bad while we are the true enlightened ones worthy of divine status. Let’s not deny that we are all made of the same things, all equally capable of falling to evil acts or rising to good deeds.

Simian

What has changed in the last 120 years?

We can start with (many are US-centric):
Human race much larger than U.S.
Women getting the right to vote- Has the overall respect for women gained or depleted?Ask lil wayne
Antibiotics-Science not ethics
vaccinations-again science many refusing vaccine for their kids
Mixed marriage moving from meaning 2 denomination to being not even notable when it is 2 races.-Did someone in a racially mixed marriage tell you that?
Women getting the right to own property.-Great place for a Girls gone wild shoot.
End of segregation.-Legally,yes now we just seem to do it on our own.
The Civil Rights movement.-Racism and prejudice are hardly noticeable anymore
Effective birth control.-Effective in what?promiscuity and spread of STDs
Sanitation systems-hardly an ethical gain.

We may not be perfect, but in a general sense, humanity does make strides in improving justice.-having money definitely improves your chance for justice.

The underlying ethics of your examples are nothing new.An already-existing ultimate truth about ethics,regardless of religion,race,gender or whatever,
has been established for a long time.The only thing the human race finds about itself is that purpose is usually tainted with self interest and being oblectively ethical is seemingly impossible.

I think it’s worth stating that you can’t really speak for or against absolutes without using absolute statements (unless you are really wishy washy).

The concepts held by religios peopal as well as ethical humanists are contingent on absolutes: first and foremost the absolute existence of good and bad. You can’t even conditionally qualify anything as either without absolutes. The whole concept of relativism in ethics or morals or truth refutes itself from the get go.