OK, this is a little melodramatic and contrived, but it is a question I was asked at an interreligious lecture, and I believe that this question reveals a lot about one’s religious vision. So I would like to hear from our readers and from the other bloggers how you would answer this question:

You and a companion are lost in the Sahara desert after a car crash on a deserted road, and no one knows to come and look for you. After a day waiting and hoping someone would come, you and your companion decide to start walking with your last two canteens of water. Your companion drinks all of his water right away, you use your sparingly. Late in the day, he falls and breaks his leg. He is delirious from the trauma, cannot travel any more, and cannot even stand for you to carry him because of the…

The Ethical Society, and our national federation, the American Ethical Union, has long supported abortion as being an often difficult but spiritual and ethical choice. Our highest value is the worth and dignity of every person, and since pregnant women are clearly people, while pregnancies are not clearly people (witness all the arguments and differences of opinion on when human life begins), our official stance (individual members, of course, have freedom of opinion) is that to force a woman against her will to carry a pregnancy she does not want threatens her physical, psychological, and spiritual health, and therefore it violates rather than affirms her worth and dignity.

The Missouri Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice is an organization that brings together representative voices for the millions of clergy and lay people from every major religion and denomination (and many minor ones) who support women’s and men’s sexual health and reproductive rights.…

One of the members of the Ethical Society of St. Louis who has a background in Buddhism has been teaching a class in “Ethical Mindfulness,” in which he’s trying to blend the mindfulness meditation practice of Thich Nhat Hanh with the philosophy and social activism of Ethical Humanism. I have been getting great benefit from these classes. Humanism has many positive ideals, but we humanists are still working to create or find common practices that help people develop their ethical ideals and the habits to act on them. This seems to be where we can learn a lot from classical Buddhism, which is generally non-theistic and which focuses on practices that help us become more aware of ourselves and our actions, and therefore more able to choose “right action” rather than to react out of anger or fear.

Developing the habit of following my breath and observing my thoughts and…

(Disclaimer: I caught one of the nasty colds going around, so if this is less than coherent, apologies.)

In the comments to my first post on Religious Humanism, the question came up, Where do morals and ethical values come from?

Most of us have had our moral ideals shaped in part by our religious communities, but in perhaps a less straightforward way than we think. I’ve read that most people don’t actually know the moral principles of their own religions—they can’t name more than half the Ten Commandments, for example, and I’d bet that most members of the Ethical Society couldn’t tell you our 8 Commitments of Ethical Culture off the top of their head, nor do most humanists know the details of the latest Humanist Manifesto.

Yet it’s been my experience that most people, whatever their religion or life philosophy, share basic moral instincts, such as not to harm or use…