DAY 70 (Dec 15) Meaning in Your Life

Today was a very interesting day of discussing the fundamental needs that people have that are address, for some, through religion.

Deontology - comes from the Greek word, "Deon", which means duty.  One of the ways that most of us are comfortable working within a worldview that has rules of things that are acceptable to do and things that are not acceptable to do.  For example, we all agreed that stealing your classmate's pencil is not acceptable and therefore stealing anyone's pencil is not acceptable.  We made a link here to other, more serious issues like, murder.  It's not ok to kill others.

Next we asked where your ideas about it not being acceptable to steal or kill came from.  For some of you it's just what you've been taught by parents, friends, society, school, etc. (i.e. it's the way you have been socialized), and for others such ethical / moral codes from from a religious source, e.g. the Bible.  This is deontological in origin, but it's more than simple that - it's a duty-based outlook that comes from a spiritual or religious source.  This we call, "Divine Command".  In other words, the moral/ethical code has it's root in a god and holy texts.

I made this point with the class because during yesterday's introduction to Christianity there were many questions about how Christians can believe certain things and I did not want the focus to be on the minutiae of that religion, rather I wanted us to focus on the human needs that we all have and how Christianity (and any other religion) addresses those needs.  The need we focused on today was the need to have rules to govern our lives and the need to live a meaningful life.

We listened to Bruce Cockburn's "Shipwrecked at the Stable Door" and examined the meaning of the lyrics to that song.  There are many references to capitalist, materialistic society and there are biblical references too.  We then began to work through Rick Warren's TED Talks lecture on bringing meaning to one's life, something that we'll continue tomorrow (with the few people who are here because of the Grade 11 field trip to the ROM on Friday).