August 16, 2004

Saludos.  My name is Manja Mary Argue.  The Manja is pronounced Maña and the Argue is pronounced just as it seems.  It is a good old Irish name from County Cavan.  I have been asked to write a regular column for this paper.  I have already written one article contrasting the Law with Morality.  In future issues I will be writing on topics such as that one. 

I spent ten years in Catholic boarding schools as a ward of the state of Oklahoma.  I left at the age of 16, angry and bitter and very anti religion and/or anything spiritual.   I not only disliked religion but I looked down on people who  participated in it.  Ah such arrogance. However I have come to a point of my life where I have been able to release my anger and open my self to the rich and varied believes that abound in this world.

When I reached my sixtieth birthday I enrolled at Humboldt State University in California and earned a BA degree. It is an interdisciplinary degree named, Critical Thinking and Ethics in Communications.  The head of the English Department came up with that title and I shook my head and said, “Hum, sounds good to me”.  But essentially what I was doing was looking at ethics and how we come to have them, how we relate them to each other, and how we practice them.  To this end I took courses in Philosophy, Critical Writing, and Ethics in Journalism.  I also audited courses in various departments that were on the topic of ethics as it applied to that discipline.  At HSU the Philosophy Department was also a Religious Studies department and I took courses in the religions of India and China.  I am sorry that there were no courses on the religion of Islam.  There also were no courses that looked at the religious beliefs of people prior to their coming under the influence of one of the major religions.  That is, indigenous religious beliefs.  I have done some reading on my own about these beliefs although no organize study of them.

So let us begin with a really difficult subject.  Ethics.  In the Platonic view ethics were part of another plane on which it existed as an ideal.  To Plato this was true of all things i.e. the ideal chair or the ideal cable car etc.  The problem with this view is that, although it gives a location for ethics, it really does not describe just what the ethical ideal is.  I’m certainly not the great philosophical thinker that Plato was but I do have a view point.  In all of my readings and studies I keep coming across one very simple rule that seems to exist in all religions and cultures that I have knowledge of and that is: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”.  Sometimes this is stated, “Do not do unto others as you would not have them do unto you” but the core principle is the same.  Could the definition of ethics really be this simple? Tune in next issue for more of this discussion.