Posted by johnboy on September 10, 1999 at 14:27:41:
some have criticized the Global Ethic movement for being too anthropocentric and having, therefore, a deontology that lacks authority or external validation
however, even an atheistic or agnostic humanism using a nowhere anchored paradoxical trust in uncertain reality without reference to primal origin, primal
ground, primal support or primal destiny to affirm a global ethic is asking me to love unconditionally, and radically so (apologies to Kung for my free-
wheeling deployment of his verbiage)
to me, this "no-Myth" prompts an appropriate response to Ultimate Reality while, at the same time, perfectly honoring the ineffability of the encounter with the Mystery of human existence
encounters with the Mysterium have always resulted in either profound utterances or obnibulated silence (in a sense, the humanist or agnostic has taken the silence route, along with the Buddha ... not to practice syncretism with the non-theisms ... i just see some parallels)
a purely humanistic appeal may be ignorant of the experiences and devoid of the expressions of kataphatic theocentrisms but it resonates in my
existential bones and flows through my apophatic marrow
to me, the anthropocentric and theocentric deontologies have been, respectively, radically apophatic and radically kataphatic, but either
way, we're not inventing rain, we're just opening our umbrellas
what of the origin and meaning of the Global Ethic? what of the origin and meaning of human life? we simply are
we're not formulating a Global Ethic, we are discovering it and its manner of self-revelation will give us epistemological fits and teleological
spasms--- but they are so much fun!