Dr. Joe Chuman's Talks at The Bergen Ethical Society
As the leader of the Ethical Culture Society of Bergen County, Dr. Chuman gives our platform address the first Sunday of each month. Below are selected transcripts and videos.
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What to do when life is not fair
The need for fairness is among the deepest needs of the human soul. The yearning for fairness is something that seems to be implanted in us at birth, and becomes vivid when we grow to awareness of the social world beyond ourselves. From the time we are small children we keenly sense when others have not been fair to us, whether preferential treatment is given to others in the midst of game, when we are unjustly blamed for something we have not done, or when we receive less than our rightful share. This powerful desire that the world and those in it be fair is a longing that remains with us for the rest of our lives and colors the texture of our experiences every day.
Read more...
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Their Dignity and Ours
If there is anything that approaches a creed in Ethical
Culture it is respect for the dignity of human beings. A respect and reverence
for the worth or dignity of people is the foundation of Ethical Culture; it is
central to our understanding of ethics and to us. “Dignity” is a word we
frequently use, but what do we mean by it? Certainly, without even defining it,
we know very well when our dignity has been violated. It is that emotional pain
we feel when we have been insulted, when we are made to feel, deliberately and
maliciously, ashamed and humiliated, when our privacy has been invaded, and
when part of us which we would prefer to keep secret from the world has been
exposed for everyone to see. Our dignity has been assaulted when our reputation
has been attacked, or when we sense that those with power lord it over us and
make us feel small. Vulnerable as we are, there are, perhaps, innumerable ways
in which our dignity can be assaulted and violated.
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Political Leadership and American Ideals
The presidential campaign of 2008
is proving to be the most exhilarating political event within memory. Most
eye-catching and inspiring is, of course, the Democratic side, with the
inevitability that either a woman or an African-American will be the
presidential nominee. It’s a novel, surprising, if not astonishing turn of
events, which could not be more exciting if some master political operative in
the sky had planned it that way.
Read more...
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Darwin's Challenge to Religion and the Religious Response
Several years ago, the famed
paleontologist, Stephen J. Gould, in one of his monthly articles in Natural
History magazine, opined on the origins of baseball. As every American
knows, our national pastime was invented in the nineteenth century by Civil War
hero Abner Doubleday, and the first game was played on a makeshift field in Cooperstown,
New York, where baseball’s Hall of Fame now stands.
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Ethical Culture Confronts Life’s Challenges
When I began my graduate seminar in
human rights last Thursday evening at Columbia University, I told my students
that to investigate the human rights field, to study in depth such phenomena as
international trafficking, the conscription of child soldiers, the horrors of
genocide and torture, is to expose oneself to the darkest underside of human
behavior. I noted that the field of human rights is inherently depressing, but
it is also hopeful, and that it should be their mission as people who will work
internationally in the field of human rights to bring hope to the human condition.
And then without much reflection, I shared with them my own take on reality. I
told them that in my view of the human condition and its prospects, I am a
short-range pessimist, but a long-range optimist.
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