Originally Posted by guito411

I would like to propose other factors that determines ethics (as inspired from reading Paul Tillich's Courage to Be)...

1) Anxiety of Fate and Death. Society's anxiety eminating from the fact that we are all finite beings. (Anxiety caused by the threat of non-being)

2) The Anxiety of Guilt and Condemnation.

3) The Anxiety of Emptyness and Meaninglessness

We (All of humanity) suffer from this looming anxiety, not able to identify the exact object that causes us this constant fear, so we cope with it using various devices. A culture's ethics are determined by that culture's particular coping device. The coping device may be a theistic religion, or super nationalism. Ideally, individuals accept this anxiety by finding what Tillich describes as "the courage to be" or self actualizing, but hardly anyone ever accomplishes that.

For Example:
A Christian society attempts to bypass the threat of non-being with the tenement of everlasting life. However, the dogmas of Christianity are a false idol, an attempt to mass produce individualized self-affirmation. It is not the dogma, but the task of defending the dogma that proves to be all too effective in being a scape goat for the culture's anxiety.

John Shelby Spong, A New Christianity For A New World, p. 68


Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be




If a culture masks this anxiety with theistic religion than, depending on the level of anxiety, it will violently react to any defiance of it's dogma. If everlasting life is a hoax, the anxiety of non-being must be confronted.