• Religion as Ethics
  
• Ethics as Praxis
  
• Sources of Ethics
  
• A Lived Attitude
  
• Individual and Community
  
• Societies
  
• The Whole Person

Religion as Ethics

We are philosophically and practically committed to a view of humanity as Homo ethicus. That is, we see all of life primarily through an ethical lens and we live all of life primarily in pursuit of quality of relationship and of social transformation. We define ourselves in terms of a commitment to study, promote, live by, and apply ethical values. We value care and respect for the individual, the pursuit of justice in society, and the creation of community.

Ethics as Praxis

All the great religions and philosophies of life require that theory and practice go hand in hand, but again and again history witnesses to the loss of focus on behavior through conflict over creedal elaborations or orthodoxies of ritual or questions of true identity. Ethical Culture not only gives a primacy to ethical action over creed or ritual, but finds in the lived experience of eliciting the best the raw material out of which theory develops.

Sources of Ethics

We draw our ethical values from the moral heritage of the great religions, the insights of the moral philosophers, the moral wisdom of our social traditions, the shared insights of our groups, research into human and animal behavior, and the reasoning, experience, and sensibility each of us develops in -confronting ourselves and in engagement with the needs and challenges of the world.

A Lived Attitude

We define ethics not simply and solely in terms of what is right or wrong, but in the larger sense of what is good and what is true. Our ethics is not just a debate about morality but a lived attitude of respect for the worth of others and of ourselves. That is why it escapes being defined by any creedal formulation. It is always a "raid on the inarticulate," (in T.S. Eliot's phrase), a quest.

The Individual and the Community

In our ethical view, each person is an independent center of learning and sharing-an independent center, to be respected and valued as such, so that no one can lord it over another in thought or behavior; and yet a center for learning and sharing, because the goal of the individual is completion in interaction with others. We seek a creative balance between the fulfillment of the individual and the good of the community.

Societies

Therefore, essentially and strategically, we seek to operate within the wider community as a society and not only as individuals. Unlike some others of humanist persuasion, we are deliberately and firmly committed to a congregational way of existing and functioning. Each society is a microcosm of and springboard to the wider community.

The Whole Person

While laying great stress on the rational mind as the processing agent of reality, our ethics is as large as the human mind, as large as human experience, and as large as human community. Our ethics is understood and expressed emotionally as much as rationally. It finds its lineaments in art as well as science. It is hewn and honed as much in the marketplace of social change as in the cloistered study of philosophical thought. It pursues the Greek ideal of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness, as well as the Hebrew ideal of social righteousness and the Christian ideal of inwardly motivated love for the outcast and even for the enemy. It is open to Oriental religious traditions as to modern Western movements. But it embodies what it takes from all these traditions in its own frame of reference. it has a sense of the human being and human community as constituted by a power to choose and, having choice, to be thrust inevitably into making choices in the light of ethical principle and ethical experience. We begin, continue, and end with the human as Homo ethicus.