What do I mean by moral challenges? Well, defining morality is a sticky business even if you’re a full-time philosopher, which I’m not, or a believer in God, which I’m also not. The definition I’m favoring these days goes something like this: morality means making decisions that benefit the most number of people in the long run, and by extension the human race as a whole.

So what, in my opinion, are the greatest moral quandaries currently facing the species? Thinking from the long view, and trying not to get bogged down in short-term issues (e.g. the Iraq War), I’d argue that they are these five:

1. We need a sustainable way to live on the planet. As I’ve written before on my post about Global Warming Skepticism, I don’t particularly care about the Earth, except inasmuch as we can’t live without it. Right now, letting the Earth die means letting us die. So it’s imperative for the species’ survival that we either a) learn to conserve the planet’s natural resources, b) figure out how to keep the species going using renewable resources, or c) invest heavily in survivalism science that will let us live without them. (Or, more likely, a combination of a, b, and c.) Personally, I’d be happy living in a funky sci-fi dome city, but making something like that sustainable is much harder than it looks. Ergo: investing heavily in alternative energy is a moral imperative.

2. We need to divorce morality from religion. I don’t think anything good comes from the belief that we should refrain from murder, theft, and rape because someone wrote it down in a book five thousand years ago. Those of us who don’t believe in an all-powerful Being In The Clouds are just as capable of defining principles of morality and sticking to them — in fact, I’d argue that we’re more capable. If you want to continue to believe in God, great; but we can agree on moral principles regardless without the intervention of priests, pastors, rabbis, popes, ayatollahs, imams, or prophets. What I’m saying is that the species needs to be able to think moralistically in a way that’s inclusive of both religious and non-religious people.

3. We need to figure out how to balance personal freedom with equitable division of wealth. Westerners are inclined to see the political landscape as a spectrum between hard-core loony socialism (all the world’s wealth should be divided equally among its population, regardless of merit) and equally loony hard-core capitalism (everyone go grab your share of the pie, and if that results in radically uneven distribution of wealth, so be it). In Infoquake and MultiReal, I called these two poles governmentalism and libertarianism. Somewhere in the middle, theoretically, is a society where nobody’s starving and everyone can afford basic medical care, yet we still have ample freedom to make our own individual choices without governments taxing us to death. We’ve got to find that place, and figure out how to sustain it long-term.

4. We need to take the nuclear option out of the picture. Once upon a time, two countries were idiotic enough to play a high-stakes game of chess where the stakes were the survival of the human race. You don’t like my way of governing? Fine, then let’s blow the whole place to hell and you can’t govern any of it. Figuring out how to get rid of these weapons so that nobody has the power to scour the planet clean is one heck of a challenge. There’s no Cold War anymore, but the odds of a nuclear war breaking out in either the Middle East or the Indian subcontinent are still much too high for us to ignore. (Personally, I don’t think the threat is going anywhere until some theoretical point in the future when we’re living so much of our lives virtually that physical threats just don’t make sense anymore.)

5. We need to get serious about global human rights. The United States pays a lot of lip service to the idea of global human rights — and compared to much of the rest of the world, we’re willing to do something about it more of the time — but too often we back down from the ideals of democracy when it suits us. The way we’ve helped Israel shunt aside the results of free, democratic elections in Palestine is shameful, and the way we turn a blind eye to similar human rights abuses in our allies like Egypt and Saudi Arabia is equally ludicrous. But compared to much of the rest of the world, we’re light-years ahead. We’ve ditched slavery, worked hard to put all races on an equal footing, and we’re in the long, slow process of recognizing alternative sexual orientations. Until the whole planet works the same way, we’re going to have a hard time moving forward as a species.

Okay, so these are my five long-term moral challenges for the species. What did I miss?

Update 1/16/08: Some interesting commentary on this article by S. M. Duke here, here, and here.

Insulting someone else’s religion isn’t what I’m trying to do here. I’m just trying to understand the concept, because at this point I’m really having a difficult time taking Pope Benedict XVI seriously. The position just seems so anathema to the entire concept of Christianity.

Keep in mind that I’m a non-believer. Keep in mind that I’m not particularly well-versed in the New Testament, and my knowledge of the Old is a little creaky as well.

But it seems to me that even a facile reading of the Gospels would lead one to conclude that, if Jesus were to suddenly drop by Larry King’s studio tomorrow night to speak his mind, he would advise the leader of the world’s largest Christian faith under no uncertain terms to:

1. Sell off all his shit, including every last square foot of Vatican City real estate
2. Get his ass out of that bubble
3. Charter a plane to downtown Baghdad or sub-Saharan Africa
4. Spend the rest of his life ministering directly one-on-one to the poorest and most disenfranchised of the world’s population

Again, I know this is coming off as pissy and disrespectful, but I really, sincerely don’t understand it and want someone to explain it to me.

Now, please don’t think I’m trying to claim the Pope is evil. I’m aware that Catholic charities and Catholic churches and just plain ol’ Catholics spend a lot of time and money and effort ministering to the poor. I’m aware that there’s much more to the faith than just shoveling money and blessings to the destitute.

But I don’t understand the palace. I don’t understand the splendor. Would Jesus have sanctioned a big, gaudy palace? Seems to me that the guy I read about in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John would have told his emissary on Earth to get the cheapest, sparest office he could find, somewhere in close proximity to the people who need him the most. Like Fallujah, or Darfur. Jesus was the guy who hung out with the lepers, beggars, and prostitutes. Shouldn’t the Pope be out there looking for the direst, most miserable spot on Earth?

Someone needs to explain to me how the modern concept of the Pope fits in with the things Jesus said in the Gospels, because I’m just too ignorant to understand it. And I know that saying I’m ignorant sounds snide and cutesy and dismissive, but that’s not my intention. There are many educated, rational, intelligent people around the world who believe in Catholicism and who believe in the Pope, and I just want to understand their thinking.

(While we’re at it, perhaps somebody can explain to me how anyone who believes in a man that advised us all to “turn the other cheek” could possibly countenance the U.S. invasion of Iraq, or the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan for that matter. George W. Bush and many of his Republican allies claim to be devout students of Jesus. Fine. But Jesus specifically said that when a bunch of violent, malignant fuckheads slam planes into the World Trade Center and murder three thousand innocent people, your job is to:

1. Forgive the hijackers
2. Pray for them
3. Reach out to your enemies with love and understanding

(You can choose to believe that’s a wise course of action or not. There are plenty of neoconservatives out there that can make logical, rational arguments for our wars that have nothing to do with religion. But the New Testament is pretty clear about Jesus’ opinion. So do you believe in what the guy with the long hair and sandals said, or don’t you? How can you believe in the war — in any war — and yet still believe in Jesus?)

So I really would like someone to explain how people can claim to be devout students of Jesus and yet have such blatant disregard for the things he actually, you know, said.

* If you’re going to respond to this little unfocused rant, please don’t respond with any of the following:

1. “Well, the liberals/Muslims/Jews/atheists/Democrats claim to believe x and yet they do y.” Yes, I’m perfectly aware that all of these groups are stuffed to the gills with hypocritical fuckheads too. We’ll get to them another time.
2. “All religion is stupid and illogical.” Bully for you for believing that, but that doesn’t help me understand what’s going through these people’s heads any better. And I really, really, really want to.
3. “My religion/branch/sect/creed is much better than those rotten Catholics because…” Again, wonderful, rant about that all you want on your own blog, but I don’t want to hear it on mine. Here, we only rant about things that I want to rant about.