Ethics/Morality

The foundations for human morals and ethics are found in the book of Genesis. The issue of capital punishment was given Genesis 9:6, God’s Covenant with Noah upon leaving the ark and entering the new world after the Flood: “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed; for in the image of God has God made man.” In the former world, from the Creation to the Flood, permission had not been given to take the life of the murderer. Instead, the murderer was to be exiled as in the example of Cain who murdered his brother, Abel (Genesis 4:8-16).

Just how does the modern geologist tell the age of a rock by simply looking at it? For that matter, where do all those millions of years come from and how can they be reconciled with Genesis? Until the 17^th century most people of Europe and Britain believed the biblical account of creation and a global Flood. They considered history as “static” but by the late 1600’s this began to change to “progressive history.” Both invention and discovery gave this impression. Genesis tells of mankind’s Fall from a noble beginning.

1. Human pride is the usual cause of racial prejudice and every ethnic group has been guilty of believing themselves to be somehow superior to all others: Christians of the past have been no exception. Modern genetics has well established the fact that all colors of the human race will have derived from a single mating pair; the color of that pair would have been brown and, in fact, that is the predominant color of the human race today. Scripture reminds us that all men are of the same blood (Acts 17:26) and nowhere speaks of race although it does speak of families.

She was Lithuanian, Jewish and unmarried when she entered the United States in 1886 as an immigrant looking for work. The 17-year-old Emma Goldman married reluctantly at 18, but before her 20th birthday she had been divorced twice from the same man. Vowing never to be trapped by matrimony again, she argued that love in marriage was a contradiction; love should be free, not bonded, and she practiced her conviction with a succession of lovers until her 65th year. A century ago this was a radical lifestyle, but then Emma Goldman was not the average woman.