A Secular Ethic In A Christian Context

1. LIFE MATTERS: The universal human experience is that life in its ultimate context or backstory, whether that context takes secular or mythological form, has meaning, value, and purpose beyond itself.
   
2. DEATH THREATENS: The anticipation of death experienced in fear, disappointment, and suffering fundamentally threatens this ultimate meaning, value, and purpose by challenging this context.
   
3. FEAR CORRUPTS: The threat of death, evoked in our continual experiences of people, places, and things - including those dark aspects of ourselves that we, our society, or our culture find unacceptable - corrupts our actions such that we become alienated from and destructive towards ourselves, other people, and nature. These corrupted actions may take the form of:
   
• Aggression: attempting to defeat the threat of death through the control or destruction of those anticipations,
  
• Escape: attempting to flee or ignore or be distracted from those anticipations, or
  
• Servitude: attempting to achieve a “negotiated peace” with the threat of death through service to some talisman vainly thought to possess power over death.
  
4. DEATH IS DISARMED: As compared to the corrupt response to the threat of death, there is a freely available freedom from death and its anticipations that replaces destruction with healing and alienation with reconciliation in this world as we know it.
   
5. PEACE IS ESTABLISHED: While this freedom from death and its anticipations is latent in all human experience, ironically it is most unambiguous and militant in our encounters with death and its anticipations where, rather than being explicitly defeated or destroyed, those encounters are subverted into occasions of healing and reconciliation.