Law, Jesus, and Ethics

We are being conformed to the image of Christ, not Law.

He answered them, “What did Moses command you?” They said, “Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of divorce and send her away.” And Jesus said to them, “Because of the hardness of your heart he wrote you this commandment.” Mark 10:3-5

A crisis of ethics

The present economic turmoil in America is but a symptom of a deeper crisis, a crisis of ethics.

What Did We Expect?

A report published today in USAToday indicates that self-checkout lanes in grocery stores are a mixed blessing.

On the one hand, customers appreciate the convenience of being able to move quickly through a checkout lane with minimum interruption and maximum ease.

On the other hand, grocery store theft has increased dramatically through these self-checkout lanes.

According to Jayne O’Donnell and Sarah Meehan, “Theft – intentional or not – is up to five times higher with self-checkout than when cashiers are working.” People are not lacking in ingenuity when it comes to ways of stealing grocers blind. One company that monitors such theft reports that it has “seen people scanning their Starbucks as bananas, leaving their items in the cart or reusable bag instead of scanning them and overloading the bagging area so that un-scanned merchandise can be piled on without being sensed.”

When Will and Persuasion Fail

Can you see where this is headed?

If your computer seems unusually warm today it could because a firestorm of ethical signficance has erupted over at The Atlantic website.

As reported by Leo Hickman at The Guardian, charges of "eugenics" and warnings of Nazi tyranny are flying against three scientists who, in an interview at The Atlantic, suggested that human bioengineering might be a way of getting on top of the climate change crisis.