Religion & Ethics: Content from Across the ABC

The Moral Compass

22/03/2015, 06:30 pm

The taste of memory

21/03/2015, 5.00pm

Annunciation

22/03/2015, 10:00pm

From 'Your Grace' to 'the accused'

18/03/2015, 05.30pm

Malawi mouse gospel

22/03/2015, 6.35am

Senior School Choir of the Year

22/03/2015, 11.30am

Islamic Fusion

22/03/2015, 6.00pm

Conversations on Religious Current Affairs

22/03/2015, 10:00pm

Charles Chaput, First Things

The biggest problem we face as a culture isn't gay marriage or global warming. It's not abortion funding or the federal debt. These are vital issues, clearly. But the deeper problem, the one that's crippling us, is that we use words like justice, rights, freedom and dignity without any commonly shared meaning to their content. We speak the same language, but the words don't mean the same thing.

John Keown, Ethika Politika

Unfortunately, coverage of this debate by the mass media is typically one-sided and emotive. Viewers, listeners, and readers are subjected to a succession of heart-rending human interest stories of sick or paralysed people who want assisted suicide. As the saying goes, "If it bleeds, it leads." These stories seem designed not only to tug on public emotion, but to tug it in one direction: toward legalization. To the extent that opposing views are aired at all, they are often caricatured as "religious" - despite the fact that legalization has long been opposed by secular bodies like the World Medical Association.