Some Alternatives to Christian Ethics

Since I began writing my column for the Deseret News back in 2011, each column has been between 736 and 739 words long.  This one is no exception:

http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865680201/Some-alternatives-to-Christian-ethics.html

But it seems to have hit a nerve among at least a few atheists and agnostics and fellow travelers.

I didn’t deal with this, they say.  And what about that?

Patience, friends!  I supply the nuances and flesh out the details in separate columns.  (Sometimes even, implicitly, in the biweekly columns that I do on Saturdays with Bill Hamblin.)  It’s a cumulative case.  And I’ll return to this and other issues.  Have already done so, in fact.

I do like the commenter, though, who triumphantly points out to me that Desmond Tutu and Beowulf aren’t contemporaries.  A careful reading of the column will demonstrate that the thought that they’re 1300 years apart had never so much as entered my mind.  Nor had I realized that the Beowulf poem is likely fiction.  And I certainly wish that I had called the column “Some alternatives to Christian ethics” instead of “An exhaustive examination of all of the alternatives to Christian ethics,” since, as one astute writer points out, I don’t deal with Buddhism, Hinduism, and other world faiths, and since I use only a few examples (whereas I should have meticulously discussed dozens of them).

Where would I be without such acute critiques?

Posted from Paris, France