The Hon. Michael Kirby recently said that those in the churches expecting gay people to be celibate should 'start thinking about the real moral questions in our society and in our world. They should lift their thoughts from the human genitals to real problems, on which their views may actually be helpful, such as animal welfare, refugees, modern social relationships, the protection of children, the state of the biosphere, global poverty', and so on.
I'm sure there are people — both inside the churches and out of them — who have an unhealthy fascination with sexual morality. Likewise, there are undoubtedly people who, in the guise of Christian piety, hold very unchristian attitudes towards men and women who are attracted to members of the same sex.
These people are missing the point of ethics, in particular the system of ethics first expounded by Aristotle and subsequently reconciled with the Christian faith by St Thomas Aquinas.
When I first started working in bioethics I discovered that the words good and evil have a very natural, normal, logical meaning. 'Good' means 'good for human beings', and 'evil' means 'bad for human beings'. Aristotle described the ultimate goal of human life as 'eudaimonia' or 'flourishing': actions that contribute to our flourishing are good for us, and actions that detract from our flourishing are bad for us.
The point of ethics is to work out (hopefully ahead of time) what it takes to flourish, and whether our actions assist or impede this goal. We know what it takes for plants and animals to flourish; what about we 'rational animals'? Most of the answers are already known, and widely recognised across human cultures and history.
Unfortunately ethics, morality, and basic terms like good and evil have become loaded with a range of other meanings. We modern Australians unwittingly inhabit an intellectual landscape shaped and scarred by centuries of countervailing thoughts, opinions, ideologies, and interpretations. We carry a lot of baggage — cultural, religious, and moral. Getting rid of baggage takes a lot of time and energy: you have to unpack it.
The only way to unpack the baggage associated with the word 'evil' is to study its precise, complex meaning and overcome superficial allusions to devils waving