My Personal Credo
Personal credo of Donald Harvey Marks
I recently (June 2021) completed the course: Build Your Own Theology. The ending assignment was for each to create their own credo - a statement of beliefs which guide our individual actions, which in my case follows:
I believe in:
● reason, ethics, health justice and social justice,
● in the not-all-knowing power of science, and of facts over truth,
● that we were made in God’s image, however we see God - as a creator, as a universal force of love, or in a more classic sense. To me, Psalm 18 means that we should see ourselves as part of nature in God, and God in ourselves, in the universality of life, and of God as a life force,
● that God reflects ourselves, and we can see our reflection in God,
● that no one can fool God, but we can certainly fool ourselves and those we care about most, at least for some relative amount of time.
● that God, our universal spirit, knows our hearts, and is revealed to us as required.
● that great peace can come from harmonizing our lives and our ethics with the rhythm and flow of the universal spirit,
● that in addition to the 4 classic forces in nature (strong, weak, gravity, electromagnetic), that love, forgiveness, pride and the spirit of life are also very strong and very important forces,
● I believe that there are absolute moral rights and wrongs, without which society will simply collapse,
● I object to and reject moral relativism and its consequence uncertainty, because they undermine my confidence in how I see morality, norms and values.
● I am suspect of following dispassionate logic and adopting absolutist principles in my life,
● that as a moral citizen, I see that truth (ethical, moral, theological) can be relative and situational, not always absolute. Truth, not being fact, by its very subjective nature is quite relative, and I see a range of truths and an open set of beliefs.
● I tend to see life, morality and truth as finely nuanced, complex and relative things that generally do not respond well to absolute laws, rules that don’t change or inflexible statements,
● I believe that truth is relative in the human and moral realms that I live in, simple answers often don’t exist, absolute statements don’t always work, and eternal truths are hard to come by,
● I can not know and control everything, and I fight to accept this and just be at peace. I accept that most moral and human issues defy absolute answers.
I personally advocate for:
Return of #FairnessDoctrine to all media, public and private, to enable fair and balanced reporting and opinion,
Medicare55, expand Medicaid and negotiate all drug prices
repeal of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, Section 230(c)(1), to hold social media responsible for malicious, harmful and false posts
Related writings
Einstein, Relativity and Relative Ethics, by Donald Harvey Marks, physician scientist https://bit.ly/3gWWH9t https://bit.ly/3rcqZMj
What I Haven’t Told My Family on the Meaning of Time. Reflections on personal mortality, by Donald Harvey Marks, physician scientist https://bit.ly/374cpzJ
Jonas Salk, Polio Vaccine and Vaccinating Against Hate, by Donald Harvey Marks, physician scientist https://bit.ly/3xjtosh
Link to my Favorite Books📚 (and my recent read list)
Odyssey Project, video recap of the life of Donald Marks, https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PJC8qCiUajqtwTw46o-t3FmldUaLJfjM/view?usp=drivesdk