Eyewitness to the Dalai Lama Talking about Religion and Morality

A pair of bloggers at Huffingtonpost have reported on their first hand experience with the Dalai Lama in Costa Rica. They were impressed by this religious man's insistence that morality can exist without a divine power. Popular culture seems to have it that morality depends on God's laws. But in academic philosophy and in the great thinkers of the past we read in philosophy departments the possibility of secular morality is basic.

He said that only a very small percentage of people, despite their membership in one kind of religion or other, are actually taking their religion very seriously. Most so-called "religious" people are only very superficially involved with the particular faith, in which they happen to have been brought up. To that he added something even more daring and maybe even shocking to many of his academic but still nominally Catholic listeners, when saying, "most people are really only money-worshippers," implying that their religious pretensions are, at rock bottom, only hypocritical.

... in addressing his student audience at the University of Costa Rica, the Dalai Lama affirmed specifically that ethics and morality need not be based on religion or belief in "God." He frankly admitted that, in this respect, he did have a strong disagreement with the Pope, in their recent, private meeting. The latter insisted, of course, that morality had to be based on religious faith. In contrast, the Dalai Lama declared that ethics and morality can arise simply out of recognition of our mutual interdependency, leading in turn to such secular virtues as respect, caring, and compassion for others.

Read their whole post here