Chuck Colson's speech on ethics at the Harvard University Business School scores some credibility points.(click link for text)

That's a lot of tags.

Dude. Jim. WTF is up with the tags?

He's a smart guy. But he's got a twisted view of human nature I do not share.

Just because some - even many or most - people need an eternal agent, real or imaginary, to affect change - does not mean that humanity is doomed without some stern father figure in the sky to tell us what to do OR ELSE.

We're a pretty decent species. We'll figure out how to get through this. Or we won't, and mother earth will find some new species to take our place.

Nobody is going to to rescue us, but us. We have nobody to rely upon but eachother. The only miracle is in us overcoming our own fears, apathy and selfishness in reaching out to eachother.

I think that by letting go of this expectation of somebody coming and making everything right - we realize our own responsibility to do that for ourselves and eachother.

Xavier: I think you put too much trust in humanity. :)

I know people. I know they're broken.

Every wonder and terror... human.

Broken, brutal and striving. Overcoming history and our own nature. Born from mud and reaching for the stars.

That's the story I tell myself about where we've come from, why things go wrong, and where we're going. I like it better than we're disobedient creations, whose highest aspiration is slavery and our greatest reward is an eternity of telling somebody else how awesome they are.

XavierAM:

When you write,

"I know they're broken",

is this the equivalent of saying,

"no one is perfect"?

Jim - there is no applicable standard of perfection.

XavierAM:

When you write,

"I know they're broken", does this imply a known state of "not broken"?

Or, in other words, what do you mean when you write, "I know people. I know they're broken"?

That people behave irrationally, short sightedly, cruelly and self destructively.

XavierAM:

The fact that people behave irrationally, short sighted, cruelly and self destructively presupposes that there is a standard for behaving rationally, far sighted, compassionately and
self constructively.

Does it not?

Yes. Mine.

XavierAM:

Is the preceding comment a variant of this

definition

No, while egocentric I do not deny the existence of the external world.

However, I'm perfectly apt at coming up with my own standards for behavior. I can decide what to eat for breakfast, too.

Sweet mother of cheese, it looks like he just copy/pasted the speech text into the tags field after turning all punctuation and paragraph breaks into commas.

Anyways, said speech earns no credibility with me, no matter how eloquently he makes his misguided points.

Here is an updated link to the text of the Chuck Colson speech given at Harvard on April 4, 1991. The title of the speech was, "The Problem of Ethics."