What do you thing are the top 5 social and ethical issues facing us today? What gets you worked up? Global warming? Slavery? Abortion? Pornography? Sexual Promiscuity? War? Torture? Corporate Greed? Homosexuality? Persecution? Pedophilia? Gun Control? Racism? There are many more social and ethical issues I can think of. I am sure you can too. I would like to hear your thoughts. Which do you think are the 5 most important and why?
Curious Christian 
Slavery, Torture, Destitute poverty, virulent greed, Systemic violence – All products of the seething, silent underbelly of globalised capitalist free trade.
Worse than this is one’s own inability to forsake a comfortable middle class, upper class or out of reach ruling class lifestyle: to allow the poverty stricken third world enough self sufficiency in their own land to irradicate their requirement to move to the first or second world simply for survival.
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Yes, wealth & poverty issues are what I keep coming back to. Huddo’s just put it better than I can.
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Injustice and poverty were issues that were obviously close to the heart of Jesus. Just as obviously though, those categories are quite broad. So I wonder now, maybe we need to bring our circle of concern into alignment with our circle of influence? I ask myself, what is within my circle of influence? What can I hear God calling me to do? I think helping broken families in my area is one thing. Drugs can be a problem associated with that. Being an agent of and advocate for inter-religious reconciliation is another. War justified by religion is associated with that.
Getting philosophical though, I think there is a meta-concern. The split in the church between those who care about personal purity and those who care about social justice. We need to approach ethics more holistically and Christo-centrically.
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1. Corporate greed & associated evils
2. The idea that people are disposable — this includes war, abortion, capital punishment, reckless driving and several other things.
3. Racism, ethnocentrism, nationalism etc — who is our “we” and who is our “they”.
4. Seeing people as sexual objects or objects for our gratification generally. This includes most sexual sins, but central to all of them is the attitude behind them.
5. Acquisitiveness, and the greed culture generally.
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For what it’s worth, these are pretty much in the order they came to mind:
1. Availability of clean water
2. “Real” – fairly produced – good food that isn’t genetically altered, hormone enhanced, corporately chosen, etc.
3. Messing with genetics of humans, plants, and animals – we are gonna create something really bad really soon
4. Poverty, slavery, and other issues that keep people captive and give nothing that captivates our imaginations
5. Literacy, which seems to be a leverage issue for helping change many other aspects of life.
Without addressing the first three, it’s hard to sustain life. Without addressing the next two, it’s hard to sustain a hopeful lifestyle and future. As a list, I could see each of these as addressing interwoven core issues of general humanity/community, ecology, and individuality. No split.
After these five, I’d probably get into a lot more of the specifics … but if we don’t address these as core systems issues, what’s the point of only addressing specifics? Those may make a difference, but these five deal with overall sustainability.
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Brad, I live in Africa and the issue you put first is definitely prominent for people here. However that– and the lack of education, health care, a functioning criminal justice system, road safety, economic opportunity, environmental pollution and more– can be blamed on the endemic corruption of government. There is plenty of water and resources here to make this place a paradise, but corruption sucks the life blood of civilization so that the poorest and least suffer most.
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