Contents
- Scottish Parliament Wednesday 4 April 2001 (Afternoon)
- Time for Reflection
- Looked-after Children and Adoption Services
- Decision Time
- Water and Sewerage Charges
Time for Reflection
To lead our time for reflection this afternoon, we welcome the Rev Andrew Hill, who is the minister of St Mark's Unitarian Church here in Edinburgh.
Good afternoon. There was a Jewish rabbi who lived during the first century of the Common Era, and the rabbi's name was Hillel. One day, someone came up to Rabbi Hillel and said: "There are so many laws and so many regulations that it is quite impossible to remember them all. Please teach me one rule that covers them all and that I can remember while I am standing on just one leg."
I wonder whether you can imagine for yourselves just one rule that could sum up every law and every regulation that has already passed through this Parliament, and every law and every regulation that will pass through it in the future—one rule that you could remember while you were standing on just one leg.
There must be a human limit to how many important rules even legislators can actually remember. Nevertheless, there have to be rules about common ways of doing things, otherwise we would continually collide with each other. But most rules are neither right nor wrong. They are simply codified conventions, such as driving on the same side of the road as everyone else who is going in the same direction.
Laws and regulations exist from necessity, but in normal everyday living we rarely think of them or refer to them. There simply is no time to live by the rulebook, and the danger of doing so is that we end up looking for loopholes in the law, or searching for ways round regulations, and then proudly pronouncing, "But it's not against the rules."
Rabbi Hillel had an answer for his questioner. His answer was, "Don't do to anyone else the kind of thing that is hateful to you." This, Hillel said, was all the laws put together, and all the rest was just an explanation of that one short rule. His rule was a version of what ethicists know as the golden rule. It exists in many different forms and can be found in Christian, Hindu, Confucian, Taoist, Bahai, Buddhist, Moslem, Hebrew and Jain scriptures, as well as in humanist and secular literature.
I wonder what your golden rule is that sums up all the laws and all the regulations that have passed through and will pass through this Parliament—and remember that the older we get, the shorter our memories become, and the shorter the time we can actually stand unaided on one leg.
Thank you.
Our main item of business this—
On a point of order.
A point of order already.
On a point of order. Would it be possible to ask the guidance of the Presiding Officer as to how MSPs can raise the subject of civil servants' behaviour in the chamber following allegations against Dr Paul Brady—
No, I am sorry, Mr Lochhead. You submitted an emergency question and I declined it. We cannot have any arguments now about how the matter that you refer to can be raised. You will have to find one of the conventional methods.