Morally Bankrupt Amorality Cannot Do the Heavy Lifting

Few and Far Between

The controversies rocking the United States over sexual immorality in high places has a number of aspects to it.  At the most superficial level it's good to see the beginnings of public rejection of sexual immorality.  Weinsteingate has served well in that regard--prompting a burning spotlight to be trained upon the media and the Hollywood glitterati.  The accusations and confessions have been spewing forth in a paroxysm of projectile vomiting.  

The "system" is rejecting the filth.  But now things have moved on to politicians and those who dance the dervishes of power.  Suddenly, both left and right are caught in the maw of gross, partisan hypocrisy.  When a member of the opposite party is accused of engaging in sexual predatory behaviour the very balefire of Hell is summoned.  But, when the accused is a member of one's own political party, or in-group, undignified silence is the order of the day.  Voices have begun to be heard calling for a removal of the logs out of one's own eye. 

This, from Politico:

Sinking Sands

What's the Beef With Milo?

We made an argument yesterday that once biblical teaching about marriage and family is rejected--as the West has done--all that is left is "everything goes".  We recognize that in making the "anything goes" claim we have jumped over a few valleys here and there.  While the logic of the argument is sound, the sociology of the argument is a bit more complicated. 

Since we do not currently live in a society which tolerates "anything goes", there are a number of sociological or political realities which determine right and wrong, lawfulness and illegality.  But our argument remains valid: if the Bible's definition of marriage and family is rejected, any other definition of marriage will turn upon the particular prevailing "flavour of the month".

With the acceptance of homosexual "marriage" and the rejection of the Bible's authority on the matter who gets married to whom, and on what terms and conditions, becomes a matter of the prevailing political winds at the time.

Pomo's Universal Acid At Work

The End of Absolutes: America's New Moral Code

Research Releases in Culture & Media • May 25, 2016
Barna Group

Christian morality is being ushered out of American social structures and off the cultural main stage, leaving a vacuum in its place—and the broader culture is attempting to fill the void. New research from Barna reveals growing concern about the moral condition of the nation, even as many American adults admit they are uncertain about how to determine right from wrong. So what do Americans believe? Is truth relative or absolute? And do Christians see truth and morality in radically different ways from the broader public, or are they equally influenced by the growing tide of secularism and religious skepticism?

A majority of American adults across age group, ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic status and political ideology expresses concern about the nation’s moral condition—eight in 10 overall (80%). The proportion is closer to nine in 10 among Elders (89%) and Boomers (87%), while about three-quarters of Gen-Xers (75%) and Millennials (74%) report concern. Similarly, practicing Christians (90%) are more likely than adults of no faith (67%) or those who identify with a religious faith other than Christianity (72%) to say they are concerned about the moral condition of the nation. Though measurable differences exist between population segments, moral concern is widespread across the demographic board.

Much less widespread, however, is consensus on morality itself. What is it based on? Where does it come from? How can someone know what to do when making moral decisions? According to a majority of American adults (57%), knowing what is right or wrong is a matter of personal experience.

Just Dumb

The Fruits of a Superficial Education

In John Key, New Zealand has a Prime Minister who is superficial in critical ways.  His analysis and thinking upon some issues barely gets beyond the puerile.  When first elected to Parliament he was faced with a Prostitution Reform Bill--which would make prostitution a perfectly normal and mainstream occupation--you know, like taxi driving.

Key declared that he intended to support the Bill, announcing to the House:

I do not believe, and will never believe, that the government can legislate for morality. [John Roughan, John Key: Portrait of a Prime Minister (Auckland: Penguin Books, 2014), p.111.]

There has been a strong streak of libertinism in his approach to such issues.  He threw his weight behind New Zealand's homosexual marriage private member's bill and undoubtedly was very influential in it passing.

What Key apparently struggles to grasp is the ubiquity of morality.  It is just dumb to assert, "I will never believe that the government can legislate for morality".

It's All Relative, Said the Rabbit

The Madding Crowd

In his book, A Hobbit Journey, author Matthew Dickerson reflects upon why aspects of the writings of J R R Tolkien jar so gratingly upon the ear of the modern Westerner.  The world view of the Lord of the Rings and the Silmarillion reflects a cosmos with moral absolutes and true moral guilt.  It portrays evil as a personal hatred and malice towards others.  Increasingly in the West, this simply "does not compute". 

Such notions of true moral good and evil are being washed out of the modern mind.  Or the attempt is being made to wash them out.  Firstly, take materialism--the dominant worldview in the West, along with its kissing cousins of atheism, secularism, and progressivism.  In all these variants, there is no such thing as absolute, objective good or evil, right or wrong.  So-called evils are merely the result of particular or societal programming.  Morality and immorality is akin to--in fact, can be identified with--programming the machine.  We are what we are because of the alignment of electrons and quarks.  "We are what we are because we're not what we used to  be."

Anthropologist Ruth Benedict, writing in 1934, described this Brave New World: 

The Reason Many Despise Tolkien's Work

Faux Protests and Outrage

We have been recently working through Matthew Dickerson's A Hobbit Journey (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press/Baker Publishing, 2012).  Dickerson has a PhD from Cornell and teaches at Middlebury College in Vermont.  In A Hobbit Journey, he attempts an exposition of Tolkien's world-and-life view as it emerges in The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion.

At one point he takes up the issue of why Tolkien is loathed by many of the high priests and prophets of our secularist age. He argues that it is due in significant part to Tolkien's notions of objective morality and moral responsibility.  He explains:

Objective morality--or what some people call "moral absolutes"--is a definition of good and evil that is real and true for every person (and every culture), regardless of whether that person (or culture) happens to believe it to be true. [Dickerson, op cit., p. 127.]

Tolkien's mindset believes in objective morality and moral absolutes.  The modern world does not.  Therefore, for many amongst the chattering classes and the Commentariat, much of his corpus appears odd, at best, childish,simplistic, and superstitious at worst.  His is the shawl of the Grand Anachronism.

Dickerson employs an illustration to explain the contrast between Tolkien's philosophic and religious principles and those of the modern age.

Consider a computer virus.  No matter how inconvenient or destructive it is, a computer virus is just an impersonal collection of computer code composed of bits (zeros and ones) on a computer.  A virus has no will of its own and cannot be considered evil or immoral. . . .

Now suppose that a person who commits a heinous crime is only acting as he or she is programmed to do, as a materialist world view states is the case. . . . Then by no means can that person be evil; only the programmer of that person can be evil.  In this case, however, the programmer is believed to be a blind, impersonal force.  In short, where there is no choice at all, there can be no moral (or immoral) choice.  In a merely material world, we may at worst consider another person's actions as inconvenient to us; we cannot call them "evil" or "immoral."  Or, if we do, then we are really only calling "immoral" the universe itself . . . . I any case, the word immoral has no meaning in this context. [Ibid., p. 128.]

Does this sound familiar?  It is everywhere around us.

Empty Sophistry

Why Our Children Don’t Think There Are Moral Facts

By Justin P. McBrayer

New York Times

 

 

What would you say if you found out that our public schools were teaching children that it is not true that it’s wrong to kill people for fun or cheat on tests? Would you be surprised?

I was. As a philosopher, I already knew that many college-aged students don’t believe in moral facts. While there are no national surveys quantifying this phenomenon, philosophy professors with whom I have spoken suggest that the overwhelming majority of college freshmen in their classrooms view moral claims as mere opinions that are not true or are true only relative to a culture.

What I didn’t know was where this attitude came from. Given the presence of moral relativism in some academic circles, some people might naturally assume that philosophers themselves are to blame. But they aren’t. There are historical examples of philosophers who endorse a kind of moral relativism, dating back at least to Protagoras who declared that “man is the measure of all things,” and several who deny that there are any moral facts whatsoever. But such creatures are rare. Besides, if students are already showing up to college with this view of morality, it’s very unlikely that it’s the result of what professional philosophers are teaching. So where is the view coming from?

A few weeks ago, I learned that students are exposed to this sort of thinking well before crossing the threshold of higher education. When I went to visit my son’s second grade open house, I found a troubling pair of signs hanging over the bulletin board. They read:

Fact: Something that is true about a subject and can be tested or proven.

Opinion: What someone thinks, feels, or believes.

Hoping that this set of definitions was a one-off mistake, I went home and Googled “fact vs. opinion.” The definitions I found online were substantially the same as the one in my son’s classroom. As it turns out, the Common Core standards used by a majority of K-12 programs in the country require that students be able to “distinguish among fact, opinion, and reasoned judgment in a text.” And the Common Core institute provides a helpful page full of links to definitions, lesson plans and quizzes to ensure that students can tell the difference between facts and opinions.

So what’s wrong with this distinction and how does it undermine the view that there are objective moral facts?

Unintended Consequences

Do They Realise?

 The real problem, for those who would overturn the Christian moral order is not whether it might be true that the young could be influenced into homosexual acts, habits and milieux.  The problem is that this possibility could be seen as a danger rather than an opportunity.  Thus the very suggestion that it might be worse if that young man chose a homosexual orientation rather than a heterosexual one is the real offence against the new code of belief. The new order is based upon the idea that there is no moral distinction between homosexual and heterosexual acts, that those who believe that there is are morally faulty, and that the human race can be educated out of its general disapproval of homosexual acts.  Do those who support it, claiming that they do so in the name of tolerance, realise the radicalism of the programme they are supporting?  I suspect not.  [Peter Hitchens, The Broken Compass: How Left and Right Lost Their Meaning (London: Continuum, 2009), p.120f.]     

Atheism and the Moralisms of the Wax-Nose, Part II

Atheist Evangelicals

John Gray
The Guardian
March 3, 2015

In itself, atheism is an entirely negative position. In pagan Rome, “atheist” (from the Greek atheos) meant anyone who refused to worship the established pantheon of deities. The term was applied to Christians, who not only refused to worship the gods of the pantheon but demanded exclusive worship of their own god. Many non-western religions contain no conception of a creator-god – Buddhism and Taoism, in some of their forms, are atheist religions of this kind – and many religions have had no interest in proselytising. In modern western contexts, however, atheism and rejection of monotheism are practically interchangeable.

Roughly speaking, an atheist is anyone who has no use for the concept of God – the idea of a divine mind, which has created humankind and embodies in a perfect form the values that human beings cherish and strive to realise. Many who are atheists in this sense (including myself) regard the evangelical atheism that has emerged over the past few decades with bemusement. Why make a fuss over an idea that has no sense for you? There are untold multitudes who have no interest in waging war on beliefs that mean nothing to them. Throughout history, many have been happy to live their lives without bothering about ultimate questions. This sort of atheism is one of the perennial responses to the experience of being human.

As an organised movement, atheism is never non-committal in this way. It always goes with an alternative belief-system – typically, a set of ideas that serves to show the modern west is the high point of human development. In Europe from the late 19th century until the second world war, this was a version of evolutionary theory that marked out western peoples as being the most highly evolved. Around the time Haeckel was promoting his racial theories, a different theory of western superiority was developed by Marx. While condemning liberal societies and prophesying their doom, Marx viewed them as the high point of human development to date. (This is why he praised British colonialism in India as an essentially progressive development.) If Marx had serious reservations about Darwinism – and he did – it was because Darwin’s theory did not frame evolution as a progressive process.

Atheism and the Moralisms of the Wax-Nose, Part I

What Scares the New Atheists

John Gray
March 3, 2015
The Guardian

[In this extended essay published in The Guardian John Gray focuses upon the inevitable amorality of atheism.  Since atheism has no foundation for any morality, what moral precepts its does advocate have no defendable foundation.  Atheist moral precepts are wishful thinking. This has led atheists down through the years to adhere to a bunch of conflicting moralisms, moral positions, and moralities.  We have broken the essay down into shorter segments and will publish over consecutive days.  Ed.]


In 1929, the Thinker’s Library, a series established by the Rationalist Press Association to advance secular thinking and counter the influence of religion in Britain, published an English translation of the German biologist Ernst Haeckel’s 1899 book The Riddle of the Universe. Celebrated as “the German Darwin”, Haeckel was one of the most influential public intellectuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century; The Riddle of the Universe sold half a million copies in Germany alone, and was translated into dozens of other languages. Hostile to Jewish and Christian traditions, Haeckel devised his own “religion of science” called Monism, which incorporated an anthropology that divided the human species into a hierarchy of racial groups. Though he died in 1919, before the Nazi Party had been founded, his ideas, and widespread influence in Germany, unquestionably helped to create an intellectual climate in which policies of racial slavery and genocide were able to claim a basis in science.

The Thinker’s Library also featured works by Julian Huxley, grandson of TH Huxley, the Victorian biologist who was known as “Darwin’s bulldog” for his fierce defence of evolutionary theory. A proponent of “evolutionary humanism”, which he described as “religion without revelation”, Julian Huxley shared some of Haeckel’s views, including advocacy of eugenics. In 1931, Huxley wrote that there was “a certain amount of evidence that the negro is an earlier product of human evolution than the Mongolian or the European, and as such might be expected to have advanced less, both in body and mind”. Statements of this kind were then commonplace: there were many in the secular intelligentsia – including HG Wells, also a contributor to the Thinker’s Library – who looked forward to a time when “backward” peoples would be remade in a western mould or else vanish from the world.

But by the late 1930s, these views were becoming suspect: already in 1935, Huxley admitted that the concept of race was “hardly definable in scientific terms”. While he never renounced eugenics, little was heard from him on the subject after the second world war. The science that pronounced western people superior was bogus – but what shifted Huxley’s views wasn’t any scientific revelation: it was the rise of Nazism, which revealed what had been done under the aegis of Haeckel-style racism.

It has often been observed that Christianity follows changing moral fashions, all the while believing that it stands apart from the world. The same might be said, with more justice, of the prevalent version of atheism. If an earlier generation of unbelievers shared the racial prejudices of their time and elevated them to the status of scientific truths, evangelical atheists do the same with the liberal values to which western societies subscribe today – while looking with contempt upon “backward” cultures that have not abandoned religion.

The racial theories promoted by atheists in the past have been consigned to the memory hole – and today’s most influential atheists would no more endorse racist biology than they would be seen following the guidance of an astrologer. But they have not renounced the conviction that human values must be based in science; now it is liberal values which receive that accolade. There are disputes, sometimes bitter, over how to define and interpret those values, but their supremacy is hardly ever questioned. For 21st century atheist missionaries, being liberal and scientific in outlook are one and the same.

It’s a reassuringly simple equation. In fact there are no reliable connections – whether in logic or history – between atheism, science and liberal values. When organised as a movement and backed by the power of the state, atheist ideologies have been an integral part of despotic regimes that also claimed to be based in science, such as the former Soviet Union. Many rival moralities and political systems – most of them, to date, illiberal – have attempted to assert a basis in science. All have been fraudulent and ephemeral. Yet the attempt continues in atheist movements today, which claim that liberal values can be scientifically validated and are therefore humanly universal.

Fortunately, this type of atheism isn’t the only one that has ever existed. There have been many modern atheisms, some of them more cogent and more intellectually liberating than the type that makes so much noise today. Campaigning atheism is a missionary enterprise, aiming to convert humankind to a particular version of unbelief; but not all atheists have been interested in propagating a new gospel, and some have been friendly to traditional faiths.

Evangelical atheists today view liberal values as part of an emerging global civilisation; but not all atheists, even when they have been committed liberals, have shared this comforting conviction. Atheism comes in many irreducibly different forms, among which the variety being promoted at the present time looks strikingly banal and parochial.

What do Hacking and Torture Have in Common?

Conflicts of Interest

The moral vacuity of Unbelief has been on display in recent days.  Firstly, the prurient frenzied delight over the hacking of Sony digital property, the breathless headlines about who said what to whom (to sell more newspapers and subscriptions) and the joy in seeing senior executives at Sony shown up to be nasty little people.  Hollywood and the gossip columnists (virtually the entire media set) are all atwitter.  Yet, in the same breath said media will condemn hacking as theft and an egregious crime.  Recall the moral outrage and self-righteous fulminations of the media and the Chattering Classes at the phone hacking undertaken by Rupert Murdoch's News of the World. But that was "them" not "us".  It makes all the moral difference in the world, apparently.

We have seen the same phenomenon in New Zealand.  One self-righteous moral pygmy receives stolen e-mails from notorious "right-wing" blogger, Cameron Slater and the media engage in an orgy of prurient, sensationalist twittering.  Quietly ignored is the fact they were profiting from the proceeds of a crime.  Ah, well, everyone was doing it, so we could not afford to ignore it.  The end (making a dirty profits) justified the means (exploiting stolen property).

Doubtless the media would be sniffy nosed at an individual hacking into, say, hospital patient records in the attempt to profit from their theft.  But in their own case and when it concerns their own book, they grandly ignore their complicity in crime because they tell themselves are operating "in the public interest".  Self-righteous, hypocritical mendacity. 

But crimes being committed "in the public interest" are pretty acceptable these days.

Trans-Gender Regrets

A Life Poem Becomes A Death Chant

The Federalist recently carried a piece which is one of the saddest we have read for some time.  It concerns the bitterness and regret of people who have "transgendered".


Secularist human rights are morphing in an entirely predictable direction.  Since there is no ultimate standard, sanctioned by an ultimate Person, to which we must answer and by which we must be bound, all talk amongst secularists of human rights eventually disintegrates into letting people be whatever they want to be.  The ultimate right is self-will-worship.  Sexual ethics and sexual identity rapidly devolve to will-worship or the worship of self.

With the assistance of modern surgical techniques and chemical interventions, women can become men; men can become women; and gender types can vary across a menu of more than fifty shades of grey.  But the human cost of this folly is now emerging, and it is acutely sad.  Firstly, the post-op regrets:

Trouble In Transtopia: Murmurs Of Sex Change Regret

Transgender people who regret their sex changes typically get buried in venom rather than love.

By Stella Morabito  
The Federalist

Everyone has regrets. Some of us have big regrets. Most everyone has some place to go to get help dealing with them. Except for, say, a guy who had sex-change surgery and now would like to have his penis back. (The one God gave him.)

Our culture seems pretty much “to each his own” when it comes to elective bodily mutilation and the regret thereof. And there’s a lot of regret out there. According to a British poll, a whopping 65 percent of those who’ve had various cosmetic surgeries regret it. People who regret their tattoos, plastic surgery, or more extreme body modifications (here’s a sad Buzzfeed pictorial on the effects of ear gauges) can read up on the Internet and find an open array of remedies. Plastic surgeons make money both puttin’ it in and takin’ it out. Hollywood stars can speak openly about misgivings over their boob jobs and whatnot. Regarding her lip enhancement surgery, Courtney Love said: “I just want the mouth God gave me back.

Then, secondly, comes the ostracism, often with a tirade of abuse, inflicted upon those who subsequently regret their folly.

Limping Limpidly

The West's Double Standards

As we write this the Western world is agog with disgust at the brutality of an insurrection unfolding in Iraq.  People are being lined up and mown down.  Others are subjected to public beheadings because they don't believe in the peculiar doctrines of the Islamic Sunni sect.  The West decries such behaviour as medieval by which it means, primitive--that is, ibehaviours that belong to an age which has not benefited from the Enlightenment. 

The West, in its preening desire to be inclusive and tolerant towards all has conveniently forgotten that the historical symbol of Islam is the scimitar.  The ardent Islamic Sunni soldiers now operating in Iraq are simply being consistent.  And, we want to ask the chattering classes and the Commentariat in the West, what could possibly be wrong with that?  Upon what high moral stool is the West sitting whence to declaim such behaviour? 

The established religion of the West is secular humanism, and its philosophy of existence is evolutionism.  But the West has conveniently forgotten that secular humanism and evolutionism is morally neutral at best, vacuous at worst.  Yet still the West clings forlornly to notions of morality, of right and wrong.

Hypocritical Cant

So, What's Wrong With . . . ?

We have all heard of "convenient Christians"--folk who seek to maintain a Christian façade when it is socially, politically, or personally convenient to do so.  But, it is all part of acting out a persona.  Such people are rightly called hypocrites, an epithet of disdain.

But far more common, yet equally despicable is the hypocrisy of Unbelievers.  It is impossible to describe adequately the tawdry hypocrisy of Unbelievers prattling on about this evil and that wrong whilst they know--and we all know--they don't believe a word of it.  Oh, maybe they tell themselves they are true born again believers, who detest whatever particular ignominy of the day.  But in truth they have no foundation, no principles, and no ethics upon which their high dudgeon can be sustained.  At best it manifests mere cant.

Since Unbelievers reject the Living God, anything is possible and acceptable in principle.  Anything which is allegedly not acceptable or wrong or immoral is not actually, for "wrong" and "immorality" have no ultimate or operational meaning.  What is "wrong" to one is "right" to another.  One man's treasure is another's rubbish.  Who knows?  Who cares? 

We suspect that more than the odd couple know this to be the case.  That is why Unbelievers are so shrill about their moralities and their principles and their ethics.

Teenage Suicides

The Crown of Secular Amorality

New Zealand has one of the highest youth suicide rates in the developed world. Often-times these appear as "outbreaks"--a cluster of suicides occurring in small communities.  The working assumption is that the news spreads amongst the small community by word of mouth, Chinese whispers, social media, and conversations around the dinner table.  Everyone knows, but no-one talks about it.

The latest spate of youth suicides (five so far, one as young as ten years old) have occurred in Taupo Bay  in the far north.  They follow a similar outbreak in Kawerau two years ago.  The tragedy is palpable.  The stupidity and senselessness of the suicides overwhelming.  The cold, hard reality is that there was nothing in these young lives so discouraging or so bad to justify such gross actions.  That they thought there was indicates that these kids had departed from the realms of reality and truth and had entered a destructive fantasy realm.  The realm in which so many of their parents live and in which our society glories.

The Uberman As Paper Tiger

The Christian Sense of Wrong and Right

The Highwaymen made famous a song written by Jarvis and Cook about two kids raised . . .

In the crystal sense of wrong and right
We were born and raised in black and white . . . 

but the very concept of right and wrong--of morality--has come under serious attack in the past 150 years.

Nietzsche was perceptive and prescient upon insisting that there was a connection between God and ethics, between God and morals.  Kill God, and anything goes.  But, for Nietzsche there was a "trade off".  Kill God, and we kill off morals.  But we are left with man.  Man can grow and develop to be an Uberman, a man with a big chest, a being who would take the place of God and determine his own morals, a morality that was worthy a superman.  Nietzsche sought to kill God off in order to enable man to take His place and assert himself as a demi-god. 

The West has lived with the notion of a dead God and big-chested men for over 150 years.

Faux Outrage

When the Amoral Profess Morality

The amoral brigade regularly festoons itself with faux outrage.  We have in mind occasions when Christians are exposed as having been engaged in sinful practices, sometimes extremely bad ones. 

The Christian position on such travesties is sound, sure, and consistent.  The Christian Gospel teaches that all men, all men, are totally depraved--by which we mean that the thoughts and intents of the heart are evil.  So it is not unexpected that from time to time professing Christians fall into sin once again.

The amoral brigade shrieks, "Hypocrisy!".    No--hypocrisy would be if the lapsed believer and the Christian Church attempted to justify, explain away, excuse, or in any other way deny the evil and sinfulness of the person's actions.  After all, we believe that Peter--an apostle, no less--publicly denied the Lord thrice, despite the fact that he had heard the solemn utterance of our Lord that the one who denied the Christ before men would be denied by that same Christ before His heavenly Father.