Taking a bite out of moral relativism

By: American Decency Staff

One question that has to come into your head if you are at all engaged in politics or the culture war is: "What are these people thinking?" There are, of course, two sides to every issue, but both sides look at the same facts and come up with polar-opposite solutions. One side looks at abortion and says "Don't kill that baby!" while the other side thinks "Don't let that baby ruin the mother's life!" causing the first side to say, "Wait, what?" One side says, "Radical Muslims killed 3,000 citizens on September 11, 2001. We should make sure they don't do that again." while the other side says, "Grandma, please remove your shoes as you go through the backscatter machine" causing the first side to say, "When was the last time a grandma hijacked a plane?" Writer, producer, and comedian Evan Sayet gave a speech at the Heritage Foundation in 2007 which he called "Regurgitating the Apple: How Modern Liberals Think." Sayet finds it necessary to explore this topic because it is Liberal thought which permeates our culture. Americans are soaking in a marinade of Liberalism from the time we first hear our kindergarten teacher explaining sexual orientation to us to when we graduate Northwestern University (having attended, of course, their "human sexuality" class), not to mention the shameless indoctrination imbedded in TV shows. So the "how modern Liberals think" part makes sense, but what about "Regurgitating the Apple?" Sayet explains his title in this way, "you see, if mankind lost Paradise when we ate the apple and gained knowledge of right and wrong, they believe that if they could just regurgitate the apple – give up all knowledge of right and wrong – we can return to Paradise." I'll let Sayet make his own point, but first I am going to let C.S. Lewis nail down the fact that there is a standard of right and wrong at all. "I know that some people say the idea of a Law of Nature or decent behavior known to all men is unsound, because different civilizations and different ages have had quite different moralities. But this is not true. There have been differences between their moralities, but these have never amounted to anything like a total difference…Think of a country where people were admired for running away in battle, or where a man felt proud of double-crossing all the people who had been kindest to him. You might just as well imagine a country where two and two makes five. Men have differed as regards to who you ought to be unselfish to – whether it was your own family, or your countrymen, or everyone. But they have always agreed that you ought not to put yourself first. Selfishness has never been admired. Men have differed as to whether you should have one wife or four. But they have always agreed that you ought not to have any woman you liked." Lewis goes on to explain that if you break a promise to someone who claims to not believe in this Law of Nature, he's not going to just let it slide because, whether he likes it or not, that man knows he's been wronged. So let's move on to Sayet's point. "The Modern Liberal will invariably side with evil over good, wrong over right, and the behaviors that lead to failure over those that lead to success. Give the Modern Liberal the choice between Saddam Hussein and the United States, and he will not only side with Saddam Hussein; he will slander America and Americans in order to do so. Give him the choice between the vicious mass murderer corrupt terrorist dictator Yasser Arafat and the tiny and wonderful democracy of Israel, and he will plagia­rize maps, forge documents, engage in blood libels–as did our former President Jimmy Carter– to side with the terrorist organizations and to attack the tiny democracy of Israel. It's not just foreign policy; it's every policy. Given the choice between promoting teenage abstinence and teenage promiscuity–and believe me, I know this from my hometown of Hollywood–they will use their movies, their TV shows, their songs, even the schools to promote teenage promiscuity as if it's cool: like the movie American Pie, in which you are a loser unless you've had sex with your best friend's mother while you're still a child. Conversely, NARAL, a pro-abortion group masquerading as a pro-choice group, will hold a fund-raiser called "'F' Abstinence." (And it's not just "F." It's the entire word, because promoting vulgarity is part of their agenda.) So the question becomes: Why? How do they think they're making a better world? The first thing that comes into your mind when trying to under­stand, as I've so desperately tried to understand, is that if they side always with evil, then they must be evil. But we have a problem with that, don't we? We all know too many people who fit this category but who aren't evil: many of my lifelong friends, the people I grew up with, relatives, close relatives. If they're not evil, then the next place your mind goes is that they must just be incredibly stupid. They don't mean to always side with evil, the failed and wrong; they just don't know what they're doing. But we have a problem with this as well. You can't say Bill Maher (my old boss) is a stupid man. You can't say Ward Churchill is a stupid man. You can't say all these academics are stupid people. Frankly, if it were just stupidity, they'd be right more often. What's the expression? "Even a broken clock is right twice a day," or "Even a blind squirrel finds an acorn now and again." But if they're not stupid and they're not evil, what's their plan? How do they think they're making a better world by siding with Saddam Hussein, by keeping his rape and torture rooms open, by seek­ing the destruction of a democracy of Jews? I don't know if you've seen the list going around the Inter­net of all the Nobel Prize-winning scientists from this tiny state of Israel. How do they think they're making a better world by promoting to children behaviors that are inappropriate and cause diseases and unwanted pregnancies and ruin people's lives? How do they think they're making a better world? What I discovered is that the Modern Liberal looks back on 50,000 years, 100,000 years of human civilization, and knows only one thing for sure: that none of the ideas that mankind has come up with–none of the religions, none of the philos­ophies, none of the ideologies, none of the forms of government–have succeeded in creating a world devoid of war, poverty, crime, and injustice. So they're convinced that since all of these ideas of man have proved to be wrong, the real cause of war, pov­erty, crime, and injustice must be found–can only be found–in the attempt to be right. If nobody ever thought they were right, what would we disagree about? If we didn't disagree, surely we wouldn't fight. If we didn't fight, of course we wouldn't go to war. Without war, there would be no poverty; without poverty, there would be no crime; without crime, there would be no injustice. It's a utopian vision, and all that's required to usher in this utopia is the rejection of all fact, reason, evi­dence, logic, truth, morality, and decency–all the tools that you and I use in our attempts to be better people, to make the world more right by trying to be right, by siding with right, by recognizing what is right and moving toward it. What you have is people who think that the best way to eliminate rational thought, the best way to eliminate the attempt to be right, is to work always to prove that right isn't right and to prove that wrong isn't wrong. You see this in John Lennon's song "Imagine": "Imagine there's no countries." Not imagine great countries, not imagine defeat the Nazis, but imagine no religions, and the key line is imagine a time when anything and everything that mankind values is devalued to the point where there's nothing left to kill or die for. Obviously, this is not going to happen overnight. There are still going to be religions, but they are going to do their best to denigrate them. There are still going to be countries, but they will do what they can to give our national sovereignty to one-world bodies. In the meantime, everything that they teach in our schools, everything they make into movies, the messages of the movies, the TV shows, the newspaper stories that they pick and how they spin them have but one criterion for truth, beauty, honesty, etc., and that is: Does it tear down what is good and elevate what is evil? Does it tear down what is right and elevate what is wrong? Does it tear down the behaviors that lead to success and elevate the ones that lead to failure so that there is nothing left to believe in?â€Â A culture can't survive on moral indiscriminateness. If there is no Absolute Authority to say, "Don't steal. Don't murder," then there is no standard for civility between neighbors. Literally, there is no basis for civilization. If there is not an absolute standard of right and wrong, why shouldn't I take my neighbor’s money? Why does it matter if I kill him to get it? There's nothing wrong with that because there's nothing wrong. But there is a God who defines Truth.  Who created right and wrong and wrote it on our hearts – on the hearts of liberals and conservatives.  And while there are many working feverishly to suppress that Truth today, we know that in the end He wins. ========================================================== Your support is important to our ability to make a difference. Donate online at: https://secure4.afo.net/ada/donate.php American Decency Association is a member of the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability. American Decency Association Bill Johnson, President P.O. Box 202 Fremont, MI 49412 ph: 231-924-4050 www.americandecency.org http://www.twitter.com/billwjohnson

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