AN “ENLIGHTENED” PRAGMATISM

 

 

Trust flees when the higher principles of truth, honesty, and integrity are rejected. It had been assumed that pragmatism - a cost/benefit analysis would be enough to sustain their faith.

 

Today’s secularists had promoted faith in an enlightened pragmatism, a far-sighted pragmatism, which would perceive the long-term benefits of this pragmatism. It would look into the future and discern that by pragmatically maintaining the principles of equality, honesty, and human rights, we would all benefit.

 

Perhaps, this might have been true if we were more like robots without fears and desires. However, this faith in pragmatism alone overlooked human nature and the world we occupy, where we must eat and pay our bills. These take precedence over a distant and unfounded faith in “enlightened” pragmatism, and its focus on the future.

 

These immediate considerations quickly convert pragmatic idealists, who carry “No Justice, No Peace” placards, into realists who have children to feed and eventually begin to see that their comrades are no better than those they had sought to re-educate, and even worse!

 

In other cases, a stubborn confirmation bias continues to triumph over truth and the evidence to the contrary. This common bias insists that there is no need for God. Pragmatic Naturalism can provide what is necessary, even for morality and human well-being, despite the millions it exterminates.

 

Atheist, humanist, and author of the Humanist Manifesto II, Paul Kurtz, affirmed that pragmatism (not God’s moral principles) is the only possible justification for morality:

 

·       How are these principles [of equality, freedom, honesty, morality, etc.] to be justified? They are not derived from a divine or natural law nor do they have a special metaphysical [beyond the material world] status. They are rules offered to govern how we shall behave. They can be justified only by reference to their results [benefits]. (Preamble)

 

However, humanity demands immediate benefits, not the promised benefits of an unsubstantiated and unpromising faith. Consequently, few professionals are willing to risk their careers to oppose the present idiocy that sexual identity is simply a matter of choice and not genetics and biology.

 

“Enlightened” pragmatism allows little room for freedom, truth, and reality. It is a faith without a foundation. Consequently, it must be maintained by intimidation and coercion, the legacy of all communistic states.

 

When we reject the God of the Bible, we reap mental incoherence:

 

·       For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things. Therefore, God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! (Romans 1:21-25)

 

When the Truth of Creator is not our #1 passion, the vacuum demands filling, even by the untruths of self-deception.