The Hubris to Judge: Moral Relativism and Secularism

 

The more Western culture rejects its Christian roots, the more we will hear disparaging remarks like:

·       The Bible is no basis for morality. Just look at the treatment of gays, women, and the Canaanites. The Bible should not be taken seriously by anyone!

In effect, they are saying:

·       The Bible does not agree with our modern norms and values. Therefore, it is wrong and must be rejected.

Instead of the Bible, the current norms have become the new authority and every other religion or value system must be measured against these current norms. If they fall short, then they must be rejected.

This “tyranny of modernity” is no less dogmatic than the values that they seek to replace and, in many cases, it is more intolerant. Just look at a recent Federal decision to criminalize schools that forbid a boy, if he deems himself “transgendered,” to enter a girl’s bathroom. The entire school is made to conform to the whims of one child. Reasonable? Not in the slightest!

This cultural/moral relativism is unreasonable in many ways. For one thing, this philosophy is a denial of any higher, absolute values. Instead, relativists claim that morality is just something that we create. And yet, they will defend their decisions by invoking an appeal to innate human rights – that Transgenders have an innate human right to choose any bathroom that feels right to them.

Well, what gives them this human right if there is no higher objective law to which we must adhere? If instead morality is subjective – just something that we create – how then is it possible to appeal to the higher principle of an intrinsic human right when, according to their own assessment, none actually exist.

If there is no God to confer human rights, based upon His overriding concern for humanity, then “human rights” is just an idea that we create, and if we create it, we can just as easily retract it. Consequently, “human rights” are just a useful and temporary tool to argue for our own set of non-existent rights.

In fact, such human rights advocates acknowledge that the values of society are evolving. Therefore, this made-up concept of “human rights” is also evolving. But if it is evolving and based on nothing more than societies passing whims, then on the basis of what can the relativists claim that the morality of the Bible is wrong? All they can coherently say is that the Bible violates their own created standards.

It is like grading a math exam and failing certain students despite the absence of and  correct answers. As the teacher needs correct answers in order to fairly and objectively grade an exam, the relativist also needs objectively correct moral laws to judge the Bible. However, they admit that they lack such a thing. Instead, they admit that they judge by a relative and subjective standard of their own liking.

It’s equivalent to the teacher saying, “I don’t have any correct answers, but I will fail you anyway!” This is the predicament of the relativist. He wants to judge, but with only his own arbitrary and subjective answers, he knows that he cannot judge.

It would be one thing to say, “I don’t like the morality of the Bible.” Logically, at least, that statement is acceptable. However, when the relativist charges that the morality of the Bible is wrong because it doesn’t conform to his subjective, relativistic, and evolving standards, he is acting illogically. If his moral standards are merely something that he created, he has no right to insist that others conform to them!

If fact, if  morality is just something that is humanly created, then they cannot coherently criticize anyone, not even Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot.

Of course, the moral relativist will not admit that his subjectivism has placed him outside of the realm of responsible moral discussion. Therefore, the Christian should remind him:

·       You cannot make objective critiques of the Bible’ standards once you have rejected objective moral law and are left with only your own created standards.

Masochism, Western Elites, Sweden, and Rape

A recent video places Sweden as the rape capital of the world. 

A 2013 Front Page article had placed Sweden as number two:

• Sweden now has the second highest number of rapes in the world, after South Africa, which at 53.2 per 100,000 is six times higher than the United States. Statistics now suggest that 1 out of every 4 Swedish women will be raped.
  

• With Muslims represented in as many as 77 percent of the rape cases and a major increase in rape cases paralleling a major increase in Muslim immigration, the wages of Muslim immigration are proving to be a sexual assault epidemic by a misogynistic ideology.

When someone is seriously ill, he goes for testing to identify the source of the problem. Without accurate diagnosis, there can be no meaningful intervention. However, this isn’t happening in Western Europe. (See both the UK and Norway where Muslim rape of non-Muslims has also reached epidemic levels.) Instead, the diagnosis is strenuously avoided and even censured. It is as if the Western nations have a death wish or at least a virulent case of runaway masochism.

Benedict XVI wrote about this perplexing masochistic phenomenon. He notes how Western culture, en masse, has turned against itself and its Christian heritage:

• This case illustrates a peculiar western self-hatred that is nothing short of pathological. It is commendable that the West is trying to be more open, to be more understanding of the values of outsiders, but it has lost all capacity for self-love. All that it sees in its own history is the despicable and the destructive; it is no longer able to perceive what is great and pure…Multiculturalism, which is so constantly and passionately promoted, can sometimes amount to an abandonment and denial, a flight from one’s own heritage. (Quoted by Jean Bethke Elshtain, First Things, March, 2009, 36)

Why has the West “lost all capacity” to appreciate its own heritage? Why does it punish itself? Author Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali Muslim turned atheist, shares this insight:

• Liberals in Western politics have the strange habit of blaming themselves for the ills of the world, while seeing the rest of the world as victims. To them, victims are to be pitied, and they lump together all pitiable and suppressed people, such as Muslims, and consider them good people who should be cherished and supported so that they can overcome their disadvantages. The adherents to the gospel of multiculturalism refuse to criticize people whom they see as victims. Some Western critics disapprove of United States policies and attitudes but do not criticize the Islamic world, just as, in the first part of the twentieth century, Western socialist apologists did not dare criticize the Soviet labor camps. Along the same lines, some Western intellectuals criticize Israel, but they will not criticize Palestine because Israel belongs to the West, which they consider fair game, but they feel sorry for the Palestinians, and for the Islamic world in general, which is not as powerful as the West. They are critical of the native white majority in Western countries but not of Islamic minorities. Criticism of the Islamic world, of Palestinians, and of Islamic minorities is regarded as Islamophobia and xenophobia.

Okay, victims are to be pitied, but why at the expense of the well-being of our own nations? What perverse psychological mechanism is preventing our elites from valuating and protecting their own people? Do they feel guilty for the benefits that the West has enjoyed?

Guilt and shame are life-controlling forces. In Healing the Shame that Binds, psychologist John Bradshaw perceptively wrote:

• When shame has been completely internalized, nothing about you is okay. You feel flawed and inferior; you have the sense of being a failure. There is no way you can share your inner self because you are an object of contempt to yourself…To feel shame is to feel seen in an exposed and diminished way. When you’re an object to yourself, you turn your eyes inward, watching and scrutinizing every minute detail of behavior…This paralyzing internal monitoring causes withdrawal, passivity and inaction. (13)

Bradshaw’s understanding of shame might explain why the West has been bending its neck before the sword of Islam. Perhaps the West feels ashamed of its privilege and must atone for it.

Shame had also been a life-controlling and life-diminishing factor for me. My feelings of unworthiness were so powerful that I couldn’t enjoy anything. I couldn’t take a shower for more than two minutes. I just didn’t feel worthy of it. Nor could I spend any money on myself. However, when I did go without, I felt more worthy. When I didn’t, I felt psychologically threatened, as if I had done the unpardonable. I was trying to redeem myself. However, when I came to know my Redeemer Jesus, this bondage began to loosen. Since He paid the price for my sins, I no longer had to redeem myself.

It seems that we are built with a moral law that tells us that we are unworthy unless a price is paid for our unworthiness. Some indulge in self-flagellation; others in self-mutilation; while others pay the price through compulsive do-gooding and people-pleasing. In any case, we are controlled by the slave-master “shame.”

I think that this problem has gone viral, as has rape in many of the Western nations. Why? We have rejected our only protection against internal accusations of shame and unworthiness – Jesus the Savior – and are paying the just price for this rejection.

ISIS, Transcendence, and the Failures of the West and the Church

It might not simply be a taste for blood and sex that draws thousands of Westerners to ISIS. It might also be that ISIS offers them a commodity that has become increasingly  discredited in the West – transcendence and a higher reason for being.

In support of this point, writer Janie B. Cheaney offers these affirmative quotations to explain the attractiveness of ISIS:

• “[A] yearning for a transcendent cause that liberal society can have trouble satisfying,” wrote Ross Douthat in The New York Times.

• “His discontent … is driven by ideas, and by the human needs those ideas seek to satiate,” observed Charlie Cooke at National Review.

• “The Islamic State not only has the romance of revolution and the promise of action and power, but also religious and apocalyptic appeal,” concluded Michael Brendan Dougherty of The Week.

• “Because it gives meaning to life,” Michael Ledeen summed up on his own blog. (World Mag, Oct. 4, 2014, 22) 

According to the videos aired in the West, these jihadists seem to celebrate the fact that they are faithfully serving Allah by doing the “right thing.”

Several years ago, I attended an interfaith conference at a local liberal church, where I was surprised to see a 15 year-old waiting expectantly for the conference to begin. Intrigued, I asked him why he had come:

• I want to hear what the Imam says.

I asked him, “Why the Imam? Why not also the Rabbi and the Pastor?” His answer saddened me:

• I have some Muslims in my family. They take their faith seriously.

What an indictment of the church! What has happened to us that we reflect our Lord so lamely?

However, this is also an indictment of Western society. Cheaney puts it this way:

• The West has spent the last two centuries chasing true belief from the main stage of public life. Pluralism, our highest communal value, requires no one to believe anything that would render anyone else’s beliefs invalid.

It is worse than that! Pluralism – also called “religious pluralism” or “multi-culturalism” – claims that, since everything is relative and there is no religious or cultural truth – we cannot say that one religion or culture is more true than another. In fact, judging one religion better than another is now labelled “arrogant,” “imperialistic” and “chauvinistic,” especially in Western media and the university. No one wants to be labeled a “narrow-minded bigot,” and so Christians have been marginalized, silenced, and made to feel ashamed of their faith.

However, by purging such religious truth claims from educated society, the West has paid a great price. Not only can it not speak convincingly against ISIS, it can no longer hold up a better portrait of transcendence for our hungry and deluded youth. Cheaney therefore writes:

• The poverty of pluralism becomes apparent when rootless young Muslim men find transcendent meaning in slaughtering infidels… It fulfills a need that won’t be satisfied at any bargaining table. It will have to be fought and defeated.

However, how can we fight against this ideology if we do not have one to hold up in place of Jihad. Cheaney therefore observes:

• But faith can only be fought with faith, and Western culture has undercut itself… It picked the juicy low-hanging fruits of Christianity [like love, justice, equality, and forgiveness] while disregarding the Son who shines on them, valued the comforts but discounted the Comforter.

Oddly, this is something that Ayaan Hirsi Ali, ex-Muslim, ex-Dutch Parliamentarian, and atheist, seems to understand better than most Western intellectuals and even Christians:

• The Christianity of love and tolerance remains one of the West’s most powerful antidotes to the Islam of hate and intolerance. Ex-Muslims find Jesus Christ to be a more attractive and humane figure than Muhammad, the founder of Islam.

• I have a theory that most Muslims are in search of a redemptive God. They believe that there is a higher power and that this higher power is the provider of morality, giving them a compass to help them distinguish between good and bad.  Many Muslims are seeking a God or a concept of God that in my view meets the description of the Christian God.  Instead they find Allah. They find Allah mainly because many are born in Muslim families where Allah has been the reigning deity for generations… (p. 239)

• The Christian leaders now wasting their time and resources on a futile exercise of interfaith dialogue with the self-appointed leaders of Islam should redirect their efforts to converting as many Muslims as possible to Christianity, introducing them to a God who rejects Holy War and who has sent his son to die for all sinners out of a love for mankind… The Vatican and all the established Protestant churches of northern Europe believed naively that interfaith dialogue would magically bring Islam into the fold of Western civilization. It has not happened, and it will not happen…. To help ground these people in Western society, the West needs the Christian churches to get active again in propagating their faith. It needs Christian schools, Christian volunteers, the Christian message… The churches should do all in their power to win this battle for the souls of humans in search of a compassionate God, who now find that a fierce Allah is closer to hand. (Nomad, pp. 247, 249, 250, 251)

We all need the Transcendent. Since the West marginalizes it, the pilgrim will just go elsewhere, even in the gutter, to find it. Oddly, it is an atheist that sees this more clearly than the rest of us.