VALUING LIFE

What enables us to value life and to live it to its fullest? According to atheist Peter Atkins, “Because there is no afterlife, we are forced to grasp [and value] this life.”

But how can we value a life that is essentially valueless? According to the humanist Max Hocutt:

·       “To me [the non-existence of God] means that there is no absolute morality, that moralities are sets of social conventions devised by humans to satisfy their needs…If there were a morality written up in the sky somewhere but no God to enforce it, I see no good reason why anyone should pay it any heed.” (Understanding the Times)

How then are we to live a morally purposeful life if there is no absolute/objective morality or value? Instead, life becomes reduced to a merely physical existence. Therefore, when the good feelings and health leave us, we are left with nothing to value.

STABILITY, IDENTITY, AND PERMANENT VALUES

NYT columnist David Brooks thinks that the social pressures governing life on American college campuses are overwhelming:

·       "When a moral crusade spreads across campus, many students feel compelled to post in support of it on Facebook within minutes. If they do not post, they will be noticed and condemned." (NYT, 3/15/16)

Brooks is convinced that the social pressures are greater when the standards are always shifting:

·       "Everybody is perpetually insecure in a moral system based on inclusion and exclusion. There are no permanent standards, just the shifting judgment of the crowd. It is a culture of oversensitivity, overreaction and frequent moral panics, during which everybody feels compelled to go along."

Brooks believes that the college student can find a greater measure of stability by basing their identity on values that are “more permanent”:

·       "If we’re going to avoid a constant state of anxiety, people’s identities have to be based on standards of justice and virtue that are deeper and more permanent than the shifting fancy of the crowd. In an era of omnipresent social media, it’s probably doubly important to discover and name your own personal True North, vision of an ultimate good, which is worth defending even at the cost of unpopularity and exclusion."

However, on today’s college campus, imbued with moral relativism (MR), this has become difficult. For one thing, MR is attractive for the very reason that it is dangerous. It tells the students that they are in charge – the captain of their own ships. They can decide what is right for themselves. If it feels right to them, no one can objectively tell them that it is wrong. Consequently, the college campus celebrates any and all forms of sexual expression.

Brooks understandably ennobles that idea of finding “standards of justice and virtue that are deeper and more permanent than the shifting fancy of the crowd.” However, he wrongly associates these “more permanent” values with finding “your own personal True North.”

He is sending out contradictory signals – double messages. While on the one hand, he seems to recommend basing our values on what is objective and unchanging, but Brooks then suggests that we have to find our own personal subjective values. If our values are subjective, they will be as flimsy and impermanent as the university values that he derides. Also, they will be no less vulnerable to social pressure than the values they already possess.

Instead, in order to stand against the social pressures, we need to know that our values are objective, coming from above, and therefore are unchanging. It is only when we know this that we can stand against the tsunami of peer pressure and public opinion.

If we are going to resist persecution, it is not enough to know that we are standing upon our own “True North.” Jesus had recently suffered the worst imaginable death and His disciples were brought before the governing body – the Sanhedrin - that had earlier turned Him over to the Romans and demanded His death. Besides, these Apostles were also uneducated men, but when they were commanded to no longer speak of Jesus, they surprised the Sanhedrin with their courage:

·       But Peter and the apostles answered, “We must obey God rather than men. The God of our fathers raised Jesus, whom you killed by hanging him on a tree. God exalted him at his right hand as Leader and Savior, to give repentance to Israel and forgiveness of sins.  And we are witnesses to these things, and so is the Holy Spirit, whom God has given to those who obey him.” (Acts 5:29-32; ESV)

The Apostles were able to withstand the threats and pressures because they were convinced that they were standing upon God’s own “True North,” not on their own values or fleeting sense of dignity.

Mao, Humanity, and Faith

The way we think is the way we live. Our lives show off our values in sometimes horrific ways:

·       Mao Zedong, founder of the People's Republic of China, qualifies as the greatest mass murderer in world history, an expert who had unprecedented access to official Communist Party archives said yesterday. Frank Dikötter, a Hong Kong-based historian… compared the systematic torture, brutality, starvation and killing of Chinese peasants to the Second World War in its magnitude. At least 45 million people were worked, starved or beaten to death in China over these four years; the worldwide death toll of the Second World War was 55 million. 

The extermination of 45 million wasn’t simply a matter of poor judgment. Instead, it had been the result of genocidal values. Marvin Olasky, editor-in-chief of World Magazine, reports that in 1957, Mao stated:

·       I’m not afraid of nuclear war. There are 2.7 billion people in the world; it doesn’t matter if some are killed. China has a population of 600 million; even if half of them are killed, there are still 300 million people left. I am not afraid of anyone.

For Mao, people, even his Chinese people, were little more than numbers. In the atheist/communist estimation of things, humans might have risen to the level of “animals,” but still entirely expendable to achieve their great progressive vision.

Mao and others were murderers. Dismissively, we call them “revolutionaries” or “idealists” to dignify their horrors.

But why shouldn’t we regard human lives as the necessary cost to accomplish our ideals? Perhaps a good idea, if achieved, is worth the price, even of the murder of 45 million?

Genocide is never justified! Why not? According to the Word of God, we are endowed with inestimable value, having been created in God’s very likeness. Without this revelation, genocide will always remain an option, however much we deny it.

Only the Bible stands against the degradation of humanity. Today, we remain numbers. We called “wet machines,” and are regarded as just another member of the animal kingdom. We are no more than products of our environment and genetics, lacking freewill, driven exclusively by deterministic forces, which dictate all of our choices. Should we be surprised when we are treated according to our diminished status?

Why Church Attendance has Declined

Why has church attendance declined so drastically in Western Europe?  British writer Kingsley Martin famously boasted that “rationalism has argued the Church out of existence.” However, the stats stubbornly demonstrate the very opposite thing.

Meanwhile, Mary Eberstadt, senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C, offers a different explanation:

•  Social science has roundly established that vibrant families and vibrant religion go hand in hand. Conversely, not living in a family means that a given individual is less likely to be found in church. As Wilcox has summarized the data, “The recent history of American religion illuminates what amounts to a sociological law: The fortunes of American religion rise with the fortunes of the intact, married family.” Similarly, the late sociologist Steven L. Nock observed in his 1998 book, Marriage in Men’s Lives, that “changes in the number of children in the married couple’s household have large consequences for men’s church attendance…With each additional child, men increase their attendance at services by 2.5 times per year.”

•  More families and more children, in short, means more God. Similarly, to summarize other statistics, marriage increases the likelihood of belonging to a religious organization—whereas cohabitation, by contrast, has what three researchers have called a “strong, negative effect on the probability of religious activity.” Unmarried people without children are less likely to go to church than are married people, or married people with children. A married man with children, for example, is over twice as likely to go to church as an unmarried man with no children. Once again, where there is more marriage, there is more religion; where there is less.

While children draw families to church, deviant sex also drives many away. The more Westerners have practiced a sexuality that is not accepted by the church, the more they have distanced themselves from the church and affiliate with those who accept their lifestyle.

I have seen this close-up. Several gay friends have distanced themselves from me once they embraced the gay lifestyle, understandably surrounding themselves with those who affirm them. When I had reconnected with one friend after some years, he was astonished with my views. “I didn’t know that people still believed like you!”  He had immersed himself into a community where there were no dissenting opinions.

This same phenomenon pertains to other forms of deviant sexuality. The more indulgence in pornography or adultery, the more we seek a value system or community that will affirm our behavior.

We seek to assuage our conscience. Therefore, we seek to avoid any influence that will make us feel guilty. Consequently, the more that Western values and sexual practice depart from Christian values, the less attractive the church!

Are “Fundamentalists” all the same?

My Response to a Progressive Christian who opposes criticism of Islam:

Thanks again for your willingness to cross the isle to engage in substantive dialogue. You wrote:

•  “What you're writing is that reading the Quran literally always leads to the sort of extremism that is causing so much harm.”

Just about always! However, as you correctly point out, there are also peaceable verses in the Koran. However, the imams – the teachers – correctly understand that these were the earlier verses given before Muhammad had an army, and these have been replaced by the jihadic verses. Therefore, all of the Western commentators that I know of observe that as Muslims get deeper into their holy writings, they become more radicalized.

•  “Reading the Bible literally, fundamentalist Christians have pushed for the teaching of the Creation story in science classes instead of evolution, justified the prejudice and discrimination of gays and lesbians…”

I certainly grant you some of this, but I don’t see how you can compare legitimate political democratic persuasion to Islamic rape, kidnapping and genocide!

As I tried to argue before, perhaps without sufficient clarity, we are all fundamentalistic about certain things. You are fundamentalistic against extremism and violence, as you should be. I would also assume that the principles of justice and love are also fundamental non-negotiables for you.

Admittedly, we derive our values from the Bible. However, is the source for your values any more trustworthy than ours? And what if the Bible is actually God’s Word, as many of us believe? Shouldn’t we devote ourselves to it?

You will probably point out that the Muslims also believe that their own holy writings are God’s Words. Of course, this is a critical issue. Has God spoken to humanity, and are there ways to know this? I think that there are many ways – both subjection and objective (miracles, fulfilled prophecy, changed lives/societies, internal and external consistency…).

•  “A literal interpretation of any holy book … naturally leads to an extremism that you find in fundamentalist Islam and in fundamentalist Christianity.”

“Literal” is not an accurate word. Instead, we try to interpret the Bible as it was intended to be understood. Some of it is highly figurative and some isn’t. More importantly, it depends on what one is fundamentalistic about. As a Christian, I follow the New Testament, which teaches me to put the needs of the other before my own. Although I fail badly at this – and this continues to humble me – I trust that the Lord forgives me and is delighted when I get off my butt and reassert myself to love others.

Love also demands that I cry out about the victimization of the innocent. In our world, the vast majority of these are Christians, as the jacket of “The Global War on Christians” by CNN writer John L. Allen Jr. states:

• From Iraq and Egypt to Sudan and Nigeria, from Indonesia to the Indian subcontinent, Christians in the early twenty-first century are the world’s most persecuted religious group. According to the secular International Society for Human Rights, 80 percent of violations of religious freedom in the world today are directed against Christians.

Allen writes:

•  “The Open Doors” estimate, based on decades of tracking the realities of persecution in some of the darkest corners of the earth, is that roughly one hundred million Christians today suffer interrogation, arrest, and even death for their faith, with the bulk located in Asia and the Middle East. The overall total makes Christians the most at-risk group for violations of religious freedom. (37)

I would love to turn my back on these painful realities, but I cannot. I also fail to understand how others who call themselves “Christian” can be so dismissive of these realities.