The Grand Experiment
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One of the main ongoing debates between Christians and Atheists is over the foundation for morality. Christians believe that morality in inherently tied to God. To reject God, is to reject the foundation for morality. Atheist often distort this into a claim that atheist are immoral. This however is not the case. It is not that an atheist must be immoral, but rather that they are free to choose whatever morality suits them.
More importantly, a society that rejects the foundation will over time drift farther and farther from Christian morality. While this drift does not happen quickly it does happen and this is exactly what we have seen over the last few decades. Very early in the abortion debate opponents argued that an acceptance of abortion would lead to other things like an acceptance of euthanasia. While supporter of abortion rights ridiculed such claims, now euthanasia is legal in one state and people are pushing for it to be legal in others. Similar parallels could be drawn for many other issues such as the push for homosexual rights leading to sex marriage, or the push for the ERA and the claims it would lead to same-sex bathrooms, bathrooms that are now beginning to appear, though under the more PC name of gender-neutral bathrooms.
Opponents of the Judeo-Christian morally that once dominated in America are taking a piece-meal approach, challenging only specific issues at any given time. They are quick to point to the religious foundation for Christian morality as a way of rejecting it, yet they never provide any alternative foundation in its place.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the public schools, and the results are becoming increasingly clear. In the first edition of Christianity and Secularism written in the late 1980s I wrote about how in Los Angeles a wall was built around a school to keep bullets from hitting the students. Since then we have had a number of students bring guns into schools to kill.
While such things would have been unthinkable a decade or two earlier, now unfortunately they are increasingly common. Secularists vigorously resist any attempt to link such shooting to their undermining of the Judeo-Christian value system. It is as if a person did not like a part of a building, so they undermined the foundation of the building believing that only the part they did not like would crumble.
The secularists have sought to undermine traditional views of most forms of sexuality, the family structure, and life among other things. To do this they have pushed an attitude of non-judgment, with its catch-all denunciation; “who are you to judge?” This is hardly a rational position as they are judging any who dared disagree with them, without seeing a conflict. Still they have been very successful with the young, many of whom are now so non-judgment as to be amoral; so amoral that it is difficult for them to even think in terms of morality.
Following the murders at the Mall in Omaha last month, an NBC TV reporter interviewed a friend of the murderer, (played by Dennis Prager on his show. Dec 6 2007 Third Hour)
Reporter: “What are you thinking about now, now that you know that [your friend] was involved in the shooting earlier today”
Friend of Murderer: “I don’t think anything less of him, because I know that [he] would never have done anything like this just for fun it, it was he wanted to go out in style and that is what he did, he went out in style.”
No judgment for the lives taken. No judgment for the family and friends whose lives will never be the same because of the loss of a loved one. No judgment for the wounded or their pain and suffering. Instead, “I don’t think anything less of him… it was he wanted to go out in style.” To those who grew up with traditional Judeo-Christian values, the lack of any moral judgment in those words is very hard to comprehend. Yet it is what the secularists pushing non-judgment have created.
As if it were some bad science fiction movie, the secularists have conducted a grand experiment on society, with our children as the guinea pigs. They have raised a generation whose main view of morality is to not pass moral judgments. They chipped away at the foundation for morality, thinking that only those part of the Judeo-Christian morality they disagreed with would fall away. But whatever their intentions, they have raise generation for whom the questions of is it good or evil; is it right or wrong, play little if any part in their thinking, replace instead by “does it affect me personally?”
What will be the result of this experiment? Nobody knows for sure but the current trends don’t look good. Not everyone raised with this view will want to ‘Go out in style’, killing as many as they can in the process, but we have already seen that an increasing number do. More widespread is the marked increase in cheating, or the winning at any cost mentality that pervades sports, business, and politics.
If you assume that thousands of years of human history are irrelevant, and that most if not all the bad things in history were the result of religion anyway, then perhaps this grand experiment of producing an amoral society will produce a better society. I for one doubt it.
This is Elgin Hushbeck, asking you to Consider Christianity: a Faith Based on Fact.
