By Steve Bolton
On the twenty-first of this month, our nation will
pay homage to the heroism of a leader who once said, “I have a dream that my
four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be
judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream has not failed us, but the present generation of
Americans has failed the dream, because it no longer aspires to punish the
guilty or acquit the innocent based on the content of their character.
Much has gone wrong with the dream since King spoke
these words at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963. Before his assassination, the
civil rights leader was refocusing his energy on a more ambitious goal that no
section of the political spectrum would dare to speak of today: forging a
coalition of working class whites and blacks to prevent capitalists from
exploiting the country with the kind of ease they do today. Even the most
left-wing elements of the Democratic Party today are far to the right of what
King’s political nemesis, Richard Nixon, believed about economics. King did
succeed admirably in overturning segregation, yet de facto segregation has
never been stronger thanks to reverse racism, which has made many of our inner
cities no-go areas for whites. Although he is looked to as a sort of ethnic
hero by blacks, King’s dream also encompassed whites and other races and
ethnicities. Worse still, many of our black ghettos are worse off than they
were in the mid-‘70s, thanks to the betrayal of the nation by a capitalist
class that has deliberately shipped moderate-skill level industrial jobs
overseas, as well as the invention of crack cocaine. Margaret Sanger, a racist
and Nazi sympathizer, had a dream of her own back in the ‘30s of eradicating
America’s black population through the spread of abortion clinics, as part of
an informal program of eugenics. As a result, more blacks children are murdered
every year in America by their own mothers than all of those killed under
slavery over several centuries. Sanger’s dream was King’s nightmare, but it has
become a reality in America today, thanks to an across-the-board rejection of
the moral system that King believed in.
All of these failures to put King’s dream into action
could be the topics of long discussions, but one of the key threads that ties
them all together is this: America as a whole has rejected the moral system
that King believed in. Thankfully, we have held on to the important lesson that
racism is a particularly vile evil (at least outside of the ghettos, where
racist epithets are most commonly heard) but have confused that cause with many
others which have nothing to do with it, to the point that it conflicts with
the Christian moral code that inspired King. For example, creeds are now
considered beyond criticism, as long as they are not Christian, as if they were
somehow equivalent to race or ethnicity; every other philosophy under the sun
is tolerated, from Islam to Wicca, as long as it is not drawn from the Bible
that King read so avidly. The common belief popularized since King’s time that
all religions teach the same thing is patently false, as can be verified by
actually reading their holy books, which few of today’s lazy and arrogant
commentators on politics and religion ever bother to do. Buddhism,
Christianity, Islam and other faiths only seem to teach the same thing because
we are so distant from them all. King wasn’t distant from one of those faiths.
Nor did he fail to make personal sacrifices for his beliefs, starting with the
obvious step of investing some sweat equity to learn its teachings. Contrary to
the theory of religious relativity that most Americans subscribe to today, not
all creeds are of equal worth, which can be proved quite easily. For example,
if some charlatan started a new church that taught that stealing from
non-members is perfectly permissible, you would be well-advised to lock your
doors and bolt your windows if one of its members moved in next door. Sadly,
the handful of foreign religions left on the planet today and many of the
fringe churches springing up in Christianity all contain some sort of
contradictory moral flaws in their teachings. This is true even if we judge
them by the standards of the Southern Baptist churches that inspired King’s
followers in the ‘60s, which had far more in common with Catholic standards of
justice than they do today. At first glance, it appears that Western
civilization, in its arrogance, believes that it has more enlightened standards
to judge the content of a person’s character than either King or the Catholic
Church ever had. If we dig a little deeper into modern logic, it seems as if
the people of the West don’t want to be judged by the content of their character
at all. On its face, this is a slap in the face to King’s dream, since it
absolves those guilty of committing injustices from paying for their crimes.
Yet the rejection is even deeper than that, for at heart, the present
generation actually seeks to substitute a standard of judgment which is the
antithesis of the Christian code King believed in, one that justifies those
whose character is empty of content.
From Religious Relativity to Whitewash
Like Gandhi, King got his ideas on non-violent
resistance from the Bible, which proved to be incredibly practical in both
cases by sparing the people of India and the blacks of the American South from
having to wage wars of liberation that would have cost millions of lives. As a
minister, he was certainly familiar with this passage from Matthew 7:1-5: “Judge
not, lest you be judged. For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged,
and the measure you give will be the measure you get. Why do you see the speck
that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the beam that is in your own
eyes? Or how can say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’
when there is a beam in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the beam out of
your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your
brother’s eye.” This is perhaps the only Bible passage left in our time that it
is permissible to quote in public, as Bible-bashers are fond of doing, for they
think it gives carte blanche to any sort of behavior they want to excuse.
Despite the fact that our secular civilization rejects all but the ceremonial
trappings of Christianity – to the point that discussion of it is legally or
socially banned in academia, our schools, the media and in politics – this
particular teaching is allowed to flourish, although it is a distinctly
Christian idea found in no other religion. Those who cite it are typically
hypocrites with beams the size of the World Trade Center in their eyes, for
they have no intention of trying to discern what Christ actually meant by it;
all they know is that it gives them ammunition to pursue their own particular
agendas free of criticism or just punishment. They’re not fond of quoting
passages like Proverbs 20:22, Romans 10:19, Hebrews 10:30, Psalms 94:1 and
Nahum 1:2-3, which echo the flat statement in Deuteronomy 32:35 that “Vengeance
belongs to the Lord.” Judgment, justice and punishment are not wrong; they
merely belong to the one individual capable of meting them all out perfectly. It
would be an injustice in and of itself if monsters like Hitler and saints like
Mother Teresa received the same recompense in the end, which is exactly what
many of the villains among us are hoping for. It would be too much like Heaven
for an evil man to escape justice in the afterlife and too near to Hell for the
good to be cheated out of their reward, which is exactly what would happen if
death and a final, irreversible judgment did not place finite limits on the
actions of all humans. It makes perfect logical sense that powers of judgment
should be vested in a perfect being, since we are imperfect beings who by
definition are bound to err in our judgments at some point. It also makes
perfect sense that people should only be forgiven in proportion to how much
they forgive others, as Matthew 6:14-15 and Mark 11:25 mention; this is really
the only way to combine both justice and mercy without watering down either. The
most imperfect souls, however, are those who refuse to recognize their
imperfections, which is the real agenda of those who cry “don’t judge” most
frequently today.
One of the key distinctions between those who deserve
mercy and those who do not is that the latter, especially in our time, simply
won’t admit their own guilt. Numerous passages in the Bible speak of the need
to forgive others, even if they commit injustices against us unto 77 times 7,
as Matthew 18:22 states. A lot of selective quoting goes on with these
passages, however, such as the overlooking of the additional condition in Luke
17:3-4 that a person must admit their own guilt: “Be on your guard! If your
brother sins, rebuke him; and if he repents, forgive him. And if he sins
against you seven times a day, and
returns to you seven times, saying, `I repent,' forgive him.” If a person
does not admit their own guilt, it is a bit like a rebel holding on to his
weapons while waving a white flag. It is far worse, however, for a person to
continue their rebellion against God by rejecting the very standards of justice
he judges everyone by. Authentic forgiveness means that both the victim and
victimizer recognize that an injustice was committed; by foregoing the
punishment they had a right to inflict upon the victimizer, the victim escapes
some of the punishment due for their own transgressions against others. The clearest tests of forgiveness come when
you have an adversary completely within your power, yet let them go with a slap
on the wrist because they ask for your mercy. This is entirely different from
whitewash, in which either the victim or the victimizer claim that no injustice
was committed at all, which makes authentic mercy impossible since there is no
sin to forgive. G.K. Chesterton, the most prolific English language defender of
Catholicism in the last century, wrote on several occasions that the definition
of modern mercy consists largely in people thinking themselves magnanimous for
forgiving things they don’t truly believe to be evil. For example, during his
classic discussion of the “Suicide of Thought,” he points out this
inconsistency in the ethical system of Robert Blatchford (1851-1943), a leading
atheist writer of his day:
“Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their
pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful. For example, Mr. Blatchford
attacks Christianity because he is mad on one Christian virtue: the merely
mystical and almost irrational virtue of charity. He has a strange idea that he
will make it easier to forgive sins by saying that there are no sins to
forgive. Mr. Blatchford is not only an early Christian, he is the only early Christian
who ought really to have been eaten by lions. For in his case the pagan
accusation is really true: his mercy would mean mere anarchy. He really is the
enemy of the human race-- because he is so human.”[1]
Atheism was still a fringe movement in its day, but
in our time the philosophy of Blatchford is the de facto party line. By the
advent of the 21st Century the commercialized civilization of the West
underwent a sea change in its theology, to the point that enforced agnosticism,
under the guise of secularism, has become the rule; the idea that orthodox
Christianity could actually provide authentic solutions to the problems of this
world is now taboo. Along the way, virtually the entire moral code derived from
orthodox Christianity has been rejected piece by piece, save for this one false
teaching leading to fake forgiveness. The has led to a debacle in which
selective quoting of the Bible and other Christian sources has become the norm,
even among the highest echelons of the Catholic Church, where the lone defender
of Christianity left is actually a virtual prisoner in his offices at the
Vatican.
That
is why we hear a lot of loose talk by atheists and false Christians alike about
forgiveness, but none at all about the whole gamut of specific commandments the
same God laid down for our personal conduct, ranging from the impermissibility of
popular injustices like divorce to the condemnations of usury and speculation.
The same commentators certainly are not citing any of the numerous commandments
that enjoin Christians to defend the weak, contend with those who deride their
faith, to bring division rather than giving in to evil, or to shun those who
spread heresy. Thanks to the largely false historical portrayal of the
Inquisition, heresy is now painted as something bold and daring; but as
Chesterton also pointed out, it really is one of the greatest evils
conceivable. Even an atheist must agree that tampering with a divine message
for worldly purposes would be a truly disgusting thing, if the message were
indeed authentic. We don’t need to address such lofty questions, however, for
heresy is wrong for quite tangible reasons in the here and now. As Chesterton
put it so succinctly, a heretic who teaches a thousand people that thievery is
acceptable does far more damage to society than any single thief acting alone.
The unique thing about the oral climate of the modern age, particularly in the
last couple of decades, is that its heresies are mostly moral in nature, which
means they lead directly to injustices against fellow human beings in this
life. The great heresiarchs of the past rarely differed with mainstream
Christianity on moral topics, for their disagreements were usually about fine
points of theological doctrine that are important but have only indirect
consequences on the well-being of the rest of humanity. Nestorius never
justified capitalism; Arius can point his finger at this generation in disgust,
for it never crossed his mind to justify abortion. Some of the later heretics
like Calvin and Luther did tinker with the moral code of Christianity a bit,
but the decline in standards they engendered was so gradual that the ethics of
the Founding Fathers were still virtually indistinguishable from those of
Catholicism. The standards of the generation that King and John F. Kennedy
belonged to still had a lot more in common with both the saints and the framers
of the Constitution than they do with the present generation. Both of these
great leaders have been accused of committing adultery, yet neither man stooped
so low as to devise a formal defense for adultery itself. This is exactly what
our generation has done; the modern Apostles of Whitewash are fond of pointing
out that Jesus let the adulterous woman in John 8 go without the stoning she
deserved, but neglect to mention the fact that she cried tears of repentance. I
shudder to think of what might have happened to her had she angrily demanded
the right to commit adultery, free from either criticism or punishment, as
millions of modern adulterers do today. In fact, as I pointed out in my last
column, our generation has the audacity to justify homosexuality, a
particularly grotesque form of adultery pursued for the sheer thrill of
breaking taboos. All of our ancestors not only condemned it, but assumed that
the law could punish that and many other kinds of sexual injustice. The same
dynamic is active with even worse sins, like abortion, which Susan B. Anthony,
Lucretia Mott and all of the great feminists of the 19th Century abhorred. It
is also true of the sins of the so-called conservatives, who are now free to
applaud capitalist economic policies that the Catholic Church, the Founding
Fathers and even the leaders of the Progressive Era all rightly condemned. The
one common denominator of our age is that the people of the West, particularly
in America, are fiercely willing to march for their supposed rights to do
things that our ancestors considered evil, but will not make the slightest
sacrifice for causes that men like Kennedy and King fought and died for. If the
standards that those great leaders of the past subscribed to are correct, then
the content of America’s character has degraded badly in just a single
generation, at a pace that is much faster than the rot which killed the Roman Empire.
The survival of Western civilization now hangs
entirely on one crucial question: which standard of right and wrong is correct?
If God were to set down a particular moral code, then that code would by
logical necessity be the correct one, so the simplest route to answering that
question would be to sort out the competing claims various religions have made
to legitimacy. That would take a lot of painful thinking and even more
excruciating soul-searching that our fat generation just isn’t in the mood for;
it is much easier to subscribe to the teachings of religious relativity that
all faiths really say the same thing, regardless of how demonstrably untrue it
is. Then we can put another steak on the barbecue or go back to channel surfing
with a clean conscience, or so we would like to believe. We have not only
receded so far from all religions or any desire to discern truth that we now
lump David Koresh in with St. Francis,, or Mohammed in with Buddha, but have
decayed to the point where we confuse religion with culture and ethnicity. This
is an now an easy mistake to make, given that our commercial civilization
treats religion as merely a form of entertainment; just as the Irish are no
better than the Bantu, and a preference for Swiss cheese is no better than a
love of Limburger, so too is voodoo on the same plane as Judaism. This line of
thinking is entirely stupid, however, for religion has very little to do with
particular forms of singing or architecture and everything to do with behaving
in a particular way, according to the specific wishes of a deity. Religion
entails making true rather than false statements about God, in the same way
that mathematics involves finding the right answer to equations like 2 + 2.
Regardless of whether he does or does not exist, there must be some objective
answer to the question of his existence one way or the other; the one thing it
can never be is a subjective matter of taste, for the way some people answer
the crucial question of his existence must be closer to the absolute truth than
the opinions of others. Logically, the one thing we cannot do is invent our own
omnipotent deity and have it coexist with all the omnipotent deities conjured
out of thin air in the minds of every Average Joe on the block. Although such a
tangled pantheon is obviously illogical to the point of madness, this is
exactly what the modern theory of religious relativity demands.
To some extent, the various denominations and faiths
present in the world today can coexist, as long as they stick to strictly
theological topics like the Trinity and so forth. Where secularism founders
badly, however, is at the places where theology impinges on the real world; for
example, if God were to have an opinion about economics, psychology or some
other academic subject, then he would be right and the economists and
psychologists would be wrong in exact proportion to how much they disagreed
with him. That is a subject for a different time, however, for there is a far
more obvious area in which religion cannot be ignored: ethics. All religions
make ethical demands of some kind, even if it is only a mere absence of them;
none of them agree completely, while some, such as Islam, have numerous
commandments which are the antithesis of those found in Christianity. Once
again, if God were to make demands about our conduct, they would automatically
be morally correct by definition; even if he did not exist, that fact alone
would have an enormous effect on our behavior by allowing us to take certain
actions and avoid otherwise we otherwise would not. The subject of morality is
so closely entwined with religion that the two can never be separated, by
logical necessity; it might be possible to separate one particular set of
opinions from the public discourse through persecution, as our secular society
does in an Orwellian fashion, but one can never develop a rational system of
ethics without reference to religion in some way. Even if God did not exist,
this dilemma would still persist for eternity – yet if he does not, it would be
compounded, for imperfect people can never invent a perfect moral code. It is
an ex nihilo impossibility, like
creating matter out of nothing or making a bigger box fit inside a smaller one.
If there is no God, the human race is up the creek without the proverbial
paddle, because it will never develop
a better moral code on its own. It is simply irrational and impossible. Left to
its own devices, the human race can only squander whatever imperfect moral
sense it has, through entropy. In spite of this insurmountable dilemma, the
notion that ethics have evolved towards loftier ends is being spread like a
contagion throughout our forcibly secularized society, although there is no
supporting evidence. Logically, they cannot change for the better without
outside interference by a divine being, yet historically, we can see that they
are indeed changing over time. That is because the standards of justice Western
civilization subscribes to have been decaying over many generations, receding
at an accelerating, alarming pace away from the beliefs of King and Kennedy, or
the Founding Fathers before them, all of which ultimately sprang from the
Catholic Church and Christ himself. For each step forward we took in ethical
conduct in the 17th Century, the West lost ground in two others; by the 20th it
made five new mistakes for every past one it fixed, such as racism; and since
the ‘80s, we have been in free-fall. The one common denominator tying together
almost all of the cultural and political changes of the last few decades is
this: they are all contrary to the teachings of Catholicism, which men like
King and Kennedy subscribed to more to than the present generation does.
Immoral Relativity
The ideology now reigning in its stead is widely
referred to as moral relativity, which is logically inconsistent on its face.
Its sole commandment seems to be “don’t push your morals on me,” yet each time
a relativist makes this demand, they push their own code on everyone else. As
Jesus said on several occasions, he who is not against him is with him, and
whoever does not gather with him, scatters, which makes the term “amoral” an
impossibility in Christian terms. Even without resorting to Christian theology,
however, it is easy to see that moral relativity is not simply amoral, for the
absence of justice is an injustice in itself; as mentioned before, for example,
it would be a terrible thing if both Hitler and Mother Teresa met the same fate
in the hereafter. Furthermore, I have yet to meet a moral relativist who puts
their own philosophy into practice. Steal from them and they will not buy your
excuse that robbery is perfectly legitimate in your mind; when roasted on spits
by cannibals, I suspect most of them suddenly develop objections to
cannibalism. Other moral philosophies can add caveats that mitigate guilt when
evil stems from true ignorance, like in cases of a person whose sense of right
and wrong is diminished from being born in a cannibal tribe. Jesus even asked
his Father to forgive the high priests who killed him, thanks to their ignorance
of the fact that they were committing the greatest crime imaginable, deicide. Just
because a large group of people, such as a tribe of barbarians or a group of
renegade clergy, decides that something is right doesn’t make their choice
morally valid; cultural relativity is a good thing, up until the point where
cultures are deemed to be of equal worth regardless of the content of their
character. Cultural relativity is correct when it sticks to the beliefs
expressed in the Declaration of the Independence, that we are all created
equally, regardless of where we live or who are parents are - but it founders
when expanded into a gross assumption that we remain equal at death, regardless
of our actions in life. There is no room for allowance of ignorance, or
forgiveness of any other type in moral relativity, for there is really nothing
to forgive, nor is there any such definable thing as good character or justice.
In fact, insisting that there is an offense to forgive is the only real offense
possible in that way of thinking.
This
philosophy is completely unworkable, which is why no one really believes in it,
except as an excuse to whitewash crimes they want to go on committing. Moral
relativity is uncomfortably close to the single commandment of the Satanic
Bible, “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.” Like the supposed
author of that phrase, those who follow this dictum are actually egoists; what
they really want is a selfish double standard, in which offenses against
themselves are punished severely and their own offenses are not punished at
all. In other words, there is no forgiveness for themselves for they never
commit any wrongs, nor is there forgiveness for others, since they don’t
deserve it; this is precisely why so many of those who are fond of crying
“judge not” also seem to hold vicious grudges against those who trespass
against them. What it rapidly degenerates into is an anti-Christian standard,
in which each person, like Satan, sets themselves up as a God to determine what
is right and wrong in their own eyes. This is far worse than the Mosaic Law, in
which an eye was taken for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. As Gandhi pointed
out, that can lead to everyone being left toothless and blind, if there is no
forgiveness; Christ’s answer to this problem was not to automatically absolve
everyone, which would be unjust, but to let one criminal keep his eye in return
for allowing another who had knocked out his teeth to walk free. Christ
augmented the Mosaic Law in this way rather than abrogating it; he actually
strengthened the moral system of the ancient Jews rather than tearing it down.
As he said himself in Matthew 5:17-20, “Think not that I have come to abolish
the law and the prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.
For truly, I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a
dot, will pass from the law until all is accomplished. Whoever then relaxes one
of the least of these commandments and teaches men so, shall be called least in
the kingdom of Heaven; but he who does them and teaches them shall be called
great in the kingdom of Heaven. For I tell you, unless your righteousness
exceeds that of the Scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the Kingdom of
Heaven.” The additional commands he gave about forgiveness tightened the law,
rather than relaxing it a single iota. We all still have to follow every jot
and tittle of the moral aspects of the Mosaic Law and the clarifications Christ
made to it, but a substantial majority of the people of the West seems to be in
a mood to abolish it all. It is no wonder that heresy is perceived to be a
daring adventure rather than the horrible crime our ancestors treated it as,
for we have sunk to the depths of inventing a philosophy that relaxes all of the commandments found in the
Bible, as well as the Catholic teachings that illuminate it. Our civilization
embraces heresies that the great heresiarchs of the past would have considered
unthinkable, all of which are rooted in the worst kind of judgment of all: that
Christ himself had bad judgment. Consciously deciding not to follow his
directions is also a judgment, one that
we will be brought to account for if he exists, but we have advanced far beyond
ordinary excuses like weakness of will, inattention and ignorance to outright
rebellion. Teaching others that the directions he gave are incorrect is not a
praiseworthy act of forgiveness, but a damnable act of revolt. Smudging the
line between right and wrong does not exonerate anyone, but merely adds to
one’s guilt, especially if we teach others how to obscure it.
Quite often, something falsely called “love” is used
as an excuse to smear that line. That is entirely incompatible with a love of
truth, justice, or the God who went to great trouble to communicate those laws
to us, for our own benefit. The damage does not end there though, for
everything that he has forbidden has the secondary effect of injuring other
human beings in some way, which is not loving at all. This extends to so-called
victimless crimes, whose victims simply aren’t immediately visible to us.. As
the saying goes, the devil is in the details; the Bible gives us a meticulous
explanation of what it means to love someone in an exhaustive list of
circumstances, rather than giving us merely general, vague, airy platitudes
about love. That is why everyone who wants to learn how to love will read it
avidly, followed by the papal encyclicals, writings of the saints, the Summa
Theologica and the rest of the Catholic Church’s endless treasure trove of
knowledge, should that not be comprehensive enough for you. What we will gain
is a list of specifics about the differences between love and hate in every
potential predicament we face in life. Every time we fail to discern the
distinction between the two, we cause injury to others without just cause,
which does not spring from love. Refusing to learn those distinctions when the
opportunity arises is a judgment, in and of itself, that both the teachings and
the people they are designed to protect are not worth paying attention to. When
we lose that sense of right, a sense of wrong inevitably takes its place; where
light is not, darkness is. There is no in-between space for amorality, for grey
is merely white and black intermixed rather than a distinct color of its own.
That is precisely why moral relativity rapidly devolves into something far more
sinister: might makes right, so that the weak perish and the strong survive.
The ultimate selfishness is to do unto others, before they do unto you, to take
an eye and a tooth before someone else knocks out your own. This is precisely
the prevailing ethic of competition in our commercial civilization, which is
run by men who think exactly like the Scribes and Pharisees who crucified
Christ.
It would be a terrible mistake to think that the
money-mad society our capitalist class has crafted actually entails a sincere
belief in moral relativity. Some effort is expended in maintaining an illusion
of inclusiveness, but only for the same selfish reason that merchants generally
aren’t known for taking moral stands: fighting is bad for business. Christ once
called the Pharisees and Scribes “whitewashed tombs” because they were as
meticulous about their appearance as the average Young Republican or Christian
Coalition member is today, yet inside they were “full of dead men’s bones.” Our
leaders also take great pains to maintain a semblance of order and place great
stress on both their own appearances and the beautification of society, but the
civilization these latter-day Pharisees have built is also a sepulchre that is
clean as a whistle on the outside, yet corrupt and filthy on the inside. For
example, if your neighbor detracts from the beauty of your street by failing to
mow their lawn, they can be fined; but if they murder their own child for
money, or commit treason against their own families through adultery, they
cannot even be criticized, let alone punished. The twisted, materialistic
paradise capitalists are building across the planet is built on the bones of
innumerable victims, all of whom have been exploited for that purpose; among
them are the one billion children
murdered by abortion worldwide since 1973, the millions of people starved to
death in the Third World each year by capitalist economic policies and the
millions of victims of the West’s unavenged genocidal wars to implant that
system across the globe during the 20th Century. If there is one offense that
our supposedly tolerant society cannot abide, it is to demand justice for these
people. This, in itself, is merely the first of many offensive judgments by a
civilization that is already tolerant of evil and becoming progressively more
intolerant of good with each passing day.
The present generation is intolerant about a wide
range of perfectly innocuous behaviors that it has no right to condemn, yet
indulges in a wide variety of injustices that it has no right to applaud.
Lopping off a baby’s arms and legs with embryotomy scissors, for example, is an
exceptionally intolerant and judgmental act on the part of the mother. Cheating
on one’s spouse is also a judgmental act. So, for that matter, is sleeping with
someone out of wedlock, which is hardly an expression of love for your
partner’s future wife or husband. It is not a sin to accept charity when
necessary, but few other groups are as openly despised in America and England
as those on the dole – regardless of the circumstances that put them there, such
as the treasonous transfer of the manufacturing bases of those countries to
East Asia by Big Business. It is a sin to gamble in the markets, extract
interest on loans, charge whatever prices the market will bear and pay workers
as little as one can get away with – which is why the people who commit these
crimes receive one of our nation’s highest honors, a cover story in Fortune 500. Any kind of religious
viewpoint is automatically judged to be false, as long as it is Christian in
origin, to the point that the public is brainwashed into assuming that such
people are automatically biased, which is a bias in and of itself. As I will
discuss in a future column, our society is also afflicted with a vicious,
creeping prejudice against age. One of the consequences of this is that men are
now forbidden to date younger women, which was once common, even though there
is no sin in that; it is not considered wrong, however, to divorce or engage in
homosexuality, which are both acts of hate in each and every circumstance.
Another consequence is that men in particular are required to change their
tastes as they grow older, from genuine enjoyment of hobbies like hunting,
watching WWF wrestling matches, reading comic books, playing instruments or
driving fast cars, to cold, dead pleasures, such as pride of ownership in
having the most expensive riding lawn mower on the block. There is nothing
wrong with the former pleasures, as long as they do not interfere with one’s
responsibilities, which do not include spending one’s entire life in the
service of the most prominent sin of our age, avarice. This is the idol that
binds together many of these seemingly disparate instances of intolerance. They
all stem from one particularly devilish philosophy, class prejudice, which is
an unholy union of pride, the Original Sin, and the love of money, the root of
all evil. Social Darwinism is the de facto philosophy of our age, which has
metastasized down into the common people like a tumor; that is why it is
considered perfectly acceptable to call someone a loser for being poor, but
unacceptable to call someone out for getting rich through unjust means, such as
aborting or contracepting one’s children out of existence. It is not that our
Brave New World lacks standards, but that it enthusiastically pursues a
standard that looks more like the mirror opposite of Christianity with each
passing day. It also enthusiastically persecutes anyone who points out these
glaring defects. Moral relativity is just a ploy to disarm genuine criticism of
injustice; what we really have immoral relativity, in which good is punished
and evil is rewarded, so that the rich, the beautiful and the strong can pursue
their idols unmolested. Failure to speak out against this system, however, also
springs from a judgmental attitude that the victims of these crimes aren’t
worth defending. Anyone who does not stand up for the victims of any crime, on
any side of the political spectrum, ranging from adultery to abortion to
militarism to greed, does not love them. It is against such people that Proverbs
21:13 is aimed: “He who shuts his ear to the cry of the poor will also cry
himself and not be answered.”
Turning
the other cheek is the right policy when wrongs are committed against you, but
it amounts to cowardice when applied to others; obviously, sitting idly by
while a mugger beats an old lady is not an act of love for the latter. And anyone
who refuses to act out of fear of offending the mugger really has reached a
point of madness from which there is little hope of return. In fact, the
reversal of good and evil we have seen is uncomfortably close to something
Jesus called “the unforgivable sin” against the Holy Spirit. Theologians have
speculated on the meaning of this for millennia, but the context in which the
warning is given is important: it was directed against a Pharisee who objected
to Jesus performing a miracle of healing. In essence, he judged that this was
an act of evil, not of good. Our entire society is rapidly being brainwashed
into a similar way of thinking, in which the birth of children, one of the
greatest gifts from God, is considered a scourge to be curtailed; this is exactly
how they are regarded now by lovers who accidentally create life and
overpopulation theorists who have made it their life’s mission to eradicate
life itself. Nothing good can come from such a cold philosophy and nothing
does, for even the tolerance and love that such people extend towards bad
causes is also feigned. Under the new standards, for example, criticism of
homosexuality is verboten. In casual conversation, however, many of its
staunchest defenders among straight people speak derisively about gays without
even realizing it. This kind of hypocrisy pales in comparison, however, to that
often displayed by so-called conservatives, many of whom don’t merely stick
with secretly committing sins they publicly criticize, particularly acts of
adultery; the worst of them are actually secretly happy that evils like
abortion are rampant, because these injustices make them look good in
comparison. Underneath the façade of moral relativity, hate abounds, in secret
bashing of sinners and secret admiration for their sins. Martin Luther King was
fond of the saying, “love the sinner, hate the sin,” but this generation, which
pretends to respect him, has disrespectfully warped it into its opposite: hate
the sinner, love the sin.
The
new standard is the opposite of having your cake and eating it too; it can be
likened to poisoning your cake and choking your enemy with it at the same time
Thankfully, it is possible to have the best of both worlds, but only if we love
truth, justice and the God who made them enough to make sacrifices for them. Chesterton
once wrote that the truly extraordinary thing about Christ is not that he
displayed virtue, but he displayed all of
the virtues at the same time, which is a painful balancing act to pull off. If
we want mercy to coexist with the love of justice, one way to pull it off is to
cling doggedly he highest standards, without watering them down one iota –
while simultaneously assuming that anyone who violates them would do a better
job than you, if they were fortunate to have your experience, knowledge or other
advantages. When one person outshines another in good conduct, it works out to
everyone’s benefit – unless the runner up is acting out of pride, which ruins
everything it touches by turning life into a contest. In some situations,
failure to act injustice doesn’t mean we’re being humble and forgiving, but
that the beam in our own eyes is larger than we think it is. In others, it is
best to give the perpetrator the benefit of the doubt, by tempering our justice
with mercy, or even forgoing punishment altogether. The only way to discern the
difference is through painful soul-searching, which means staying focused on
removing the beam in one’s own eye most of the time; the way to both justice
and forgiveness is through the path of humility, which allows one to see more
clearly. The best place to start is to realize that none of us can compete in
righteousness with a guy who is willing to hang on a cross for such a bunch of
scoundrels; in fact, in all likelihood, there are probably a lot of people we
disrespect who will end up ahead of us in line at the pearly gates. I could end
up in a hotter place in the next life than anyone else, because God doesn’t
show the slightest favoritism towards anyone – which is why he’s the only one
capable of judging us fairly. No one ought to holier than thou, but nor can we
water down the standards of justice handed to us at great cost to past
generations; the first is sanctimonious while the latter amounts to sacrilege.
I sure don’t want to be judged for the content of my character, because I know
how bad it really is; that kind of knowledge presents one with a stark choice,
however, between gritting your teeth and doing the very difficult, life-long
task of fixing one’s one soul, or rejecting the perfect standards we’ve been
given and skip merrily into Hell. Those standards are tough and fair, unlike
those taught by other religions, all of which are tainted with some degree of
evil. I have not always met the standards of Catholicism, but that doesn’t mean
those standards are wrong. It means that I am wrong. No one can escape the
logical necessity of judging that certain standards are true and others false,
for otherwise we couldn’t make any sort of statement about right and wrong at
all, even ones favorable to moral relativity. We don’t have a right to make a
judgment about people, however, which is why I at least try avoid personal
criticisms of fellow human beings who might get ahead of me on Judgment Day –
with the exception of cautionary tales of a few highly placed celebrities and
politicians who publicly misuse their power and authority, of course. Make no
mistake about it, we will all be called to account for our judgments, as we
should be. Martin Luther King Jr. will be as well, and his record is not
spotless – unlike St. Mary, the only non-divine person who ever met all of
God’s requests, which is a singular exception in human history. If we do not
believe in being judged by the content of our character, then we are
obstructing the vision both of these great leaders had of bringing justice to
this world. If we don’t believe that we are responsible for our choice of
creeds and the moral standards they bring with them, then we also empty the
content of our character. If we accept a standard that is the mirror opposite
of Christianity, then we not only reject King, but the person who inspired his
most heroic actions, the King of Kings. His boss was a Jewish carpenter who
once said that “he who rejects me rejects him who sent me.”[2]
By rejecting his standards, we reject Him; we must put down our weapons and
admit that we’re in a state of rebellion, before he rejects us in return. He
was kind enough to warn us in Proverbs 17:15, from a free book that he has made
available across the planet, that “He who justifies the wicked and he who
condemns the righteous are both alike an abomination to the Lord.” Our
generation is unique in that it has made a habit of doing both simultaneously.
It will not be allowed to do so indefinitely.
The writer is a former journalist with a Bachelor’s in
journalism and a Master’s in history from the State University of New York at
Brockport, with a focus on American foreign policy and specializations in
U.S.-Latin American relations and counterinsurgency history. He has worked as a
paid foreign policy columnist for several newspapers and has credit towards a doctorate
in Latin America history. He is a convert to Catholicism from atheism and has
been an avid reader of textbooks on topics ranging from particle physics to
psychology to economics since age 9.
