What Religious Liberty?
The Incredible Ever-Expanding Dead End
Anti-Cure, Anti-Life
Whose Values in
Education?
Toppling
Dominos
Anti-Christians
don't have to be Hypocrites but Many Volunteer
Intolerant Tolerance
The Emperor's
Clothes or a Cheap Tuxedo
The Myth of
Hitler's Pope, Part I
The Myth of
Hitler's Pope, Part II
Embryonic
Stem Cell Research Again
The Madness of
Secularism
"Don't Impose Your
Religion on Me"
Dictatorship of Relativism
Two Babies at Christmas
Living Will or Death
Warrant?
Court Ordered
Slow Motion Torture-Death Sentence
Men in Black
A Lot of Hot Air
The Culture War
Battles
"Stay with us, Lord"
Secular-to-English Dictionary
Moral Guidance for
Catholics in this Election
Christians
Losing America
Stem Cell Wars
Catholic
Pro-Abortion Politicians and Communion
Useful Idiots
Who Killed Jesus?
A Primer on Gay
Marriage
Whose Side are You
on?
Vouchers Revisited
Real and Fake
Cloning Bans
Broken Compasses
No Room in the Inn
Killing Fields
Revisited
Gay but not Merry
Adam and Steve?
The Battle for the Court
Victimless Crimes
More Salt, Please
The Next Big Fight
When Religion
Becomes Evil
Virginity Making a Comeback?
You've Come a Long Way,
Baby
The Incarnational
Approach
The Many Meanings of ACLU
Things Your Media Never Told
You
A Nasty Little Secret
Two Points of View on the Birth of Jesus
You Gotta Kill Them. How Else
Are They Going To Learn?
Perplexing Christmas Questions
How Do You See Christ Today?
Now that there is Another Ewe, will there be
Another You?
What is Conscience Anyhow?
Divorce of Love and Life
What Counts as a Mass?
What is a Covenant?
I Wish I had Your Faith
Are there Too Many Decrees of
Nullity?
Dutch Treats
Ecumenism
Going from Baby Doe to Granny Doe
Comments of Evangelium Vitae
The Exception Corrupts the Rule
Good Morality or
Good Medicine
Generation-X'ers Smart in Every Way But
One
A Matter of Good Breeding
Herod and Pontius Pilate at the
Polls
Hitler's Pope or Righteous Gentile?
The Unknown God
What exactly is wrong with
homosexuality?
Ideology Trumps Science, Reality,
and Common Sense
What Exactly is an Indulgence?
Infallibility and Error in the Church
Pilate Asked, "What is Truth?"
The Truth about Families
New Killing Fields
Choice of Language and Language of
Choice
A Lexicon for Our Day
Why are there so many bodies?
Marijuana, Medicine or Menace?
Medical Research and Ethics
Meditation
"You Taught me well,
Mommie dearest"
Moral Fallout
Neutral on the Wrong
Side
"These are the
Nineties After All"
Many are Wed but Few
are Married
"...Prepare him for
additional obligations"
A Useful Lie
A Partridge in a
Pear Tree
Religious Persecution in
the U.S.?
What Makes a Person a
Person?
The Point of a Point of
View
Politically Correct,
Morally Depraved
Population
Controllers out of Control
Practical Dreamers
Social Progress
through Immorality
Shall we Do Evil for
Goodness Sake?
Reason and Faith
Resurrection Glory
Same Sex Marriages?
Pearl of Great Price
"I used to be
schizophrenic, but we're all right now"
Sexual Morality
Irrelevant in Judging Public Officials?
Undesirable Side Effects
Some News is Good News
SOSSLQ's, not POSSLQ's
Spoils of Splits
Why Attend Mass
Every Sunday?
Is it All Right to Pull
the Plug?
An Appeal for Intolerance
Topics Catechetical
A Voting Catechism
A Moral Guide to
Voting
Vouchers: Has Their Time Come?
What Child is This?
What did they die of?
You are the Man
You may be a liberal
if...
Get Rid of that Worthless
Relative
Planned Un-Parenthood
Weighing Pro-Life Issues
Prior to Voting
|
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by Monsignor James C. Brunner |
Faith Points |
Christians are Losing America
Eighty percent of Americans call themselves Christian. In spite of that they stand by idly as the country changes its former Judeo-Christian culture into a neo-pagan immoral freak show. Christians have not triumphed in the 30-year war against the unborn. Schools have been scrubbed antiseptically clean of Christian principles and traditions while immoral sex education and secular indoctrination flourish. Christians are not especially influential in politics, in the media, in entertainment or literature. They are helpless in guarding children from pornography in public venues.
The moral values of the nation are not what they once were. A recent Gallup poll reveals that certain practices are morally acceptable; others are morally unacceptable; a third set divides the nation into two warring camps.
Americans find morally acceptable capital punishment, sex between the unmarried, divorce, and embryonic stem cell research. Oddly, the survey omits mentioning contraception probably because only the most retro Catholics consider its morality debatable. All these practices are condemned by the scriptures or the Church interpreting the natural law.
Americans find morally unacceptable the practices of polygamy, extramarital affairs, suicide, and cloning of human beings.
There is another set of practices that divide Americans. These include having a baby outside marriage (49% for, 45% against), abortion (40% for, 50% against), homosexual behavior (42% for, 54% against), and doctor assisted suicide (53% for, 41% against). Once again these practices are condemned by Catholic morality, but enjoy wide approval among Americans.
One does not have to be very old to recognize that in times past practices now approved were universally condemned. What happened and how could it happen in a nation with a large majority of Christians?
One answer is that Christians endorse, at least by their actions, the immoral behaviors. Tasty forbidden fruit is not just for pagans. It is unlikely that there will be much enthusiasm in battling what one practices.
Another answer lies in tolerance based on moral relativity, which maintains that since certain moral positions cannot be proved to be correct each person should be allowed to decide what is good or evil for himself. Moral relativism is bankrupt both morally and intellectually. If moral relativism were a valid moral principle then the person who was the most consistently morally relative should be the best moral individual. Scarcely anyone could think of someone more morally relative than a sociopath but no one would nominate him for sainthood.
The intellectual poverty of moral relativity is evident. To maintain, for example, that a lesbian couple should not be allowed to adopt children is unfair undermines relativism because it points to an objective standard of fairness to judge a situation. That is fatal to moral relativism which holds that there are no such objective standards. You cannot in one breath say there are no objective moral standards and in the next appeal to one. Fairness is the content of someone else’s morality which relativism holds cannot be applied to another. Moral relativism prevents any meaningful discussion of morality. Under its rules there would be no meaningful comparison of one moral system to another. If we say that one moral system is better than another and therefore you ought to adopt a particular point of view you are saying that there is an independent measure of morality which you denied when you said that all moral judgments are relative.
It is incorrect to argue that diversity in moral practice is evidence that there are no objective moral standards. The fact that there were once people who believed the world is flat and that the sun revolves about it is an example of diversity of opinion but not an argument that the earth has no shape or does not revolve about the sun. In a situation of diverse moral opinions the correct conclusion is that some are erroneous. There have been erring cultures, e.g., Communism and societies of head hunters. Emphasis on difference of opinion obscures the fact that there is widespread agreement among human beings about the basics of morality.
If moral relativists want us to be tolerant of other moral positions, then they must admit that there is at least one moral absolute: tolerance. But that undermines relativism which says that there are no absolutes.
If there were no external measures for morality we could not speak of moral progress as evidenced by the elimination of slavery, or of condemnation of immoral practices such as genocide, or about moral reformers such as those who fought for civil rights for blacks. If there were no objective measures of morality then we could not say that Mother Teresa was a better person than Josef Stalin.
Relativists argue that democracy is not possible if external moral norms could be imposed on those who disagree with them. This is clearly false. One may believe in absolute moral principles and also believe that the best way to inculcate them is by open discussion and debate. A free society guarantees the right for a person to be correct but also the right to be wrong. A moral absolute for a free society is that under no circumstances may someone coerce a person into accepting a conviction that I have about the wrongness of a certain activity although there can be legislation outlawing the activity.
There is a third reason for the decline in morals in our society and that is morality is regarded as a matter of motives and feelings, which are sacrosanct. It is a morality of the heart and not the head. Any sort of villainy can be justified if the motive is worthy. Thus to free a pregnant woman of an unwanted burden it is all right to kill a developing human being. For Communists, killing political enemies was good since they opposed socialism. For Nazis, killing defective persons, which for some reason included overachieving Jews, was good because it prevented adulteration of the super race.
The heart is an extraordinarily powerful force when enlisted in good causes, but useless in morality because it is blind. Thus the heart approves same-sex marriages for loving homosexual couples. It does not see the devastation that these will have on heterosexual marriage, on children, and on homosexuals themselves who have median lifespans 33 to 26 years shorter than heterosexuals depending upon whether they die of AIDS or another cause. When the heart contemplates a pregnant 16-year old how can anyone say she must not abort but must give birth? The heart does not see the innocent developing human being that is slaughtered and the confirmation of the dangerous principle that troublesome humans can be eliminated. Elevation of the heart is really self-deification. The bible warns us to beware of making our hearts our guides. See Numbers 15:19 and Jeremiah 17:9. Our hearts are often expressions of our own narcissistic desires that have no regard for others.
There are many other reasons for the decline in morality in our nation. At the heart of it is Christian inactivity, political ineptitude, or immorality. We no longer fight for decency but acceptable indecency. As we spiral into worse immorality and barbarism Christians deserve the most blame because their numbers are sufficient to prevent it.
St. Mary's Church Pastor & Vicar
