I work hard to keep optimistic about America. Europe is pretty much done. The rest of the world is a hell hole of human suffering, civil rights violations and criminal activity. Rousseau’s noble savage eats his young. But America is the bulwark that holds back the ocean with a broom. God, I love my country.
But even my own country is under assault. Not by weapons and armies, you can’t beat a country built on an idea with guns. Guns don’t kill ideas…ideas kill ideas. So I’m declaring war on Subjectivism. Our schools aren’t supposed to teach religion, but if you remove the foundation of the Judeo-Christian world view, you don’t teach tolerance, you teach that Judeo-Christianity shouldn’t be taught.
My daughter has spent her first year in kindergarten and Daddy has been monitoring the year’s holidays to see what she’s actually learning from school. Thanksgiving, according to public school is a day to be thankful…for anything. But when George Washington actually signed the proclamation for Thanksgiving the day was “to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many and signal favors of Almighty God.”
“Christmas”, my daughter learned, isn’t generally spoken. It’s a celebration of “Happy Holidays”. It could be a winter holiday dedicated to your toe-nail but the name of Christ is not dispersed in the reading materials, incorporated into the crafts or named by the school. It’s controversial, and I agree that Christ is controversial. I just think it’s a good kind of controversy. And it’s an official government holiday. “Happy Holiday” is not the holiday. It’s “Christmas”. There’s the big bad word you’re not allowed to say in public school. Lock the doors. Gather up your children. They’re going to say the word “Christ” and “mass” in public. It’s the end of the world.
But then comes EARTHDAY. You’d think the Son of God himself came in the form of a tree. Crimony! My children were sent home with flyers naming “Mother Earth” as worth protecting. The homework assignments were full of objective moral truth statements using phrases like “we should recycle” and “we ought to keep our rivers clean”. It is the only morality my children are formally taught in school, and it is a collection of faith statements marked by a glorious holiday where they shut down streets in my city, the children’s channels celebrate and actually name the day. Jesus!
Who am I to judge Earthday? On what grounds do any of us have to call something actually right or wrong? I’ve been reading ETHICS by Louis Pojman and he carefully dismantles the philosophy of Subjective Ethical Relativism and it’s freaking me out, because this is the primary religion taught in my own culture…yes, even within the American Christian church.
Indulge me, read this section and don’t try to guess who said it. Just read it and tell me if it’s something that you generally find traded among the good people of the United States:
Then I learned that all moral judgments are “value judgments,” that all value judgments are subjective, and that none can be proved to be either “right” or “wrong.” I even read somewhere that the Chief Justice of the United States had written that the American Constitution expressed nothing more than collective value judgments. Believe it or not, I figured out for myself - what apparently the Chief Justice couldn’t figure out for himself””that if the rationality of one value judgment was zero, multiplying it by millions would not make it one whit more rational. Nor is there any “reason” to obey the law for anyone, like myself, who has the boldness and daring “” the strength of character “” to throw off its shackles. …
“Who are you to judge?” is a statement I hear often in moral debates. It is in itself a value judgment so it’s self-refuting, but that’s beside the point. The people who let this one fly think they’re pretty damned smart. This is our culture’s trump card. It’s also played in the company of similar cards like “That’s true for you but not for me.” and “Who determines right and wrong, you?!”
These are all statements of Subjectivism and they are articulated by our culture, and the man who gave the above statement, serial killer Ted Bundy. No, I’m not saying that those who believe Subjectivism are going to be mass murderers. But I am saying that you must philosophically be a Subjectivist before you can be a Ted Bundy.
Here’s more of the Ted Bundy statement which is paraphrased by historian Harry Jaffa:
I discovered that to become truly free, truly unfettered, I had to become truly uninhibited.
Is this Ted Bundy or my university’s Bachelor of Arts Program?
And I quickly discovered that the greatest obstacle to my freedom, the greatest block and limitation to it, consists in the insupportable value judgment” that I was bound to respect the rights of others. I asked myself, who were these “others”? Other human beings, with human rights? Why is it more wrong to kill a human animal than any other animal, a pig or a sheep or a steer? Is your life more to you than a hog’s life to a hog?
Darwin, Dawkins, Singer, Shermer.
Why should I be willing to sacrifice my pleasure more for the one than for the other? Surely, you would not, in this age of scientific enlightenment, declare that God or nature has marked some pleasures as “moral” or “good” and others as “immoral” or “bad”?
Best-selling authors Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens.
In any case, let me assure you, my dear young lady, that there is absolutely no comparison between the pleasure I might take in eating ham and the pleasure I anticipate in raping and murdering you. That is the honest conclusion to which my education has led me””after the most conscientious examination of my spontaneous and uninhibited self.
Most Subjectivists are hypocrites. They may preach that Judeo-Christian values are an illusion but they don’t live that way. We have a word for people who actually create a morality of their own and ignore the values of the real world, “Sociopath”.
