Students Unwilling To Make Judgments On Right And Wrong

The following article is taken from excerpts of Chuck Colson’s “Moral Relativism and Education”:

Dr. Stephen Anderson teaches philosophy at A.B. Lucas Secondary School in Ontario, Canada. His students had just finished a unit on metaphysics and were about to start one on ethics.

To jump start the discussion and to “form a baseline from which they could begin to ask questions about the legitimacy of moral judgments of all kinds,” Anderson shared with them a gruesome photo of Bibi Aisha, a teenage wife of a Taliban fighter in Afghanistan. When Bibi tried to get away from her abusive husband, her family caught her, cut off her nose and ears, and left her to die in the mountains. Only Bibi didn’t die. Somehow she crawled to her grandfather’s house, and was saved in an American hospital.

Writing in Education Journal magazine, Anderson relates how he was sure that his students, “seeing the suffering of this poor girl of their own age, [they] would have a clear ethical reaction,” one they could talk about “more difficult cases.”

But their response shocked Anderson. “[He] expected strong aversion [to it], … but that’s not what I got. Instead, they became confused … afraid to make any moral judgment at all. They were unwilling to criticize,” as he said, “any situation originating in a different culture. They said, ‘Well, we might not like it, but maybe over there it’s okay.’”

Anderson calls their confusion and refusal to judge such child mutilation a moment of startling clarity, and indeed it is. He wonders if it stems not from too little education, but from too much multiculturalism and so-called “values education,” which is really just an excuse for moral relativism.

Anderson writes, “While we may hope some [students] are capable of bridging the gap between principled morality and this ethically vacuous relativism, it is evident that a good many are not. For them, the overriding message is ‘never judge, never criticize, never take a position.’” Anderson wonders whether in our current educational system, we’re not producing ethical paralytics? Well, if the horrifying example of the students’ reaction in this case is any indication, Anderson already knows the answer.

We would do well to ponder the words of Pope Benedict, who said on January first that neither justice nor peace is possible if we do not hold the Ten Commandments as expressions of objective truth. The Pope said that peace and justice are simply “words without content” unless founded on the bedrock of natural moral law, as expressed in the Decalogue, given to Moses more than 3,000 years ago.

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Engaging Our Neighbors About Truth

Quoting Chuck Colson:

[A]s my colleague T.M. Moore writes in his weekly ViewPoint column at the Colson Center, our culture, our civilization, many of our friends, family and neighbors, and even many within the church are in the grip of the lie.

And what is the lie? T.M. says “The lie insists that God either does not exist or is not really relevant to human happiness … [that] every human being must decide for himself” where to find happiness. “This is the way that seems right” to so many people these days, but, as Proverbs 14:12 says, “in the end, it is the way of death.”

The most obvious manifestation of the lie afflicting modern culture is relativism — the idea that there is no absolute truth. Relativists, T.M. points out, “insist that truth is what people understand it to be, depending on their circumstances. … A relativist cannot say definitively that this or that idea … is true; the most he can say is that it may be true for me, for now.”

It’s not hard to see how moral relativism lies at the heart of so many of our cultural pathologies: greed, abortion, the breakdown of the family, so-called “gay marriage,” and on and on.

But “those who know the truth in Jesus Christ,” T.M. writes, “cannot simply stand by while the lie ravages churches, communities, families, and individuals.” We need to engage the culture, engage those who disagree with us. And engaging others means, first of all, listening patiently to what they have to say.

And then when we speak our turn, we must respect them as men and women made in the image of God, realizing that because they are made in God’s image, they are always “susceptible to the in-breaking of truth when it is offered in a firm, gracious, and clear manner.”

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Relativism And Moral Truth

36 Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting, that I might not be delivered over to the Jews. But my kingdom is not from the world.” 37 Then Pilate said to him, “So you are a king?”

Ideas Have Consequences!

Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. For this purpose I was born and for this purpose I have come into the world—to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth listens to my voice.” 38 Pilate said to him, “What is truth?” (John 18:36-38)

Ideas have consequences. If you accept relativism as a moral code, then you really can have no system of morality. The philosophy of relativism demands that every man has the right to do what he defines as right for himself. This world view believes everything is permissible and nothing is impermissible. The Old Testament tells us there were times like this in ancient Israel: “In those days there was no king in Israel: every man did that which was right in his own eyes” (Judges 21, 25). This text defines moral relativism: right and wrong is what you choose it to be; morality comes from within you.

If there is no absolute standard of right or wrong then there is no concept of guilt. This is why relativism is so popular today. If there is guilt, then there is responsibility. Guilt implies an absolute standard of right and wrong. This is what the culture today is seeking to avoid.

The very people in our culture who hold to this position, however, still try to hold on to morality for self-protection. They even want other people to be accountable for their actions. If nothing is absolutely true or right, if nothing is absolutely wrong, how can anything be condemned? Therefore, if relativism prevails, morality dies. If there is nothing true beyond what you will to be, there is no objective right or wrong to provide a moral compass for your life. Some people look at this belief as something that frees them from the law of the Bible. In reality, however, it locks them in a dark prison of opposing truths which lead to insanity. Without God’s absolute objective truth to hang on to, all is lost.

Relativism kills meaning and with it, motivation. Why? It is because there can be no real meaning in anything you do. This, in turn, leads to the addiction of escapism in order to avoid reality. We find escapism in things like alcoholism and drugs.

People do not have anything to live for. Their lives are filled with emptiness, anguish and despair. There is no point to this life, so why live? The philosophy of relativism is destroying our culture and, as Christians, we need to understand it and oppose it.

“Men Without Chests”

C. S. Lewis

C. S. Lewis made some interesting observations about the trends influencing modern manhood.  He considered such men to be stunted men, whose desires never rise above the belly and the groin.  These men conform to the soft despotism of the state and become willing slaves. They are men who do not care about the truth and thus they are malleable clay in the hands of those in political control.  Dr. Benjamin Wiker writes:

Lewis understood, with prophetic lucidity, that our ills today are largely the result of our ongoing attempt to escape from our own nature.

Such is the theme of his first chapter [The Abolition of Man], “Men without Chests.” In it, Lewis pillories a lamentable book (typical of his time and ours) that attempts to indoctrinate  mere schoolchildren with moral and intellectual relativism. The authors, whom he calls Gaius and Titius (in reality, Alec King and Martin Ketley), declare matter-of-factly that words don’t have any real connection to things, but are mere descriptions of our subjective feelings. . . .

For Lewis, these were fighting words, because they were words designed to usher in peace at any cost, even at the cost of truth, words designed to make chestless men who believed in nothing and hence would fight over nothing.

Here Lewis brilliantly ties together two modern trends: the emasculation of society and widespread intellectual and moral relativism. Both of these trends have one aim: to make men peaceful by removing the great sources of war (at least as some see things), the belief that there is truth, and that the truth is worth fighting for. Chestless men, men whose fighting spirit has been entirely quashed by relativism and the belief that manliness itself is one of the great sources of the world’s evil, are at least peaceful men. And for those who desire peace at any cost, the deformation of men and the destruction of the natural human desire for truth is a small price to pay. It is no accident that King and Ketley’s book was written between the two hideously destructive World Wars.

According to this view, we must, for our own survival and peaceful co-existence, escape from our own nature. Maleness must be left behind; it must have no place in our brave new world. Passionate truth-seeking is likewise a thing of our bloody past; it must have no place in our schools, our public discourse, or our media.

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