Can you handle the truth?
The great problem of relativism is a curse of our time. One need only think of the great financial crisis gripping the world today to understand it's colossal impact. Men, desiring greater profits, went to extraordinary efforts to create such a blur between the lines of sound business practices and reckless gambling on a massive scale, effecting the economy of the entire world by their actions. If Francis Schaeffer were alive to see this, he would point them out and say, "See, I told you that all men cared about was their own personal peace and affluence." Men have followed their own hearts down a moral black hole, and their wealth and stability fell with them. And so now the biblical injunction is once again true: "‘The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge’?"(Ezekiel 18:2) Indeed, the burden on the younger generations is always greatest when men fall to moral relativism in greed.
Let us consider another matter that so clearly shows the madness of moral relativism, namely that of the debate around abortion. For while actual scientific work has proved almost beyond any doubt that a fetus in the womb is a person, complete and living and even emotional, the public desire for blood has never stopped. In the name of progress and freedom more than forty million children have been destroyed since the Roe v. Wade decision came down in 1973. And all this despite the overwhelming evidence of sonogram technology that shows the child in the womb skipping and swimming and playing in it's mother's womb.
When we look back at the time of the Nazis in Germany and the terrible things done in the name of progress and humanity, we all like to think that we would be the ones who would have resisted and stood for the right things and done the right things. After the towns were liberated in Europe one scene played itself out over and over. The women who serviced the German army officers as prostitutes were brought out into the public square and beaten by the other women of the city for "sleeping with the enemy." It was quite shocking to see prim little old ladies and mother's with children in the one hand and reaching with the other to tear the hair out of these traitors to their way of life and beliefs.
Why paint such terrible pictures on the canvas of your mind? Because when the true nature of evil is exposed and brought out for all to see, it is easy so see that such a thing as right and wrong do exist, that there not only may be but that there absolutely must be an absolute standard of truth. For if there were not, the Nuremberg trials were all wrong, and a terrible mistake was made. I know of no one that would be such a relativist as to think that Nazi killers should not have been hunted down and prosecuted, although I have heard of such people.
Or consider the public executions of Ceausescu or Saddam Hussein. For while the act itself was detestable, it took days of repeated airings of the execution to satisfy the people that he was really dead and gone. Such monsters were these men that when people reminisce about their death they smile and remember the event with fondness.
Or consider something more recent. On January 8, 2011, a young man opened fire on a crowd of people killing six and wounding many others. He was a deranged young man, driven by strange conspiracy theories of his own making and was well known by many in the area as unstable. It is in cases like this that it is even more difficult to understand any purpose or point to the event. In my personal response to try and understand this tragedy I came to the place of seeing this horrific event as the thing that it is, which is simply pure evil. From this point I reasoned thusly:
"It's like this:
If there is true Evil, then there must be true Good.
If there is true Good there must be Right and Wrong.
If there is Right and Wrong then there must be Absolutes.
And if there are Absolutes, there must be an Absolute, from which all the other Absolutes derive their authority.
And this absolute Absolute is God."
(from the series "Questions of God: Questions of God Special: "Why, God? Why?")
You see, my preference would be to argue from the creation and it's beauty and complexity, or the great lives of people like Mother Teresa, Corrie Ten Boom, the prophets and apostles, and many other selfless lives that prove the incredible power of the love of God to move ordinary people to do extraordinary things. But we humans have this amazing ability to logically explain away good deeds and even beauty and design. We question the motives of those who serve and love and even rejoice when we discover that, like the mere mortals that they were, they struggled with haunting doubts and times of darkness. We channel our inner legalist and judge good deeds done by righteous people as somehow having sinister motives and design, despite the proof of the good deeds themselves. So, for me, the shortest distance between two points is to look directly at real Evil and draw the inference from the conclusion. If somewhere in this sin-sick, weary world we can see a trace of light around a shroud of darkness, soon we may be able to look to the light, having put the darkness behind us forever.
from JavaJazzJesus
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