Curiouser and Curiouser
June 7, 2015 Leave a comment
From the Big Bang to the Black Rabbit Holes of Moral Relativism
Have you noticed that many of the well-coifed commentator’s these days now use the phrase, “The fact of the matter” to preface their comments? This is empiricism trying to counter relativism’s cynicism.
Modern day liberals, pundits of the ersatz, consider themselves open-minded individuals. They are proud of their openness to all things. So open-minded are they in fact that when truth is encountered it is immediately short-circuited bypassing their AND/OR gates, never residing in memory. Truth is discharged from their feel good capacitors. Truth, for them, is just one of many options. Truth is not the warm and fuzzy logic they want to be plugged into. Truth is electrifyingly absolute.
“As a rule, only very learned and clever men deny what is absolutely true. Common men have less brains, but more sense.” -William T Stance, an epitome found at the beginning of Roger Kimball’s book “The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia”.
These open-minded folk are so welcoming to come and go Change that they post a “For Rent” sign on their foreheads for all to see their obeisance to the gods Openness, Diversity and Equality.
Oops, there goes another foundation!
These open-minded folk are also the ones who so voraciously attack the First Amendment as a mistake-a mistake to let people speak their minds. Go figure. But this thinking works in the Rabbit Hole known as Asinine.
Let’s take a look at only some of today’s Ass-saults on Absolutes.
It is 2015 and truth and its consequences can be hard to swallow. Truth and its consequences can be abstracted into “Am I a victim of uncontrollable influences?”
Here is a portion of Vanity Fair’s May 2015 article “Civil War at NBC News” written by Bryan Burrough about NBC’s Brian William’s deliberate lack of Total Recall scandal:
“[Deborah] Turness [head of NBC] and the other executives who had gotten involved quickly became frustrated, as they would remain for days, with William’s inability to explain himself. “He couldn’t say the words ‘I lied,’ “recalls one NBC insider.
We could not force his mouth to form the words ‘I lied’. He couldn’t explain what had happened. [He said,] ‘Did something happen to [my] head? Maybe I had a brain tumor, or something in my head? He just didn’t know. We had no clear sense what had happened. We got the best apology we could get.
And that was a problem…”
Brian Williams-post truth
It is 2015 and you can Tune in, toke up, smile big: Introducing The First Church of Cannabis.
(Bill) Levin, a 59-year-old carpenter, started the church on March 26, 2015, to push the limits of Indiana’s new Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), which prohibits the government from “substantially burdening” anyone’s right to exercise his or her religion. Earlier this year, the controversial bill sparked protests from gay rights groups claiming it would allow for businesses to discriminate against gays and lesbians citing religious beliefs. (Emphasis mine)
The First Church of Cannabis is Epicurean in all in its smoke and mirror glory. Who needs a church with the living true God when the inaccessible uncaring-what-you-do god of Epicurus will do?
Speaking of “gay rights” it is 2015 and most Americans greatly overestimate the percentage of the LGBT self-described “queer” population. Perhaps this is due to air deprivation-the loud sucking in of all the air from the planet by the LGBT ‘community’ in order to replace it with the exhaust of revved up Epicurean narcissism:
“PRINCETON, N.J. — The American public estimates on average that 23% of Americans are gay or lesbian, little changed from Americans’ 25% estimate in 2011, and only slightly higher than separate 2002 estimates of the gay and lesbian population. These estimates are many times higher than the 3.8% of the adult population who identified themselves as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender in Gallup Daily tracking in the first four months of this year.” (Emphasis mine)
Of course the LGBT ‘community’ will refute the accuracy of this poll by saying that another 30% of the population is still in the closet (waiting to be coaxed out of the closet and into a confused symbolism state-the LGBT ‘light’ of gay).
It is 2015 and moral relativism’s apotheosis is a “fundamental transformation” POTUS with a bully pulpit.
Barack Obama’s latest political foray into untruth is his national domestic and foreign policy of fatalism-“AGW, this is settled science”. This populist scientism qualification is severely lacking in the facts due diligence requires asserting “settled science”. Obama’s stipulation is meant to shunt away the requisite evocative questions inherent within a democratic political process. In Obama-speak “Settled science” means “Settled issue”: “I said IT and therefore it must be true since I have enough power and sycophantic cohorts to proclaim it to be true”.
It is 2015, June, and Pastor Saeed Abedini has been in an Iranian prison for three years while Obama negotiates his own legacy.
It is 2015 and where we once had two distinct naturally evolved sexes-“He created them male and female”- we now have the amorphous word “gender” bandied about. The political winds of “Diversity” are uprooting millennia of family trees-naturally evolved binary sex procreations and ‘recreating’ traditional marriage in its own image with a frenzy to will to power one’s self-‘right’-ness… but never righteousness.
It is 2015 and have you noticed that multiculturalism is all the rage? You don’t hear the word “multiculturalism” proclaimed in public but one can see its assault on America and its devastating effects under Obama’s lawless immigration fiat.
Multiculturalism insists that all cultures and all religions are of equal value. Multiculturalism insists that there is no difference between Judeo-Christian beliefs and those of radical Muslim imposed Sharia Law. Per Obama and the Progressives all groups must be co-opted in order to dilute your white European background vote and shore up non-Western Democrat votes for the next election. “Divide and conquer” is his conscious mantra.
Multiculturalism is passive-aggressive toward America. Multiculturalism genuflects to the god “Hyphen”.
It is 2015. Have you noticed that we are no longer Americans? We are now hyphenated groups: African-Americans, Asian-Americans, and Hispanic-Americans. Many of these and other groups live a hyphenated life of one foot in and one foot out, having forsaken adopting the American settler’s values. “They are coming to America” for the handouts that only Big Brother can give and know full well that American values are ‘flexible’ according to who is in power, ergo kindled ethnocentricity melts the pot holding them.
It is 2015 and women now have added their maiden name to their married name-one foot and in one foot out of the marriage.
It is 2015 and I am reminded of Alexis de Tocqueville’s prescient warning about soft despotism. I apply it now to our 2015 morally relativistic “activist” judiciary that
“extends its arm over society as a whole; it covers its surface with a network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules through which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot clear a way to surpass the crowd; it does not break wills, but it softens them, bends them, and directs them; it rarely forces one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one’s acting; it does not destroy, it prevents things from being born; it does not tyrannize, it hinders, compromises, enervates, extinguishes, dazes, and finally reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd.”
It is 2015 and moral relativism’s tyrannical belief system has taken modern man captive and placed him in chains within a dark but fire lit cave.
As pushed in Epicurus’ time an individual’s sensory feelings, his inner sanctum response to the self-projecting chimeras on the cave wall, have become a socialism everyone must share to ease pain or else. To make this a personal reality each Atlas must shrug off the moral cornerstone with which one needs to plumb line truth and then replace it with the Objectivism of ‘rational and ethical’ egoism or, better, self-interest à la carte à la cave.
The modern listener is now tuned into the frequency, “The fact of the matter” and “This is settled science” to reassure his free-floating cave-wall derived angst. At the same time leaving the cave of self-pity is not an option and thereby Democracy in a cave is denied the daylight of truth.
We say, “if Barack Obama’s scientism can make us a victim of say AGW in a society of victims then the scientism proposed becomes ‘truth’ for me, a willing adherent to the new criterion-moral relativism. And victimization means I am therefore oppressed and in need of Big Brother to take my Whole World in His Hands”.
Moral relativism as a formula for life and not yet atheistic (atheism would come after Christianity began) was tossed around during the time (BC) of the Greek philosopher Epicurus. The “atomists’ of that era believed in a distant out-of-sight-out-of-touch god. They believed that one’s own sensory feelings and close kowtowing friends would better serve their introspective needs. Scientism, born during The Enlightenment, is moral relativism’s distant cousin.
Scientism is the politics of fact. Where science is about seeking truth in the form of verifiable fact, scientism is about seeking consensus about how you feel about the facts. These feelings are Epicurean sensory feelings superimposed onto verifiable fact-“How will this fact affect me”.
I could go on giving examples of this post’s rubric but it is Sunday and I must go to my church to remove the impurities of Moral Relativism from my mind, heart and soul. Come join me.
Curiouser and Curiouser, to be continued…
Some things to ponder:
When everything in life is valued by the same lowest common denominator as the Progressives would have it does value retain value? Are we not animals at the lowest common point? Ergo, isn’t socialism basically the exalted rights of certain animals on the Animal Farm to determine the rights of the others? See de Tocqueville quote above.
Is it OK for teachers groups to have seminars decrying white privilege while at the same time affirmative action denies other races (e.g., Asians trying to enter Harvard) equal opportunity? Is “white privilege” really Black on-demand-privilege projection?
“Justice: by any and all means necessary.” Is it OK to place Black-American ethnocentrism over every other race while demanding diversity, equality, egalitarianism and justice? Isn’t “Justice: By any and all means necessary” spoken by a Black-American District Attorney a call to lawlessness and anarchy under our country’s rule of law?
Isn’t the application of discrimination of one race over another called racism? Inequality?
It is 2015 and the erosion of moral relativism is washing away the sand foundation of society’s structure.
“What Americans call “liberalism” is the ideology of western suicide.” -James Burnham, Suicide of the West
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It is 2015 and WordPress has informed me that it is my six-year anniversary blogging with WordPress. Inconceivable!
Cindy Wity 
So You Want to Give World Peace to Your Mother for Mother’s Day?
May 9, 2015 Leave a comment
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
World Peace. Now there’s something your mother would love-the kids not fighting! But it will take some doing. FTD is not showing this item on their webpage. Hallmark may have a singing “What a Wonderful World” gift card. Good luck finding that one right now.
In the meantime-between War and Peace, that is-I suggest that you at least call mom and thank her for her wisdom, her support and her prayers on your behalf.
World Peace. If you think about it world peace comes when the world is ordered in such a way that man, a free moral agent, doesn’t repeat the history of self-centered reason leading to violence and to exclusion. I’ll tell you what I mean a little bit later in the post.
To better understand man’s secular attempts at world order read former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s new book “World Order.”
As a foreign diplomacy expert and an experienced and well-read confidant of several presidents and policy institutes, Kissinger provides the reader of “World Order” years of insight into centuries of cultures, societies and homogenous people groups that have formed political entities. In the aggregate, these entities whether during strife or in peace, would become known as the “world order.”
World Order by Henry Kissinger
Out of a political will based mainly on reasons of security through power, countries with formal boundaries and armies would form. But, this did not happen without the give and take of diplomacy and frequent battles over territorial claims. The flux of national wills would determine the world order at any given moment.
Today’s tenuous world order, as viewed from the U.S., includes aggressive-always seeking to expand Russia, passive-aggressive imperial China, the tinder-box known as the Middle East and the ever obtuse North Korea.
Today’s world order also includes the incendiary radical Islamists who are central to Iran’s deployed political will of “do or die” theocracy. There are non-state terrorist groups aligned with Iran. All this and sectarian strife: neighbor against neighbor.
As I see it, the stability of today’s world order borders on chaos. Cyber black-hat communities and international terrorists may hack, steal, deface and destroy information systems necessary for a nation’s financial and political security. There are no territorial borders in cyberspace, no rules of engagement, no easily determined policy of retaliation and only a faint hope in a firewall as means of deterrence. As technology rapidly advances, Kissinger warns, so do the implications of world order rapidly taking a turn for the worst.
In talking about the role of internet as it affects human consciousness by tailoring truth to the user Kissinger notes, “Western history and psychology have heretofore treated truth as independent of the personality and the prior experience of the observer. Yet, our age is on the verge of a changed conception of the nature of truth…
The concept of truth is being relativized and individualized-losing its universal character. Information is being presented as being free. In fact, the recipient pays for it by supplying data to be exploited by persons unknown to him, in ways that further shape the information being offered to him”
On the same page Kissinger asks, “Where, in a world of ubiquitous networks, does the individual find the space to develop the fortitude to make decisions that by definition, cannot be based on consensus?
AND thanks to nebulous foreign policy decision-making by the Obama White House, nuclear proliferation is increasing! Nuclear armament is now considered a necessity by countries such as Sunni Saudi Arabia. The Saudi are concerned about Shia Iran and nuclear asymmetry.
Currently, U.S. foreign policy appears to be a policy based primarily on President Barack Obama’s vision of himself and his desired legacy. Could it be that Obama wants to see himself as egalitarian with Iran to the point of doing to Israel what he does to America over and over?
The only sure thing we have learned about Barack Obama’s World Order policies which effect both domestic and foreign issues is that Obama’s allegiance is to his far left political ideologies and has never been with America and its lessons-learned traditional values. Oh sure, nice ‘flowery’ speeches are made in kabuki theater-like moments but his passive-aggressive actions and his evocative denigrating words are reminders of his early-60’s radicalized mindset. He is not for peace. Obama is a divider of classes, races and genders. World Peace is the last thing on Obama’s mind. He wants “transformational change”, whatever that is. It could mean that the U.S. becomes the People‘s Republic of Obama.
Remember, Obama was mentored by radical leftists, leftists who pledged their allegiance to the “Goddamn America!” flag. Barack Obama was taught to denigrate America within a vision of world order that does not embrace our historical roots. Those roots are of no value to him.
Obama mentions Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King and yet has no clue as to the depth of moral character or the extent of sacrifice each of these larger than life men had brought to America. These two men so endeavored with their prayers and decisions to bring about reconciliation and peace, not Obamic division for political gain.
Obama’s “Dreams from My Father” reveals to us that he is always looking over his shoulder, looking for Jim Crowism, for colonialism, for unabashedly proud Americans. He wants to shame America and Israel into submission to his political will, a will that only knows a radicalized world order. Little wonder he ‘empathizes’ with the Iranians, giving them the benefit of many realized doubts. But, that’s enough writing about our lame-blame President. He will be out of office in twenty months. Mothers, rejoice!
So you want to give World Peace to your mother for Mother’s Day? It will take some effort on your part to make this happen.
First I recommend to you Miroslav Volf’s book, “Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation”. This book is mentioned in a video within my post “The Problem of Evil, A Good God and a Different Way to Be Human“. N.T. Wright brings up the book while discussing forgiveness.
Exclusion and Embrace by Miroslav Volf
Here is one passage from the chapter, “Violence and Pain”:
Second, in the same video mentioned above N.T. Wright discusses forgiveness in light of Volf’s book.
Is forgiveness weakness? Is forgiveness capitulation of power, a loss of reason? Or, is forgiveness true power, true freedom and true embrace of the other. Is forgiveness the means to true World Peace?
Forgiveness is part of a larger reconciliation package: where evil has happened, it needs to named for what it is and in a sense shamed and then dealt with. “Where real evil has happened it needs to be addressed.” Forgiveness and reconciliation addresses what has actually happened. Within this context of embracing the “other” people are brought together. New life, new order is restored. Amazingly powerful and new possibilities including healing of communities will occur. World Peace ensues.
As Wright describes in the video, shutting the door of your heart to God’s forgiveness leaves us on inside looking out. I would add that a root of bitterness begins growing down through the floor boards making you decision to move through the growth to open the door difficult and then, later, almost impossible.
These are heavy concepts but you love your mother so take on these truths and become a peacemaker for Mother’s day.
“Blessings on the peacemakers! You’ll be called God’s children”-this Mother’s Day.
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Added 8/12/2015: “Every politician who is involved in this (#IranDeal) will have blood on their hands.”
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Filed under Christianity, Culture, Current Events 2015, Islam, Mother's day, Political Commentary, Politics Tagged with Exclusion and Embrace, forgiveness, Henry Kissinger, Iran Deal, Islamic Terroism, Miroslav Volf, Mother's day, reconcilitaion, World Order, World Peace