The moral relativism of the Left can take us to some pretty strange places where Right and Wrong lose all meaning.  Except, that is, when it comes to condemning George W. Bush and other Evil Republicans while giving a pass to terrorism and abortion.

1. As Einstein said, “It’s all Relative”

I have a question that’s been bothering me for some time now, ever since my social consciousness was raised a couple of years back by the National Religious Partnership for the Environment.  It’s embodied in an extension of the question they asked when they tried to persuade me that God wouldn’t like it very much if I continued to drive my SUV. 

I still have my SUV, and am thinking about buying another one even with $3 a gallon gas.  Three bucks is a lot to pay for dead dinosaur juice, but then again this isn’t 1973, and my total annual income isn’t in the low 4 figures.  So while the good people at NRPE failed to convince me to get rid of my Hummer and pile the wife and kids into a Yugo instead, they did stimulate a related question that also needs to be answered. “Just what kind of car would Jesus drive to take his girlfriend to an abortion clinic?”

Please don’t laugh.  Questions like this pose a serious dilemma for modern-day moral equivocators who find no universally accepted basis to judge another human being’s actions — unless, of course, we’re talking about the motives of George W. Bush who lied to get us into a war against Iraq, or Dick Cheney who personally arranged for Halliburton to profit from the plush contracts this immoral war produced so he could boost his 401K retirement payout. 

Clearly, the car I drive is an exception to the rule that one man’s morality is just another man’s opinion, since according to the NRPE my choice of vehicles has biblical implications.  And as CBS, CNN and the New York Times (to name but three) have repeatedly demonstrated through their objective reporting, we can know what was in George W’s heart when he attacked Iraq for no good reason, and make judgments about this action that go far beyond simple policy disagreements.  There are demonstrable “right” or “wrong” actions here which transcend one’s personal preferences.  Polluting Mother Earth with a gas-guzzling Humvee is, well, wrong; just as going to war with the peace-loving people of Iraq was wrong.  Not “wrong” because there was a better way to accomplish the same objective — such as, buy three SUV’s instead of one Hummer; or bomb Iran and North Korea instead of Iraq to remove a threat to American security — but wrong, period. 

And why is this?  According to the True Believers on the Left, any car bigger than an electric golf cart, or one that doesn’t use solar power as its primary source of locomotion, is morally indefensible because it’s killing the environment.  The fact that such a vehicle doesn’t actually exist because Dick Cheney and his evil Oil Industry buddies want to raise the earth’s temperature by forcing us all to drive gasoline powered monstrosities, doesn’t make this issue go away.  It simply requires us to choose the lesser of all evils and buy that Yugo instead of opting for a larger, heavier, and dare I say, more comfortable car.  One day, when the Democrats return to their rightful place of power in Washington, “Option B” will disappear all together.  New legislation will outlaw these gas-guzzlers and require U.S. automakers who are fighting for their economic survival to pump billions of dollars of R&D into creating a solar powered Myth Mobile.  This will end pollution and eliminate global warming, and make the U.S. a more eco-friendly, but poorer nation.

As for the other great evil presently facing the world, the one brought about by George W and his buddies’ never-ending quest to seize Iraq’s oil, deny U.S. citizens their civil liberties and kill or imprison all people of color, we should all know by now that war is never the answer.  That is, of course, unless a Democrat is in power.  Then it’s okay to bomb the living hell out of Bosnia until the bad guys surrender, or pack off a bunch of Asian-Americans into a holding camp because they’re the wrong color while we’re fighting a war against their ancestral home, or use nuclear weapons to save some lives that might be lost if we don’t kill a lot of innocent women and children. 

All of this is lamentable, as is the loss of any human life that hasn’t been electively aborted.  When a Democrat is in power, though, it is not immoral.  But put a pair of panties on a terrorist’s head when the Republicans are in town, and you have grounds for Impeachment against an illegitimate president who routinely, and systematically, denies the right of due process to captured enemy combatants.

2.  Infidels and Infants

So we know that at least two situations arise which lend themselves to absolute moral judgments: driving the wrong type of car, and wars prosecuted by George W. Bush.  But how about the myriad of other social and political questions facing the nation?  I’ve looked to the Left for guidance on two other issues that seem to be of equal importance to SUV’s and George Bush’s presidency: the actions of terrorists who deliberately target innocent civilians, and the taking of an unborn human life. 

As different as these two actions are, what I’ve found is that they each converge in an interesting way so that the answer for one leads us to the answer for the other.  Unfortunately for the Left, the answers they provide don’t tend to support the morally relativistic positions that normally characterize their positions.  Rather, these answers demand that we apply universal notions of right and wrong to both of these situations.  Which is to say, we apply the concept of genuine, not relative morality.  Not my morality, or the guy down the street’s morality, or Western morality, or French morality (as an independent subset of Western morality), or any other relativistic moral judgment based solely on one’s culture, wishes, whims, or other individual variable, but morality, period.

This implies that there are “right” or “wrong” actions that transcend time, culture, and individual personal preferences.  And if that is true, then something must account for the fact that a common set of moral values is installed, recognized, and perpetuated within each individual and the human race as a whole.  This suggests only two broad options.  It must either involve a purely physical explanation (such as culture, society, genetics, etc.), or a metaphysical one; which is to say a morality based on the existence and purposeful actions of God.

I can almost see the wide-eyed stare from those who think I just stated that we should overthrow 200-plus years of Constitutional government and install Jerry Falwell as our new president.  And you thought it couldn’t get any worse that Bush?  No, this isn’t what I was implying.  I was simply taking the notion that God cares about bumper-to-bumper traffic and U.S. foreign policy, and carrying it forward to a logical conclusion.  I said “logical” conclusion, rather than a purely relativistic one, so we don’t end up with a series of television commercials that pits Jesus in a Yugo against Allah in a Mini-Cooper to see who can get the better mileage.  Or worse, so we don’t insert the wrong kind of religiously-inspired discussion into a public policy debate.

That wide-eyed stare just got bigger.  Once again, I need to remind myself about the state of education in the U.S. public school system, and explain what I actually mean. I am not making a comment here about any U.S. Supreme Court decision, or the contorted logic they used to arrive at it.  What I’m saying is that we need to recognize two undeniable facts up front.

First, the United States system of Constitutional government was founded on a Declaration of Independence that invoked centuries of Judeo-Christian thought to justify the creation of a new country.  It did not set up a theocracy.  But it did recognize that laws made by men apart from a Higher Authority, as opposed to laws that are a part of a Higher Authority’s purpose for man, are fundamentally immoral.  And immoral laws, ultimately, cannot stand.  Not even ones rationalized as conforming to this Higher purpose. 

Second, acknowledging God in the Declaration of Independence, but avoiding any direct reference to God in the Constitution, does not tell us one damn thing of any real importance in and of itself.  It’s the substance of these Constitutional provisions that matter, not whether they specifically reference Jesus, Yahweh, Allah, or the Big Guy Himself.  The question isn’t whether the laws and Constitution of the United States directly acknowledge the existence of God, but whether the laws man makes conform to the God-given moral justification for having a government in the first place. 

3. Get me the Tylenol.  I feel a headache coming on

I am not going to put everyone to sleep now by launching into an intensely detailed review of Constitutional politics and American culture.  Rather, I’m going to give each of you an opportunity to skip this section entirely and go directly to Section 4, or stay around a little while longer and let me frame this issue for you in a more complete manner.  You’ll arrive at the same destination point either way.  The difference is, this section will give you an exact roadmap, while passing it by will send you on more of a journey of discovery.  Either way is perfectly fine.  Each has its own advantages and disadvantages depending on your point of view.  Me, personally, I love this kind of stuff, but I know it makes some people’s eyes glaze over. 

So here goes.

3.1. How God fits in to this discussion

In discussing an issue as complicated as this, I’ve cautioned people in the past about starting an analysis with a preset conclusion and then working backwards to find data to support it.  Instead, the best approach is to ask basic questions and assemble a working hypothesis, then test it out with an objective look at the facts — sometimes mixed with a little humor to keep things interesting or to illustrate a longer point more succinctly. 

This doesn’t mean entering a discussion with a blank stare.  We all have a particular way of looking at the world, and we all have different life experiences and acquired knowledge that helps us navigate a new issue.  What is does mean is that you don’t start with the conclusion that Elves actually make Keebler cookies and then look for evidence to support it, but with a hypothesis that they do.  This keeps you from consciously omitting certain facts or downplaying different conclusions the data might lead you to.  If you find out through this process that there is no magic elf tree, but rather a big old factory in Waukegan, then that’s your conclusion.  You can’t ignore the evidence and arbitrarily conclude that the state of Wisconsin has a vested interest in promoting Waukegan industry so it lies about the elves.  

Therefore, while I may start with a personal conviction that God exists, I don’t automatically assume that God gave us all the common moral code referenced in the Declaration of Independence; other than to agree in the broadest sense that God, by definition, created the universe and everything in it.  However, if the only explanation that accounts for the existence of a universal moral code points to direct action by God, then I’m prepared to let the evidence lead me in that direction.

Acknowledging God as the source of morality — rather than man, culture, the environment or genetics — doesn’t automatically mean that I want to impose a religious theocracy on America and ban Darwin from the classroom.  I don’t assume that every scientist who believes in quantum mechanics and eleven dimensions of reality is an atheist.  It may be that the majority of scientists are atheists, and it may be that the majority of Christians believe in the literal interpretation of the bible.  Neither fact, if valid, has anything to do with the ultimate truth of a matter, unless the person seeking it refuses to keep an open mind and consider all options. 

However, I realize that to some scientists, allowing for God as an independent variable is like asking them to include space aliens or an undersea civilization in their hypotheses.  This is no more bizarre than to those on the other side who can’t understand why God must automatically be excluded because He can’t be observed directly.  Science draws inferences all the time from objects it can only study indirectly, if at all, at the subatomic level.  Quantum mechanics speaks of probabilities and possible outcomes for things it cannot directly measure.  In certain cases the object takes on dual characteristics, such as having the simultaneous properties of a particle and a wave. 

I’m not suggesting that there is a 1:1 comparison between what can be known through quantum physics, and evidence that would support a claim for a direct act of God.  But I am saying there is no reason to categorically eliminate God as a possible explanation for some things that are beyond the grasp of human understanding and/or deny His existence all together.  That is not a scientific judgment, but a personal opinion bordering on dogma.  We can measure brainwaves, and chart their specific interaction with the brain.  This is not the same as measuring thought, though, which is the product of this activity.  The more ethereal the object, the less likely it is that science will be able to answer all of the questions associated with it.  And the notion of morality is about as ethereal as they come.

3.2 Measuring morality

Morality, which is at the heart of any discussion of “right” and “wrong,” can be defined in a variety of different ways, just as moral Relativists have repeatedly shown.  In the broadest sense, a study of morality comes down to deciding a basic issue.  Is morality objective, or subjective?  Is it the product of opinions and preferences, or a universal truth?

Subjective morality is a fancy way of saying that moral judgments arise through individual preferences; social, economic and/or cultural conditions; or environmental factors.  We judge something to be “moral” because that’s what our culture tells us, or our institutions and practices lead us toward, or other outside factors impose upon us at a particular moment in time.  In the most extreme, relativistic case, morality is nothing more than the opinion each individual holds on a given issue, a sort of judgment de jure.

Objective morality implies the opposite.  While the process of recognizing or expressing a particular moral judgment may be influenced by social, cultural, political, economic, or other outside pressures, the content of the moral judgment is not.  Morality is truth.  Truth is universal.  Society, politics, and individual personal preferences do not give us our morality.  Rather, they work to suppress an individual’s recognition of the truth, or to help bring that truth out in its fullest expression.

Assuming that morality is not subjective, and in fact is grounded in universal truths, another question is raised.  Just where do these universal truths come from?  Politics, social forces and individual preferences would not be strong candidates, because none of these factors are shared equally by all people in all periods of time.  There is nothing inherent in a communist system, for example, that would shape an identical morality to that which would arise through a capitalist system.  In fact, capitalism and communism are likely to produce polar opposite views of morality.  You may think your boss is immoral because he’s paying you so little, but a stand-up guy if he gives you an extra thousand in your Christmas bonus.  In a Marxist-oriented system, how much you make isn’t the determining factor.  It’s whether you are alienated from the ownership and control of the means of production.

It seems reasonable that only two possibilities can account for a universally-shared morality.  The first involves the genetic makeup of human beings.  That is, does a particular gene or gene sequence shared by humanity create common moral values?  We know that autism and bipolarity can block the expression of certain emotions.  However this does not explain the presence of emotion in the first place.  Likewise, a genetic explanation for morality must deal with how moral values are created, not merely how they are expressed or inhibited. 

On the other hand, a universally-shared morality could also be explained on a metaphysical level.  Just as an automobile is more than the sum of its parts, a human being is more than flesh, and bones, and genetics.  Those who believe in life after death intrinsically accept this notion.  Therefore, just as God gives us a soul that contains the essence of who we are, He instills in every human a common moral code that is independent of genetics or any natural-world explanation.  Real world forces can act upon an individual to suppress the recognition and/or expression of these common moral values, but they cannot alter or replace an individual’s moral code.  That code is universal, and immutable.

3.3 God and human morality

However, demonstrating that a God-based, universally-shared morality in fact exists is a daunting effort.  It requires a combination of elements. 

First, a common, universally-shared moral code must be shown to exist.  This moral code must have both a general and practical component.  “Do good” is a universal moral principle, but it provides no intrinsic guideposts to help each of us understand what “good” is.  Therefore, anyone can do anything and simply label it “good.”  This is the relativistic way to express morality, and is commonly expressed as a political or social philosophy.  The concept of “good” to an environmentalist would not necessarily be the same as it is to a capitalist, or socialist, or a member of a cult, or a member of a political party. 

The underlying principle must read, “Do good by doing X,” where “X” has sufficient substance to guide a morally-based decision.  I’ve focused on the dual concepts of innocence and harm to provide this substance.  Harming an innocent human being can be clearly understood as an inherently immoral act.  Bringing harm against a human being who “lacks innocence” is not immoral in and of itself.  Defending oneself against attack, participating in war, and executing a convicted criminal are three obvious examples.

What makes these particular examples moral or immoral are the details surrounding them, which again relate back to the underlying moral principle.  Conviction in a kangaroo court does not make an execution moral.  Conviction and sentencing under the due process afforded by a Constitutional republic can.  I say “can,” because this is not an automatic conclusion either.  Two honest, differing conclusions can be drawn depending upon the details of the case, as well as other morally-based factors.  The exact letter of the law could be followed in securing a conviction, thus making the action moral, but a different set of arguments might be raised about the morality of executions themselves.  Since the underlying moral code offers support for both positions, each outcome could be considered appropriate.  In a society founded on a belief in universal moral principles such as the inalienable rights of man, this debate takes place within a constitutional framework that is built on this same philosophical foundation.  In short, in America, we use the local, state, and national governments that flow from the Constitution to decide among equally valid competing moral questions.

For the purposes of this essay, though, getting close to the clear expression of a universal moral value does not demonstrate that a universal concept does in fact exist.  Not every nation, at every moment in history, has had a genuinely representative form of government.  Therefore state actions in and of themselves cannot provide a common measuring tool.  But the example of executing a criminal who has been afforded his due process rights in a Constitutional republic does lead to a way to finding a practical application of a commonly shared moral value.  We do this by removing any judgment that man would make under the Constitution about another individual’s innocence, and deal with pure innocence itself  

If we can then show that no social, environmental, or biological explanation accounts for the universal acceptance of a common moral value, we have satisfied at least half of what is necessary to support a metaphysical rather than a physical explanation.  However, we also need to show that a physical explanation could not account for it as well.  The fact that primitive man was unaware of the existence of DNA does not mean that DNA was not the key factor in explaining human reproduction.  Or put another way, the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Since we can never prove a negative, we have to set a reasonable standard by which a lack of evidence will strongly suggest the absence of evidence.  The best way is to assume that a physical mechanism to provide morality does exist (i.e. genetics), and then explore the logical implications of it.  Lysenko was a Soviet geneticist who cut off the tails of mice and bred them in the expectation that after several generations the new mice would be born without tails.  His explanation of how physical traits changed was, to be generous, inaccurate.  Genetic change simply does not occur that way.  Similarly, while we cannot presently identify which genes may provide for human morality, we can work backwards from this assumption and examine the implications of this if it was true.  If morals come from genes, and we understand the way in which genetics operates in the human body, we can build a logical case one way or another for a genetics-based morality.

3.4 God, religion, and morality

The only way a metaphysical explanation can stand is if all possible physical explanations do not fully account for an activity.  Then, a metaphysical explanation at least becomes plausible.  At this stage, invoking the name of God becomes much more than a symbolic acknowledgment of man’s relationship to his Creator.  Rather, God Himself becomes the explanation.

However, focusing on “God,” is not the same thing as referring to “religion” or “religious tenets” like the Ten Commandments.  They are related, but not identical concepts, and may be viewed very differently depending upon the nature of the society and culture it operates in, not to mention the specific beliefs of the religion itself.  The same is true with morality.  Morality is not what you believe personally, or what you glean from culture or society, or what a particular religion teaches about morals and values.  Religion may reflect the basic concepts of morality, as well as urge individuals to make proper moral choices, but it does not provide the content of that morality any more than society, culture, or an individual does. 

Nor does recognizing a universally shared value mean that an individual will always operate within that moral code.  The code only sets the parameters of acceptable behavior.  Individuals must choose to act within the boundaries of that code.  If they do not, it doesn’t mean that a universal moral code doesn’t exist, or that individuals can substitute their own moral judgments for ingrained moral values.  It simply means that the individual is “wrong.”  This is when moral judgments are appropriate, when the actions of individuals violate the common moral code, not because one person holds a different opinion than another person on the same subject.

3.5 The influence of God on the American political system

With this in mind, I want to focus on the God-based moral foundation provided by the Declaration of Independence that eventually led to the creation of the U.S. Constitution.  The specific details of that morality will be discussed later.  What is important for now is the fact that the Founding Fathers credited God with bestowing inalienable rights in all man, and these rights in turn justified rebellion against established authority. 

In creating policy or passing laws from this Constitutional basis, the debate isn’t whether to have a God-based morality insert itself into our law-making process.  It’s already there.  The question is how to do this so that one specific religion does not gain an unfair institutional advantage over other religions.  And, furthermore, how to recognize the appropriate limits of this God-based morality when making our laws. 

Limiting the practical application of a God-based morality in political life is not the same thing as denying any role for it in political decisions.  This confusion arises because of the relativistic justifications all sides of this debate have brought into the political arena.  Atheists want to deny a role for a God-based morality at any point in the law-making process, while Christian activists want to insert God (or more specifically, their concept of religion and the tenets of their faith) into our public institutions. 

Moral Relativists are like the French at the United Nations.  They’ll trot out the name of God to sell a Yugo or oppose a policy they don’t like.  But otherwise, they’re perfectly fine having God remain an ethereal being that each individual seeks guidance from according to their personal preferences.  However, should any of this personal communication from God spill over into the public arena, like the ACLU defending the Constitution, moral Relativists would rather see an immoral law passed legally than a moral law imposed on the people unlawfully. 

The initially confusing thing about this last statement is that these relativists are indeed right about not imposing a private morality on the public no matter how odious the issue.  This even applies to situations where this private morality and universal moral code are identical (such as abortion), but the law allows this immoral activity to continue. Morality — even the “right” morality — cannot be imposed in a constitutional republic.  It must be willingly embraced by the country through its institutions and practices, or the unintended consequences may far outweigh any short-term good.  Efforts to promote prayer in public schools, regardless of how pure the motives of its advocates may have been, led directly to the success of moral Relativists in establishing abortion on demand as a national “right.” 

3.6 The practical application of morality in American politics

The best way to illustrate this point is to go back 150 years or so in U.S. history.  The shorthand way of describing the American Civil War was to “free the slaves.”  That was indeed an outcome of the war, and for many Northern citizens it was a strongly motivating factor in prosecuting the war.  But despite John Brown’s raids and the growing moral outcry over this despicable practice, it wasn’t the issue of slavery that prompted the war.  It was the issue of States Rights in relation to the authority of the Federal government.  War broke out because of actions of State governments that refused to recognize the legitimate authority of the national government.  Therefore, the Civil War was fought over a legally-oriented, Constitutionally-based issue; not a moral or philosophical question as embodied in the Declaration of Independence. 

Why is this important?

The U.S. Constitution provides the direct, legal-political framework for all laws made within the United States.  Even though it was fought with the use of competing armies, the Civil War was actually a legal-political battle, not a moral one.  Clausewitz defines war as simply “politics by other means.”  And it was through politics (war) that the practice of slavery in America was ended, just as politics had legalized it in the U.S. Constitution (the Three-Fifths Compromise), and an amendment to that same Constitution eliminated slavery as a legal concept (the 13th Amendment). 

Because the real battle over slavery took place in a legal-political arena, the culture of the nation was changed.  Today, the debate is no longer over how to count slaves for the purpose of representation in Congress, but whether one piece of legislation or another has gone too far, or not far enough, in support of the principle of equal justice and civil liberties.

This “lesson” in ending American slavery has important implications for the focus of this essay, terrorism and abortion.  It illustrates the important role that morality plays in defining the legal-political basis for action, as well as the proper arena in which to apply morality to public and private life.  Without a universally recognized and accepted moral foundation to end slavery, neither John Brown’s raids nor all the vocal opposition to slavery in the world would have made a difference in shaping the post-Civil War era.  The rebellious states would have been brought back into the Union, and life would have gone on as before despite the Emancipation Proclamation.  Rather than expressing an enduring principle of morality, it would have been little more than a war-time tactic that could have easily been pulled back or modified dramatically in Reconstruction America.  With no intrinsic right to liberty, a right recognized as coming directly from God, freeing the slaves would have been just another bargaining chip to do with as politicians pleased.

But it was not the Declaration of Independence that gave Lincoln the power to prosecute the war, or issue his Emancipation Proclamation.  It was the U.S. Constitution, which drew its moral justification from the Declaration of Independence.  Had slavery been ended by executive fiat, or vigilante justice (no matter how well intentioned), the culture would not have changed.  Culture is reflected in the laws of the land.  And these laws had not been changed.   Had the South attempted to force its system on the North, or otherwise threatened physical harm to neighboring non-slave states, war would have been justified on moral as well as legal-political grounds.  And when it was over, the culture would have been changed through violence, but it would have been violence of a different nature.  Rather than return wayward politicians and citizens to the fold, the focus would have been on eliminating the threat.  The carnage that we already know from five years of civil war could conceivably have been even higher.  Cultural change would have been brought about through the elimination of a threat and the substitution of a new culture in its place, much like the challenge the Western world faces today in its fight against Islamo-fascism.

The moral seeds of slavery’s own destruction were sewn at the very creation of the U.S. Constitution when southern landowners acknowledged the limited humanity of their slaves through the Three-Fifths compromise.  The same human being who had no Constitutional rights was counted as three-fifths of a person for taxation and representation purposes.  It took almost a hundred years for those seeds to blossom, but that intervening time was used to clarify the moral bankruptcy of slavery and prepare the country for eventual change.  If the Civil War had not been fought, enough new states would have joined the Union to legally abolish this abominable practice.  With each passing year the rationalizations for allowing slavery were slowly being pealed away to expose the moral ground below it, until nothing but naked, venal self-interest remained to justify the practice of owning another human being.

3.7 From slavery to abortion and terrorism

Both terrorism and elective abortion rationalize their behavior in much the same way that southern plantation owners did during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

They exist by denying basic human rights, but take this denial to the next level.  The logic of terrorism and abortion requires that the perpetrator completely deny the humanity of the thing being killed.  In neither case is a human life being taken, because in both cases terrorists and abortionists have rationalized away its human qualities, and therefore its basic rights.  This is why Islamo-fascists teach that Jews are no better than animals, and believe that Infidels are not “innocent” human beings.  And it explains why a woman aborting her child must look at her baby as an “undifferentiated tissue mass” or a “Right to Choose,” instead of as a developing human being.  In both cases arbitrary criteria is used to deny a person’s humanity, and because of this the seeds of their own destruction have been sewn as well.  Terrorism cannot survive without fear; and eventually fear is conquered.  Abortion cannot survive without ignorance; and eventually ignorance is replaced with knowledge. 

What allows both terrorism and abortion to exist today is a deliberate effort to ignore, pervert, or rationalize-away our common moral code in the name of expediency and self-interest.  We look at world consensus to justify our actions, ignoring the fact this consensus is made up of personal self-interests and is not based on a common moral value.  We seek a legal justification for action or inaction through the United Nations, without first asking whether a core moral issue is at stake.  There is nothing inherently wrong with either consensus or global cooperation.  But unlike our system of laws and government – which was built on the principles embodied in the Declaration of Independence — world opinion and world government has no such similar base. 

Mouthing a concern for human rights is not the same thing as recognizing that those rights derive from God, not man.  The fact that a country has the word “Republic” or “Democratic” in its name does not therefore make it truly democratic, or insure that it will operate as a republic.  It is only when we move beyond mere words and begin to look at actions and intentions that we discover the truth of a matter.

What has allowed elective abortion to supplant slavery as a national indignation is a combination of the factors I addressed above — self-interest, rationalization, hidden agendas — but something else too.  Those who took the “moral high ground” in sparking this debate had their own set of vested interests and hidden agendas.  Beginning with prayer in public schools and other public institutions, they took key provisions of the Declaration of Independence and substituted their own religious preferences for “God” so that paying homage to “Jesus,” not following a God-given moral code, became the focus of their efforts.

Because of this approach, moral Relativists were able to seize the debate and frame their core issues in a deceitful way.  Since Religion A claims to speak for God, and the Constitution forbids the state to establish an official religion, then both Religion A and the God it speaks for must be completely removed from the secular world.  This logic prevailed because the Constitution is not the Declaration of Independence, and drawing inspiration and support from God is not the same thing as making laws that reflect God’s rules as expressed by a particular religion.  It didn’t matter if what Christians believed perfectly matched 95% of the beliefs of every other religion.  The Constitution, though inspired by God-given rights, was still man’s law.  And man’s law did not permit the establishment of an official state religion.

By hijacking God and linking Him to a battle to promote their values, not only did the Christian community lose their fight, it allowed the notion of “God” — the basis for their claim — to be wiped out with it.  This then led to an even more determined fight to infuse “politics with religion.”  Relativists became even more relative to prevent their opponent’s success, and as the Relativists carried the fight to its relativistic extreme, atrocities like abortion on demand became the law of the land. 

This, ultimately, explains why a concept like abortion could take hold and flourish in a society that condemns human right abuses, and even passes laws against cruelty to animals, but it will allow a healthy 20-year old developing child to be killed without the same level of due process it demands for suspected mass murders and captured terrorists.

3.8 Strategy and tactics

Education, not confrontation, is the way to expose the relativist thinking that goes against the common moral code to rationalize abortion.  We need to return the definition of “harm” to a practical level that is universally true in every example.  This means defining harm in a way that does not allow Relativist distractions to confuse preferences, opinions, or desires with other examples of true harm.  If the example we give is indeed universally true, then working backwards we can re-engage a debate that falsely labels a developing fetus as anything other than an innocent human being.

Fighting the evil of Islamic fascism requires the exact opposite approach.  Education, dialogue, compromise and debate is just another form of appeasement.  Unlike America, which is governed by the constitutional rule of law, this battle takes place in the completely lawless and relativistic stage of world affairs.  I say lawless because the United Nations — the world’s governing body — passes morally equivocal resolutions that cannot or will not be enforced against the perpetrators of evil they claim to oppose.  The U.N. is the modern-day Articles of Confederation that was ultimately replaced by the U.S. Constitution to promote stability and security within the 13 independent colonies and allow the values embodied in the Declaration of Independence to be fully recognized.  

For abortion, the fight begins by validating whether the Declaration of Independence ‘got it right’ when attributing its underlying morality to God, instead of man.   The answer to this question carries great implications for not only America, but for all societies under every conceivable social, political, economic or religious system. 

Answering it will also bring out the true nature of Islamo-fascism. Where abortionists draw their justification from man-made laws, not a God-based morality, Islamo-fascists accept the fact that God created a common moral code, but claim to have the exclusive right to interpret and enforce it.

The reason that Islamo-fascists view themselves as the ultimate arbiter of morality is obvious.  What is less obvious is the insidious way replacing God with man-made “Rights” brings us to the same outcome.  Instead of blowing up a school bus full of children and killing them all at once, abortion kills these innocent human beings one-by-one.

4.  You can’t choose your Relatives

My Liberal friends are forever chastising me for unfairly judging them when I label their arguments weak, confused, duplicitous, ignorant, self-contradictory, and often hypocritical.  Granted these aren’t moral issues in and of themselves, but they usually lead to the charge that by saying they are “wrong” to believe things like animals have rights that are equal to humans (whose inalienable rights derive from God, because men have souls and animals do not), I am somehow “imposing my personal morality” on the actions of other people.   Rather, I should simply acknowledge that we have a difference of opinion in this situation like we do in many others, and let it go at that.

My usual reply to statements like this is: “If there is no objective ‘right’ or ‘wrong,’ just equally valid differing opinions, then under what conditions would you say that raping and murdering a five-year old child isn’t wrong?”

Normally, my Liberal friend thinks for a few moments about what I asked, then changes the subject to George Bush’s DUI or some other morally relativistic position.  But instead of sidetracking the discussion, let’s stick to the main point I raised.  Are there values that are universally true regardless of what individuals think, or the cultures that ground their actions, or the periods of time they live in?

My intention is to use the remainder of this essay to lay out a series of thoughts and related questions that will lead us all to — dare I say — a universally agreed-upon conclusion that morally-grounded value judgments can, and should, be made about at least two issues: terrorism and abortion.  Terrorism is not simply freedom-fighting under another name; one that is defined by Western culture and the ROWGs (rich old white guys) who dominate it so they can dismiss their own atrocities while condemning equivalent actions by their enemies.  It’s a barbaric, immoral crime against humanity practiced as an art form in the present era by Islamo-fascist radicals.  It deserves to be identified and condemned, even by Reuters and CNN.  Abortion is an equally, if not even more heinous act of brutality perpetrated against an innocent human life.  Labeling it a “choice” instead of calling it what it really is, doesn’t change its nature.  To kill an innocent civilian with a waistbelt full of dynamite or a shrapnel-filled missile fired at a civilian population center is no different, morally, than terminating a pregnancy when anything less than the life of the mother is at stake.  Both result in the deliberate death of an innocent life, and both are acts of unspeakable brutality.

I need to pause here for a moment, though, and expand on the challenge I raised to moral Relativists who intend to give me examples of when the rape and murder of a five-year old child is acceptable. 

First, I chose this exact imagery because it produces a visceral reaction, instead of just leaving it at the "rape and murder of (fill in the blank)."  Having admitted that I’ve done this deliberately, I expect moral relativists to accuse me of “poisoning the jury” by invoking this “excessive example.”  Like a defense attorney would argue in a trial, “The jury knows that my client has been charged with three counts of rape and murder.  I object to your honor showing them photographs of the bloody corpses of little children with their vaginas torn apart, arms cut off and eyes gouged out and . . ..”

You’re upset with me for making you read this.  I know, and I apologize.  If I had left out the “torn limbs” part, and just focused on the vaginal tearing and bloody corpses, would that have made a difference in how you reacted?  Or maybe keep all the description, but just one corpse instead of three?  Would you have reacted the same way?  Perhaps you’d still have been revolted, but maybe a little less disgusted?   Or is there anybody out there who would have reacted positively?  You know, something like “the gouged out eyes are okay, but maybe a little less blood on the corpse, and no mention of the vagina, and I can keep reading while I eat my dinner?”  Would that have made a horrible image seem acceptable, or even positive?

You’re upset with me again, I know.  I sincerely apologize, and I feel very bad for making you think about such horrible things knowing full well that it would disgust you.  I can hear you saying, “Was it really necessary to be so deliberately provocative, Phil?  Can’t you make your point in a less disgusting way?”

I can.  And I just have.  Whether you are male or female; young or old; American, French, Chinese, Australian or any other nationality; Christian, Jewish or Muslim; white, black, green, yellow or purple; lived in 2006 or lived in 1306, what I just wrote would disgust you.  Everyone, everywhere on the planet, regardless of their culture, society, genetic makeup or the time they lived, would have the same basic reaction.  Only a psychopath or mentally disturbed person would find the graphic imagery pleasing, or morally neutral (like reading a cereal box cover).  99.99999% of the people who have ever lived on the planet would be revolted, with “How revolted?” the only real question to be asked. 

Which means that a universal morality must exist that is independent of any laws, preferences, culture, geographic location, race, gender, or any other man-made, genetic, or environmental factors.

This is quite an admission for a moral Relativist who does not believe in universal notions of right and wrong.  Unless, as I said earlier, a Republican is in office and doing something they don’t like.  Then a clear moral basis for condemnation exists.  So the Relativist protests that he was deceived.  He was caught off guard by an appeal to his emotions.  He’s a decent human being, and any decent human being would react that way.  The illustration is a fraud.

Okay.  I can feel their pain, and understand their position.  I want to be fair, so I’m giving everyone fair warning now.  I’m going to give you another example, but it won’t employ any graphic terms.  The words “kill” and “rape” will be the only deliberately provocative words I employ, and they won’t be amplified with any further details.  Read them over and over to desensitize yourself, and resist an unfair emotional appeal to your decent way of looking at life.  

Is everybody ready now?  If so, proceed to the next section.

5.  Who’d like to Volunteer?

I propose a simple challenge to those who still need to be convinced of my central proposition: that a moral code exists within us that is independent of what men think, do, are genetically, learn from others, where they live, and just as important, when they lived.  What I say will be as true for someone living today in Buenos Aries, or in Kentucky in 1947, as it will be for an Egyptian pharaoh centuries earlier, or a human being born 1,000 years in the future.   

Here’s the challenge. 

Walk into a crowded public place and yell at the top of your voice, “I love the XYZ football team/chocolate donuts/long walks in the moonlight!”  See if anyone looks at you with revulsion.  They may think you’ve had too much coffee or too much sugar that morning, or your choice of football team completely sucks, or make some other relatively benign personal observation.  But they won’t run away in horror or call the police.

Now do the same exact thing, but instead yell, “I love to rape and kill little children!”  You don’t even have to be any more graphic than that. 

Now I ask those of you who think my belief in a universal moral code is wrong to guess how many people will have shouted “Me too!” or “Tell us how you would do it!” as opposed to, “I’m going to kill you myself right now you perverted son of a bitch!”  It will be interesting to hear what the person accepting this challenge reports back.  That is, if he hasn’t been beaten into a coma by the people who attacked him after he shouted. 

But the Relativist says, “Of course they’d beat me senseless!  What decent person wouldn’t?  The test is unfair.”  Despite the election of George Bush, the U.S. is a basically decent country with decent people.  Our teacher union-taught public school systems instill these values in children at an early age.  Our unbiased mainstream media gives people the truth about Bush’s corrupt policies and actions, and helps counter the indecent behaviors Republican Party members try to foist on the people.  Thanks to Liberals and the Democrats, the proper morals are being loaded into young children’s minds, and the right moral thinking is repeatedly reinforced throughout their lifetime.  If it wasn’t for Limbaugh and Fox TV and guys like you, there wouldn’t be as much voter confusion today, and Morally Relative Liberal Democrats would be running the country like the Founding Fathers intended them to.  As for the rest of the world? Everyone hates Bush.  World consensus reflects this common sense of decency, which is always focused on “the children,” next to which is “Fairness,” “Privacy,” and “A Woman’s Right to Choose.”  These are the building blocks of universal worldwide morality.  So of course everyone would react the same to that awful statement.

Okay, so instead of a public place filled with decent people, let’s find a place that’s filled with corrupt and venal humans who lack any sense of true decency or honor; in short, the exact opposite of the kind of guy you are.  If you and other decent people would instinctively react in horror to such an outburst because you are decent, then someone who is the exact opposite should either be indifferent, or supportive of your statement.

I know the perfect place to conduct this study.  No, it isn’t the United States Congress, or the editorial room of the New York Times, or the leadership of either political party just to be fair.  It would be a maximum security prison filled with rapists and killers — just the kind of guys who should like this stuff if “decency” (or the lack of it) is the determining factor.

So there you’ll stand in the middle of the worst examples of humanity, and you’ll loudly, and unequivocally, shout out your love of raping and then killing little children. And what do you think will happen?  Will 100 percent concur?  90 percent?  Seventy-five?

No.  The room will grow deathly quiet, and in about ten seconds when the dregs of society finish registering the thought of what you actually said, they will converge on you as one to rip the heart out of your chest and feed it right back to you.  How’s that for imagery?

And why would these morally depraved despicable human beings do this?  Because each of them has a child, or a niece or nephew, or just a tiny shred of human decency still left in an otherwise empty soul.  And even though they may rape or kill other adults, which is also a morally reprehensible act, they instinctively recognize that killing or abusing innocent human life is also a morally depraved thing to do. 

Because they have been able to rationalize away, or ignore, or otherwise suppress the moral code that governs key aspects of adult relationships, doesn’t mean that moral code is gone, or that parts of it have vanished, or that it was never there.  Some moral guideposts may be buried so deep inside them that they will never again surface, but they are still there. And just because they have suppressed one aspect of the same, innate moral code we all share as part of being human, it doesn’t mean they have suppressed every shred of morality.

It’s no coincidence that every prison keeps child molesters and pedophiles separated from the other prisoners because if they didn’t, a man who committed the most unspeakable crimes would be so morally outraged they’d kill these prisoners the moment they had the opportunity.

If you think this is simply an American phenomena, then I invite you to pick another country of your choosing anywhere in the world and test this theory. Surely there is some society, somewhere in the world where you’d get at least a neutral, or maybe even a positive reply?  I’d even let you divide a populations into male-female, young-old, tall-short, or any biologically-based subset. 

For those Relativists thinking about this challenge, it has to be a sensible real-world test.  No hospital maternity ward filled with non-aborted babies (who are indeed “human” according to the Constitution, but not yet capable of expressing rational thought); or second graders who will look at you in stunned confusion before returning to their coloring books; or North American Man-Boy Love Association gatherings since they are not a representative sample of society or any of its sub-groups.  And you can’t pick DumbJerkistan and yell it in English so no one can understand you.  You’ll have to learn the language, because you probably won't find a translator willing to stand within 50 feet of you.  Find me a truly representative sub-grouping of humanity that meets this challenge, and show me that they really aren’t offended by what you announce publicly, loudly and earnestly, and I’ll reconsider this point. 

Oh!  And just to make it completely fair, I’ll shoot a DVD of you rehearsing your statement so I can make sure it’s played on your behalf if you suddenly develop laryngitis after traveling all that way and can’t speak.  I can justify the extra expense by the offset of cashing in your return ticket when we discover it isn’t needed, because coffins are loaded with the other baggage on an airplane. 

Either that fate awaits you, or you’ll be enjoying a nice long stay as a guest of the state in their local penitentiary.  For your sake, I just hope they don’t have access to the latest technology, and there’s no way for them to play the DVD that was entered into evidence at your trial.

6. It’s a Small World After All

So, now that we’ve dismissed the sophistry of those who want to say that some sort of a universal “decency” gene or acquired behavior provokes a common revulsion at child rape and murder, what else could be the reason for this near-universal reaction?  I say “near-universal” because even in America we have groups like the North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) that advocate “consensual” sex with extremely young children.  Even though they may not technically “rape” and kill, they’re certainly going to be a lot more receptive to the general idea than the average person would be.

I will admit, though, that in saying 99.99999% of the world’s population would intuitively know that child rape and murder is an immoral act, this figure is a guestimate on my part.  It could be as high as 99.9999999999%, which leads to another question: Why does everyone, everywhere in the world, at every time in history, react the same way?  The answer, I believe, is found in the following hypothesis.

There is a universally-shared moral code upon which all humans instinctively base their judgments.  The infusion of this code into each human being does not depend on outside factors like social structure, culture, or historical time periods.   Nor is found in a specific gene or gene sequence.  Rather, it is an intrinsic part of us.  People may violate, ignore, rationalize-away or suppress all or part of this innate moral code, but it is still there.  It always was with us, and always will be with us as long as we are alive, and is an essential part of what makes us “human.”

To ease everyone’s concerns, I will no longer be any more graphic than to say “the rape and murder of a child,” because that thought alone is actually offensive enough to trigger a reaction based on everyone’s innate moral code.  The extra bit of imagery I used was to help convince any remaining skeptics that a universal moral code exists.  Each reader’s own personal reaction to the graphic imagery was probably proof enough for those with an open mind.  For those moral Relativists who remained publicly unpersuaded while suppressing their instinctive revulsion, I offered them the additional challenge to drive the point further home.

I also did it to underscore another important point that bears stating.  We do a great injustice to the search for understanding when we use language to soften an issue instead of sharpen it.  This is another effect of morally-relative thinking.  “Terrorists” is such a harsh word, so we say “freedom fighters” or “resistance fighters;” or just use the organization’s name to identify those involved (“Hamas attacked” vs. “Hamas terrorists attacked”).  Or, we talk about an “explosion” instead of a “homicide bomb.”  And we don’t show people the video of Daniel Pearl’s head being sawed off while he was still alive.  We just say he was “killed,” or if we really want to make a point, say he was “beheaded.”  

As difficult as it is to face some of these issues because of the innate moral repugnance we feel, I suggest that we all just suck it up and act like adults instead of frightened children.  Most of the problems in the world today exist because people would rather rationalize away the threat, or appease a bully instead of confront him, or just not have to deal with the thought of nearly 50 million aborted babies when they’d rather listen to their favorite CD.  This allows reality to be re-defined by morally relative, agenda-driven special interests whose policy can only survive if it’s an “undifferentiated tissue mass” and not a baby.  It also allows morally relative, politically expedient politicians to work against the national interest so they can lie themselves back into power.  Evil must be recognized before it can be confronted, and we need to start a new, more accurate national dialogue now. 

If Bill Clinton can help make it safe for the country to talk about a penis instead of “a thingie,” then I’d like to suggest that when addressing moral issues, we call everything we talk about by its proper name.  It doesn’t matter if a soccer mom in Georgia, or barber in Montana, or a housewife in New Jersey gets offended by seeing periodic replays of a twenty-six year old woman or a forty-two year old businessmen plunging to their death from the top floor of the World Trade Center.  What matters is that five years later these same people are not lulled into a sense of false security because George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld have been working 24/7 to kill all the bad guys they can find.  This is how a world-wide Islamo-fascist threat that seeks to kill or maim as many Westerners as possible becomes understood as “Bush Lied People Died.”

As you can see from this essay, I have no trouble using precise, and at times powerful words to describe an action.  I justify this on a clear, moral-based recognition of right and wrong, or where the issue is morally neutral, on an objective review of the facts.  Challenge my facts with relevant competing facts, or show me the critical inconsistencies or contradictions underlying my analysis, and I’ll change my mind.  And I have, as you’d know if you heard me speak about Richard Nixon in 1972 and 1974, or about the need for a guest worker program in January 2006 and February 2006. 

Precise does not mean inflammatory, however.  I do not always need to say “murder” when the word “kill” will get the same clear message across in that circumstance.  Nor do I need to scream “baby-killer” at a woman who just had an abortion.  Man has a role in promoting morality in general.  To do this he must use his intelligence rather than an agenda-driven logic to apply moral principles to real-world examples in order to develop appropriate guides for his actions.  He has the right to debate, the right (and obligation) to help others see moral issues more clearly, and the right to speak out about or look disapprovingly upon bad moral behavior. 

But he does not have the right to punish other individuals who he determines have violated the moral code.  That right is reserved exclusively for the giver of those moral values, and for Him alone.  Where bad moral behavior coincides with a violation of man’s law, we punish an individual through our institutions, not our individual actions.  And we punish the transgressor only for violating the law, not for violating the moral code that may have inspired the law, or simply coincided with it.  Again, that punishment will be determined by God according to His review of the action — not ours.  And if punishment is warranted, it will be a matter between God and that individual, and not anyone else.

In a society of law based on genuine democratic principles, the proper course of action is to speak out about what is morally correct as the situation warrants, or educate those who are morally confused or morally deficient if the opportunity is there.  And then you try not to screw up your own life too badly so you don’t go to Hell.  That’s about as clearly as I can put it as a general principle. 

So don’t ask me to tell a woman contemplating an abortion, “I guess we just have a strong difference of opinion on this,” or stay silent all together so as not to “offend” her.  I won’t picket her house, harass her on the phone, or post her address on the Internet like the Left thinks all “morally-superior” people behave.  Instead, if the opportunity presents itself, I’ll look at her and ask her a simple question: “How do you think you’re going to feel when you see a friend’s son or daughter riding a bike, going to school, or just sitting on the floor reading a book, when you know that you caused the death of your own child?”  

She’ll either think about it, or she won’t, and either stop the selfish, self-centered act she is about to take, or go ahead and have an abortion.  Whether the people who witness my conversation or hear about it later think I’m an insensitive, chauvinistic brute or some other equally disparaging image couldn’t bother me less.  When confronted with a clearly immoral choice, I can’t be concerned about what other people think.  If there’s anything that’s clear after hearing about the “world consensus” on appeasing Islamic fascism, or listening to a debate at the United Nations, or reading about the history of WWII prior to 1939, moral codes do not come from human consensus.

In fact, for those who don’t want to struggle through reading the rest of this essay, I have a pretty accurate shortcut you might want to employ to know which policy or activity reflects the proper course of action in a given situation.  Find out what world consensus thinks; or if the issue is limited to the United States, what Moveon.org and similar organizations, reporters and pundits in the mainstream media, Jesse Jackson or David Duke, Ivy League School or self-proclaimed ‘progressive’ political science professors, or any Democrat who is running for president or just standing before a television camera thinks. And do the exact opposite. 

Like abstinence and the reduction in teenage pregnancy, the proper application of this theory works every time.

7. I mean what I say and I say what I mean

One of the problems in writing about moral Relativism is that relativistic thought and comparisons are so, well, relative, that one can quickly fall into a meaningless trap.  Dismiss a relativistic notion for one situation, and a hundred other variations on that same theme pop up.  If you’re not careful, you’ll spend endless hours debating peripheral issues without ever getting to the core issue that would answer it all.  Answer it, that is, for someone really seeking an answer.  Like Global Warming advocates who focus on the output of a computer model without ever really questioning the accuracy of the data that drives it, or bypass concerns about whether all exogenous variables have been adequately accounted for before making a prediction, they begin with a conclusion and work their way backwards.  Fundamental questions can never be reached, because before you can debate whether the foundation of a home is solid or termite infested, you must first decide whether copper or plastic tubing is best for the upstairs bathroom — and defend how you can state your answer with absolute certainty if another study recommends the opposite equipment.  My approach is a little different.  I believe that we first need to make sure the house isn’t about to collapse from rot before we devote any time to what, ultimately, may be an irrelevant question.

So to avoid an endless parade of if-then’s, I’m going to evaluate a couple of additional explanations that if correct, could account for the common moral code we all share.  To do this, I’ll need to continue using the real-world example of “raping and killing a five-year old child” in order to express the underlying principle that is being addressed here: It is inherently immoral to harm an innocent human being.

But before I can do that, I want to make sure we’ll all working off a common understanding of key terms.  “Harm” could mean any number of things: torture, injure through neglect, rape, kill, maim, mentally or physically abuse, etc.  I’ve chosen “rape” and “kill” as two real world examples because each involves a clearly-recognized harm that results either in death, as is in the obvious case of killing, or in mental trauma (i.e. an abusive violation of a person’s dignity or psyche), or physical trauma (i.e. bodily injuries) when the harm results from rape.  I chose a five-year old child to illustrate an example of unmistakable innocence.  Even a prostitute who is raped is an “innocent human being” in that particular case, because the focus is on an individual act at a specific moment in time, not the legal or moral propriety of her occupation. 

As a quick but important side note, we often use the terms “legal” and “moral” as synonyms, because in a society built on Judeo-Christian values we like to think that we base our laws on the principles taught by these religions, which — when applied properly by someone other than Islamo-fascists, cult leaders, or the idiots every religion has who preach hate disguised as virtue — reflect these universally-shared core moral values.  But “moral” and “legal” are not the same thing.   They often are in a Representative Republic (again, putting aside the abomination of legalized abortion in the United States that even some "progressive" religious leaders condone).  But it is also true that other morally-neutral factors enter into the making of laws as well.  “Fairness” is a concept that can have a great impact on policy decisions, but it is neither a moral or immoral concept in and of itself.   Fairness can be used to justify any action depending upon the politically-motivated assumptions of its proponents.  Set-aside quotas for minorities are often viewed through the prism of “fairness.”  Instituting quotas favoring one group means automatically discriminating against another.  But if the quotas are seen as a way to cure past evils, then they can be explained as a “fair” way to treat a difficult situation; just as counting slaves as three-fifths of a human being was seen as a “fair” way to deal with another difficult situation.  

When discussing a fundamental issue, we need to avoid legitimate examples that may nevertheless carry extra “baggage,” and allow relativistic distractions to move the conversation off course.  In the case of the universal moral code, raping and killing a five-year old child expresses the underlying principle that it is inherently immoral to harm an innocent human being as clearly as I can make it.  This is why I keep returning to this example as a way to see if other factors than the one I proposed really do account for everyone, everywhere, in every time period of history innately understanding that such an activity is wrong.  

This may be a good point to pause for a moment, and make sure we’re not having a parallel conversation on the concept of God as well, where we’re using the same word to describe a fact or concept, but defining that word differently.  To do that, I want to go back to an earlier essay I wrote on Global Warming¹ to illustrate a point.  I contend that climate-changing data collected by satellites and supplemented by millions of ground stations distributed across the globe provides an accurate assessment of world temperatures today.  The problem with claims that the Earth’s temperature has risen by “one degree” over the last hundred years is that this global network wasn’t in place until the 1970s.  Those of you old enough to remember the Mercury and Gemini missions of the 1960s may also remember that communication between the space capsule and Houston took place via strategically placed ground stations, resulting in periods of signal loss where the capsule was “out of range” (that is, between ground stations). 

Therefore, at best we’ve collected thirty-five years or so of highly accurate weather data, supplemented by the data that was gathered before that.  That data got better as we approached the 1970s, but was still very incomplete.  It wasn’t collected globally, but only in places where amateur meteorologists or actual scientists had set up their equipment.  Thus, we may have had some reasonably good data for England and parts of the United States, but not the Amazon jungle, large parts of China, most of Australia, and the 70 percent of the Earth’s surface covered by water, just to name just a few. 

Scientists have taken what data exists and massaged it the best they can, and extrapolated a reasonably-justifiable “average world temperature” number from it for 1900 to the 1970s. They’ve combined these estimates with the hard data figures to produce a global century temperature average.  Then they use this figure to determine that the Earth’s temperature has warmed by one degree.  (It’s actually a bit more convoluted than this because the baseline is the 1880s — which was chosen by the Global Warming alarmists because it was an unusually cold period.  By starting from a lower point the Earth’s temperature seems to rise more quickly, just like starting an analysis of Hurricane trends would differ if we began in the highly unusual year of 2005 — where we ran out of A-Z names, and had to start the alphabet list all over again with Hurricane Alpha, Beta, etc. — or started it in 2006, which has a much lower incidence of global hurricane activity.)

Even though scientists have done their very best to produce an accurate world-wide temperature average for each year prior to the 1970s, a “reasonably-justifiable” figure is not a precise figure, so combining the two gives us an estimate of global temperatures in the 20th century, not an exact record of it. 

I thought this was a pretty straightforward, common-sense statement, and couldn’t figure out why some people who read the essay kept challenging my contentions that we didn’t have highly accurate data until well into the space age.  One of these individuals contacted me offline, and after a couple of additional confusing rounds of discussion, I finally understood what the problem was.

To him, even though the pre-1970s data was incomplete, it had been thoroughly reviewed by the scientific community, and attempts were made to compensate for its inadequacies through a variety of statistically-valid methods.  This cleaned the data up quite a bit, and made it as accurate as humanly possible. 

So when I said that Global Warming data was “accurate” post-1970s, but was an “estimate” pre-1970s, I was speaking about the undeniable facts of data collection.  On the other hand, he and other Global Warming advocates claim the pre-1970s data is “accurate” because it is as accurate as scientists can make it.  Rather than just add up all the raw data without any regard for where it was collected and how it was collected, they make professional judgments to produce a clearer, more “accurate” picture.  The data collected after the 1970’s was “precise” data, because the earth’s temperature could be precisely measured.  Therefore, my estimate+accurate analysis was trumped by their accurate+precise analysis, meaning that the world’s temperature did in fact increase by one percent in the twentieth century.

Of course this is pure sophistry, and goes to reinforce my point about how activists and True Believers distort the entire global warming debate either deliberately, or through convoluted reasoning.  Simply labeling your data “accurate” doesn’t make it “accurate,” no matter how well the missing, incomplete, and crudely collected figures were massaged by really smart people.  This is why it’s so important to enter into every new inquiry with an open mind, instead of with a rote defense for a pre-conceived position.  The data needs to lead the conclusions, not the other way around.  

I owe a great debt to the people who challenged my methodology on Global Warming, because if it wasn’t for them I might have overlooked an important point in this essay.  Not only do I have to contend with Relativistic rationalizations that arbitrarily define the beginning of life, but by mentioning God as a possible factor in any of these issues, I’ve hit the Trifecta:

(1) Relativists who believe there are many possible variables, except for God;

(2) Atheists who believe there are many possible variables except for God, and anyway God doesn’t exist, and

(3) People of faith who think that believing in God is identical to believing what their particular religion teaches 

While I spare no words in the comments I make about relativists and atheists, I want to be sure that everyone understands I am not attacking religion.  What someone believes, and how they want to express those beliefs, is none of my (or anyone else’s) business.  That is, unless they want to fly a plane into the World Trade Center and murder a bunch of people to promote their view. 

But even though Christian activists don’t say they’re going to kill me because I shave every morning or won’t pray to Mecca five times a day, some insist that I accept their view of God in my schools, public institutions, and personal life.  Factoring in the possibility of God as a possible way to explain certain phenomenon is not the same thing as factoring in Jesus, Allah, Yahweh or Buddha.

Therefore, in discussing the difference between a God-based or genetic-based morality, when speaking about God I am focused entirely on The Creator of the Universe, and not on the belief-sets of a particular religion.  You are free to keep whatever image you want in your mind as you read this, but thinking that it’s Allah instead of Jesus, or Jesus instead of Buddha, isn’t going to make any difference to the conclusions I draw.

When addressing a genetic-based morality that is independent of God, it gets a little trickier.  The best way to do this is to clarify what that concept is not, before we can begin to ask the question of what it might be.   

A genetic-based morality is not a simple stimulus-response.  All humans have deeply encoded, at times hormonally-based reactions to outside stimuli.  The most obvious is the change in breathing, sweating, or other physical manifestations that accompany physical attraction.  Not everybody is attracted to the same type of individual though, so while the response may be identical for males and females, the stimuli is not.

But there is at least one universally-shared biological reaction we all have in common that could, if applicable to this discussion, provide for the possibility of a genetic-based morality.  It involves both sight and sound, and it’s pretty gross, so I’ll try to outline it just as my psych books used to. 

It goes something like this.

We all automatically feel the need to wretch at the sight or sound of seeing someone vomit.  This is a hold-over from our “cave man” days when tainted meat or poisonous roots or fruits were a real problem.  Say a member of the clan gets a bad chunk of dinosaur meat (yes I know, they didn’t co-exist; I’m just making a point), and starts to vomit.  Others in the group see or hear him and immediately feel the need to vomit too.  It’s a shared genetic trait, and every single human has it.  So does it allow for the possibility of a shared genetic-based morality too?

If you think the answer is yes, consider this.  Al Gore and I are standing next to each other at a party talking about Global Warming.  I grow quiet for a moment.  He thinks I’m dazzled by the depth of his brilliance, and keeps pressing his point that we’re all going to die unless he’s elected president.  Suddenly, I begin to vomit.  Al sees me hurl chunks, and he feels the need to vomit too, as does everyone around us.  We’re all sharing a common human moment, though one I’d rather not spend too much more time discussing.

If you think this in any way lays a foundation for a genetic-based explanation of shared moral values, you may want to ask a follow-up question.  Exactly why was I vomiting?   The answer is pretty simple.  What made me vomit was listening to Al Gore! 

So even though everyone had the same exact reaction, the stimulus wasn’t bad meat or too many funny little mushrooms.  It was a thought, a belief, an opinion or a judgment I had.  And even though Big Al vomited right along with me, I doubt seriously that we shared the same belief system at that moment in time. 

Therefore, to prove the existence of a genetic-based morality, we need more than sweaty palms or a Global Warming lecture.  Morality encompasses a belief system, and those core beliefs need to be the thing that triggers a common human reaction — like the thought of someone raping or killing an innocent child.  My visual image may be a white female five years old, while yours may be a black three-year old baby or a six-year old Asian boy.  It doesn’t matter.  It’s the act, or a visualization of it, that triggers the common moral response.  Not the fact that the kid was male or female, or black or white, or green or yellow.   

But before I begin to analyze the possibility of a genetic-based morality, I need to point out for the sake of clarity that the hypotheses I will use do not come from any outside source.  They are my creations, which reflect my objective effort to frame the substance of the debate as honestly as I can. 

The sarcasm and satire found in my analyses of some of these hypotheses, however, is just a shorthand way to show how incredibly inane or relativistic certain things are that flow from these hypotheses. This way you won’t have to suffer through any more verbiage than necessary to get to my final points.  But the hypotheses and the presumed evidence to support them are treated as seriously as I can construct them, based on the countless hours of mind-numbing discussion and debate I’ve had with relativist friends and teachers over the years.

Hypothesis 1: Civilization produces a universal moral code. There is no universally held moral code across time.  It only exists in the contemporary world because the overall logic of “civilization,” which requires it.  And civilization is a device created by man, not directly by God.

First Evidence: Many primitive cultures practiced human sacrifice.  More than simply children were sacrificed; but in certain cases children were the victims.  (In any event, though we are using the example of a child for clarity, the sacrifice of any human being would be just as immoral.)  Though “civilized” in comparison to primitive humans, these cultures were in only the early stages of civilization.  The practice of human sacrifice largely disappeared as humanity continued up the evolutionary ladder, and civilization installed the universal moral code.

Analysis:  People can, and do, act immorally.  This is a reflection on those individuals’ actions (their “free will”), not an observation about the morality or immorality of an act.  It doesn’t matter if child sacrifice was occasional, rampant but specific to one culture, or worldwide.  Human consensus does not create morality.  The fact that ritual sacrifice died out as civilizations grew more complex and advanced, and different societies interacted with one another, may in fact provide anecdotal evidence to support the hypothesis of God-given innate moral code. 

The first thing to understand is that there is no value-laden, commonly accepted, practical example of what an advanced civilization is compared to a more “primitive” one.  These judgments are culturally based, highly relative assessments based on widely different factors.  In the West, the tendency is to look at technological advances.   But there is also a strong philosophical component.  Societies with roughly equal technology can still differ on public consensus regarding which type of economic or political system to install, whether capital punishment is permissible, how to treat the environment, how to conduct themselves in world affairs, and so on.  There are even vigorous debates about competing philosophies within each technologically advanced society.  Why would one person who wants to execute murders, bomb Iran, deny the “obvious” existence of Global Warming, pay lower taxes, and elect a Conservative president feel exactly the same way about every single innate moral code as a person who holds exactly the opposite opinion? 

That they do feel the same about not harming innocent life is remarkable — and unbelievable — if civilization is driving the consensus.  This same view on moral codes is not only held by a Conservative American and a Liberal Frenchman, it’s held by an Islamo-fascist terrorist whose “civilization” is more comparable to 12th-century Europe without the WMDs, than any technologically, culturally, socially, economically, or politically “advanced” Western-style society. 

So what is the trigger mechanism that allows a homicide bomber about to blow up a schoolbus full of Jewish children to also feel innate revulsion at the harming of innocent life?  It’s not a different core moral code.  The terrorist’s moral code is identical to ours, despite what we think about his actions.  The trigger mechanism is actually his society, the civilization that gives him his cultural and political reference points.  The fact that he finds no problem killing Jewish children is a result of his society and culture working to suppress the moral code that equates Jewish children with other innocent life, and allows him to think of them as animals instead.  Pack the bus with a bunch of little Ayatollahs instead of Jewish scum, and his response is completely different.  He’d ditch the bomb and invite them to his house for lemonade and cookies.

Civilization doesn’t create universal moral values.  It is completely neutral in the formation of morality.  If it has any impact at all, it is to suppress or enhance the appreciation of everyone’s already-existing shared moral values.  As civilization progresses and more and more people interacted, there is less opportunity for one group or individual to “lose their moral compass” and rationalize the pursuit of immoral acts.  This can help bring out the fullest expression of our innate moral code.  But technological advances and cultural interaction do not always have a “civilizing” effect.  They provide the palette, but the artist must still create a portrait.  This is why individuals who have access to Western education and technology, CNN satellite broadcasts, and the New York Times to learn of the latest U.S. government plans to stop their immoral activity, can still reject the pressures from an increasingly interconnected and interdependent worldwide community, and unleash the next atrocity against innocent human beings.

There is nothing about civilization in and of itself that instills core moral values where none existed before.  Used by men to organize their lives and advance their own interests, it can help or hinder the fullest expression of each individual’s morality.  Even a primitive, blood-thirsty society of child-sacrificing pagans who never even heard of God the Creator (vs. the gods they created) didn’t go around raping and/or killing little children whenever they pleased.  There is no support in the historical record for any notion like this.² 

Second Evidence: Forget about ritual sacrifice, and just focus on killing in general.  Not merely children, but people of all ages, sex, and races, throughout the world and throughout time.  If killing innocent life is so repugnant, then why is it so pervasive?

Analysis: The fact that the state can brutalize its people, including five-year old children, is not unique.  Stalin, the Nazis, Pol Pot, Islamo-Fascists, and hundreds of other states, tribes, and bands of people routinely can and do deliberately harm innocent life, and have done so throughout history. 

The fact that killing innocent people exists, and may even be “common,” is more of a statement about human character than it is about human morality.  Consider the basic moral principle that is illustrated by the story of Noah’s Ark.³  Regardless of the fact that everyone on the planet was behaving one way, Noah and his family believed that these actions were immoral.  So, when the day came for God to judge each person’s actions against the same moral code that He instilled in all men, even though “the rest of the world” thought Noah was wrong and they were right, they were punished.  And Noah and his family were not.

Whether one person, a dozen, a million people, or 99% of the Earth can rationalize-away the immorality of indiscriminate killing is not an issue.  That act is still immoral.  It’s just easier to do at times because killing families, groups, cities or whole races, doesn’t make it “personal.”  It doesn’t take a sadist to drop a bomb from 50,000 feet and obliterate a city of 300,000 during a time of war if he believed that the war was just and the order was morally permissible.  But ask this same pilot to line up three, two, or simply one of these citizens and shoot them in the head, and he would absolutely refuse on moral grounds.  Dropping an atomic bomb can be morally justified during wartime depending upon how one interprets the appropriate moral code, even if it involves the unfortunate killing of citizens in a combat zone.  But an arbitrary execution cannot be morally justified at any time.

For those of you who need more discussion about “moral killing” or however you would interpret the above passage, I ask you to hold that issue aside for the moment.  The bombing of a civilian population center could be an example of deliberately killing innocent life, or it could not.  There will be more discussion later on how killing can be morally justified under a particular set of circumstances.  The answer is brilliantly straightforward, and the credit for this (at least insofar as I was affected) goes to Dennis Prager who spoke about it on his talk show.  It’s one of those moments we all get where we have one of life’s mysteries clarified in a moment of stunning revelation.  I’ll provide you with Mr. Prager’s specific insight later as part of a broader discussion on this issue.  But for now I ask you to accept as a working hypothesis that I can demonstrate a clear rationale for morally-justifiable killing, and dropping a bomb on a city does not automatically make it immoral. 

But an arbitrary execution is.  The person who just tried to kill you seconds ago on the battlefield, and would justify you killing him first if for no other reason than self-defense, becomes an innocent life the moment he surrenders.  Not “innocent” of any crimes he may have committed through his previous actions.  That is a determination for a military tribunal or a civilian court of law, depending upon the circumstances of the case, and the present composition of the U.S. Supreme Court.  He is an innocent life because our innate moral code can instantly recognize the difference between both situations pre- and post-surrender.  This isn’t learned, and it isn’t taught.  Speaking facetiously, it is expressed differently in different situations, as we learned in fighting Islamo-fascism. Surrender by an American soldier is an indication that he has ceased immediate combat.  Surrender by an Islamo-fascist is a way to bring the enemy closer so you can kill him with a hidden gun.

That one example underscores perfectly the difference between the way I see things, and I believe most people do who are honestly seeking truth, and the morally relativistic, politically motivated pseudo-morality of the American Left and their fellow Relativists worldwide.  When hearing that an American soldier killed a wounded Iraqi lying on the floor, Liberals everywhere were outraged.  The tactic of using a phony surrender to kill U.S. troops was already well-known at the time of this incident.  Several soldiers had been killed in the closing days of major combat operations by precisely this tactic.

And yet, seeing an opening to damage President Bush politically, Leftist politicians, media outlets, and erstwhile opinion leaders (left-wing bloggers and left-wing websites) near universally condemned this action, the U.S. soldier who fired the shot, Donald Rumsfeld for overseeing the war, Dick Cheney for profiting from Halliburton (no particular connection to a specific event is needed, just the general mention of Iraq), and especially George Bush for lying about his reasons for invading Iraq. 

This absolute, utter lack of moral grounding when it comes to seeking a purely political objective is the reason why it will never “be safe to vote Democrat” until the Islamo-fascists are defeated.  Then, like Churchill in the aftermath of WWII, the people who owed their safety to the tough, viciously-condemned actions that were taken to protect them, can dismiss the individual, or party, or political philosophy that defended their security so the opposition party can fully return to power. 

And after a period of morally relative policies that produce instant gratification for the people they are intended to benefit so as to strengthen these politicians’ voting base and help get them re-elected, the country will reach another point where that party’s leaders will diddle with a young girl and a cigar — while hiding behind self-constructed legal barriers to avoid confronting a problem — and let the world plunge into another dangerous state that requires the adults to return.  After being blamed for causing the problem they are now trying to fix by fighting back against the people who attacked the country, thereby making them madder and retroactively justifying the attack, the problem will be resolved and the cycle will be repeated again.

This is the sad history humanity has and will continue to face as long as good people fail to seek the truth about things because the images are unpleasant, and Relativists have succeed in perpetuating the myth that “world consensus” is the fountainhead of proper action through which all morality flows.

Hypothesis 2: Human biology produces universal morality.  It isn’t that God somehow magically instills a moral code in humans. The basic biology of human life does.  The adverse reaction we all have to the killing of an innocent life is genetically a part of us.  Although the “morality gene” has not been found yet, neither has the specific gene for many other physical characteristics we can see, touch and measure.  Morality is a metaphysical concept — like thought — that arises from natural processes like brain waves arising from the brain.  It can’t be measured directly, but it does exist in the same way that we know “love” is real, but cannot be physically measured.

Evidence: Genetics governs all aspects of our life from the color of our hair, to our propensity to drink, to whether we will be prone to shyness or outgoing and uninhibited when living our lives. Since no morality gene per se has been found, there is no biological evidence of its existence.  However, the absence of any direct confirmation is not automatic proof that it doesn’t exist.  We can prove something indirectly by bringing different observable phenomena together, and then assembling them into a logical format. If the explanation produces a result that is coherent and internally consistent, and no other explanation is as comprehensive and logically tight, then science demands that we accept it as “truth.”  We routinely do this for the behavior of subatomic particles in quantum physics, and to “prove” the existence of black holes which by definition cannot be seen, touched, or directly measured.  And we also do something similar to confirm our belief that there is a God, and it was He who created the universe.

Analysis: The idea that our genetic makeup is responsible for human morality is based on the assumption that “having morality” is no different than having red hair, autism, or possessing a genetic trait for shyness.  It starts with a conclusion, not a hypothesis.

If we start with a hypothesis instead, it leads us in a similar direction — but with one major difference.  Instead of asking the question “how does a genetic-based morality work?” we ask, “what would the implications be if in fact human morality was a product of genetics?” 

Why is this difference in approach crucial?  The issue here isn’t whether environmental factors, social structure and/or social pressures, or the interaction with other components of an individual’s genetic makeup can influence their behavior.  Cleary it can.  Autism, Bipolar disorder, alcoholism, mental illness and a wide variety of other factors can alter an individual’s short- or long-term behavior.  When we add in things like a possible genetic disposition for shyness, aggression, curiosity, fear, or other similar factors, it becomes even more apparent that many forces can positively or negatively shape an individual’s attitude and behavior. 

But influencing the expression of a trait is not the same thing as loading that trait with content.  There is nothing contradictory about a commonly shared set of moral values that can be suppressed, on an individual level, by a wide variety of genetic and environmental factors.  Or conversely, that other genetic and environmental factors can nurture this morality to help an individual find its fullest expression.  Burning a book or reading a book are two opposite actions as well.  But like the above example, neither provides the book with its content.  And it is this “content,” a universally-shared moral code, that we must explain.

Let’s assume for the moment that genetics can (a) influence the expression of morality in an individual human being, just as genetics can influence the ability to express love in an autistic child, and (b) gives that morality its specific content as well. 

If (b) is true, when science eventually finds the “morality gene” (or gene sequence that causes morality), we should be able to alter or influence it like we already do with certain other genetic traits.  Even something as ephemeral as “shyness” is supposedly subject to some level of genetic manipulation according to recent studies.

Treating the content of morality as a genetic by-product leads to a couple of frightening, but logical scenarios:

Switch on, switch off: Each individual shares 99% of all the world’s genes.  (However, not every gene is active in every person, which accounts for the wide variations we find in human beings.)  So, there is nothing inherent in our biology that prevents the overwhelming majority of all people from carrying a “morality gene.” 

But what happens if the 1% of the human genome that Joe is missing turns out to include the morality gene?  Joe would then be incapable of expressing any moral thought. Without a sense of morality he can have no understanding of right or wrong, good or evil.  His very existence then presents a completely predictable danger to society.  We require child molesters to register with the police after their release from prison instead of simply allowing them back into the general population.  No “pedophilia” gene has been found, but research has shown that like alcoholism, pedophilia cannot be cured.  It must be controlled. 

While support groups, combined with a person’s own sense of determination, have demonstrated that alcoholics can remain sober for long periods of time, there is no similar evidence that a predilection toward pedophilia can be similarly controlled.  Not every child molester continues to abuse children once his activities have been discovered and he is punished for his crime.  But science recognizes that the desire to have sex with children is such a primal urge for these people that unlike alcoholism or other addictions, no sense of personal responsibility — or moral barrier — can completely control it.  This is why life-long monitoring of child molesters is required and passes constitutional muster, even though they have completed their prison sentence and have been released from jail. 

A person missing his “morality gene” would not have to overcome any moral objections to raping or murdering children.  He would have no moral inhibition at all.  No amount of therapy, counseling, education or other human effort could help him re-connect with his inner moral code, because it isn’t there.  Every other amoral or immoral behavior would follow this same pattern.  These wouldn’t represent tendencies, or predilections, but completely predictable behavior.  The only obvious way to protect society is to identify these individuals at birth through genetic testing, and lock them away for their entire life. 

On the other hand, what if John possesses a morality gene, but it is dormant? Unless science can find a way to “switch it on,” John and other morally-stagnant individuals represent an identical danger to society that Joe does.  Therefore, to protect the rest of society, propriety dictates that he should be consigned to a similar fate.  We arrest and imprison people all the time for conspiracy to commit a violent crime.  What difference does it make if the “conspiracy” is a genetic-based certainty instead of a conscious plot?  Society is still in danger, perhaps even more so.  The rapist and thief can always change his mind, but the genetically-defective human is simply doing what comes normal and natural. 

And what if the missing or dormant morality gene shows up more in one population than another (like Sickle Cell or Tay-Sacks disease)?  Should we consider quarantine or sterilization procedures for that group?  Lacking basic morality isn’t like having red hair instead of blonde, or being prone to shyness or a particular disease.  It represents a real, measurable, predictable threat to the social order.  Morality can’t be taught or loaded into a human being because morality is not an intrinsic part of being human, but rather an intrinsic part of human genetics.  So like a defective animal, we need to cull them from the herd and get on with our daily lives. 

The biology-driven logic of this is already at work in our society.  Deke Slayton, one of the original Mercury astronauts, was denied space flight status for years because of a slight genetic defect that caused an erratic heart rate.  Despite his training, extensive experience, and no outward physical problems associated with this condition, he was grounded and not permitted to fly in space in the Mercury program. 

If the slight genetically-induced problem was enough for NASA to make this expensive, difficult decision, how difficult would it be for society to identify morally-deficient humans through genetic testing, and separate them from the rest of society at the moment of their birth?  Like ticking time bombs, it wouldn’t be a matter of if they would act in a completely immoral and dangerous manner, but when?  Supposedly “moral” arguments to treat these unfortunate people with greater compassion would need to be evaluated in light of the knowledge that genetics provides morality.  We are not being deliberately cruel by denying a blind man a driver’s license, or telling someone with a weak heart that they can’t run a marathon.  These are simple facts of life; or more precisely, simple facts of biology.  Since morality does not come from a “Higher Authority,” but rather from man’s own DNA, the truly “moral” thing to do is to act on behalf of the entire society and protect the species.

If I’m not mistaken, we have a term for scientists engaged in this type of activity, and for the community that supports it, one that’s drawn from similar “justifiable” reasoning in an earlier period of history.

Nazis.

Add a little here. Take a little away there:  If morality is nothing more than a physical (genetic) attribute, it becomes subject to the same laws as all genetics.  This means that we can practice selective breeding to produce a morally stronger, or morally weaker human being.

For example, ten generations of males and females each over six feet tall is likely to produce a child that will also be very tall.  If that 11th generation child is taken from his parents shortly after birth and placed in a house where the average height is five feet tall, it would not affect the child’s genetic development in the least.  It would still grow up tall.  Buddy the Elf learned this the hard way, in a film starring Will Farrell.  

If this is true for you, and me, and Buddy, and if it is equally true that our core morality is found entirely in our genes as influenced by outside forces, then we should be able to selectively increase or decrease the content of each child’s innate morality if we choose to do so.  After a few generations of selective breeding, their descendants’ morality gene would be 1+X or 1-X, depending upon whether moral or immoral traits were favored in the selective breeding. 

With the proper application of science, we could therefore produce a subset of humanity with little morality — or no morality at all — to do those tasks that are best performed by amoral or reduced-moral people.  You know, things like political assassinations, television news broadcasting, performing abortions, becoming a Hollywood celebrity, and of course the perennial examples of used-car salesmen and politicians.  Taken a step further, we could divide the human race into fixed castes or classes, much like we did a couple of centuries ago when skin color was used as the basis for this selection.

The discovery of a morality gene would have other interesting implications as well.  If several generations of selective breeding can make an animal either more docile or aggressive, then conceivably it could work in human beings too.  There may be a moral reluctance to do this at first, but once the morality gene is identified I’m sure some third-world dictator who can’t get his hands on a nuclear weapon would start a moral-degenerate breeding program.  His country only needs to wait a couple of generations as the least moral women are bred with the least moral men to accelerate the process. 

Combining a moral-reduction program with other genetic manipulations, human males can be engineered to be bigger and stronger, and inherently more aggressive.  By reducing or eliminating their morality gene they’ll lack the same inner moral code you and I have, so they won’t think twice about killing innocent men, women and children to further some political aim.  We’ll call them soldiers. 

And if we can selectively breed aggressive, amoral men, then we can selectively breed shy, but extremely attractive women to produce generations of pliant, docile women lacking any moral constraints.  We’ll call them concubines and girlfriends, or just “the ideal date.” 

All this is patently ridiculous.  Because science wants to find a biological or genetic trigger to explain every human action, the temptation is to treat morality as just another disease or human characteristic.  The mistake this logic makes is that it confuses what genetics can do, with what it clearly can not do. 

A selectively bred short woman cannot will herself to be taller, no matter what the social, cultural or environmental stimuli she is exposed to.  So, by the same natural laws that govern the genetics of height and hair color, a selectively bred docile woman should never be able to overcome her selective breeding and learn aggression, or how to compensate for her shyness, or to experience personal growth of any kind.  She was bred to be compliant, and will always be that way.

But we know from the anecdotal experience of our own lives and family that tendencies are not physical characteristics.  I will never make People Magazine’s top 100 sexiest men alive list unless I have extensive plastic surgery, and can invent a time machine to get rid of 30 extra years or so.  But I can learn to overcome my fears, compensate for my shyness, control my impulses, and generally take control of my life independent of my genetic tendencies.  All this is within reason, as the examples of alcoholism and pedophilia show.  But even the most despicable pedophile can “find Jesus” and alter his behavior, however difficult it may be.

We run a great risk when looking for the essence of a human being in their DNA sequencing.  Genetics does count — but not for everything.  It provides a convenient excuse for my wife when I embarrass her in public by telling the offended party that I suffer from Tourette’s.  (I don’t, actually, though at times you wouldn’t know it). But genetics didn’t make me moral or immoral, any more than it made me forty pounds overweight.  Too many ribs and Twinkies did that.  Only a person suffering from Prater Willie’s disease can’t control their eating.  For the rest of us, while I may have a genetic preference for potatoes over broccoli, I still have five fingers and a fork that has something to do with my weight gain.

There is no morality gene that loads a common moral code into every human being.  Simple common sense will tell us that, if the examples above don’t illustrate the absurdity of this logic well enough.  It becomes even more apparent that this cannot be the case when it’s an ephemeral quality like love or morality instead of a physical one.  Even a genetically-predisposed shyness manifests itself differently from individual to individual.  No one would mistake an insult comic for a shy human being — that is, of course, unless the overly aggressive behavior is compensation for the insult comic’s shyness instead of a natural tendency.  But other than some surface similarities in expression and body posture, not every shy person reacts to the same situation in an identical way.  Some hide, some avert their eyes, some become very quiet, some withdraw completely from society, and some communicate with others via the internet instead of in person.  Some learn to overcome their shyness, and some never do. 

But does all this result simply from environmental interactions with genetic predilections?  What about a person’s will or desire to change?  Can that come from within them instead of without?  And if it does come from within, is simply the result of another genetically-induced chemical reaction?

For those who actually believe that man is nothing more than biology interacting with the environment, you have a species-related moral obligation to act now even though all the evidence is not in.  Even though we can’t locate or identify all genes yet and determine what each does, we have enough evidence of a genetically-related foundation for alcoholism and pedophilia.  Alcoholics who manifest this disease, and their genetic offspring who carry the gene, need to be subject to different rules and regulations than the rest of society.  Drunk driving kills thousands more innocent people each year than George Bush’s tax cut policy, and we all know how morally offensive that is.  Pedophilia can’t be cured, so these predators need to be put down immediately like a diseased animal, and their genetically-related relatives monitored closely.   There is no God who gives men a common moral code, so there is nothing to “answer for” for taking a difficult, but necessary decision on behalf of the species.  Morality is the product of man’s genetics as influenced by his environment.  Separating out the weak and killing off the diseased is a simple act of nature, and one demanded by a moral code that is caused by genetics as well as controlled by it. 

I’ll leave this section with one final thought that brings together this notion of genetically-created morality with the practice of elective abortion.

Regardless of what the scientific community and social engineers think about the possibility of a genetic-based morality, we can already see evidence that humanity shares a common moral code with respect to the destruction of innocent human life.  Otherwise, we’d find numerous cultural or historical examples of child rape and child murder to accompany the obvious history of violence and warfare.  If five thousand soldiers are going to die on the battlefield in a clash between armies, what difference does it make if a couple hundred little boys and girls are killed too?  Women and children are routinely massacred as villages are burned to the ground or entire populations sent to the death camps.

There is, obviously, a clear difference between combat during wartime (or mass murder of anonymous individuals of all ages), and killing one individual.  Though the victim is just as dead, the act is a highly personal one.  One person attacks another, and takes their life.  The aggressors may be part of a larger group (like a team of killers, or a gang), but the victim is a single individual, and this makes it personal.  The victim doesn’t die by accident (because another person was targeted), or as collateral damage.  They are the target.

So, how do we reconcile the following “facts” if morality is the product of human genetics interacting with the environment?

● Genetic-based morality (or a morality given to man by God) does not prevent human-human killing during combat, or the deliberate massacre of populations, or one-on-one crime.

● There is a common, deep-seated aversion within people to deliberately harming an innocent human being.  The concept of a “just war” permits innocent human casualties as an unintended consequence of battle.  Mob-related rationalizations permit the mass murder of entire populations, including innocent human beings.

● Abortion on demand is only permitted if the object being aborted is defined as proto-human or pre-human life.  Although this fact, in itself, does not prove that the woman aborting her baby in week 19 would automatically take the child to term if the state defined life as beginning in week 15, it does indicate that society, overall, would not tolerate the deliberate “destruction” of an innocent human life.  This further strengthens the indirect evidence that humanity shares a common moral code.  Abortions can only be forced on a population under a non-democratic, dictatorial form of government.

Which leads us to an interesting question.  If the commonly-held moral opposition to harming an innocent human life is based in genetics, why must the state force women to have abortions as a matter of public policy? 

A case could be made that in a closed society like China, all calculations on every issue are zero-sum.  My gain is your loss, and vice versa.  Left to their own devices, there are not enough women who would voluntarily abort their child for the benefit of society, since their “loss” would represent an actual “gain” for a different woman who allowed her baby to be born.  Thus, the state steps in to enforce a policy that requires all women to participate equally.

On the other hand, in capitalist America, unless you are a Liberal or Democrat looking at the economy, life is not a zero-sum game.  A $100 million tax cut does not mean a loss of $100 million in tax revenue.  That tax savings is spent by consumers and invested by businesses to grow the size of the economy.  A far greater amount of tax revenue returns due to the associated growth of the U.S. economy, and with it an expansion of the tax base.  Since American women live in an open society, having an elective abortion does not automatically mean suffering a personal “loss” while another woman receives a personal “gain.”  That is, except for “losing” the unwanted potential-kid which she didn’t want anyway, she doesn’t lose the legal right to have a child at a later time, incur any fine, or suffer any financial penalty related to the abortion. 

So, in an open society women choose to abort as a matter of personal preference, as opposed to a state dictate to have an abortion. This means that there is no basic genetic inhibition to abortion.  The only restrictions are those imposed by the legal process in response to the individual moral judgments of other groups (like Christians and Right-to-Lifers) who force their agenda-driven views on those who oppose them.  Since in nature “might makes right,” the state must listen to these voters and set up artificial touch-points that allow legalized abortion prior to the 20th week.  But by defining a woman’s “health” as a mitigating factor, and allowing that term to be broadly defined, any woman who wants to abort her child at any time may do so.

This neatly wraps up all the important elements to a theory of genetic-based morality.  Killing in any form is not genetically abhorrent.  Abortion is not an aberrant social behavior.  A state may force abortions for the good of all people if the individual decision to abort is zero-sum.  But in a positive-sum society, where all manner of choices are permitted and no particular penalty is attached to abortion, women will abort their fetus freely.  The only restrictions placed on abortion are those ones artificially imposed by the state in response to a competing genetically-produced morality.  But a clever solution can be found to bypass these restrictions and allow for de facto abortion on demand.  A commonly-shared moral belief may exist about not harming an innocent human being, but a developing fetus is not a “human life.”  It only becomes a human life after it is born.

The problem with this logic is that it begins with genetic, biological imperatives, but concludes with a man-made sleight of hand.  If every key part of this process, including the content of morality, is genetically-based, then man is indeed an “exogenous factor.”  The state either mandates abortions, or it puts limitations on the practice of abortion.  The decision to abort or not is made by each individual woman, and is based on a variety of factors that she, and she alone, would decide without this outside interference.  Some women would carry the child to term, and have several more, since that is her individual preference.  Others would abort at 1 week, 15 weeks, 30 weeks, or even shortly before going into labor.  It’s all a matter of individual preference, and left to her own devices, a woman would make her own personal choice.

Only it isn’t as simple as that.  If genetics (combined with environmental factors) drives everything, then man can’t decide that “human life” begins only after squeezing through a woman’s birth canal.  Human life begins when it begins, regardless of where we pinpoint that moment.  Saying that a human baby isn’t really human until X amount of time has passed, or Y event has taken place, only makes sense if X and Y are objective standards.  I know that a tree is not a baseball bat until it is machine tooled to reach a certain condition.  And I know it’s not a Louisville Slugger until that brand is stamped on it.  Tree, machine, workmanship and branding are all parts of the process that make it a finished product.

But a developing baby is not the same thing as a man-made object.  Its value and identity is not defined by the end product (“being born”).  Rather, we have to look in the opposite direction, at the beginning, and ask a fundamental question.  Regardless of whether “it” has arms and legs, can breathe on its own, is developing normally or abnormally, what is the earliest moment we can say with absolute certainty that “it” became “it?”  Or in other words, just exactly when was “it” created?

The problem many people have with looking at human life this way is that they focus on the surface issues only.  It must meet certain subjective criteria before they will feel comfortable admitting (or become convinced, or be forced to concede) that it is indeed a human child.  It must survive on its own outside the womb.  It must have a brain instead of a brain stem.  Its heart must be beating.  It must pass through the birth canal.  And so on, and so on.  This is the same subjective nonsense that allowed people to look at the color of a man’s skin and say that “it” did not fit the definition of a “human.”  Or make the same judgment based on religion, or national origin, or intelligence, or its expected or actual quality of life, or any other characteristic.   It’s all nonsense.  Rationalization disguised as objective analysis

When I look at a newborn baby girl I don’t see anything that resembles a thirty-year old woman.  The head and limbs are not in the same size or proportion, and its body shape is completely different.  It doesn’t communicate the same way, or have any appreciation at all for its surroundings.  I’d be just as justified calling it “proto-Mary” as I would be to call the adult woman “Mary” if I based my criteria on the same distorted logic that abortionists use to distinguish between a 19- and 20-week old fetus. 

“Creating human life” is just that.  Creation does not mean that life can’t develop, and that in developing life cannot change appearance, often radically.  A caterpillar bears no resemblance at all to a butterfly, but still represents the same life — just at a different stage in development.  As 30-y