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-year old Mary continues to age (or “develop”) her external features and internal organs will change too.  Change is what defines life.  Without it we’re dead.  So why should change be used to deny life to a developing human being, instead of indicate absolute proof of it?

You can take a trillion human sperm and a thousand human eggs and place them in two separate containers.  As long as they do not mix, human life is impossible.⁴  But allow a single sperm and a single egg to unite inside a woman’s body, and human life has begun.   One sentence, identifying the precise moment in time when the status of each constituent element fundamentally changes, is all that is needed to supplement this statement with the logic to support it.  Find me the same parsimony in words to justify an elective abortion at week 19, 30, 22, 15, or any point in between, and I’ll support the wisdom of that choice instead of labeling it what it really is, a rationalization disguised as a thoughtful choice to advance a political agenda.

In the United States, 20 weeks represents the “magic” date that human life is assigned to the developing child.  Why does 24 hours make such a difference either way in granting “human” status?  Or even 4 hours?  I can tell you exactly why one second matters in the view that life begins at the moment of conception. 

But for the sake of some dubious interpretation of a Constitutional provision that never once mentions the words “separation of church and state,” moral Relativists, Feminists, and other deep thinkers will ignore the logic of any opposing view and impose an arbitrary cut off date instead.  Even though believing that life begins at conception requires no illogical compromises, arbitrary definitions, or any political tradeoffs to reach that conclusion, it must be summarily rejected because of its religious implications.  Ignoring the fact that God’s name was invoked to justify our rebellion against England, Relativists contend that this is a secular state.  God doesn’t officially exist because we can’t see him.  But that hasn’t stopped the government from funding research on quantum issues, which has exactly the same “problem.” 

So, in the spirit of compromise on behalf of all Right-to-Lifers everywhere, I propose sending the following letter to the keepers of our public morality: The United States Congress, mainstream news media, college professors, Democratic party officials, George Soros, Moveon.org, N.O.W., The United Nations, and Liberals and moral Relativists wherever they are.

I, Phillip Ellis Jackson, hereby authorize the United States government and all State and local public institutions to eliminate any further use of the word “God,” as well as its associated designations (Jesus, Allah, Buddha, Yahweh, Jehovah, etc.), in the matter of ending arbitrary, elective abortions in America.  In its place, you are free to substitute any word you want.  Even “Hillary Clinton.”  This will take away any religious element that gives you concern about adopting a life-begins-at-conception policy, and pass the following legislation: Hillary Clinton created a shared moral code that recognizes the sanctity of innocent human life.  Since 20 weeks, or 19 weeks, or any other artificially-determined, politically-motivated cut-off date cannot be supported by a logical, fact-based explanation, we now concur that life begins at the exact moment of conception. This is all part of Hillary Clinton’s plan for the universe.  Since it has nothing to do with an unseen, hypothetical deity formerly known as “God,” it doesn’t violate the U.S. Constitution. Although I have not consulted with my fellow Right-to-Lifers, you know that we are a monolithic, single issue bunch — part of the extra chromosome crowd Al Gore referred to in a less than charitable moment.  I can therefore guarantee that you will receive complete “consensus” from this group, which is a determining factor to you in deciding moral issues.  It doesn’t really matter what you call God, or whether you even believe He exists.  God doesn’t need you or me to validate His existence.  But he does need all of us to do our best to see that His moral code is observed. So give Hillary or anyone else the credit for creating the moral code that God instilled in each of us at the moment of conception.  (How do I know the exact time this morality was bestowed upon us?  That’s when a human life is created, and since morality is an intrinsic part of us, it is not something that is “added on.”)  But for Hillary’s sake, please do it quickly so we can stop defining a child as a proto-baby before the 20th week, just like Islamo-Fascists define Jews as something subhuman regardless of their age. The sooner we stop killing innocent life (pre-natal or post-natal), the sooner we’ll restore some moral dignity to our lives.  And maybe then a lot of the crap that passes for Relativistic “objective” analysis will be exposed for what it is, and we’ll start coming together as a nation.  Or as a world. Respectfully, Phillip E. Jackson PS:  I would have suggested that you use Al Gore instead of Hillary Clinton’s name as a substitute for inventing a universal moral code.  But he already invented the Internet, and I didn’t want him to get too swelled a head. Speaking of Al Gore and those “extra chromosomes” he said we had, you should know that he might be on to something here.  If you really believe that a moral code is genetic, then we’ve clearly got those extra genes! So let us help you genetically-deficient human beings compensate for the innate moral understanding you seem to lack by choosing to kill an innocent child for the sake of a man-made “Right.”  Because of your genetic deficiency, it’s not your fault that you can’t recognize your actions for the despicable things they are.  But we certainly can because we have the genes you lack. And we know that if Al Gore said it, it must be true.  You believe every word he says about Global Warming, even though we can’t actually prove that any of it is true.

Which returns us to the discussion of whether genetics, and genetics alone, somehow accounts for all men sharing a common moral code — and a few women too. (Please don’t write.  It’s just a joke for the humorless Relativists who will attack this statement because I keep using the traditional shorthand phrase “man” to mean “humanity,” or “manandwomanity,” or whatever it’s supposed to be called as decided by the PC police.  I promise to be more sensitive below and write more clearly and straightforwardly.)

We need to meet a relativistic challenge about the human soul.  The soul is what survives us after our physical death.  It contains the essence of who we are, and what we did with our life on Earth.  That life allows God to judge our actions, and put in its simplest terms, reward us with Heaven or send us to Hell. 

Since we know the earliest moment a human life could be created is the moment of conception, the only logical moral line between human and kind-of-but-not-quite-yet-human is at this point too.  If there is a genetic moral code instead of a God-based one, this would logically be the same point it is infused as well, because this is also the point that the genetic material unites.  

The fertilized egg then develops into a baby born nine months later. However, the Relativists say that birth is not an absolute guarantee.  The “undifferentiated-tissue-mass-which-is-now-beginning-to-develop-into-a-human-being-that-should-be-born-in-approximately-nine-months” could suffer any number of fates that end its existence.  It could die inside the fallopian tubes, never attach to the womb lining, develop a problem that causes a spontaneous abortion, and so on.  It would be just as dead as the tissue mass ejected by a woman having an abortion, except for one difference. 

We didn’t kill it.

But this is only a minor point to the moral Relativists.  If, as we contend, both genetic and God-created humanity begins at conception, but the united egg and sperm spontaneously abort, it raises a significant theological issue for them.  "Did the minutes-old tissue mass have a soul?  And if it did, did the baby go to Heaven, or did something else happen to it?" 

Here’s how I expect the conversation would go.

You, Phil Jackson, have maintained that the act of conception is tantamount to the creation of human life.  You further say that this is also the moment that a shared morality is instilled in man by God.  Your Christian belief system says that there is a Heaven and a Hell, and those places are a reward or punishment for each individual’s actions. 

You use the example of a five-year old innocent life so that no extra “baggage” will cloud the issue when you demand a logical, internally-consistent response to your questions.  So now we, the moral Relativists you mock, throw this right back in your face, and ask you a question.  How can God judge the action of a zygote, who you say has both a soul and inherent moral code?  That zygote never developed into an embryo, or a fetus, or a non-aborted baby.  It never had hands, or eyes, or a brain.  It never even lived outside the wound, so there is no way it could "do" anything to be judged.  Your whole notion of precisely when a tissue mass becomes human, or a so-called universal moral code is installed in that tissue mass to make it human, collapses of its own weight.

There’s no support for your thesis at all, except for a minor, circumstantial coinciding of events that occur around conception.  Call it a baby all you want, but until it can live outside the womb on its own, it’s not anymore “human” than a cyst is. Twenty weeks was chosen because it’s a necessary compromise in a political system where the laws of men rule, not the laws of God.  If you want God to dictate your life, go live in a cult, or set up a theocracy somewhere in a deserted South Sea Island.  But this is America.  People have rights, even the women you don’t seem to care very much about.  It’s their body, and you have no right to tell them what to do with it. 

You can moan all you want about your love for humanity, but even though I know nothing about your life, I know you’ve never [fill in the blank with the appropriate contribution, personal act of sacrifice, demonstration of care for an actual human life other than your own family, etc.]. So back off with your phony, hypocritical analysis that just tries to confuse us with a bunch of irrelevant facts and questions, when we already know what the right thing is to do! 

I’m sorry to have lost my temper, but you Christian fanatics really piss me off!

Phew!  This mind-meld with Liberal, morally relativist thought takes a lot out of a guy!  Mr. Spock never had to go through withdrawals the way I do when he and Bones did the same thing.

I know you just know I’m about to make some really, really, really great fun of this question in a few moments.  So before you read any further, look back and see if any of my own non-relativist, rational thought crept into this question and unintentionally exposed it for the abject stupidity it really is.  I’ll wait.

Satisfied?  Okay, here’s my answer.  We’ll start at the beginning and work our way through.  The moral Relativist asks, “If a soul makes you human, does a blastula, gastrula, or zygote have a soul?  If not then, do they get it at any other stage of embryonic growth?”  It’s an excellent question, if I do say so myself.  And I have an equally excellent answer.

How the hell should I know?

I’m not God.  I’m a simple human being who has been given a brain and an opportunity to use it.  I don’t know what a soul looks like, where it is, or just exactly when and how I got it.  I don’t know if man really evolved from a lower life form (although I have my opinions) and reached a point of self-awareness where God allowed it to become human; or if the Garden of Eden is literally true.  And I don’t know how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, or whether they have cable in Heaven so I can keep watching CSI. 

And I don’t care. 

I don’t even care if we humans got the whole “soul” thing right, or if there’s really another mechanism by which God makes us more than decomposing organic matter after we die.  All I know is that like love, which is real but cannot be seen or touched, morality, which also cannot be seen or touched, does not come from our genes and the environment.  So if it’s not the product of man’s genetic makeup or the environment he lives in, then the only answer left is that it comes from God.

I also know my moral compass is fundamentally the same as your moral compass.  And although it may lead us to opposite conclusions about a given subject, if we’re both drawing on the same innate morality we each possess, then I know that both of these options — though different — will be consistent with our common moral values.

And, I can also understand that if this same moral code tells us intuitively that it’s “wrong” to rape and kill an innocent child, it must also be wrong to abort an innocent child.

So unless someone can show me the moral-based logic that a 20-month old fetus is a human child, but a 19-week old fetus still isn’t eligible for his human green card, then I say we are morally wrong to kill it.  Like the first time a person has sex, you can never reclaim your virginity again once you’ve engaged in physical love with another human being.  (I leave all questions of whether oral sex, or cigar abuse, or any other specific activity is “sex” to Bill Clinton to answer.  Please write him with your questions, and focus here instead on the act of intercourse as the traditional delineation point.) 

That act of uniting with another human being is a point that marks a clear change in human “status,” even though it’s a largely symbolic one.  You can pretend to be a virgin again to fool someone or spice up your private life, but you can never really undo the act itself which made you “lose your virginity.”  And if we can recognize a purely symbolic change as one that has cultural, psychological, or personal substance, why is it so hard to understand the intrinsic difference between a separated egg and sperm, and one that has united?

So unless we want to play relativistic word games about the difference between week 19 and 20, and/or insist on knowing when a soul is delivered to the tissue mass in question (how about next Tuesday at 11:45 am?  At 11:44 it’s a tumor, at 11:45 it’s another deduction on your IRS 1040), the only way to act morally is to protect that human life too.  Whether it is developing or developed, it is still innocent.  And regardless of whatever “compromise” you reached and who you reached it with, innocent life does not deserve to be deliberately killed!

A genetic explanation for a universal human moral code is no explanation at all. It is science devoid of any acknowledgment of God, not even as the “thing” that created it all, set the universe in motion, and then just stepped back and stayed the hell out of the way.  By focusing only on man, society, and the measurable or observable aspects of nature, it looks at a sliver of the puzzle, not the puzzle in whole.  And like the four blind men feeling an elephant who understand nothing other than what is directly in front of them, they each are convinced they know the true nature of the object they are studying.

If you still believe that genetics plays a part in morality, then I have a follow-up question for you.  Genes are genes.  They turn on or off on their schedule, not yours.  This is why three-year old girls don’t have breasts, and my wisdom teeth came in at age 20 instead of 55.  Yet, by defining human life as the 20th week of pregnancy, you arbitrarily pick a politically convenient date to assign human status to a developing child.  This is the same child you say derives its morality, its basic humanity, from its genes. 

All of which leads to an interesting question.  How do you know these supposed morality/humanity genes aren’t active from the moment of conception?  Consider this analogy.  Little Johnny really doesn’t need his big testosterone boost until he hits puberty.  Before that, a little will do just to keep the plumbing ready for future use.  But some other little boy has a testosterone deficiency.  Why not just remove a little from him and a few other male babies (assuming that was possible),⁵ and give it to a deficient child?  Little Johnny and his buddies will make some more naturally in a few days or weeks.

Only Dr. Mengele or a fool would do that to an innocent child.  That missing hormone could be absolutely critical.  Or it could be meaningless.  A rational person would wait until science absolutely knew before performing the procedure.  And if it could never be known for some reason because of its complicated interactions with other developing organs, again only Dr. Mengele or a fool would remove it anyway.

But Right to Choosers will abort that fetus at 20 weeks because the law permits it, not knowing if its “morality gene” has activated yet or still lies dormant.  It would be a sad, lamentable thing if years later we found that the morality-activation date was really 18 weeks instead of 19, or that it was 20 weeks and 5 minutes instead of twenty weeks period.  This means it wasn’t a more-than-just-a-potential-human-baby you aborted, but a really-really-close-to-being-an-actual-human-baby.  And, if one day science discovers that it was the moment of conception after all that really mattered, there’s about 50 million “little mistakes” lying somewhere in a biohazard bag.

"But hey," you'd say, "how were we to know?"

I’ll tell you how.  Despite what PETA says or thinks, humans don’t just have a higher form of morality than animals, or a different form of morality than animals.  Humans have morality.  Animals have instinct.  I "love" my dog (but not the same way I love my child).  He has funny expressions on his face, and a distinct personality from the other dogs I’ve owned.  He gets upset when I’m sick, and while I hope to never test this theory, he might even be like that little dog I heard about in Scotland who lay on top of his master’s grave for 14 years after he died. 

I know some of you want to believe that because of examples like this, animals think and feel just like we do.  And because of this, you want to believe that they have a soul (or whatever you want to call it), so we’ll see them again in Heaven (or whatever it is we go).  Why?  Because if they really had a soul, it wouldn’t just make them human-like.  It would make them mini-humans. 

If wishes were reality I’d be richer, thinner, and living the Islamo-fascist version of heaven on Earth right now.  But, sadly, they aren’t.  So we need to strip away the relativistic nonsense that passes for analysis regarding what, where, why, and how a soul actually is, and say something neutral like this.  “X” makes me human.  It isn’t “X-1” that makes Rover a dog.   It’s a completely different set of factors altogether. 

If you strongly disagree with my observation, then I ask you another question.  Why doesn’t the entire world feel the same universal revulsion that you do about harming an innocent animal?  You know, that same universal revulsion all humanity feels about harming an innocent child?  

Again the answer is pretty clear.

In the West we might love our pets and treat them like family, or drive around with Animal Friendly license plates to show our solidarity with them.  But in other parts of the world they routinely eat the same thing I just played fetch with.  Cute or not, it’s a meal that feeds a family of five, not counting leftovers. 

If dogs don’t invoke a universal moral judgment, what about something genetically closer to man?  Certain apes not only possess many surface similarities with man, but we also share a lot of the same genetic code.  Is it at this level man and nature unite to provide a universal response to the same mental imagery? 

Once again, in the West we may treat monkeys better than, say, Frank Purdue does chicken.  But we still cage them and experiment on them.  While our domestically grown enviro-Nazis get equally upset about experiments conducted on lab rats or chimpanzees, Tammy Faye Bakker and millions of other American women could care less if the latest shade of eyeliner was tested first on Bonzo’s eyeball, as long as they think it makes them look attractive.  That number rockets even higher when you throw in animal research on serious diseases in the hope that the next Christopher Reeve can get out of his wheelchair and walk again, to recreate the imagery of John Edwards in a more appropriate venue.  And this doesn’t even begin to address how these supposed human-cousins are treated in other parts of the world.  Monkey brain pate is not a cute name for tapioca pudding in parts of Africa, if you catch my drift.  Even if we don’t eat them or experiment on them here in the U.S., we still don’t treat these animals the same way we treat our children — not even the really obnoxious ones!

And yet, some people have espoused the notion that dogs and monkeys and other animals have rights just like humans do.  They advocate laws that recognize these alleged “rights.” Dog owners become dog stewards or dog guardians or some such designation. Because human beings are not monolithic, we can always find cases here and there of bizarre ideas and practices.  However, while it may seem like a worldwide animal-rights movement is starting to take off — requiring moral Relativists to give serious thought to an emerging world consensus that "animals are people too" — I need only remind you of two things. 

First, San Francisco is not the world, regardless of how much air time these idiots get on NBC.  And second, even if everyone in the world thought the same way they did, it wouldn’t make a dime’s worth of difference when drawing a conclusion about whether animals have “rights” just like humans do.

Even though I may love my dog more than say, Howard Dean or Dan Rather, I can still tell you with absolute certainty that if Rover and the worst excuse for human debris were trapped together in a burning building and I could only save one of them, I’d be looking for a new puppy as soon as I recovered from my burns, not to mention the shock that I’m the guy responsible for Dan or Howard still showing up on TV.  Substitute a brain-damaged human in a vegetative state lying in his own filth who was probably going to die in a week anyway, and it wouldn’t make a difference.  Rover would still be toast, literally and figuratively. 

Even a supposedly worthless (in the eyes of the mainstream media), brain-damaged, bed-ridden woman like Terry Schiavo has more intrinsic value than the smartest, most wonderful, rarest, most precious animal on the planet.  That person was created — literally or metaphorically — in the image of God.  She has a soul, and an inborn code of morality that all of us share.  Whether she was born that way or became that way makes no more difference to me in recognizing her intrinsic human nature than focusing on the color of another person’s skin, or any other physical attribute you choose. 

Whether I have a DNR provision in my own will or not is irrelevant to this calculation.  If I’ve violated an intrinsic moral code by allowing myself to die a natural death without having my life artificially prolonged, then there’s only one guy in the universe whose opinion I need to worry about, and it isn’t the story editor at CNN.  However, signing my own Do Not Resuscitate decree, or making my opinion on the issue perfectly clear well before the event (not telepathically several years after a lawsuit is settled where my spouse got more money by keeping me alive), is not the same as you or anyone else deciding that it’s time for me to go because you wouldn’t want to live that way. 

Killing and raping a child, or pulling the plug on me or Terry Schiavo against our expressed wishes, or arbitrarily deciding that a developing human being is not worth bringing to term are exactly the same things.  Anyone with a clear moral compass can see it because the logic is so straightforward.  The only ones who can’t are the ones who won’t because it interferes with another agenda.  Or they don’t want to see it so they can keep mouthing platitudes and slogans disguised as reasoning.  Or, in the worst case of all, they can’t see it because their own moral compass is buried so deep inside them that it no longer registers.

So I ask those of you who think that morality comes from civilizing forces, or is genetically deposited in all of us apart from God directly placing it there, to consider this final question.  When you talk about the link between (a) genes and morality, and (b) morality and being human, and (c) human beings acting in a morally correct way, aren’t each of these part of the same overall thing? 

Fred stealing my credit card is not the same thing as Rover grabbing my wallet and burying it in his favorite backyard stash.  One’s a thief who has the ability to reason, think symbolically, understand moral concepts of right or wrong, and act or not act in accordance with them.  The other is an animal.  Not just because he smells really bad and has manners like a pig, but because no matter how much we like to think that “the kitty is smiling at me” as my young nephew once said right before it attacked him, an animal has no ingrained morality or a soul.  All it has is instinct and basic animal intelligence.  And possibly an owner with an overactive imagination.
 

8.  Alice through the looking glass

As much as I’d like to leave this silly question of genetic-based morality and move on to another equally-dubious idea that moral Relativists use to justify abortion, I need to completely close the door on any discussion that would substitute nature or “natural rights” for the existence of a higher moral authority. 

Leaving aside little problems like genetic mutations that alter genes — and could one day remove this trait all together, or divide humanity into two separate genetic camps — I’m going to use the moral Relativists' own pronouncements about a woman’s “Right” to kill her unborn child to create this scenario.  That is, I will show how a genetic foundation could possibly account for the universal reaction we all have to harming an innocent child, but would actually permit (also from a genetic-based morality) a woman to have an abortion.  All we have to do is suspend reality for a few minutes and hang on for the ride while we let the Women’s Rights/Relativist logic lead the way.

Here it goes.

The human race is still expanding in the US and elsewhere, even in abortion-happy China.  Consequently, there’s no real worry about the human species’ ability to survive. 

This means, logically and genetically, that we should not expect to see the same uniform reaction to child rape and murder if worries about the species are driving this emotion.  Unless the action affects the biological imperative of the species, that gene remains dormant.  Animals do a form of this all the time in nature as pregnancy rates rise and fall with different environmental conditions.  In extreme cases, lower life forms have even been known to change their actual sex to help preserve the species.  Humans are just a higher form of animals.  We can understand our own innate biological drives by studying lower forms of animal life, since we’re all part of the same ecosystem that will be here until Global Warming destroys the planet.

Which leads to the following logically-Relativistic hypothesis.

Hypothesis: There is some innate, genetic “worry” about too many abortions of “potential” life, when combined with too many killings of “actual” life.  Taken together, they could reach a point where they begin to impact population growth.  This might explain an innate abhorrence to harm 5-year old children.  That is, women have no problem aborting their fetus at any time (20 weeks is a political compromise; it could have been 15 weeks, 25 weeks, etc.).  Society also has no particular moral inhibition against killing children either.  But there is a biological need in everyone that is concerned about preserving the species.  And when worries about preservation of the species reach a certain threshold, everybody’s anti-kid-kill gene kicks in.

Note: Please read the passages below carefully, because a lot of it will seem counter-intuitive at first.  We have to place these hypothetical biological imperatives in the context of how societies are actually organized, particularly their political systems that make laws governing human behavior.

Assumption #1: Abortion is a natural female drive (which is why it is a “Right”) that is suppressed by male-dominated Conservative governments.  Left to their own free will, many women would choose abortion over birth.

Assumption #2: There will be periods of great Abortion Freedom when Morally Relativistic Liberal governments dominate the world, and periods of Abortion Repression when male-dominated Conservative governments dominate the world.

Assumption #3: The more male-dominated Conservative governments there are in power around the world, the more the population will therefore rise as women are forced to bear more children instead of aborting them.

Assumption #4: When Morally Relativistic Liberal governments return to power, abortion restraints are lifted.  When this happens, the population will begin to decline.

Assumption #5: This trend will be further accelerated when deluded Judeo-Christian women see the fruits of a Liberal paradise blossoming around them.  They will break free of the brainwashing that deceives them into thinking that a developing fetus is an actual human life, and join the abortion sisterhood.

Assumption #6: If Morally Relativistic Liberal governments retain power for several generations and allow unrestricted abortion, the combination of (1) the natural proclivity for women to abort, (2) the lack of an innate moral inhibition to kill children, and (3) the lack of an even more important biological inhibition to kill children, would produce the following result.  Too few humans would be produced that make it to a breeding age and repopulate the species. 

Consequently, the human race would perish.  And we certainly can’t have that. 

Analysis: So, this twisted logic goes, we innately respect the life of a young child because they are part of the “natural abortion cycle” that is part of every woman’s genetic makeup.  Not killing young children in certain periods of time only is nature’s way of preserving the race in a time of prolonged Abortion Freedom, where “too much of a good thing” (i.e. killing babies) is literally true.

Before the Liberals and moral Relativists brave enough to have read this far start accusing me of deliberately-tortured logic to make them look silly, I’d like you to consider how the above reasoning fits with the supposed notion of a woman’s “Right” to choose.

Liberal Relativist thinking states emphatically that women have a Right to Choose what to do with their own body.  This includes foreign bodies attached to them by a placenta.

If this right does indeed exist, then it isn’t a stretch to conclude that abortion must be a “common choice.”  If not, banning abortions wouldn’t affect anything.  For example, anyone can choose to kill themselves.  They can use a gun, buy pills, sit in a running car in a closed garage, or jump in front of a train.  The opportunities are endless, and can be exercised at will.  But in America, no one has a “Right” to kill themselves.  Attempting suicide is illegal in most states.  The only way to beat the rap is to succeed; otherwise you end up in the custody of the state for a few days observation — or maybe a lot longer. 

Both suicide and abortion deal with an individual’s choice about their own body.  Moreover, neither action is said to harm another human being because abortionists don’t consider the thing they kill to be human life.  And yet, the state gives “Rights” to one action, but not to the other. 

Since there are no marches on Washington or other demonstrable actions that demand rights for the oppressed suicide-attempters in America, I can only conclude that it must not be a very popular choice compared to such things as the Right to Vote, the Right to Free Speech, and the Right to Kill That Thing Growing Inside Your Belly Before The Twentieth Week — all of which have strong, vocal movements behind them.

But, tempting as it might be to draw on this logic and say that “species survival” is the explanation for not raping or killing a five-year old child, I think maybe we should step back for a moment and take another look.  While not killing five-year olds would certainly counter-balance a natural propensity for women to abort their children, thus tending to support the logical-Relativist hypothesis, perhaps we should look at what other strongly held “rights” exist today in America?  We’ll suspend the obvious observation here regarding the difference between a basic moral code and a temporary human consensus to let the logic draw out a bit further, and see if we need to bring it back later to kill it, or whether the premise is ridiculous enough to collapse of its own weight.

Simply reading a newspaper or watching your neighbors go about their lives will quickly point out at least three more rights Americans hold dear: the Right to Party and Have a Good Time, the Right to Run Up Large Charge Account Bills and Then Declare Bankruptcy, and the Right to Download Music Free on The Internet. 

These aren’t just options or opportunities that theoretically exist, like the option to wear slacks or shorts depending on the weather.  Pass laws that limit or take away any of these “rights” and you’ll get a march on Washington that will rival Dr. King’s.  People care about these rights; not just isolated individuals here and there, but millions of people throughout the country.  Although these genetic rights seem to manifest themselves most strongly among high school and college-age hormonally active human males, people of all ages and sexes seem drawn to these rights.  We can all point to enough personal experiences observing overweight 50-year old men driving around town in a brand new Porsche with a 22-year old trophy wife at their side, or read the newspapers about the rise in bankruptcy filings under Republican administrations.  And then there’s that song or two you asked your twelve-year old nephew to download from a share file that paid no royalties to the composer. 

Attempts to “limit fun,” force people to manage their financial affairs responsibly, and/or start charging them for using the Internet have routinely met with loud, wailing, hand-wringing howls.  This isn’t some isolated group we hear screaming, it’s your neighbors, friends, and even your family.  And perhaps you too on occasion.     

But the simple fact that one group (however large and vocal) may want to do something — and want it really badly — doesn’t mean that all people want or demand it.  If it was a fundamental human need, there wouldn’t be any question about it.  As vocal as these advocates might be, they need to be balanced against a larger number of people who are interested in having children and raising a family, pursuing a successful career, managing their and the country’s finances responsibly, and paying for what they want instead of scamming the system. 

Like the previous examples, though, these things are no more “rights” than the right to turn on red is a “right.”  They are felt strongly, and to some people may even manifest themselves as a genetic disposition (fun times and alcoholism, for example), but they are not universally shared by all mankind, which if true would elevate them to the level of a universal moral imperative.

But what about other, more serious human rights?   Let’s look at the U.S. Bill of Rights.  As important and deeply ingrained as the Right to Vote and Right to Free Speech are in Western society, I still can’t elevate either of these to a universal principle.  Even after the collapse of Soviet communism and the liberation of Afghanistan and Iraq, there are still a large number of people in these countries who reject any notion of Western-style democracy.  Russians live in a quasi-capitalist thugocracy, and in Afghanistan and Iraq a lot of people still take their marching orders from the local Ayatollah. 

“Rights” connected with personal freedom may tie back to certain moral principles, but it is these principles — such as a basic respect for human life — that are universal, not a free press or other rights embodied in the U.S. Constitution.  A true appreciation for democracy is something that evolves with thought, debate, and cultural evolution.  I have high hopes for democracy taking a firm root in the Middle East thanks to the courage and leadership of President Bush.  But neither he nor I, nor maybe even my children, will live to see it work as well as I believe it can.  Which means, not even the U.S. Bill of Rights has intrinsic universal appeal, because some of these concepts require a different cultural and social structure to be in place before they can truly be understood and flourish.  Russia today is a perfect example of both the potential of, and cultural/historical barriers to, Western-style democracy taking hold and prospering.  Afghanistan and Iraq will require decades of additional preparation to pave the way for thinking about Thomas Paine instead of “giving pain” when operating in a political environment.

Which puts the lie to any suggestion that abortion is either an innate, genetic drive in women upon which moral-based decisions can be made, or a universal right to kill your own unborn child that all women seek.  Rather, it is a means to a political objective perpetrated on the United States by a logic that gives more weight to man-made laws and the culturally-dependent notions of privacy and fairness, than it does to basic human dignity.  It’s the perfect, morally-relativistic logic gone completely out of control, where the focus becomes the mother’s desires, as opposed to what is in the best interest of another human being’s life.

So I ask again.  If the future of mankind is not at stake, why won’t some society, somewhere, sometime in human history, condone child rape and murder as an acceptable practice?  

And if it won’t, why not?

9.  To kill or not to kill?  That is the question

It can’t be the act itself of killing that’s the problem.  People kill other people all the time.  So what’s the big deal about killing a five-year old child?  If a mother can kill her unborn baby at 20 weeks with no supposed moral inhibition, why can’t she kill her born-baby at 60 weeks without feeling guilt or risking social condemnation? 

Now, if I said instead “kill a terrorist,” a large number of people in America today would say “sure, no problem.”  An even larger number would say it if John Kerry was president, because saying it now would benefit Bush, and there is no way that anything Bush wants or does will be supported by them.  Republicans, on the other hand, would still support the war against Islamic fascism, but would probably be pulling their hair out at the strategy pursued by president Kerry — debating which U.N. resolution to pass this week, instead of how big a bomb to drop on the bad guys.  

But the thought of killing innocent children provokes a completely different reaction, and we have to ask again why raping a five-year old child sends such a disgusting, visceral message through a person’s brain, regardless of their race, color, culture, or other factors?  Why are pedophiles vilified more than other types of rapists?  Rape twenty women and go to prison, and you’re a celebrity among the inmates.  Rape a five-year old and go to prison, and you end up in protective custody for the next 20 years so the other inmates don’t kill you.  It isn’t that we consider adult rape no more odious than a neighborhood quarrel.  We find that morally despicable too.  But the rape or murder of a child crosses an undeniable line that only a sociopath can rationalize away, and that line is universally shared.

But WHY do we know this is not just wrong, but unmistakably wrong, and every other human being on the planet knows it is wrong too including hardened criminals accused of similar crimes with adults?  Is it because it’s against the law?  Even if every country in every era independently came up with the same laws, there is nothing intrinsic that would prevent that law from being changed in a legal, constitutional manner.  There is a current debate in Scandinavia to lower the age of consensual sex between a child and an adult to age 13.  Why not twelve-and-a-half?  Why not twelve?  Maybe, by some convoluted reasoning, a case could be made for this if age thirteen is found to be socially acceptable.  But why ABSOLUTELY NOT four, or five, or six-years old under any condition?  We’re not even talking about rape now, just ordinary consensual sex.

Is it only a health issue for the child because its reproductive organs are too fragile?  No problem.  Bill Clinton solved that dilemma back in 1998 when he educated the country on a whole variety of ways to get around that little problem.  A five-year old child instead of a college age intern presents only a technical problem if you really want to look at it (which no normal person would, but I need to lay out the reasoning).  This is the 21st century.  There are a lot of ways to accomplish this objective without physically damaging the child, if you’re sick enough to want to.

But as absurd and perverted as this logic is, it leads to an absolutely critical, sincere question.  Why is this a horrible conversation?  Even if I take out the killing of a five-year old child after it is raped, and change the rape of that child to simple “sexual gratification” for the adult, it’s still completely offensive. 

This visceral reaction isn’t due to species survival, or animal rights, or man-made laws.  Michael Jackson may be a great entertainer, and if by some chance we discovered that he was a brilliant political strategist, superb economic analyst, and an exceptional social engineer, we’d never elect him president.  Not because he’s black.  The same people who’d reject the Super-Michael I just created would vote for Condi Rice in a heartbeat.  They wouldn’t vote for him, let alone want to be in the same state as him, because after a few highly publicized court appearances suddenly Bill Clinton is starting to look like Mother Teresa.  Bill Clinton has probably had more sexual dalliances with adult women in three weeks than Michael Jackson is believed to have had in thirty years.  But MJ’s are alleged to be with underage children he drugged or lured into compromising positions.  And that makes the difference.⁶  So it isn’t the issue of rabid sexual activity that fundamentally creeps everyone out.  I’d still shake Bill Clinton’s hand if I met him just to be polite.  But I’d also wash it right away in the nearest public restroom.  It’s who Michael Jackson is assumed to have had those dalliances with that makes it more than a matter of personal disapproval, and turns it into a fundamental issue.  

But again I ask in all sincerity, why should this one little fact make such a big difference?  Let’s assume there were no allegations of “Jesus Juice” cocktails to loosen the kids up, or any other untoward behavior.  If five-year old Alexandra, or Alex, was perfectly willing to do the nasty with a forty-year old man, would this make it any less revolting to our innate moral code?

If the answer isn’t obvious by now, it never will be.  We all know that sex with a child is intuitively wrong (not to mention all the other variations of this theme), and we all know that laws, societies, cultures, species survival, genetics, and different periods of human history aren’t the things that makes it wrong.  Even the most depraved stories we hear in the media about South Asian child prostitution still recognizes a fundamental limit.  Rationalizing that a twelve-, or even thirteen-year old girl is a ‘woman’ is one thing.⁷  Offering up five-year old children for sex is quite another. 

What makes it wrong is a universal moral precept that is part of the basic fabric of every human being, regardless of their genetic makeup or other real-world factors.  No one, except the most morally depraved human being, can rationalize that having sex with a young child as anything other than harmful, whether it’s supposedly consensual or not.  And since we all know, instinctively, that harming innocent life is intrinsically wrong, the worse the harm, the worse the violation. That’s why an adult rapist with no regard for the women he brutalized would still find enough moral outrage at a pedophile rapist that he would attack him.  And that’s why these “short eyes” — as they are derisively known — are routinely kept away from the general prison population.

This is the practical definition of a moral code.  It exists as a constituent part of being human.  It is not legislated into existence, but is part of our very being independent of genes, culture, and other worldly attributes (otherwise not every human on the planet would intuitively possess this code).  Some individuals may violate the code deliberately, accidentally, or pathologically — but the code still exists within them.  Some may be so affected by outside circumstances that they have to be taught to discover it within themselves, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist.  You can teach another person to read and write, drive a car, apply Aristotelian logic to a problem or follow the dictates of Karl Marx.  You can teach a person to respect others, like others, even sacrifice their lives for others.  But you can’t teach a person to love someone else. 

No matter how much you want person X to love you, you can’t educate them, or bribe them, or persuade them to love you.  You can get them to change their attitude toward you, and maybe even marry and have sex with you, but that in and of itself is not love.  Everyone knows this from their own personal experience in seeking someone else’s love, or having someone seek theirs.  “Growing to love” someone is an expression, not a fact.  It describes an accommodation over time to a person that may involve real care and sympathy for their well being.  But for those of you fortunate enough to have experienced the true love of a spouse, child, parent, or even a friend, do you really believe in your own heart that you can be taught to love another person this way?

Morality is like love.  It exists, but it cannot be measured by machines or direct observation.  Our brainwaves can be tracked, and our respiratory system can be measured as we respond to stimuli (though I caution everyone here not to confuse lust with love).  But what objective number measures your love for your child, or spouse, or anyone other you care this deeply for? 

The capacity to love may be enhanced or limited by genetics (an autistic child cannot feel love or any other emotion the way others do), just as certain biological or environmental factors may strip any connection with morality for a psychopath.  But suppressing an innate trait in a minor fraction of humanity is a different process than instilling the code that is suppressed.  You can screw up a child’s thinking in a thousand different ways and make him bury his moral compass so deep inside that as an adult it will never surface, just like you can bury any physical object so deep it can never be recovered.  That doesn’t mean the object you buried doesn’t exist; only that it is inaccessible.

But how do you load the “software” of a universal moral code in every human being, regardless of their personal situation and circumstances, so that 99.999999% of humanity would not want to go back and re-read the questions I asked about child rape and murder just for amusement? 

You can’t “load” morality into a human being, because it’s automatically there as a function of being human.  It’s there regardless of his genetics — which can only be a factor in suppressing moral judgments in an individual human being in extreme circumstances, such as autism does with the expression of love.  But it can never be “loaded” onto a blank slate. 

The philosophical “blank slate”⁸ that everyone begins life with is the culturally-dependent, genetically-influenced, family- and friend-impacted “vessel” that helps each individual express this innate morality in different ways.  We can act completely in accordance with the moral code and support absolute pacifism or “just wars.”  Our culture, genetic makeup and personal experiences help each individual express that morality, but none of these install our core moral values. 

And if this is true — that morality (like love) is an ethereal not corporal part of being human — then where does it come from, if not from God?

10. But first a time out is called by the other team

Having provided a framework for analyzing moral issues, I had intended at this point to begin a discussion about the identical moral status of elective abortion and terrorism.  But then Relativism reared its ugly head again, and we must take another time out to dismiss the pseudo-intellectual argument against making moral judgments of any kind, at any time, regardless of the issue.  The "George Bush is the Devil" exception still remains though, since that’s such a patently obvious judgment to the morally Relative Left it can be justified on a hundred different levels.  Oh, and Dick Cheney sucks too.

Anyway, to return to the issue, Relativism requires that we treat even the most odious action as a personal preference, cultural difference, or a “choice” — unless, again, George Bush and Dick Cheney, and maybe this time Donald Rumsfeld are involved.  As flawed human beings, the good Relativist argues, who are we to tell someone else what to believe, and what is moral or not?  At best, only society can make that judgment.  This is why it’s okay to condemn President Bush for leading an immoral war.  Democrats, the news media, France, China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, and a bunch of other countries have condemned Bush for lying about the same pre-war intelligence Bill Clinton used to justify lobbing 400 cruise missiles at Iraq following his deposition in the Monica Lewinsky case.  The world hates us (and Israel), so Bush is wrong, just as Israel is wrong for fighting its enemies.

What we need instead, these same people say, is to find common ground with the terrorists (I mean, “freedom fighters”).  We should not make them even madder by resisting their aggressive actions toward us.  It’s an interesting thought.  However, I’m still waiting to see what kind of compromise is possible with Israel’s enemies before I support that same policy for the U.S.  What Israel wants is to be left alone and not attacked.  What their Islamo-fascist enemies want is to kill all Jews.  If land was the only stumbling block, the withdrawal from Gaza would have prompted Hamas and “Hezabaloo” (to quote Charles Rangel) to recognize the state of Israel and enter into new negotiations for other concessions, not to keep attacking and killing Jews.  

I guess the compromise for all Israelis, then, is to commit mass suicide, since that represents the logical middle ground between continuing to live unmolested, and being exterminated.  The terrorists will not kill the Jews, denying the terrorists what they want.  And the Jews will not continue to live, denying the Jews what they want.  Only suicide prevents the terrorists from killing the Jews, while at the same time denying the Jews the opportunity to keep on living.  The logic of compromise for compromise’ sake is flawless; unburdened by the need to assign moral superiority to either of the competing objectives. 

Or, to pull out my usual example when I talk to Relativists who think that the definition of peace is nothing more than the absence of war, consider this dilemma. Talking to a Feminist (a sub-genus of relativous morales) I say the following.  Joe wants to rape Sally.  Sally doesn’t want to be raped.  What’s the compromise?  Sally and Joe have consensual sex.  Each side “compromises.”  Joe doesn’t rape, and Sally gives in on her no-sex position.  Conflict is avoided, we have peace in our time, and everybody is happy.  Right? 

Or could it be that Joe’s desires are morally wrong?  If so, there should be no compromise.  Resistance by Sally is the proper course of action.  If this is indeed the case, then what makes rape wrong?  Is it a law passed by a particular government?  If that’s all there is to it, what happens if Sally finds herself in a place where rape is lawful, or there is no law at all (like the old American frontier, or other parts of the world today)?  Does that mean if Joe and Sally ended up in Somalia, Joe would be justified in raping Sally despite her wishes?  (No law, no prohibition against rape, therefore rape is an acceptable practice.)  Or is the prohibition against rape something that transcends man-made law, cultural differences, or historical periods of time?  If so, just where does this higher moral authority come from, if it isn’t from the laws, culture, or decisions of man?    

The same dilemma that faces Israel exists for the U.S in its war with Islamic fascists who want to kill all Infidels.  Actually, it exists for the entire Western world, but like pre-WWII Europe, most of the world would rather appease a bully than fight them.  Fighting subjects you to the threat of immediate injury (vs. the possibility of even greater injury farther down the road — but until that day comes, injury remains a theoretical problem so appeasement will do just fine).  It also allows other people to say unkind things about you, like the world does about the U.S. today.  It’s important that the French, and Germans, and Russians, and Chinese, and Cubans, and Iranians, and other inhuman, repressive regimes around the world think good thoughts about us. 

Which means to the Relativist, it’s important to be liked by the rest of the world, even if we have to let a few Jews get slaughtered here and there as Hezabaloo attacks innocent Israelis, or Saddam puts a hundred thousand more Kurds into mass graves while shooting at our planes enforcing the no-fly zone at the same time he refuses to allow U.N. inspectors to verify the destruction of his WMD program.  At least we can travel to Paris in the summertime and not have to hold our head in shame because Uncle Jacques looks down on us with disappointment while accepting oil-for-food bribes from the Iraqi government.

Moral judgments don’t reflect “differences in opinion.”  If so, what is moral and what isn’t is just another way of asking what is legal, and what isn’t? The U.S. gives its citizens the opportunity to start a private sector business and hire employees.  We call them “entrepreneurs.”  In Cuba — 90 miles away from the U.S. — these same people doing the same things are called “bourgeois capitalist lackeys and counter-revolutionaries,” or the shortened version: “prison inmates.”  Same acts, same period of time.  Different cultures, different outcomes.  But as repressive a regime as Cuba is today, the leadership’s opinion about private enterprise will not always be the same.  Following Castro’s death it may tighten even further, relax a bit as it has in mainland China, or go the way of Eastern Europe and be abandoned all together in favor of installing a free market system.  But the value judgment about child rape and murder will always stay the same.

I do find common ground with the Relativists, however, who perpetuate their morally-neutral positions by reminding us of the old biblical saying, “Let those who are without sin cast the first stone.”  This is why I prefer using my Toshiba Satellite Pro to make my points, instead of a good old-fashioned public thrashing.  However, following this dictum does not mean that I can never condemn a harmful or immoral action unless my own past is pure as the driven snow.  If that was the case, we’d have no need for police, trials, or jails.  Your friendly neighborhood rapist would be free to walk the streets pursuing his nocturnal hobby because you snuck a peek at your father’s Playboy hidden in his sock drawer when you were twelve, or copped a feel from Margaret Stanford during your tenth grade Valentines Day dance.  Rape involves sex; and surreptitiously fondling a breast involves sex.  You’re both equally flawed humans, so who are you to judge? 

Of course, should we ever come across an American male or female who has made it to adulthood without once looking at, thinking about, or heaven forbid engaging in any form of straight, gay, self-induced or voyeuristic sex, we’d immediately seek to disqualify them from judging Jack the Raper because they are clearly abnormal human beings.  And from a religious cult, no doubt.  This would violates Jack’s Constitutional right to a trial by a jury of his peers, not to mention the separation of Church and State implications that putting such a bible-thumping fanatic on a jury would produce.

As you’ve probably guessed, I think this morally-equivalent thinking is rather stupid (sorry, there goes another value judgment, but I can’t help myself from imposing my Western-culture, ROWG Conservative morals on you).  Since I can’t help myself from making moral judgments, I’ll go one step further and argue that this same judgment applies to other variations of this theme.  Bringing home a ream of paper from the office supply room does not make you the moral equivalent of Betty Lou down in Accounting who absconded to Tahiti with $750,000 of the company funds.  Both actions technically involve “stealing,” but there’s this little thing about the scale of the crime.  It’s not an inconsequential difference, except to those who are looking for a way to avoid judging unpleasant situations by imposing moral equivalency on both actions.

But what about the guy who did rob the bank, or killed someone while driving drunk?  We’re no longer talking about a difference in scale.  There’s not a dime’s worth of difference between Willie Sutton and Betty Lou in Accounting.  They’re both thieves on a grand scale.  Does Betty Lou, who walked off with hundreds of thousands of dollars (not just a ream of paper from the office store room) have the right to condemn Willie Sutton for robbing banks?  She certainly is not “without sin,” so can she cast any stones (metaphorical or otherwise) in Willie’s direction?

Of course she can!  The fact that Betty Lou did something incredibly bad doesn’t cause her to lose her right to make a moral judgment about a similar activity that was done by someone else.  It may lose her some of her freedom through a stint in jail, or most of her life savings in the civil trial that follows, and as a convicted felon it will certainly lose her the right to vote unless Florida Democrats need a few extra magic ballots for Hillary in ‘08.  But just because you’re a morally flawed person, it doesn’t mean that you can’t condemn stealing someone else’s money and/or killing them in a reckless, self-indulgent manner.  It’s the action itself, not the people making the judgment that matters. 

You are not a hypocrite to counsel your child against drinking and driving regardless of what you did or didn’t do back in the 70’s.  You are a hypocrite if you deliver this lecture, and then continue to get snoggered, and then put yourself behind a wheel well into the 21st century; particularly if you are piously professing to abstain from alcohol.  All this makes you a defective human being, but it still has absolutely nothing to do with whether drinking and driving drunk is morally “wrong” or not.  It is morally wrong, and there’s just no question about it.

I’m not going to run through the countless other iterations of Relativistic logic on this subject, except to highlight the usual (i.e. most absurdly-contorted) examples that Liberals and other moral relativists tend to bring up.  “But Phil, suppose you’re drunk but your buddy has a heart attack, and you lost your cell phone to call for help and you’re in the middle of the desert with no one nearby to drive him to a hospital.  Wouldn’t it be okay to drive drunk, then?”  Yes, just like having an abortion to save the life of a mother is a valid exception.  But I said the “life” of the mother, not her “health,” since those are two entirely different concepts.  “But Phil, what if the guy still drinks and drives, but doesn’t tell people that he doesn’t do it?  Doesn’t that still make him a hypocrite?  He’s telling others it’s wrong, and even though he isn’t being a phony by lying about what he does, he’s still hiding the fact that he does it himself.” 

It’s here I usually invoke the Ted Kennedy rule.  If you’re going to be a complete and utter ass in your personal life, but your actions don’t hurt anyone else, then you’re not a hypocrite if you advocate public morality while privately leading a less-than-perfect life.  So you have one too many cocktails in your own house before you go to bed, snap at your wife in private more sharply than you should, or look at Internet porn in the privacy of your own home.  You can still counsel against drunk driving, decry wife abuse, and work to tighten restrictions on X-rated websites in the public library.  Your personal shortcomings don’t make any of these examples more, or less, moral or immoral.  But to cite the Ted Kennedy rule in its fullest manifestation, you do open yourself to the charge of hypocrisy if you rant and rave about people whose actions, you contend, show a patent disregard for human life after having let poor Mary Jo expire in the back of your half-submerged car just so you can save your political career.  Except for something as egregious as this, the fact that Teddy might drink too much (when not driving), or do anything else that showcases the worst part of human nature rather than the best, is of absolutely no one’s concern regardless of his public positions on these matters.  As long as what he is doing is legal, consensual, within the moral code and not a fundamental danger to himself or others,⁹ the matter is between him and his conscience, and is none of our business. 

Therefore, driving while drunk is still morally wrong, regardless of whether Mother Teresa or the neighborhood alcoholic delivers the message during one of his sober moments.  Mother Teresa may be a more credible spokesperson, and therefore a more effective communicator regarding the evils of drunk driving given her lifestyle compared to Uncle Ted’s.  But this is a comment on tactics, and has nothing to do with whether the message itself is “right” or “wrong.”  This is why we have to resist the impulse to automatically dismiss everything the Left says, like they routinely do when someone on the other side of the aisle speaks.  If Bush says “good morning,” Harry Reid will immediately call a press conference to denounce Bush for denying the Holocaust by suggesting that “evil” doesn’t exist.

But actually listening to what Pat Lahey says before breaking out in laughter doesn’t mean the Senator from Vermont can’t make a morally correct statement from time to time.  On the other hand, since the messenger here has a history of disguising his base political motives by appealing to higher “moral” principles, it is always appropriate to assess whether the good deed he advocates is really designed to reach a common moral goal.  Or, is simply a tactic he applies in one situation, but would just as quickly oppose in another if it suited his purposes.  All this may make Lahey and the other Lefty Moralists who trot themselves out from time to time hypocrites and con artists, but as my daddy once told me, even a stopped clock is right twice a day. 

So if the Left stumbles across a morally-correct policy suggestion, the proper reaction from the Right isn’t to reject it out of hand, but rather to take the suggestion and make it into a coherent plan or program that actually does what its Leftist sponsors say they want to achieve (i.e. the proper treatment of X), rather than what they are really trying to do (condemn Bush on Monday for spying on suspected terrorists who haven’t been accused by a Grand Jury of doing anything illegal, and then after the U.S. is attacked on Tuesday, condemn Bush for not knowing exactly what these people intended to do or not connecting-the-dots to see that they were obviously terrorists).    

So it’s the message that deserves our focus, not the messenger per se.  Getting smashed in your own house when you’re of legal age may be inappropriate, immature, or hard on the carpet when your body decides to eject some of the excess alcohol.  But unless you lie about your own propensity to drink, or use this moral argument simply as a tactic to achieve a political goal, keeping your personal life private does not make you a hypocrite. 

I think Conservatives too often fall for this trap and shy away from making moral judgments because their life isn’t 100% pure.  We condemn drunk driving as “immoral” not because it’s immoral to drink.  That’s a purely personal choice, assuming that it’s not taken to the point of excess.¹⁰  It differs from person to person, religion to religion, and culture to culture.  On the other hand, it is unquestionably immoral to put something in your body that impairs your judgment, and then get behind the wheel of a two-ton vehicle that if not handled properly can kill you or some innocent bystander.  Driving drunk, driving recklessly, driving while exhausted, etc. maliciously endangers innocent human life.  These aren’t just bad individual choices, like building up a videotape collection when the whole world is moving to DVDs, or bad choices for someone of one culture but perfectly fine for another, like wearing the latest New York City-style fashion in downtown Tehran.  All of these actions are intrinsically “wrong,” regardless of which society, culture, or time period one lives in. 

If you need any further proof that one does not need to live a completely, partially, or even marginally-pure life to recognize fundamental moral issues and speak out about them, then let me tell you I am as venal, profane, imperfect, flawed and hypocritical as the next guy.  This isn’t one of those false modesty admissions where the guy’s really a saint but is too “saintly” to admit it.  No, I am about as base a human being as you are likely to find, my Ph.D. notwithstanding.  But I have absolutely no concern about standing on the nearest soapbox to say that driving drunk and/or killing innocent people, including unborn babies, is completely immoral and wrong. 

Fortunately, as of the date this essay is posted, I’m secure in the knowledge that I cannot be called a hypocrite for “preaching” about abortion, terrorism or driving while impaired, because I’ve never done or assisted any of the three.  Well, except for that time when I was 18 and it was finally legal for me to drink after a couple of years of practice.  I had enough one night so that I should have let my friend drive me home after a party.  But fortunately, my moral lapse never resulted in harm to another human being.  It was still the wrong thing for me to do, however, no matter what the climate of the time was regarding things like this, so I offer this as not an excuse but an explanation.  I’ve never done it again, and never will. 

The public denunciation can now begin.

This is the Relativist trap we need to recognize and avoid, and even laugh at.  Even if I had a dozen DUIs in a dozen different states, not a word of what I wrote in this essay would be more or less true.  When we start apologizing in advance for our perceived human imperfections that may somehow, someway, come back to bite us if a reporter for the National Enquirer starts snooping into our lives, we’ve allowed ourselves to be intimidated by the bully into looking the other way.  It’s even more ironic if you reduce it to a purely philosophical level.  Doing big “E” evil, little “e” evil, or something in between in the past now prohibits us from speaking out about big “E” Evil in the present, or future.  Do you know what’s wrong with this picture?  Evil is dictating what you can or can’t do.  Not the impulse to do good as everyone’s internal moral code defines it.

So screw the self-righteous PC police who might now want to silence me from speaking about morals because I used the word “screw.”  (Actually, it wasn’t “screw”, but there are FCC regulations and other considerations that have to be taken into account as we put our message out, and using that word instead of my usual, more colorful description compromises nothing.  You still got the same message loud and clear.)  Whether I’m guilty of a related or unrelated bad act or not, it won’t stop me from acknowledging the fact that an immoral action is an immoral action, and that action is “wrong.”

The true irony is that Relativists are equally, if not more flawed than those people who talk about moral-based judgment.  They excuse this fact by saying that since they never publicly or even privately condemned something, they can’t be held to account for these actions unless man’s law is involved.  So they’re free to abort as many babies as they want without fear of condemnation, because in America in 2006 it’s legal to do it.

It’s an interesting concept.  So all I have to do is go back and edit this essay, take out a few examples here and there that might come back to bite me, and I can’t be vilified.  (Did I forget to take out that Playboy-in-the-sock-drawer analogy, or the reference to Margaret Stanford?  Damn!  There goes my credibility on being opposed to pedophilia.).  Well, to my knowledge I’ve never deliberately raised the Earth’s temperature either, though my brother has a bar-b-que pit that does activate the NORAD missile launch warning system every time he cooks.  And I did eat dinner at his house last Sunday.  So I guess everybody should just forget about what I’ve said about Global Warming before.

And then again, maybe I won’t stop writing, and just risk being called a hypocrite. I refuse to be intimidated by Relativists who, like a gorilla throwing up chaff to confuse his enemies, introduce side-arguments and other distractions into a discussion to prevent the morally-correct decision from being reached.  I contend that Conservatives who speak about virtues but gamble in Las Vegas¹¹ aren’t hypocrites, as the Left suggest, even if they write a book about Virtues.  But Liberals — close cousins to and allies of the Relativists — are another case all together. 

Consider this example.  Liberals profess to care deeply about personal privacy.  They resist the notion of the government or anyone else “intruding into the bedroom,”¹² and insist that a person’s sexual orientation is no one’s business but their own.  Now ask a Liberal the following question: should society be compelled to change its laws and practices to accommodate one group’s public and/or private sexual orientation or preferences,¹³ even if the vast majority of the public does not want that law changed?   Here the Liberal wants the government to use sex as a determining factor in making law.  But since it’s for a “good” cause, it’s a good thing to do.  Restricting the rights of rapists and pedophiles is also a good thing, as long as the government doesn’t go too far. It's actions must not reflect any moral indignation at what the rapist/pedophile does, but instead must be based on purely letter-of-the-law legal considerations.  Think I’m making this up?  Then go have a look at the ACLU’s actions over the past 10 years.

If you’re still not convinced, ask a Liberal how many gay friends he has.  Chances are he can give you an exact number, not just a ballpark figure.  Then ask a Conservative.  If you’re like me, you say “I don’t know.”  I don’t make it a point to ask everyone I meet whether they’re straight or gay.  If I know it, it’s because they made that fact public knowledge, not because I tried to find out.  Respecting one’s privacy, to a Conservative, means just that.  Respecting privacy to a Liberal means taking active steps to make sure that proper diversity exists among their friends as well as the broader community, which means sticking their nose into as much personal business as they can to insure that the right mix of whatever characteristics they deem important (race, sex, sexual orientation, non-Judeo Christian religions, etc.), is showcased in their own life, and imposed on the rest of society. 

The true hypocrites are those who profess to respect the sacred right of privacy, while doing everything they can to violate it in the name of pursuing a favorite public policy objective.  It is not those who recognize a moral-based right from wrong, even though they aren’t perfect in adhering to these tenets in their own personal life.  So don’t be afraid to support what’s right, even if you don’t always do the right thing yourself in every situation.  The morally correct thing is still the morally correct thing regardless of how pure your own life is.

11.  Play ball!

All of which now allows us to take the discussion to the next level.  I contend that I (and anyone else for that matter) can identify right from wrong, or recognize the difference between fundamentally moral or immoral actions, regardless of my own individual character flaws.  This statement usually leads to the question:  “Who made you the moral arbiter of society?  Just because Phil Jackson says that something is wrong or immoral doesn’t make it so.”

I completely agree.  Unfortunately for the moral relativists, rather than putting me in my place, this statement bolsters my argument.  It goes back to a notion I touched on earlier.  Morality is not the creation of man.  It comes from God.

All those atheists reading this article may now raise their hands and leave the room, because it’s pointless to continue the debate with them.  I can’t make a case that Apollo 10 should have been given the green light to land on the moon instead of making one final practice run in advance of Apollo 11, if the guy I’m talking to is convinced the whole moon landing thing was a hoax.  If an atheist believes that nothing created the universe, and we cease to exist on any level once we die, then we have no common ground for a discussion.  He believes that the contents of my cat’s litter box has the same intrinsic value as he.  They both exist as the result of a natural process, and will both degrade back into their base elements at some future point in time.  Neither has any inherent value in its own right (i.e., a soul), though each does possess a set of different characteristics.  The turd can’t talk, but the atheist can spout sh*t, and that’s really the only thing that separates them when you look at this on a cosmic level.  Since the universe created itself, and man grew out of that creation, there is no role for God.  If there is no God, then there is no morality independent of what man himself creates.

I’m convinced that most atheists arrive at the conclusion that there is no God by confusing the concept of God with the practice of a specific religion.  If you don’t believe in the Holy Trinity, or that Jesus was the literal Son of God, then God literally doesn’t exist.  If all this Messiah business and the prohibition against eating pork is a bit too much for you to swallow, then God must not exist.  Or perhaps you think that Allah isn’t everything he’s cracked up to be?  Then you hope to God that you’re living in the U.S.A. instead of the Middle East so you can become an atheist, instead of becoming dead. 

But like the previous illustrations of hypocrisy and morality, we’ve got to keep our eye on the prize instead of being dazzled by all the twinkling lights.  In the final analysis it doesn’t make any difference if we “guessed” right about Jesus, Allah, Yahweh, the chubby little oriental guy the Dali Lama worships, or his lady friend with those waving arms and hands over there in India.  God either exists or he doesn’t, regardless of whether any individual religion got the details right or wrong.  The fact that the vast majority of Americans think that “alienation” is a foreign country does not mean that Karl Marx never existed, or that he starred in a movie with James Caan a few years back.  The same is true of science and God.  The fact that science is improving our understanding of how things work on earth and throughout the universe doesn’t mean that “figuring something out” must automatically translate into “God doesn’t exist.” 

In this respect, I’ve always marveled at the people on both sides of the question who reject or reinforce their belief in God based on the debate over human evolution.  Let’s say scientists in 2006 revamp a theory they used to explain the mechanics of evolution in 1976, which modified a theory from 1946, which replaced a theory from 1926, and so on, and so on.  Science “really doesn’t know,” so the Biblical story of Creation must be literally true; or at the very least, while plants and animals evolved over time, man was somehow exempt from these same natural forces.  On the other side are those individuals who, having discovered the secrets of DNA, understood the dynamics of plate tectonics, and have seen evidence of what they believe is physical change in the human species over time, automatically must deny the existence of God.  If man can understand it and, in certain cases replicate it, then that’s all there is to it.

I find both extremes equally ridiculous.  I know next to nothing about cars.  However, if I came across a disassembled one and, with some trial and error, was able to piece it together so as to understand the fundamental relationships of its constituent parts, it wouldn’t deny the existence of General Motors.  So I figured it out?  And even though I still don’t know what that little piece over there really does, I can start the thing and make it run.  I can even make predictions about its operation and functioning that are proven true, like an empty gas tank mean ‘it won’t go no mo.’  We call this knowledge.  The fact that I understand something doesn’t make me its creator.  It just makes me wiser.

Where atheist-scientists really get hung up is over the notion of random vs. purposeful actions.  God doesn’t exist because, having figured out how things work to a certain extent, we can see that one cause produces another effect.  There is no magical interference by an other-world entity, just random actions occurring within specifically defined laws of nature.¹⁴  Leaving aside the question for a moment of who, exactly, created those natural laws, the fact that I see something as random doesn’t necessarily mean that it is random. 

Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that I built a perpetual motion pool table sitting on top of a recurring earthquake fault.  The colliding balls go bouncing around this table in a complex, but somewhat predictable manner that, with patience and the help of a supercomputer, can be discerned.  But every time the table randomly shakes it upsets the old pattern and a new one emerges that has to be reanalyzed to be understood.  Since we don’t know when the random shaking will occur, we can’t really make anything other than some precise short-term predictions and a few general long-term ones.  In short, we understand the actions of these balls through the laws of nature that operate in a random environment, limiting overall predictability while still allowing fact-based conclusions to be drawn.  This is the world without God; lawful, predictable and explainable to a point, but ultimately random.

Except for one tiny detail that wasn’t explained.  Who set the balls in motion?  Why can’t God create a universe with immutable laws of physics, start things in motion, then sit back and not interfere?¹⁵  To some people, the progress of the universe may seem random.  Maybe it really is after things got started.  Then again, maybe it is developing according to a pre-set plan our human minds are incapable of grasping. 

I’m sure if you asked a two-year old to explain why daddy does the things he does, they’d either not understand at all, or think daddy’s actions are arbitrary or random.  “Hmmm, daddy dresses with this funny thing around his neck Monday through Friday, but not Saturday or Sunday.  But now he wears an open shirt every day (summer casual).  Now he’s back to the thing around his neck, but not on Fridays (Friday casual), but not this Friday (a board meeting so he’s in a suit), and he’s not wearing one on Monday (a holiday). And now he wears them every Monday through Friday even in the summer (new management), but now he’s not wearing it at all (a vacation), and now he’s wearing one on Sunday (a funeral).”  Would the child see a pattern, or understand any of the underlying dynamics of the father’s actions?  No.  The actions would appear to be completely random, just like it does to a human being who tries to think exactly like God.  There are some things you can “get,” and other things your human mind will never be able to truly understand.

For those of you who really want to explore this topic, I strongly suggest a book by my fiction-writing partner Roy Abraham Varghese.  In The Wonder of the World, Roy shows how the notion of an infinitely intelligent mind grounding the universe is not only compatible with, but presupposed by science.  Consequently, you don’t have to reject the existence of God because you reject a literal belief in a Garden of Eden or other so-called “creationist” dogma.  (As you read Roy’s brilliant work on this and other subjects, though, keep in mind that the only thing he and I collaborate on are works of fiction.  What I write here expresses my thoughts, not his, and may or may dovetail exactly with his understanding and analyses in every respect, and in every detail.)

I, personally, have always found the Bible to be a didactic rather than historical instrument.  That is, it teaches universal lessons as opposed to providing a literal, historic record of every event it addresses.  There’s nothing wrong with believing that the Bible or any other Holy Scripture is literally true, and there’s nothing wrong with believing that it’s a divinely-inspired metaphor for how to live your life.  It’s only when we get caught up in the side-debate of literal vs. symbolic that we lose sight of the prize — that at its core the Bible, Torah or Koran is supposed to be telling us something fundamental about how to live our lives.¹⁶ 

By this I mean, if your focus is primarily on finding the actual remnants of Noah’s Ark to prove it was a historic fact, rather than trying to understand what the message the Noah’s Ark story is attempting to convey, you risk missing the broader picture.  Thus, for me, the question isn’t how much of the world was actually inundated with water; which day the rain started and stopped; or how did all those animals really get onto the ark?  Even if I answer every one of these questions to my complete and utter satisfaction, it doesn’t tell me everything I need to know.  There’s still the question of how do we live our lives in relation to ourselves, our family, our friends, our community, the rest of the world, and to God — who gives us all the moral basis for making these decisions.

Which brings us back to the point that moral judgments of right or wrong do not come from man.  They come from God.

12.  Which came first — the Deity or the Religion?

We need to once again separate a discussion of religion from a discussion of God.  Religion fills in the details of life.  It gives us rules about eating pork and shellfish, abstaining from meat on Fridays, baptism, circumcision, marriage, divorce, lending money, spending money, and a whole host of other issues.  Some of these rules and regulations dovetail from one religion to another.  Jews and Christians share some of the same Bible, for example.  And Abraham and Jesus are seen as great prophets by Muslims.  Buddhists believe in doing good works for the poor just as Western and Middle Eastern religions do.  Does it really matter whether my day of worship is Friday, Saturday, or Sunday, if the common theme across these religions is setting aside time to give homage to God?  Even those who believe in an ethereal spirit that sweeps through the trees and lakes and brings us into harmony with the universe have their ceremonies and rituals, so there’s got to be more at work here in the perpetuation of religion than fat cat priests, rabbis and mullahs promoting their own interests by deceiving a gullible public.¹⁷

Looking at underlying principles, then, rather than the specific rituals and beliefs of each religion, we’ve got to stop and ask a simple question.  Is the entire world throughout history, except for those enlightened few atheists who know that we’re only talking cat turds who will fade into oblivion once we die, suffering from some kind of mass delusion?  Are we just more sophisticated versions of Neanderthal cave men who worshiped the sun to fill a void in their feeble minds, or Egyptians, Roman, Greeks or Mayans who created multiple gods to serve the same purpose?  Or does the very fact that we’re human, imbued with consciousness, self-awareness, and a soul, mean that we innately possess the ability to recognize morality — at least on a fundamental level.  In short, do we only know that raping and murdering a five-year old child is wrong on oh-so-many-levels because Plato, Oliver Cromwell, Abe Lincoln and a bunch of other law-givers throughout the ages each independently came to the same conclusion?  Is this action wrong because it violates eons and eons of coincidentally similar laws?  Or because it violates a notion of morality that transcends human decisions. 

If man is the only force behind this conclusion, then how do we explain the fact that literally every society, at every moment in history regardless of its location in the world, finds such actions morally repugnant?  Certainly there may be a few small, isolated pockets of humanity here and there who think that pedophiliac rape is just fine.  But we have a term for these examples when compared to all the other people who have ever lived in all the areas of the world: aberrant exceptions. 

If some things can be understood as intrinsically right or wrong, then the possibility exists that others can too.  It has not been my intention to catalogue each of these possibilities, but to focus instead on the question of whether an innate universal morality exists, and if so, can we know at least one of its central precepts.

I’ve offered my thoughts on both these questions, and tried to demonstrate why I came to the beliefs that I did.  The answer is yes on both counts, which leads to the third.  Where did this moral core come from?

This is where it gets tricky for Moral Relativists, and we can’t let them slither away by seeming to concede a point they never actually did.  Like an Oval Office meeting with Bill Clinton, everyone, on every side, comes away thinking that their point was embraced.  It is not sufficient for them to say now, “Well of course there’s a universal moral code that goes beyond George Bush and your SUV.  But does it really matter how it got there?  The important thing is to acknowledge that it exists, and must be followed by all good, decent people.”

You’re thinking, “Progress!”  I’m thinking, “Where’s my wallet?” 

Does it matter where it came from?  Of course it does!  It came from God at the moment of conception.  That’s a slightly different set of credentials than from your genes, man/society, The United States Supreme Court, or the United Nations.     

There’s more to this sleight of hand than a belief that Kofi Annan is the best guy to form a world consensus, or a fear that Bush will add another conservative to the Supreme Court and some of those magical rights will disappear.  Acknowledging God as the source of morality will not only bolster the case that life begins at conception, but it will do one other even more terrifying thing.  What, you ask, could be any more terrifying to Leftists and moral Relativists than a Conservative Supreme Court, or a third term in office for Bush? 

What about the little fact that in acknowledging God as the source of morality, they also have to acknowledge the existence of God.  And do you have any idea what a fact like that will do to the whole idea of Relativism in the first place!  It’s a little tough to equivocate on an important moral issue when the Big Guy’s no longer just a religious Easter Bunny, but the whole reason we talk about Easter itself.

God is a lot more than Easter, obviously.  As passionate as Christians are in their belief that they “got it right” in nailing the details of religion, there’s a bunch of other different religions out there too.  And what about their concept of God?  Aren’t their points of view equally valid?

I’m not going to get drawn into this conversation for two reasons. 

First, it’s another Relativistic trap.  Even though I write Catholic fiction with my partner Roy Varghese, I write a lot of other things too, none of which have to do with the tenets of the Catholic faith.  So be careful in this matter or any other of making a logical, but incorrect assumption.  Just because I sound like you, and think like you, doesn’t mean I’m really anything like you.  I may be in part, or in whole.  But I may not.  Just because I can conduct myself in a respectful, professional manner, doesn’t mean I can’t cuss a blue streak in private that will make a sailor blush.  That goes too for how I practice the tenets of my Faith.  Whether I attend Church every Sunday, only at Christmas and Easter, or never at all has nothing to do with whether the logic of what I’ve been saying stands or falls on its own merit.  Focus on the message and the logic that supports it, not necessarily the messenger. 

And second, while “God” and “religion” are two closely related topics, they are not identical, regardless of how universally-correct one believes his religion to be.  Discussing universally-shared moral values is not the same thing as discussing Christian beliefs vs. Muslim beliefs vs. Jewish beliefs, and so on.  Religion A may put forth a set of standards that differ from Religion B.  But underlying both, I contend, is a basic, intrinsically-understood moral foundation that helps tell us right from wrong in a given situation.  This means that certain options are always excluded, while other options may or may not be included, depending upon what each religion teaches.  And, as the Islamo-fascists have more than demonstrated, we also need to consider whether those teachings are being interpreted by honest, sincere people, or a group of self-righteous thugs. 

What defines proper action, therefore, may be circumscribed in one religion (Quakers and pacifism, for example), while no such limitation automatically exists in another religion.  In this case, the basic morality of the action is never in question, just how it is applied to real world examples.  On the other hand, a clearly immoral action (such as raping and murdering a five-year old child), can never be justified.  It isn’t that Religion A has different rules about this than Religion B, like Christians and Jews do about eating pork.  It’s that the action is absolutely prohibited regardless of which religion we discuss, be it Christian, Jew, Muslim, Buddhist, Druid, Coptic, or any other faith.  Universal principles of morality apply across the board.

This fact allows us to recognize the difference between an honest dispute over the proper interpretation of a moral code, and an action that is morally wrong but is justified or rationalized in allegedly-moral terms.  It’s not wrong because I don’t like it, or wrong because I grew up in America instead of Tunisia, or lived my life in Alabama instead of New York, or because I’m a female instead of a male.  It’s wrong because it is wrong, and all the rationalizations and justifications in the world won’t make a dime’s worth of difference in changing this fact.

Which leads me to two conclusions. 

Islamo-fascists are not misguided.  They are immoral.  And women who abort their child (and the men and women who support or encourage such actions) are not simply exercising a “right.”  They are participating in the immoral killing of an innocent human being.

13.  I’ll trade you one Osama for Two Hitlers, and a Stalin to be named later.

Let me start with the relatively easy example (post-natal killing), and work back to the supposedly less obvious one (pre-natal killing), to support my contention.

Now, Osama and his buddies didn’t come to the notion that all Infidels must die by sitting around the camel droppings in the caves of Afghanistan while trying to come up with a way to amuse themselves one Saturday night.  Instead, they found their justification in a 14th-century understanding of Koranic morality, much like King Richard decided to rid the world of non-believers at the same point in Christianity’s intellectual development.  Only he didn’t have access to a fleet of 747s, or the capacity to set off a nuclear bomb. 

There are enough religious Muslims who don’t interpret morality this way to demonstrate that we are dealing here with a self-justifying rationalization disguised as morality, rather than a supposedly core moral principle of “kill all Infidels, especially the Jews.”  I just wish these good Muslims would be a little more vocal in taking back their religion of peace from the whack jobs who define it today, instead of quietly lamenting the radicals’ actions while reserving their most vocal protests for anyone who describes the present world-wide conflict as a “War on Islamo-Fascism,” instead of some other benign, politically-correct label.

But then again, in a morally-relative world, words count as much as actions, maybe even more so.  And in that world morality is the underpinning of all principles, except when they get in the way of a political objective.  Then they become “fungible,” a favorite term I picked up from my MBA buddies.  A little nip here and a little tuck there and “defense” become “aggression,” and “justice” becomes “retribution,” or vice versa depending upon the cause you want to support. Throw in a phrase or two about “fairness” or “doing it for the children,” and you can turn a disgruntled parent’s objection to the Pledge of Allegiance into a new civil right.  Or in the case of Islamo-fascist terrorism, you can turn a policy designed to exterminate a race into a shining example of cultural pride.

I thought naively at one point, before I started to think seriously about this issue, that surely everyone can agree that lobbing missiles across an internationally-recognized border to indiscriminately kill innocent civilians is wrong.  That is, unless you’re Reuters, who won’t label a terrorist a “terrorist” because that would impose a culturally-inappropriate moral judgment on the actions of these barbarians, or CNN which somehow forgets to disclaim that its independent tour highlighting “civilian” casualties caused by an Israeli air strike was completely controlled by the non-terrorist terrorists who are lobbing their missiles at Israeli population centers.

One man’s terrorist is not another man’s freedom fighter, regardless of what conventional wisdom says.¹⁸  It’s not a matter of being a Christian or Jew, Muslim or Buddhist, agnostic or pagan.  Certain simple truths transcend every race, religion and culture.  They may be expressed differently, or carry additional rules and regulations unique to a certain group of people, but at its core they are all the same.  In a freely elected representative republic or some other form of genuine constitutional government, individuals can be executed for their crimes, wars can be declared against other nations or hostile forces, and property can be confiscated against the landowner’s wishes.  We may, as individuals, disagree with our elected representative’s decisions to execute murders or attack our overseas enemies, and we may wonder what convoluted reasoning led to a Supreme Court decision that seizes Aunt Maude’s home so a budding Donald Trump can build his new shopping center. 

Our opposition may be visceral (if Bush is for it, I’m ‘agin it.).  Or it may be based on our literal understanding of a book written in Hebrew and Greek and then translated into English centuries later, where it now reads in English ‘thou shall not kill’ under any circumstances, instead of ‘thou shall not murder’ under any circumstances.  That little change in wording I first heard mentioned by Dennis Prager carries great implications, and is the source of much honest debate over how to properly interpret this moral edict.  This is America, and it’s all right to frame the issue either way, depending upon one’s own personal view of things.  These competing ideas fight it out in the arena of politics when we debate executing certain criminals, or putting an end to bellicose Middle Eastern tin-horn dictatorships.  There is no intrinsically right or wrong decision on such matters, because a perfectly reasonable moral justification can be made for either policy: all killing is wrong, or only murder is wrong.  It becomes a debate between (a) the state never taking a life under any circumstances, or (b) the state taking a life only when certain objective conditions are met. 

However, it is not a debate between when the state is permitted to kill, and the alternative philosophy that killing is okay anytime the state or an individual feels like it.  Even those who give the state wide latitude to execute a criminal or conduct a war never condone random, individual acts of murder.  Break into my house, and the state of Texas gives me the right to exercise deadly force.  Play your stereo too loud next door, or throw garbage on my neatly manicured lawn, or look at me funny while I’m walking down the street and I don’t have the right to kill you.  Never, nada, nunca.  It isn’t a matter of defining the proper moral guidelines for killing someone who pisses you off, gets in your way, disrespects your lawn, looks at you funny, or just plain exists.  It’s never right for an individual (or the state) to do this. 

Self-defense and protecting one’s home from intruders is not a random, petulant act of murder by one individual against another.  It is a de facto authorization by a Constitutionally-elected, representative government to fight the evil that invades your domain.  It is an evil that, by its very presence in your house if not its overt actions, threatens your personal well-being or that of your family.  Only the most facile, morally-equivalent proponent would argue that since both examples involve individuals, and both examples involve death, they are morally the same.  May I remind these folks that we already talked about the difference between walking off with a ream of paper from the office storeroom, and stealing a boatload of cash to escape to Tahiti.

All this, of course, presupposes that there is a God-given universal notion of what constitutes moral actions, and what doesn’t.  In this view, God sets morality; man merely debates its practical implementation.  Man may make laws that are morally repugnant (slavery is permitted), morally just (slavery is abolished), or morally neutral (no right turn on red).  But man cannot make his own morality.  He acts in accordance with, or in conflict to, the rights God bestows upon us through these universal moral precepts.  But he doesn’t create a new moral code by signing a piece of legislation into law.

The inherent proof of this concept becomes even clearer when we look at immoral acts as well as moral ones.   Honest people may disagree about how to act morally in a given situation.  Even though they come to different decisions, there is nothing necessarily immoral about absolute pacifism, even if it allows evil to flourish so that one day others will have to fight it.  Nor is eye-for-eye justice inherently immoral when it is administered through a lawful, democratic state acting in a lawful, democratic manner.   Each carries with it both positive and negative policy outcomes, since life isn’t a simple game of good intentions always producing good results.  The phrase “no good deed goes unpunished” doesn’t suggest that we all forego helping others and think only about ourselves.  It merely reminds us that doing what is right may sometimes give you grief.  Ask Abe Lincoln about the venomous personal attacks he suffered while keeping the nation together during the Civil War, or George Bush about the drumbeat of left-wing scorn he receives daily for fighting the forces of Islamic fascism.

The truly interesting thing about God-given morality is that even individuals and dictatorial governments who act in the most outrageous, barbaric manner — and who may even reject the notion of a universal morality — still end up drawing their guidance from these same moral principles.  Anarchists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries who rejected all social norms and set off bombs that killed hundreds of innocent people, nevertheless did not believe that they should settle disputes among themselves by just getting up and shooting the other guy.  It’s one thing to set off a bomb that kills Mary Jane and her little daughter Alice who happened to be walking by, and another to pull the trigger on Comrade Serge because his definition of “alienation and the means of production” differs slightly from yours.  You may ridicule and belittle him, and in extreme cases kick him out of the collective, but he doesn’t deserve to die.  Mary Jane and her daughter on the other hand, by refusing to join the revolution, have in essence allied themselves with the evil bourgeois forces that make life miserable for the ancestors of future Wal-Mart employees.  According to this convoluted logic, they are part of the problem.  And we all know what one does when faced with a problem; we eliminate it.  So it’s their own fault they died.  

Rationalizing immorality doesn’t make it go away, however.  Nor does acting in a marginally-moral way get you completely off the hook.  If Mary Jane ignored warnings that a bomb would go off at destination X, or was wandering through a military base that came under attack, or was killed accidentally by a terror bomb that missed its target, she’s still just as dead.  But the guy who pulled the trigger has a small moral leg to stand on, even if it is a wobbly one, since he didn’t intend for clearly innocent people to die.  But he did act recklessly enough so that innocent people could find themselves in danger very easily, and he’ll need to explain this one day to the police who hunt him down, and then at a later date to the God who created him. 

Moral Relativists will try to draw a parallel here between Palestinian terrorists firing rockets indiscriminately into Israeli population centers, and Israeli air strikes killing innocent women and children.  But these are false comparisons.  It is one thing to shoot deliberately into a crowd of non-combatants hoping to kill them, and quite another to unintentionally kill a civilian who ignores advance warnings to leave a combat zone, or allows terrorists to shoot rockets from his rooftop at innocent women and children.¹⁹

Not caring whether innocent civilians die or not to further your political or religious objective is always morally wrong, no matter how it is rationalized.  Even Osama cautioned Zarquai to stop blowing up other Muslims because it didn’t seem like the right thing to do.  This wasn’t a tactical issue to save human lives.  Had the streets been filled with Jews or Americans, it would have been open season on the Infidels regardless of the age or gender since they are the enemy.  Not just soldiers, but all non-believers.  An Infidel woman and her five-year old child aren’t “innocent” in the eyes of the terrorists.  They represent a potential threat to the Islamo-fascists’ interpretation of Islam because in their rationalized view, God tells them to exterminate all non-believers. 

It’s a sick interpretation of the Koran, and anyone without a broken moral compass can clearly see it.  Those perpetrating the carnage against Infidels may sincerely believe they are doing God’s work, but this doesn’t make it any less of a rationalization.  The concept of “threat” to the Islamo-Fascists themselves, or to the Word of God they are trying to protect, is so broad as to be meaningless.  Again it’s one thing to shoot a potential threat who breaks into your home, and another to use a high-powered rifle to blow the head off a Jewish mother sitting in a nearby park playing with her baby because you deem her very existence a “threat” to your religion. 

But even a mind capable of rationalizing this “threat” won’t rationalize completely indiscriminate killing.  There is always a line drawn somewhere which, if crossed, makes the action intrinsically bad.  As Osama and others²⁰ tried to tell Zarquai, killing your own kind somehow just doesn’t seem ‘right.’  It’s not just that it backfires tactically, which is a legitimate, practical consideration.  As the previous footnote explains, the main rationale for counseling against this action involves much more than tactics.  It is framed in pseudo-moral and religious terms. 

That Islamo-fascists distort the notion of a moral prohibition against killing innocent people so they can kill indiscriminately is a side issue in this discussion, however. The main point is that even when committing unspeakable acts of brutality, these same people feel the need to seek a moral justification that excuses that behavior.  It is a moral justification grounded in their interpretation of Islamic law, which they believe accurately reflects God’s code of morality for man.  This need to justify even unspeakable acts in the name of a higher moral authority reinforces the central, timeless, all-pervasive role this innate moral code has on human action.  One can ignore it, distort it, suppress it, or deny that it exists all together.  But in the end this common moral code is still the measurement by which individual humans take satisfaction in, or explain-away their actions.  When even Osama Bin Laden and other radical clerics can see that unrestrained slaughter is morally indefensible — which is to say, morally “wrong” –  then you’ve got to figure that anyone can recognize this as a universal principle if they really want to see it.

14. Innocent is as Innocent does

So what does this all lead to?  It’s too facile to say that the world is filled with good and bad people who use or misuse universally accepted notions of morality to reinforce and/or justify their actions. 

Despite any lingering objections from moral relativists who see no difference between the actions of George Bush and Osama Bin Laden, or who equate the actions of Islamo-fascists terrorists deliberately targeting Israeli civilians with the unintended death of a Lebanese civilian who allowed his house to be used as a rocket-launching station, I think it’s pretty clear to everyone that killing people because they don’t worship your God is, well, wrong.  Not kind-of-wrong, or a little misguided, or the product of a different cultural view of the world, but totally, completely, and unmitigatedly wrong!  This is indeed a moral judgment.  It is not just one man’s private, personal opinion, but a reflection of the inherent truthfulness of this universal, God-given principle that we must all show a basic respect for innocent human life.

Which leads me to the killing of another form of innocent human life.  We know that in-utero infanticide (pardon me, I mean the exercise of “a Woman’s Right to Choose”) is a universal truth enshrined somewhere in The Constitution.  Just don’t look too hard for the actual words, because they’re bundled inside the Constitutional Right to Privacy, which, er, is also a little difficult to point directly to.  But that shouldn’t be too much of a worry.  After all privacy, by it’s very nature, likes to keep the shades drawn and hide from the limelight, so we’ll just all have to accept the fact that it’s really there, even though no one can actually see it.  Like the proverbial little old lady who triple locks her door and only opens it a crack to let the local Meals on Wheels volunteer slip her a daily hot meal, we know that she really exists because, well, why would we be delivering food to her door if she didn’t?  So too it is with the Right to Abortion, which derives from the Right to Privacy, which comes to us from our basic Constitutional Rights. 

That’s three “Rights,” so it must be a pretty compelling argument.  Compelling, that is, until we ask what is the foundation of these rights?  Yeah sure the Constitution was built on Judeo-Christian values, but in recent years the Supreme Court and our friendly neighborhood Liberals have made it pretty clear that The Declaration of Independence, which speaks about some kind of Creator who bestows God-given rights, is not The Constitution, which expressly insists on the separation of Church and State.  Well, it doesn’t “expressly forbid” that, because like the Right to Privacy, you won’t really find those words anyplace inside it.  But the government can’t establish an official religion, and a lot of you folks keep talking about Jesus, so that automatically means God does not exist in so far as the U.S. government is concerned.  His name may be on our currency, and the Ten Commandments may be etched into the walls of the High Court itself, but those are just cultural manifestations not religious edicts.  God doesn’t make the laws of the United States or have anything to do with that process.  That’s “settled law,” as Chuck Schumer would say, and not subject to debate.

Okay then.  The Right to Choose is a man-made right, and has absolutely nothing to do with morality.  It draws no strength from any connection to an intrinsic notion of “right” vs. “wrong,” but instead finds its grounding in the concept of privacy and fairness.  But privacy and fairness have meant different things to different people throughout time and throughout the world.  These differences are neutral in terms of any discussion of morality or justice, unless they specifically impinge upon a basic issue of morality or justice.  “Fairness,” like “privacy,” is a culturally-based, temporally-ephemeral concept.  Morality isn’t.

So let’s do the math and evaluate how a man-made “Right to Choose” holds up against a God-given foundation of morality.  Specifically, we need to ask the question: “by what justification does an individual have the right to take another individual’s life without the state first making that decision through due process, a trial, appeals, and then an order of execution signed by the proper legal authorities?”

The first thing that strikes me about the abortion debate is the proposition that a state-created “Woman’s Right to Choose” automatically trumps the God-given human rights of a healthy, living twenty-week old fetus attached to her womb.  I will admit that the idea of another life form growing inside you is kind of creepy when you think about it, like some scene out of the movie Alien where this foreign creature attaches itself to the host and distends its body.  That is, until you realize that nine months later what comes out of a pregnant woman’s body isn’t a tentacle-waving monster with sharp fangs and acid coursing through its veins, but a little human being. 

But hey, the child-bearer has rights too.  I’m sure not every woman asked to get pregnant, or can afford to have another kid and still pay the rent, not to mention what it might do to her career prospects while she carries the little booger for nine months and then has to care for it after it’s born.  Besides, a lot of people think this world is so crummy that no one in their right mind would want to be born into it, even though as current residents of planet Earth they aren’t thinking about putting a gun barrel in their own mouth and pulling the trigger to hasten their own departure.

Even so, the reasoning goes, we need to do what’s in the best interest of all parties; that is, mother and undifferentiated tissue mass.  So, we kill the kid (I mean, “choose” option A instead of option B).  There’s no need to agonize over this decision, since that thing — whatever it is — isn’t really human . . . yet.  A seed isn’t a tree, just like a zygote isn’t a little boy or girl.  Perfect analogy.  Perfect justification. 

Perfect crap. 

It’s this pseudo-moralistic legerdemain that I find the most repulsive.  Except for permitting abortion, I can’t think of a single case in history where society has sanctioned an individual, not the state, with the right to arbitrarily end another individual’s life.  No trial or due process, not even a stated “reason” is needed, just a quick trip to the Planned Parenthood clinic and a stitch or two here and there, and then let the nurses dump the residue in a biohazard container.  The right to defend yourself in your own home isn’t even a universal right within this country.  And where such laws exist, a variety of different rules exist.  In some states you must use non-violent resistance first, or attempt to run away.  In others you must meet different standards of threat before deadly force can be used.  In Texas, if someone enters your house uninvited you’re limited to reloading twice if it’s a fully automatic weapon, or using nothing larger than a shoulder-fired rocket launcher if your 7.62 mm GAU gatling gun jams before you run out of ammunition.  (It’s a joke for those of you who prefer only 9 Bill of Rights instead of the full 10.  But it does explain why Texas and some other Southern states have relatively few home invasions and car jackings compared to more "progressive" states.) 

But try as they might to render any discussion of God irrelevant in the making of moral laws, and deny that a higher morality trumps their man-bestowed permission to take a human life, it is clear by their actions that abortion proponents don’t actually believe their own rhetoric.  Even those who deny the existence of God all together, as opposed to those who merely say He’s irrelevant to this conversation, feel the need to justify their actions on the basis of universally-accepted moral values. 

So how do they get around the dilemma of acting morally while killing innocent human life?  Easy. 

They simply announce that contrary to common sense, it’s not really a human life after all. 

The undifferentiated tissue mass may have grown in a few weeks to resemble a human being, but it can’t live life on its own.  So ipso facto and whatever other appropriate legal lingo they need to produce, it’s not really a child . . . yet.  (Note to file: Update my living will so the grandkids don’t automatically ship me off to the organ-donor farm if I’m temporarily unconscious and can’t feed myself, or need a respirator to breathe because I have a serious case of pneumonia.  Killing me off may be logically seen as a post-natal abortion because I can’t eat or breathe on my own, but I may not be quite ready to go yet.) 

But what if that little booger growing inside her tummy survives for 7-8 months, and she discovers at this point that she needs an abortion for health reasons?  (Note to file, this time from abortion advocates: Make sure that no one substitutes the phrase “save her life” for “health,” because as we all know a healthy mental attitude about yourself is just as important as your physical health.  The fact that you may not die if you have the child shouldn’t prohibit you from killing it if your mental state needs a boost.  It would be too traumatic to give your child (or whatever that thing is inside you) up for adoption.  You’d go crazy wondering where it was and how it was doing.  Better to kill it now so you’ll have closure, and you can get on with your life.)

Which leads us to the most despicable logic of all. 

Assuming that a woman exercises her [wo]man-given right to end her pregnancy just before the twentieth week, what happens if once the thing comes out of her it starts breathing on its own when it’s not supposed to?  Some people might actually think that aborted fetus is a baby!  This poor woman would certainly get in trouble if she had her doctor kill it, like happened a few years back.  She came into the clinic for an abortion, not eighteen-plus years of raising a child or a lifetime of personal misery after giving it up for adoption.  That thing is supposed to be dead, not wiggling around like some little human being.

Which explains why partial-birth abortion is so necessary to preserving the “right to choose.”  And why it is fought for so hard by abortion advocates when a less draconian procedure would still abort the fetus.

No brain.  No breathing.  No bother.

15. A rose is a rose is an apple

Like that little voice inside your head that always tells you what’s right or wrong despite your protestations to the contrary, abortion advocates and practitioners know they’re killing an actual human being, not just getting rid of unwanted tissue that some day might magically transform itself into a baby.  They take great steps to rationalize-away or redefine its human qualities, not to win a political debate, but to ease their conscience.  The fact that Arlen Specter thinks that thing inside a woman’s belly is a lump of tissue Monday, but a little human Tuesday, all because she reached some arbitrary date on the calendar, would be laughable if it wasn’t so tragic. 

The need to explain away a developing child’s humanity is the very thing that shows us that it’s human.  I’ve never been under any illusion about what ends up after the gestation cycle is completed for cow, a dog, a horse, or even a Wooly Mammoth.  And they’ve been extinct for almost 10,000 years!  So why is it such a mystery that intercourse between a human man and human woman produces a human child?

It’s precisely because it’s not a mystery that they need to say that it’s not really a baby they’re killing.  That is, yet.  Wait another twenty-four hours and we’ll charge you with a crime, but for now you and you alone — with no due process, and no trial, and no rights at all assigned to that, well, that! — can terminate its life.  This doesn’t convince anyone who is looking for a real answer to when human life begins.  But it does advance a political agenda at the expense of the tissue mass under discussion, and will hopefully help the ex-mother-to-be sleep better at night because she isn’t really an ex-mother after all, just twelve ounces lighter. 

I can call a tree anything I want — a “couch,” a “rock,” a “cloud,” or make up something out of whole cloth.  It doesn’t change the fact that it’s still a tree.  That lump of tissue sucked out of a tube and into a sink wasn’t a cyst, or a tumor, or excess fatty tissue.  It was the son or daughter you’ll never know, because you have a man-made “Right” that a minimum of five justices on the Supreme Court gave you.

For those who focus their justification on seeds instead of trees to draw a line between potential and actual humans, it is true that a seed is not a tree until it is planted and grows.  But on the other hand, you can water a rock or brick or bicycle seat all you want, and it will never spring roots and grow branches.  So potential does count for something. 

And may I further point out that whether the object in question is a tiny seed or full grown tree, no matter how long it grows it will never be a person.  I would no more judge the value of a zygote inside a woman’s womb by asking it to quote poetry, feed itself, or speak a coherent sentence, thus “proving” it was human, than I would ask a Liberal to string together several sentences of coherent, non-contradictory thoughts to justify his/her vote before casting their ballot.  Both actions would be equally pointless, and end up proving nothing.

That little bundle of cells may just be a developing human being, but it is still human.  Killing it while it’s helpless is no different than putting a pillow over granny’s face and then justifying your action because she’s bedridden and her mind has deteriorated, although she is still very much alive.  Granny can’t care for herself any better than an embryo, but her innocent life isn’t a right bestowed by the state to be taken away by one individual’s arbitrary decision.  Neither should the developing child be subjected to the same callous treatment.  And should anyone tell you that the difference between Granny and a zygote is that Granny was born, and this gave her Constitutional Rights, may I ask when Terry Schiavo reverted back to a small clump of cells?  Only Relativist logic assigns value to a human based on their perceived stage of “worthiness” to live.  

Morality is not a matter of personal choice, like preferring strawberry over vanilla ice cream, or to give an example of something more serious, choosing an educated, goal-oriented mate to spend the rest of your life with, instead of some drug-dependent reprobate.  This is even clearer when a value judgment is involved.  Because I say a developing fetus at 19 weeks isn’t “completely human” doesn’t make it a tumor with a neo-natal brain.  It makes the person uttering that statement a self-centered opportunist who would rather kill a developing child for economic (a baby will drag down my standard of living), political (I have the Right and I intend to use it), professional (I don’t see many senior partners in maternity outfits), health (no my life isn’t in danger if I give birth, but it will make me depressed), or other personal reasons like vanity, inconvenience, embarrassment at being pregnant, or the worst, most self-centered reason of all (I’d go crazy if I gave it up for adoption, so I’ll just end the pregnancy). 

I believe that this last reason is the major driving force behind most elective abortions.  I base this on the frequent reply from Feminist Defenders of the Right that it’s easy for a man to tell a woman she has to give birth because HE can never become pregnant.  That’s correct.  He can only support it financially and emotionally for the remainder of his life through voluntarily accepting that responsibility if the child is his own, through court-ordered child support if he shirks his responsibility, or if the baby isn’t his, through the increased costs paid by his taxes for all the schools, community healthcare, roads, buildings and other infrastructure additions needed to take care of 50 million or so no longer dead babies.

Of course, he can also adopt the child if it isn’t his, as many in the Right to Life movement, or just plain old public in general, have volunteered to do.  If you think this is only a hypothetical option that I’ve thrown in to make a point, give a call to a local adoption agency and see how long the waiting list is.  Couples aren’t routinely flying to Romania, Croatia, Korea, Guatemala, and hundreds of other places around the globe to bring back a baby just because they’re looking to boost their Advantage miles, or see if Belgrade is really everything it’s said to be in the dead of winter. 

And yes, white couples will adopt a black child (as will other black couples!), so let’s not play the race card here to justify this despicable practice by suggesting that ending elective abortions will only benefit white women because no one will want to adopt a black baby.  If the anecdotal evidence of pointing to actual examples of such adoptions doesn’t convince you, consider that the same people making this charge have also said that AIDS and crack cocaine are a white man’s plot to kill black people, and that George Bush blew a hole in the New Orleans levees to kill the ones he missed with AIDS and crack cocaine.  So why would the same people who planned this genocide want to increase the black population by ending elective abortions?  

That’s the difficult thing about a Relativistic analysis.  What’s a good argument to support one position may contradict the logic of another objective you want to pursue.  For people who reach their conclusion first, and then pull whatever sentence fragments together they can to support it, it doesn’t present a problem when pursuing another goal would contradict that logic.  You just wipe the slate clean and start thinking anew.  Each decision has its own logic tree, and like trees in a forest, they may be packed tightly together, but each has its own root system.  Topple one tree and the other trees still stand because each tree — each rationale — is a world unto itself.

If we’re looking for truth instead of an excuse, we can’t start our search with a conclusion.  We need to start every new inquiry with an open, honest question.  If the information we gather conflicts with our current understanding of the world, the conflict must be reconciled, not rationalized away.  I say “must” because I presume that each of us, ultimately, is seeking the truth of whatever matter we’re examining.  For those who believe there are no universal truths, or that truth is relative, or that all points are equally valid, the only thing required is a glib tongue or a good lawyer to get you what you want.  No amount of argument, no amount of evidence, no amount of persuasion will get someone like this to change their mind if the logic of an issue conflicts with their desires.

This self-delusion or duplicity doesn’t matter when the issue is benign.  But when a life lies in the balance, and you hold the key to whether it will live to ever see its first birthday, or just live past next Tuesday, you have a responsibility to make sure you do the right thing.  And making judgments about its presumed quality of its life, or deciding that one method of conception would have let it live but another method of conception means that it must die, is the same kind of decision we usually ascribe to former Western European dictators and current Middle East terrorists.  It’s arbitrary, it’s callous, and it’s justified by the belief that some human beings deserve to live because of who and what they are, and other human beings do not.

Which brings us to the matter of pregnancy through rape or incest.

I can hardly imagine a more horrifying situation than becoming pregnant from the sexual abuse of a parent or close relative, and then carrying that child to term.  The trauma of the abuse.  Nine months of pre-natal care.  Waking up every day and seeing your body change shape and form as the child develops.  And the shame and humiliation of everyone knowing how you became pregnant.  How long will counseling be needed after giving birth in addition to the pregnancy?  Will having to live with the memory of the rape or incest every day during the pregnancy cause even more severe mental problems that will require a lifetime of therapy?  And even though the circumstances of the conception were horrible enough, how will it feel to give birth and then have the baby taken away?  Will you think of that baby every time you see a child its age?  Will this bring back painful memories, or even bring on a confusing guilt at having given up your child for adoption?

These are not mere “inconveniences,” or personal vanity, and I would never treat them as such in any analysis.  But as difficult and unfair as they are, I ask you now to shift your perspective a bit and consider all this from the point of view of the developing baby.  Why does it deserve to die because it was conceived through incest, or rape by a stranger, or any one of a number of unwanted ways?  If I found out today, through a genealogical search, that my great, great grandmother was raped, and that’s how my great grandfather was conceived, would it render all of his life’s accomplishments meaningless?  Not to mention the fact that I wouldn’t be here to contemplate the question if he had been aborted!  What about the people around me?  Can I tell whose genetics are “pure” and whose aren’t?  And if I could, would it really make a difference in how I treat them, or what jobs and education they could have, or whether they deserved to live in the first place? 

Only by defining the fetus as something less than human can we use all sorts of Relativistic rationalizations to decide the fate of an innocent child.  Until the day comes that we can look at the genetic makeup of a child inside a woman’s body and know that it will grow up to murder, steal, beat their kids, burn down a neighbor’s house, or vote for the wrong political party, what right do we as individuals have to become judge, jury and executioner of an innocent life?  The rapist who impregnated the woman, or the father who molested his own daughter, are the criminals who deserve to pay for this crime.  Not the innocent child developing in the womb.

The fact that a child is inside a woman’s body does not automatically signify a “Right.”  It’s just a simple fact of biology.  If controlling one’s body was a “Right,” then it would apply to both men and women who use drugs in the privacy of their own home.  But we outlaw many kinds of drugs, and except for college kids and a few twenty-nine-year olds who have convinced themselves they have glaucoma, no one is demanding this right. 

Nor are women leading the charge for legalized prostitution.  It’s their body.  It should be their right to decide what to do with it.  But the same women’s organizations who apply the “it’s our body” logic would be at the ramparts defending the community if a bordello was to open up in their neighborhood.  Even one owned and run entirely by women, so there are no men to exploit the use of their bodies.  Why then is abortion a sacred Right, but other issues involving a woman’s body aren’t?

The answer is obvious.  The Right to Choose is the rationale to support a decision to permit abortion on demand.  It’s a tactic disguised as a principle.  If the same rationale was used to support prostitution, we could argue about whether legal, across-the-board prostitution produces any number of “good” or “bad” consequences.  And we could rationalize our positions all we want without fear of condemnation.  Why, because unless someone is prepared to write another 30,000 words illustrating why prostitution is a subset of rape and murder, or will harm an innocent life, the case hasn’t been made that it violates a fundamental moral principle.  

If the prostitution is coerced, it does.  I can argue clearly that human slavery violates the moral code not to harm an innocent life, and forced prostitution would be an example of this.  But if Sally Jo wants to sell her body for sex, and the law permits it, then she hasn’t done anything that is fundamentally morally wrong.  She may violate the morality expressed by a particular religion, and in this case said to “harm” herself in a spiritual way.  But it’s “harm an innocent life,” not just one group’s definition of metaphysical harm, that speaks to a universal moral value.  If I won’t let Karl Marx tell me I’m “harmed” by alienating myself from the means of production, or I won’t let an Islamo-fascist tell my wife she’s “harmed” because she works, drives a car, or won’t cover her face in public, then why should I let any religious code — no matter how well intended and even if I support it — define that term for everyone in the country? 

Like everyone else in America, people are free to promote morality as they see it through the passage of laws that do not conflict with the U.S. Constitution.  Forty-nine out of fifty states agreed with their assessment on prostitution.  But this does not mean that prostitution is therefore recognized as a fundamentally moral issue.  It simply means that it’s against man’s law everywhere except the state of Nevada. 

We can’t deceive ourselves into thinking that we are addressing a fundamental moral value when, in fact, it may simply be a logical moral conclusion based on the tenets of one’s faith.  I’ll eat all the cheeseburgers and shellfish I want without feeling a twang of moral guilt, but an orthodox Jew would see things very differently.  And though I may have a glass of wine while I’m sitting at home watching reruns of Barney Miller, the Muslim next door and the Mormon up the street would find such behavior immoral. 

If you’ve ever seen photographs of temples in India, know anything about Middle Eastern history or heard of a book called the Kama Sutra, you’ll understand that not all people see sex and prostitution in the same way.  This doesn’t make them “wrong” and others “right,” just like drinking a glass of wine at night doesn’t mean that I’m destined for the Seventh Level of Hell if I don’t straighten up.  Now take that same glass of wine, put it in a can marked “Jesus Juice” and give it to a little kid to ease his inhibitions, or hop in the car while you’re too drunk to drive, and it’s a whole different ballgame.  The moral code has been activated.  Why, because like drinking, assigning fundamental moral disapproval to prostitution depends on a wide variety of factors, the foremost of which is whether it’s voluntary or coerced.

So, if I wouldn’t let Uncle Karl tell me that capitalism produces wage slavery, ergo capitalism is inherently immoral, I can’t very well conclude that prostitution is inherently immoral.  My religion may condemn it (or it may not), and even though it may be voluntary, there are a wide variety of self-destructive activities that may accompany it that starts the moral compass turning, but until that critical mass is reached we need to call something exactly what it is: a preference.  A preference based on a set of religious teachings rather than my own personal wishes, but a preference that is not universally held throughout the world. 

All of which leads to an interesting observation.

The Women’s Movement may have been on to something after all when they talked about a “Woman’s Right.”  Only they got the details wrong, because they started with a conclusion and worked their way backwards.  This is how they can hold a position that prostitution is immoral, but aborting a 19-week old developing human being is just a matter of “Choice.”

I am not arguing that we should swap out “Copulation” for “Choice” when discussing women’s rights — although I could make a case for the “Right to Conceive” as a basic human right, since that is a genuine right many women are denied in China through the state’s policy of forced abortions.  All I am saying is that whether or not to allow voluntary prostitution in America or anywhere else is a legal issue, not a fundamentally moral one.  If certain groups believe that prostitution violates an important tenet of the moral code (i.e. do no “harm”), then they should do what all other people do who arrive at this same conclusion.  As individuals, they should not patronize prostitutes.

But unless this definition of “harm” is intuitive to the rest of humanity the way child rape and murder is, then well-intentioned people face a logical dilemma.  If a religion, a group of people, or even one individual disagree with this assessment, then what right does any group have to “harm” another by forcing them to do good as they see it, instead of as it is intuitively understood in the universal moral code?  Marx knew what was best for others, and his followers imposed that philosophy on over a billion people.  The Islamo-fascists also know, and are attempting to do the same by a different means, just as countless other groups have done throughout history. 

Imposing a judgment on other people is clearly wrong.  Promoting moral acts is clearly right.  But what about imposing morality on other people who clearly violate the moral code?  Is it right to force these people to change their immoral actions?

Relativists are about to have a field day with my answer, because it looks like I’m about to contradict everything I’ve written.  The answer is yes . . . and no.

Let me explain.  Stopping a murder from taking place, saving an innocent child from horrifying physical abuse, both these things are clearly immoral, and demand action.  Not letter-to-the-editor action, or “I’ll call the police when my movie is over action,” but direct, immediate intervention.  Stop the murder, save the child either by calling the police, or taking action yourself.

But what about an elective abortion?  It’s just as evil, and the human being is just as dead.  But if you remember, I said that I don’t have either the moral or legal right to prevent an abortion from taking place, or to otherwise harass an individual about their decision.  I can, and should, seek opportunities to educate, inform, and explain why it is wrong, just like I am doing now.  But if the woman won’t change her mind, I won’t force her to save the child.  Rather, it becomes an issue between her and God, and I’m no longer part of that equation.

I don’t do this because I’m a coward, or a hypocrite, or don’t want to get my hands dirty actually doing the things I write about.  I do it for the same reason I recognize the existence of a universal moral code, and just as importantly, recognize where that code came from.

A few paragraphs will set the stage so I can outline the logic of my position.

We live in a constitutional democracy that is governed by the legitimate rule of law.  But we also live in an imperfect world where injustice and immorality exist, because in this world everyone has a God-given free will to make choices. 

Free will gives us the ability to apply reason to all our decisions.  A common moral code exists to help guide those actions, both in terms of how we live our own lives, and how we react to the evil around us.  The desire to stop a woman from having an abortion must be balanced against that woman’s individual free will.  All moral people have an obligation to educate a woman contemplating an abortion to help re-connect her thinking with the common moral code, not to harass her.  Education can mean counseling, writing as I am doing now, putting up billboards, peaceful protests and picketing to show non-threatening disapproval and cause her to re-think her decision, and a variety of other methods. 

When these educating actions succeed and a pregnant woman changes her mind about having an abortion, or a society decides to overturn the laws that legalize elective abortion, morality is advanced.  When force is the instrument used to alter a behavior, morality is not advanced.  A tactical advantage may be achieved for one case, a hundred, a thousand or more.  But once the force is removed, the behavior is likely to return.  Only wars between nations justify the use of force, or decisions taken by a society within that society and implemented through lawful means.  As a matter of principle and a general guide to action, individuals — even groups of individuals — do not have the right to impose their free will choices on other human beings with different free will choices.

There is a practical reason for doing this, in addition to the respect we need to show for the exercise of each person’s God-given free will.  We live in a country governed by laws that are made within a legitimate constitutional framework (however imperfect at times).  If I choose to violate a law in the “defense of morality,” others will do the same as well.  Their morality may be a Relativistic one, however.  This leads to civil war or anarchy, which will have the exact opposite effect of my intentions.  Whatever short-term “good” I’ve accomplished will be erased by the long-term fallout from my actions. 

So, I will stop a neighbor from beating their child, or stop a man from raping a woman, or stop a stranger from killing another stranger.  I will not do this because these actions are immoral, but because they are illegal and I am acting to support the law.  The fact that these laws are in support of the common moral code makes it imperative that I act instead of walking away.  That action could be something as simple as calling the police, or getting personally involved in the matter. 

The same thing is not true of a law that is morally neutral.  If I watch a person litter the street I have no obligation to call the police or make a “citizen’s arrest.”  I can report him, verbally chastise him, pick up the litter myself, or just keep walking along minding my own business.  We’ll call this the Gladys Cravitz Codicil (who was the nosy neighbor from Bewitched).  Some things just aren’t any of my business, some things are in a limited (but optional) way, and some things demand my attention.

The confusion arises over how to behave in certain situations, because up until now we’ve been talking about two related, but entirely different things.  One is how to think about issues to avoid making Relativistic judgments, the second is to determine what are the universal moral codes human beings share.  We’ve identified one in this essay regarding deliberate harm to innocent life.  There may be others, or this may be the only one necessary that gives rise to all related issues (do not rape, do not kill innocent life, do not enslave other human beings, etc.).  I’ll leave it to others to make their case either way.

Reason, which helps us to recognize the existence of a universal moral code and understand its logic, tells us what to do.  But it does not necessarily tell us how to do it. 

This is because different cultures, different societies, different time periods, and different unique situations within a society, all produce too many variations to codify into a single human law.  So we need another roadmap besides pure reason (i.e. the opposite of rationalization) to understand how to act where the universal moral code is involved.  This is where each person’s individual free will comes in, because it is through the exercise of free will that man makes his choices. 

Applying reasoning and free will to the law permitting elective abortion in America today, I understand that while pure reason will lead me to the morally correct decision, reason tempered by a recognition that God also gave everyone free will helps me decide how to act in a given situation.

I recognize that, on balance, the vast majority of laws in this country do not conflict with the moral code, regardless of whether I think my taxes are too high, or you think the Supreme Court overstepped its Constitutional authority in 2000.  This compatibility with the moral code is not an accident, since our country was founded on Judeo-Christian principles.  But these principles merely inform the discussion about laws, not decide them.  The fact that so many laws passed today are still in keeping with these Judeo-Christian principles is due to two things: (1) a basic respect for all laws passed within this Constitutional framework, even those we disagree with.  And  (2) by focusing on educating, explaining, and teaching about the universal moral code, we will help people make the proper moral decisions with regard to the laws that are passed. 

Would I feel the same way if parents had the right to end their own children’s lives for any reason whatsoever?  Absolutely not.  In this situation, the balance between morally compatible laws, and our personal responsibility to confront wrongdoing, has changed.  Depending upon the exact circumstances of that case, my actions would be different than they are today.  But I don’t live in that type of society at this moment, so I can’t justify bombing an abortion clinic in the name of advancing morality.

This is why it is so important to recognize where the universal moral code came from.  It came from God.  Not from any “world consensus,” man’s genetic composition, or from civilization and society.  It is equally important to recognize that God gave man free will for a purpose.  Not every exercise of another person’s free will requires us to physically oppose it.  Some do, some don’t, and some must be balanced against the good that will occur short-term, as opposed to the bad that will result long-term.  If I was writing this about Somalia, the free will choices I would make for identical situations would not necessarily be the same.  Those actions take place within a different social and political setting, and reason tempered by free will demands that I take that into consideration.    

Why is free will so critical in this regard?  Because without it we might discover truth, but not understand what to do when applying it to the world we live in.  A brief example will illustrate this:

Exercising free will without reason or morality leads to a choice that best suits our immediate wishes, without considering anything beyond that. 

Reasoning without a moral code produces no better results for humanity.  It produces rationalizations disguised as principles, and makes genuine public debate about the best course of action impossible.

Reasoning with morality that ignores free will leads to rationalizations of another kind, namely the illogical extension of a correct line of reasoning.  The moral code says do not harm other individuals.  Abortion is a clear form of this harm.  Jane Doe is having an abortion.  Therefore, the moral code says that I must stop her through violence if necessary.  I stopped that abortion, but other abortions are being performed.  Now I must stop those too with violence if necessary.  And on, and on. Recognizing the existence of free will would elevate “education” as a morally correct option too, and thus place the entire issue in its proper, worldly perspective.

Applying morality without reasoning and/or a regard for free will is nothing more than substituting one’s own definition of morality for the true moral code, and leads to equally disastrous consequences.

All three elements therefore need to be present — free will, reasoning, and morality — for the correct choice to be made.  The “escape” for moral Relativists is that morality is a personal or societal issue, not something universally shared by all people.  If we can demonstrate that a universal morality exists, as I have attempted to do, we can now assign a proper value to all three components, and use that to guide our everyday actions.  This has consequences for every decision we make, whether they are private or public, economic or political, or even about how we understand and apply the teachings of our own religion.

If we followed this course of action, no one religion would be able to claim a monopoly on all the Truths handed down by God, other than their ability to access a common moral code that everyone shares.  So even the most fervent and devout Christians, Jews, Muslims or anyone from another religion, would immediately understand while their Faith may hold great meaning for them, and they feel that they have the correct understanding of what it takes to fulfill God’s wishes, instead of killing, silencing or abusing those who disagree, they would try to educate and teach others about their views. 

But just as significantly, they would also accept that since man cannot actually read God’s mind — but can only live by those common morals he gives us, as understood through reason (not rationalization), and pursued with a full appreciation of individual free will — then there may be more than one path to Heaven; and in fact more than one valid concept of Heaven itself.

Since the only universal concept is our common moral code, thousands of other variables will influence our decisions.  Different societies, different cultures, even different periods of history will shape an individual human being’s view of the details of life.  It may very well be that multiple religions exist as part of God’s plan to let those in completely different cultures access their innate moral code and find, through the teachings of their religion, a vehicle to express it. 

This doesn’t argue against efforts by each and every religion to spread the word of their Faith; just against efforts to force people to convert.  A person living in the orient who cannot connect with God through Buddhism may find it in Christianity, just as a Christian may find more meaning in Islam; or a Methodist may find a closer connection to God through the Church in Rome.  Each of these individual and collective efforts can only bring us closer to leading a life in accordance with the universal moral code, and from that strengthening our personal connection with God.  It’s only when men take it upon themselves to be the arbiters of God’s word and the official interpreter of a universal moral code that we end up with such widely divergent, but fundamentally similar brutalities as terrorism and abortion.

So we need to look at incest and rape again in this light.  I’m not downplaying the unspeakable tragedy of a pregnancy by incest, only asking everyone to stop for a moment and consider the full picture before we encourage a frightened young woman to abort her baby in the name of compassion.  If society assigned value to real heroism instead of glorifying the excesses of our favorite Hollywood star, it might be easier to see that a rape or incest victim carrying the baby to term, and then letting an adoptive couple care for it, is the real role model we should envy; not some celebrity who’s an alcoholic drug-addicted wife-beating tax-evading social reprobate, but showed real, personal courage by sitting down with Barbara Walters and admitting that, like all of us, he’s a “flawed” human being as part of his community service plea bargain, and to help boost interest in his next feature film.

Maybe I’ve got it all wrong.  Maybe I’m just desensitized to the pain and suffering of “real people” because I have a great family, nice home, and no real problems affecting my life now, or in the past.  Unlike the rest of humanity, I can’t see that aborting a child conceived through rape or incest is best for everyone — particularly if it’s conceived through incest, with all the supposed genetic problems that people fear will accompany it.  And so the same logic would apply to a woman who finds that her child will be severely deformed or mentally retarded and unable to live anything close to a “normal” life.  This isn’t an otherwise healthy child where one could make a case that it should live.  It’s human in appearance, and has a soul, but will never have a true life here on world.

But this facile, deceptive, relativistic nonsense ignores the fact that life isn’t just what one individual experiences.  It’s also how that individual’s life impacts others, just as their lives have impacted yours.  I have a brother-in-law who could not walk, talk or feed himself.  I don’t even know if he recognized the members of his family who came to visit him when he was finally institutionalized, and who had sacrificed enormously to care for him in earlier years.

All I know is that his life had a profound, positive impact on not only his parents and siblings, but on me as I married into that family.  I saw through him things about life, and living life, and humanity in general that I never would have understood without that experience.  Part of that knowledge helped shape the ideas I’ve presented today by bringing to the surface things that I intuitively knew, but didn’t fully understand.  What value did his life have?  I don’t know what it held for him, but for me it has had more of an effect on who I am, and what I believe, than all the books I’ve read or written, businesses I’ve run, or political leaders I known. 

And if I can count knowing him as one of the great influences on my life, how can I automatically dismiss a child conceived from rape or incest as just so much unwanted tissue to be cast aside?  So don’t tell me the ultimate concern is the aborted fetus’ presumed quality of life, or that an ignorant concern about genetics means that a child conceived through incest doesn’t deserve to live.  Anyone making a statement like that has absolutely no idea what they’re talking about, and probably couldn’t tell you the difference between Gregor Mendel and Josef Mengele, both of whom, as we say, were “involved with genetic experiments.”  If such a fear is really a social concern, then we should prohibit a woman over the age of 35 from giving birth, because there is a slightly higher probability of something going wrong with their pregnancy than someone ten years younger.  Justifying abortions based on a concern for the genetic purity of the fetus has already been floated once as a great idea, and it ended with a suicide inside a command bunker about sixty years ago.

So yes, I am arguing that nothing other than saving a mother’s life can morally justify an abortion.  This is not my morality, but one coming from the universally-shared code that no deliberate harm should be done to an innocent life.  Compounding one tragedy with another doesn’t “balance things out.”  Where the mother’s life is in real danger, we have competing equally-valid interests in play.  It becomes her choice to terminate the pregnancy, or risk her life delivering the child.  Neither choice is right nor wrong, they are both completely moral.  But the same cannot be said for a decision based on shame, humiliation, economics, career considerations, vanity, or any one of a number of endless “good reasons” to do what is easy or convenient instead of what is right.

This, ultimately, is why it is so important to recognize God both in the creation of a universal moral code, and in the creation of each individual’s free will.  If free will was nothing more than a by-product of sentient thought, a simple biological component of human life, it would be nothing more than a higher form or different kind of animal instinct.

Whatever anyone personally believes about human evolution²¹ and how we got to this stage of development, we can say that man exists today as a fully conscious, fully self-aware creature.  But not every human has the same abilities, or the same intellect.  If free will is a byproduct of nature, then it is a byproduct of intelligence, because it isn’t the heart, or the legs, or the fingernails or the toes that formulates this expression of free will.  It’s the brain, through the act of thought.  And the moment man goes down the slippery slope of assigning species-related value to an individual’s unique attributes, it’s the 1930s all over again.

So everyone has the same free will, given to them by God and not the state or some random act of nature, upon which to make their choices.  Those with an ability to reason at a higher level have an obligation to help those who don’t understand and can’t yet appreciate the simple, direct, yet profound common moral code everyone shares.  We call these people “teachers,” and they come in many different forms.  But regardless of whether it’s a pulpit, classroom, TV news broadcast, opinion paper, or just talking to the guy next door, when framing an issue in its fundamental moral terms, reasoning — not rationalization — will lead everyone to the same conclusion.  No one has the right to harm an innocent human being, which has been understood for centuries by many religions as “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

Where we lost our moral compass as a society is when we allowed rationalizations by venal, morally-corrupt individuals with a personal or hidden agenda to distort our language so a “developing child” became a “choice.”  It also took the prohibition against state-sponsored religion and turned it into a questioning of the very existence of God. 

The sad thing is, not all these distracting agendas can be attributed to the moral relativism of the Left.  What allowed Relativists to succeed in banning God from our schools weren’t the attacks by atheists and other Left-wing radicals, but the preachers and religious leaders who insisted that Christianity become the de facto state religion.  Some of this came from well-intentioned, but thoroughly misguided efforts to instill moral values as one religion viewed them, instead of searching for the universal moral core which was always there waiting to be recognized.  But it didn’t matter in the end whether Fighting For Jesus was done with the best of intentions, or was part of an effort to promote a private religious agenda. Like the example I cited above about bombing an abortion clinic, the unintended, unexpected backlash was to strip any mention of religion from our public institutions. 

Now, instead of allowing our children to find the common moral code through our schools, morality is ignored or reduced to relativistic drivel. Or taught to us by CNN, Reuters, and the New York Times.

16.  So what kind of car would Jesus drive?

I’ll end with a couple of quick stories that bring all of my points home.

A few years ago I asked my Liberal, pro-Democrat friend, who was the son of a concentration camp survivor, how he could support a party that embraced abortion since that was the ultimate example of "killing the innocent."  The question stunned him. He thought about it for a long while, then answered, "I don't want to talk about this."  Then without skipping a beat he went on to condemn Bush for something or other as if I’d never raised the issue.

Another time, when the same opportunity arose to make this point with a different pro-Israel Jewish friend (although with no relatives in the death camps), her retort was, "You'll never get me to vote Republican!  The world is much more complicated than a single issue."  To which I replied, "Would you have felt the same way if a single-issue party arose in 1930s Germany, and their only platform was 'stop killing innocent Jews?'"  Again, there was a moment's pause to consider my question before dismissing my observation and resuming her attack on Bush. 

Finally, as a post-script on Liberalism and abortion, I have one further thought borrowed from someone a while back who first made this brilliant point.  For those who focus on a man-made right to choose instead of a God-given right to life, how long do you think it will take for these same people to discover an intrinsic, God-given right to life if homosexuality is proven to be linked to one's genetic makeup, and heterosexual parents begin aborting their homosexual fetuses? 

So, to answer the question I raised at the beginning of this essay on the bankruptcy of morally relativistic thought: What kind of car would Jesus drive to take his girlfriend to an abortion clinic?

Answer:  Do you really have to ask?

17. Methodology 

This essay is a mixture of social and political theory, history, philosophy, and general commentary.  You’ll notice that the footnotes are not references to competing philosophical or religious thought from people who have devoted far greater time than I to these subjects, with far more competence than I’ll ever have, but instead provide further explanations of the points I am trying to make or the thoughts I am trying to convey. 

Whatever traditional or non-traditional lines of philosophical inquiry you detect in any single passage, sentence, or word I’ve chosen is the product of my memory of past books I’ve read, classes I’ve taken, or lectures I’ve heard.  This exercise is about using my education, my life experiences, and my God-given ability to reason to pull all the pieces of a complicated issue together and make sense of it.  Or, to put it in terms of the theme of this essay, to give voice to the same moral code I’m convinced we all have, and lay out my thoughts in a clear, direct manner so you can consider these same issues from our only true common point of reference.

I haven’t footnoted specific philosophers or philosophies since this isn’t a research paper, and I didn’t go back to consult any of these references.  What made sense to me when I read these works has stayed with me and become part of my thought process.  It’s so entwined with things I’ve discovered by myself, had reinforced or contradicted by my life experiences, or melded together with truly great thinkers that I honestly couldn’t separate out most of what I embraced from my own thinking now.  So if you think I’m plagiarizing another individual’s work by turning a familiar thought or phrase, I’m not.

It’s entirely possible that there is not a single original thought in this essay that hasn’t already been stated by someone, somewhere, at some time.  If you want to point out who said it first, I’m happy to see it posted below.  I don’t automatically credit Jefferson, or Lincoln, or Thomas Kuhn, or Clifford Geertz, or Steven Jay Gould, or any one of a thousand great minds whose words I’ve absorbed every time I apply their fundamental logic about politics, culture, society and philosophy to my own thought process.  Geertz taught me the importance of symbolic thought in the rise of culture, which in turn has tremendous implications for discussions about human behavior.  That’s now just a common sense part of my way of thinking, and I don’t quote Geertz every time I apply his teachings unless it’s at an appropriate point like now,²² just like you never cite John F. Kennedy’s inaugural speech as a “source” every time you complain about Congress or special interests lining their own pockets at the expense of the country’s general welfare.

What is original or unique about this essay, I believe, is the way these different philosophical, social, religious, political and economic issues have been combined to support the points I am trying to make.  And that thought process is my own, for better or worse.  Again, it’s entirely possible that others have reached some, most or all of the same conclusions I have, and if so again feel free to point that out if you feel it’s important.  It can only bolster the similar or identical point I’m making, so I appreciate the validation.  But unless it is really true that you can take the proverbial monkey and put him in front of a typewriter and let him bang away until he produces the Gettysburg Address entirely through random keystrokes, then I don’t think you’ll find this same article anywhere else.  Or conversely, if a thousand other authors have already found a profound fundamental connection between terrorism and abortion and I’m just number 1001, that’s okay with me.  This essay is about what I think about these subjects, and why I think that way.  If others got there in whole or part through the same logic tree, I’m glad to be associated with them.  But if some or all of this opens up a new way for others to look at life’s decisions, then I’ll have the satisfaction of knowing that what I think makes sense to them too, and I’ll be their Clifford Geertz, or Steven Jay Gould, or Thomas Kuhn, etc. 

So, while the great thing about America is that anyone is free to analyze someone’s position any way they want, I think the less productive path is to begin and end entirely with a discussion of whether Point A is part of a specific tradition of philosophical inquiry and/or diverges from that tradition, or in a related way, illustrate that Point B was said so much more eloquently by Thomas Aquinas, Karl Marx, or Ann Coulter than Phil Jackson.  Certainly some of this will be necessary to make your own points, so I’m not suggesting you don’t do it.  Rather, I urge you not to make that type of a comment and simply leave it at that.  I’ll concede any and all of those observations up front and without reservation.

Instead, what I hope you’ll do if you’re stimulated to comment is focus on the observations I’ve made and the conclusions I’ve drawn from them, and react to that.  By this I mean, don’t simply say that the reasoning is “flawed” in your opinion because it goes against your favorite philosopher’s position or political party’s world view; tell us why your line of inquiry will lead more directly to the truth than the one I used.

Please don’t misunderstand.  I am not trying to limit comments.  I’d welcome anyone who just wants to say they agree and leave it at that, just as I take no offense at people who think I’m totally off base regardless of how they express that opinion.  But opinion is not debate, and if all you want to do is register your support or opposition, please leave it at that and don’t think a diatribe for or against the essay is “analysis,” or that insulting someone’s intelligence because they disagree with you is biting humor.  I make a lot of fun of Liberal thought and Liberal icons, and don’t hold anything back when I go after a public figure.  That’s part of the price one pays for seeking public office, as George Bush can tell you so well.  But understand that challenging a non-public individual’s position vigorously, or employing gentle humor to make your point more compelling, is not the same thing as calling their parentage into question, demeaning their intelligence, or otherwise personally insulting them.  It diminishes the person making the charge, and weakens their point no matter how valid it may be.  This is America, not Air America, so it’s supposed to be a forum for discussing different ideas and philosophy.  What I say here applies as much to people who agree with me as it does to those who don’t.

18.  Reader Comments

Since I write these essays to focus my own thoughts on a given subject, my ultimate goal is to advance knowledge (mine, and yours), which means I’d appreciate two things before you challenge a point I’ve made:

1. You’ve got to read the whole essay, including footnotes, before you tell me I am completely off base on any given issue.

2. And when you arrive at what may be, in your judgment, a perfectly supportable alternative position, “support” for your point of view does not consist of saying my view is wrong, and then pointing to a website that backs up your opinion.  The arguments I build bring historical examples together with a line of thought that I try to spell out as clearly as I can.  If you think that actual events show a different picture of human behavior, make the case.  If you think that the internal logic of my analytical framework is wrong, point out the errors — and correct them.  Simply telling me that a woman has a Constitutional Right to Choose an abortion and leaving it at that ignores every point I’ve made about man-made vs. inherent morality.  It adds nothing to the debate other than to state your opinion.

So, if you are moved to respond, and simply want to voice your support or state your opposition to what I’ve said and leave it at that (with or without a couple of URL’s or cherry-picked quotes thrown in for good measure), I’m happy to know you found the essay rewarding, or conversely, you think that I want to return all women to chattel slavery just because I’m a man.  Either sentiment is fine, and they’ll reflect how the essay struck you — good or bad. 

But for me personally, since unlike Liberal ideologues I know that no single individual has a monopoly on the truth, I want to see if my reasoning holds up under public scrutiny, or if in fact I got it all partially or completely wrong — and why?

Please don’t feel that you have to major in philosophy or a post-graduate fellowship in history to offer a reasoned argument.  Some of the dumbest people I’ve ever met have a Ph.D., and some of the smartest never went to college (or in one case, hasn’t even made it through puberty yet).  It doesn’t make any difference whether your thought is supported by 20 centuries of Western philosophy or you came to the conclusion entirely on your own.  If it makes sense, and holds together consistently, you’ve got something worth saying.

As for what it will take to change my mind about any of my major points, it will mean answering the question I’ve repeatedly posed throughout the essay.  Saying that it is irrelevant in your opinion is not an answer.  Saying it is a bogus question is a substantive challenge, but this has to be accompanied by a clear (not website-driven) explanation by the person raising the issue to tell me why it’s bogus. 

Bogus or not, though, if for no other reason than to satisfy my curiosity and understand how someone else thinks, I still want someone to tell me when it’s okay for an individual to rape and murder a five-year old child; and if it is never okay, why godless commies and capitalist oppressors and Aboriginal nomads and Druids and Free Masons and even the French all independently come to this same conclusion in every era of human history?  Or conversely, tell me why slavery is okay as long as it is legal but not when it isn’t — as opposed to always being morally wrong, even when man-made (immoral) laws permit it, just like they at times permit abortion.  Those are two separate, but related ways to demonstrate that there is no universal, non-genetic, non-manmade morality as I contended there is, but rather that universal notions of “right” and “wrong” arise from something else entirely.

My essay cannot stand if these questions fall.  I’ll admit that in advance.  But feelings are not facts, so if you feel I’m wrong but can’t show me why by pointing out fundamental flaws in my understanding of history and politics, or point to gaping holes in my logic that you can explain more comprehensively, it will not change my mind no matter how many people think I’m a Neanderthal.  The truth is not something we find by consensus.  We find it by reason. 

Unlike my previous post, I’m going to wait a week or so before responding (if at all) to any of your postings.  By that time I think anyone who feels passionately enough on either side will have focused in on major issues that require further comment on my part.

---

Endnotes

1.  See my earlier essay, “An even more Inconvenient Truth: The Myth of Man-Made Global Warming,” Phillip Ellis Jackson, the Intellectual Conservative, July 2006.
http://www.intellectualconservative.com/2006/an-even-more-inconvenient-truth-the-myth-of-man-made-global-warming/

2.  I suppose, if I slip into a relativistic mind-meld and try to refute this, I could argue that lots of humans did, but by routinely killing off the children they never really grew in size or stayed around longer than a couple of generations.  So there would be no centuries-long record to discover.  To which I would say “Congratulations.  You’ve defined a theoretical situation where a society was able to collectively suppress the innate revulsion that all humans feel for such actions, and after forty or fifty years of regularly and routinely killing off their children that self-cannibalizing society simply disappeared from history.”  And if it seems like I’m stacking the deck in my answer by saying “regularly and routinely,” substitute “just occasionally.”  But just how quickly do you think you can you replace the dead kid without a Clinton-sponsored health care system in place to make sure that normal infant mortality isn’t so dramatic in its own right it threatens the perpetuation of the species?” Short life spans, third world-type levels of infant mortality, and the constant mortal danger from disease, infection, accident, animals who want to eat you while you are trying to eat or avoid them, belligerent neighbors, and a whole host of other environmental factors made life difficult enough without killing or raping little proto-Jimmy for amusement, sport, or ritual.

And if they are still listening, I’d follow that question with, “just how was it that those people in a similar, or maybe even lesser state of ‘civilization’ didn’t follow the same practice?  What kept them from thinking that hurting innocent life was no more immoral than a walk in the moonlight with your favorite girl or boyfriend?”

3.  Many people believe that the Bible is literally true, while others think that it is a metaphor on how to live one’s life.  If it is literally true, the Bible will still be a metaphor on some level, because the historical information it contains is supposed to do more than simply provide data for social scientists to analyze earlier cultures.  It is supposed to illustrate basic moral principles, just like viewing the Bible as a metaphor would do. So regardless of each reader’s personal belief about whether the Bible is literal or metaphoric, both sides seek wisdom in its pages, not just facts.

4.  The one thing we do know for sure is that a sperm and egg that remain apart will NEVER become a baby unless science one day succeeds in cloning human beings, which just reinforces my point.  Then, we’ll have an even more stringent baseline to observe than one that occurs entirely within nature to avoid labeling cloned human beings as non-human and using them as slaves, soldiers, or spare body parts.  The clone isn’t me, so it doesn’t have my rights or my responsibilities, or my debts or assets.  If the state can arbitrarily define 20 weeks as the cutoff for a mother to abort her potential baby, what happens if the “state” or a scientist is the mother?  Does that mean there’s the same 20-week magic cut off?

Note: for those Liberals, Feminists and other Relativists who are offended by me saying that the state “magically” chooses when a lump of developing tissue becomes a real human, did you also get offended when I started off Hypothesis #2 by saying, “It isn’t that God somehow magically instills a moral code in humans . . ..”  I was just wondering, relatively speaking. 

5.  Which it isn’t today, but neither was genetic manipulation of a lot of things 20 years ago. So there’s nothing intrinsically stopping man from figuring out how to do it.

6.  The only possible exception I can think of here, and it’s a minor one, is the French film director Roman Polanski who fled the United States after being accused of having “consensual” sex with a thirteen-year old girl.  Because of his directorial talent, Hollywood still treats him with at least outward respect.  However, I don’t think George Clooney would act the same way if he was introduced to the Hollywood chapter president of the North American Man Boy Love Association.  Like everyone else, he’d hide the kids and run for cover.  The cordial, or even friendly reception Polanski gets from Hollywood is just a modern-day version of the Victorian upper class rationalization that “morality is for the common people.” Those endowed with superior intellect, talent, a caring heart or political power get to make the rules everyone else must follow, but can’t be expected to let artificial constraints like these same moral-based laws control their behavior.  This hardly reflects an intrinsic moral value shared by all of humanity.

7.  To the Relativists who would point to primitive human societies and certain contemporary polygamist cults that “routinely” marry-off girls as young as twelve, I would say three things.  (1) In primitive cultures the life span of a hunter-gatherer is considerably less than it is in the West.  Reaching age forty isn’t the beginning of middle age.  It’s the last few years you’ll see before you die of natural causes.  So mating begins around the time that, biologically, females are able to bear children.  (2) For modern day polygamists, those who subscribe to the notion that a twelve- or thirteen-year old girl is the flower of womanhood tend to live in isolated, heavily protected compounds so the rest of society doesn’t find out, or when they do, hunt them down and imprison them.  And (3), where in any of these examples do you find that marrying a child bride who is still in diapers — in anything other than a symbolic way — is perfectly, socially acceptable?

8.  That is, “Tabula rasa (Latin: scraped tablet or clean slate) [which] refers to the epistemological thesis that individual human beings are born with no innate or built-in mental content, in a word, "blank," and that their entire resource of knowledge is built up gradually from their experiences and sensory perceptions of the outside world.”  Wikipedia.  The key word here is “epistemological,” which means that it doesn’t literally exist, but is a good way to help visualize the point being made.  

9.  Let’s not get too metaphysical here.  On some level everything is “dangerous” — physically, emotionally, behaviorally, and so forth.  When addressing issues of moral behavior, I’ve chosen to focus on core fundamentals, such as the belief that no one has the right to arbitrarily harm or kill another human being through deliberate neglect, or for personal gain or amusement.  Where exactly that line gets drawn is the subject of legitimate debate, but the principle isn’t.  We might disagree over the depth of your immorality in leaving a young child alone in a bathtub full of water to watch your favorite TV program, thus possibly injuring or killing an innocent human being through deliberate neglect.  But there are factors that need to be examined here before rendering a decision.  How long were you out of the room; did you deliberate shirk your responsibility or get momentarily distracted and stay longer than you intended; are you generally irresponsible or is this not a typical character flaw?  And so on. 

These are legal questions, as well as moral ones.  The moral ones, ultimately, may be something that other men cannot judge with certainty, given circumstances that we cannot possibly know that may keep it from rising to the level of a moral issue for that individual in that particular case.  Rather, after dealing with the U.S. criminal justice system which has a different set of criteria for assessing guilt or innocence, these will be matters that you’ll one day address in person with your Creator.  On the other hand, except for a case where an individual is mentally deficient and unable to understand right from wrong, there is nothing that will ever morally justify the arbitrary rape and murder of a small child under any circumstances.  This is a core issue, and it’s here that we’ll find some definable answers about moral vs. immoral actions.

10.  Not because it’s morally wrong to pass out from drinking too much alcohol, but because in combination with other factors it can injure or harm yourself or others.  The same person who morally has a glass or two of wine at dinner would be acting immorally by doing this while taking a prescription drug that could seriously damage his body.  (We all have a right to be stupid.  That’s a logical by-product of free will.  But we don’t have a right to be dangerously stupid, not even to ourselves.)  Having 10 beers watching the Cleveland Browns lose another one on TV isn’t in itself immoral if you are in the privacy of your own home.  Doing this while you are caring for your 3-month old child is.  God gave us all intelligence and common sense that he expected us to use together.  We should apply it equally to deciding what we do, as well as analyzing the behavior of others.

11.  Where gambling is legal, though their losses may be high to the guy pulling down $50K a year, they aren’t for someone who has a considerably larger income.  Gambling in and of itself isn’t immoral.  It may be illegal in certain areas (but not others), and gambling there may mean breaking man’s law.  But it doesn’t mean that God is going to punish you too, that is unless you steal to get the funds to gamble, or take the bread out of your children’s mouth to play the ponies, or engage in some other such clearly immoral pursuit.  It isn’t gambling that is the immoral act in and of itself.  I could substitute buying expensive stereo equipment for gambling, and the point would still be just as true that stealing or causing harm to innocent life by jeopardizing their home and health is just as immoral.

12.  For the Relativists reading this paper who are looking for superficial perceived contradictions they can use to show the alleged inconsistency or hypocrisy of my arguments, assume that like this and in other examples I given, it is always understood that I am referring to moral actions, not all actions.  I am not accusing Liberals of condoning child rape because it is conducted in the privacy of their own bedroom.  I don’t need to prove a point by linking superficial similarities and labeling it a fundamental truth, though I will follow the trail of their silly logic as far as it takes me.  Relativist satire attempts to do the same by linking morality and God to the writer’s religion, taking an irrelevant-to-this-discussion quote from the bible, and concluding with biting satire that having said that abortion is morally wrong, the author of those words wishes to strip the right to vote from all women, make them wear burkhas, and execute the offenders.  I’m comfortable in knowing that all non-relativists will have seen it here first when the Libs send their love, because not only will they not read the footnotes to this essay before comparing me to Hitler, they won’t even read the essay.  They’ll intuitively know what I said from the title alone, and that’s enough to dismiss the conclusions.

13.  Public example: gay marriage that is equal in all legal respects to conventional marriage between one man and one woman, as opposed to permitting civil unions.  Private examples: sodomy laws that circumscribe the actions of two consenting adults of any combination of sexes in the privacy of their own home, as opposed to in public.  States have made laws regarding both of these issues which liberals (State judges and/or federal officials) have sought to change or otherwise interject themselves into in the name of “fairness.”  Since “fairness” is not a core moral value, but a culturally or politically-dependent one, I’d need to understand why the logic of “Liberal fairness” trumps the logic of “Constitutional fairness.” 

I can define Constitutional fairness as respecting the right of state legislatures to pass different kinds of law in accordance with the state constitution and Federal Constitution where these laws and codes are specifically enumerated.  Federal civil rights laws in this case are both legal and appropriate, because the actions of the states violated specific provisions of the U.S. Constitution. Not kind-of, sort-of, can’t-see-it-but-it’s-really-there provisions.  

What I have trouble grasping is the core consistency of abstract, often individual notions of “fairness” put forward by Liberals.  For example, it was “unfair” to not allow Frank Lautenberg to replace Bob Torricelli, a corrupt Democrat candidate for the U.S. Senate, days after the state-law deadline expired to allow this change.  Torricelli didn’t die or become incapacitated, he just quit because his “negatives” were so overwhelming that he was going to lose.

According to the Liberal doctrine of “fairness,” denying people the right to vote for a non-corrupt candidate was “unfair,” so the specific details of the law prohibiting a last minute replacement didn’t really matter.  They conflicted with the concept of “fairness,” and fairness should always triumph regardless of the statute’s details.  But just recently we learned by the same Liberal Logic that it is unfair to let the supposedly-corrupt politician Tom Delay’s name be removed from the Texas Congressional ballot months before the 2006 election, even though he had voluntarily withdrawn his name from candidacy and moved out of state, making him ineligible to run. The net result is that Republicans will not have a candidate for that Congressional seat in the November election, and Democrats will win by default.  This, though, will not violate any notion of “fairness” as defined by the same political party that argued the exact opposite position four years earlier when a different outcome suited their interests.  Thus we have two almost identical circumstances (except Lautenberg had to violate existing state law to get on the New Jersey ballot), yet Liberal Democrats advocate exactly opposite actions in each case — both in the name of “fairness.”

14.  In a Quantum world, God “plays dice with the universe” (within certain parameters set by nature).  Following this roadmap, we can make some predictions (but not all) with reasonable certainty, even though we can’t understand or fully account for the whole picture.  Our knowledge of the universe is advanced, but because randomness is an inherent quality of the subatomic world, we can never achieve absolute certainty in every level of understanding prediction.  We can’t do this because we’re three dimensional creatures [height/width/depth] living in a four dimensional world [add “time”].  So some things will always be seen by us as random.  But that doesn’t mean that they are truly random; only that there is a limit to human understanding because we are human.  These things may be random, or they may not be.  We may never know.  But just because we’re limited in grasping the full complexity of the universe, doesn’t mean that there isn’t a non-random higher logic holding it all together in perfect, understandable symmetry.  Understandable to God who created it, that is.  Not to man.

15.  God doesn't have to overturn or circumvent the laws of nature to answer our prayers.  We all have the same innate moral code, but we don’t all recognize it or access it to the same degree.  Prayer can help focus the mind to bring this information out.  Or, it can make it more understandable if we have already accessed it, and help us apply it properly to the real world conditions we face.  This is how mortal man “talks to God,” and God “talks” back.  The more we become attuned to our innate, God-given morality through prayer, the more likely we are to see things more clearly and make connections in the world that would have escaped us earlier.  Sometimes these connections lead to truly “miraculous” outcomes.  But miracles aren’t things like winning the lottery. That’s simple probability and statistics at work.  Rather, a true miracle is often something small that you can’t fully appreciate until many years later.  I had an opportunity at age 24 to make a rather benign, but unkind remark that I chose not to do because, although it would have been really funny and fit with my sense of humor, it seemed to cross some inexplicable inner line and didn’t seem right.  Had I done that, my life would have turned out radically different than it has today.  The person who I didn’t insult later became the individual most responsible for helping me to survive the crushing education debt I had through jobs and scholarships.  Without that help, I never would have been able to stay in school and receive my degree, which has led me to countless other opportunities in life.  That was a miracle, and it came though a simple reflection on a general principle of morality (“doing the right thing”).  And I’ve had a number of other small, but profound situations like that pop up in my life that all centered on a decision to take one path instead of another — some of which caused me long periods of grief at first, but paid off enormously as the years went on.  

16  Again, I realize that what is a side-issue to me may be a fundamental issue to someone else.  If it’s important to you to believe that the Bible is the literal Word of God, and that Genesis is a literal accounting of the creation of the universe, then there’s no reason not to think this way.  All the other side asks is that you understand that others may have a different point of view, and they are no more justified in imposing that interpretation on you than you are on them.  Both roads lead to the same destination, and it’s what we learn from those core values that guide us along the way that is most important.

It’s when questions of process begin to overtake issues of substance that the original intent is perverted.  Just think of the Islamo-fascists who want to kill their fellow Muslims who like them embrace the same Prophet, read from the same Holy Text, and worship at the same cradle of their religion (Mecca), but have a different interpretation of certain “key” issues than they hold.  To the Islamo-Nazis, these people are as heretical and dangerous as run-of-the-mill Christian and Jewish Infidels.  Thankfully, the debate between Christian fundamentalists and other Christians, or between Christians and Jews, while pointed at times, no longer rises to the level of Islamo-fascism. 

Whether I think there’s only one single path to Salvation or multiple avenues is important to me, and of no concern to anyone else.  I’ll have to answer to God for any egregious errors I might make in coming to my conclusion.  But that doesn’t mean that others here on Earth have a right to decide my religious beliefs for me, no matter how pious or sincere their own beliefs are.  Instead, let them take comfort in the personal knowledge that they are on the right path, and I am headed for something considerably warmer.  In the end it’s God who will decide anyway, not some guy with twenty pounds of high explosives strapped to his waist.  And if this is good counsel for Islamic radicals, it is equally sound advice for religious people of any persuasion who find the way others practice their religion objectionable or deficient, and feel the need to make forcible corrections in those people’s lives, rather than focusing on whether all parties are working toward living life in concert with a common set of shared moral values.

17.  I said “more than this”, because clearly organized religions (and even a few disorganized ones) have mouths to feed and bills to pay.  And institutions run by man — even religious ones — are subject to the same selfish, venal influences that characterize every other human activity.   So finding a corrupt pope here or there, or a less than honest rabbi or mullah somewhere around, doesn’t automatically condemn the whole religion, its institutions, or practices.

18.  Conventional wisdom also said at one time that blacks were inferior; that women were biologically unsuited to hold political office; and that if the government said it, it must be true.

19.  — Or kill someone who is being used as a human shield by terrorists, or kill someone who is unwittingly standing near a terrorist hoping that Israel will kill them by mistake, and so on, and so on.  Innocent people die in war.  That is a fact.  Whether they are deliberately targeted, killed by irresponsible neglect, are set up to become a manufactured atrocity — or are killed accidentally when a legitimate military target is attacked, makes a difference in assigning moral or immoral labels to that action. 

20.  "Can Muslim Kill Muslim?" September 12, 2005.
http://www.freemuslims.org/news/article.php?article=893

Dispute in Islamist Circles over the Legitimacy of Attacking Muslims, Shiites, and Non-combatant Non-Muslims in Jihad Operations in Iraq: Al-Maqdisi vs. His Disciple Al-Zarqawi

In the past two years a religious dispute has developed between Abu Mus'ab Al-Zarqawi, leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, and his spiritual mentor Abu Muhammad Al-Maqdisi. It has focused on the question of the legitimacy of certain Jihad operations in Iraq, and in particular on the question of the religious legitimacy of attacking Muslims, of attacking Shiites, and of attacking non-combatant non-Muslims.

The dispute began with Al-Maqdisi criticizing certain methods of Jihad in Iraq. In a July 2004 epistle to the Jihad fighters in Iraq, issued from his Jordanian prison cell, Al-Maqdisi criticized the harm being done to Muslim civilians in Iraq, which, he asserted, was not justified by Shari'a law.

About a year later, Al-Maqdisi voiced additional criticism, when he was released from prison in Jordan for several days. In a number of interviews with the Arab media, he expressed reservations regarding "the extensive use of suicide operations" in which many Muslims were being killed, and stated that suicide operations were not at all a traditional Islamic means of warfare, but rather an exceptional means, for use only when necessary. Al-Maqdisi further expressed reservations about the extensive killing of Shiites in Iraq, and said that he was opposed to declaring the Shiites to be non-Muslims, which in effect permitted their blood.

In a response to Al-Maqdisi, Al-Zarqawi released an audiotape in May 2005, in which he set out the jurisprudent justification for attacking Muslim civilians in the context of Jihad warfare. He claimed that Allah had ordered the killing of infidels by all means, even if this caused the killing of infidels who did not constitute targets such as women and children, or the killing of Muslims. With regard to attacks on Shiites, Al-Zarqawi said, in a July 2005 audiotape, that it was a duty to wage Jihad against the Shiites because they were apostates (murtadoon) and had formed an alliance with the Crusaders against the Jihad fighters.

Al-Zarqawi published a third statement in July 2005, in which he rejected Al-Maqdisi's accusations and attacked him, saying that ulama who were not participating in the Jihad in Iraq had no right to criticize the actions of the fighters, thereby even serving Crusader interests. He said that although Al-Maqdisi had been his mentor, he, Al-Zarqawi, did not act strictly according to his teachings. Al-Zarqawi said he took the advice of other ulama with whom he was in contact; these ulama, he said, were "in the presence of the evil rulers," and he would not reveal their names in order to protect them.

Al-Zarqawi claimed that Al-Maqdisi's criticism of Al-Zarqawi's supposed change of heart was puzzling. He acknowledged that during their time fighting in Afghanistan, both he and Al-Maqdisi had maintained that suicide operations were prohibited, but that afterwards he had changed his mind regarding Iraq and considered such operations permissible, and even desirable. He pointed out that Al-Maqdisi had also changed his mind regarding suicide attacks, that he had once considered them prohibited, but now was stating that they were permitted under certain conditions. 

21.  Does it really matter if man started out as a single-celled creature, evolved to a point where he was given a soul and became human, or whether the story of Genesis is literally correct?  Neither one can stand up to intense scrutiny because each has major gaps or holes in the logic and evidence of its story.  But assuming for the moment that God gave us the story of Creation to serve the same purpose as Noah’s Ark that I previously addressed, I ask you a simple question.  Since you are focused on the details of how we got here more than what we are supposed to do after getting here, when all is said and done, does it really make any difference whether you, personally, can figure out how God did it?  Just exactly what does that fact have to do with whether God created nature, then stepped back and set things in motion and didn’t interfere, or Adam and Eve were kicked out of the Garden of Eden?  My two-year old niece can’t understand Newtonian physics.  That doesn’t mean Newton never existed, or the Earth, Venus, Mars and other planets don’t orbit the Sun according to his calculations. 

22.  Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures.  Basic Books, Inc. Publishers, 1973.