{"id":51,"date":"2011-10-04T00:06:55","date_gmt":"2011-10-04T07:06:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/markshea\/?p=51"},"modified":"2014-12-30T21:28:07","modified_gmt":"2014-12-31T04:28:07","slug":"the-invaluable-john-c-wright","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/markshea\/2011\/10\/the-invaluable-john-c-wright.html","title":{"rendered":"The Invaluable John C. Wright…"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

a former atheist and convert to the Catholic faith has fun chewing over the embarrassing attempt of secularism to cobble a coherent moral philosophy out of the remaining rags and sticks stolen after the vandalism of the Christian tradition.<\/a><\/p>\n

I propose the following arguments:<\/p>\n

If secularism is true, all thoughts and ideas are manmade. Moral standards are thoughts and ideas. Thus, moral standards are manmade.<\/p>\n

Manmade standards are subjective. Subjective means \u201cbased on a human authority\u201d which means, the standard is binding only to those who agree to them, and only for the duration of the agreement. Whether Pluto is a planet or not is a question of which manmade standard of the definition \u201cplanet\u201d is applied. Defining a second to be one sixtieth of a minute, or a foot to be the length of the king\u2019s foot, et cetera, is something done by the authority of a consensus, a recognized body, or by tradition, and in all cases the authority acts arbitrarily. Nothing objective would change if we defined an hour to be forty minutes or a minute to be forty seconds.<\/p>\n

If moral standards are manmade, and manmade standards are subjective, therefore moral standards are subjective, and therefore not objective.<\/p>\n

Another augment:<\/p>\n

Moral standards come from a moral authority, that is, from a sovereign will which has the ability to make moral choices and the authority to demand acquiescence thereto, whether the power to enforce that command is present or not. Hence, an unarmed policeman has the moral authority to order a fleeing suspect to halt, even if he lacks the present power to carry out that command, because the suspect is morally obligated to obey him, whether he acknowledges that obligation or not: whereas an officer in the Confederate Army has no authority to require a soldier to obey him once the Civil War ends, on the grounds that the Confederate Army has no right to exist once the Confederation is dissolved.<\/p>\n

In order for moral standards to be objective, the moral authority issuing them must be objective; in order to be objective, must be universal; and in order to be universal, the issuing authority would have to stand in an authoritative position of leadership or fatherhood or kingship to all rational beings in the universe, that is, all beings in the universe capable or moral reasoning. But if secularism is true, there is and can be no such being.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yep.\u00a0 And since secular morality is intrinsically ad hoc and people go on violating man\u2019s rules just as much as God\u2019s laws, it means that secular states must sooner or later become tyrannies, since governments are prone to start treating their citizens like cattle when they lose the confidence that they are rational beings, made in the image of God, who can be entrusted with liberty.<\/p>\n

Already, we are seeing<\/a> our elites<\/a> beginning to talk <\/a>this way.\u00a0 And with our nation on a now eternal war footing and our civil right essentially held hostage to the notion that they can be suspended should our struggle against \u201cterror\u201d demand it, we are becoming ripe for a Caesar to bring us \u201cpeace and safety\u201d when (not if) some lunatics perpetrate another outrage.\u00a0 As a friend of mine used to say, \u201cAmericans are three meals away from a revolution.\u201d\u00a0 Only in our case, it will be a revolution of the powerful and rich against the poor and weak (and the latter will be a lot more of us soon, if things do not change).\u00a0 Secular \u201cmorality\u201d will have nothing to say to that because secular morality always, in the end, says \u201cThe strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.\u201d\u00a0 When you abandon the transcendent God and worship a creature, you give up forever the power to say that there is anything higher than the word of the strongest man.\u00a0 You may coast on your Christian culture for a while and jaw about \u201cholding these truths to be self-evident\u201d.\u00a0 But all you are doing is pilfering from a mystical tradition you are simultaneously laboring to destroy.\u00a0 Sooner or later you have to choose whether you will admit that you are pilfering and rejoin that Tradition, or else finish your act of vandalism and face\u00a0the anarchy and tyranny that\u00a0follows.<\/p>\n

Pope Benedict called it<\/a>:<\/p>\n

In the modern era, the idea of the Last Judgement has faded into the background: Christian faith has been individualized and primarily oriented towards the salvation of the believer\u2019s own soul, while reflection on world history is largely dominated by the idea of progress. The fundamental content of awaiting a final Judgement, however, has not disappeared: it has simply taken on a totally different form. The atheism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is\u2014in its origins and aims\u2014a type of moralism: a protest against the injustices of the world and of world history. A world marked by so much injustice, innocent suffering, and cynicism of power cannot be the work of a good God. A God with responsibility for such a world would not be a just God, much less a good God. It is for the sake of morality that this God has to be contested. Since there is no God to create justice, it seems man himself is now called to establish justice. If in the face of this world\u2019s suffering, protest against God is understandable, the claim that humanity can and must do what no God actually does or is able to do is both presumptuous and intrinsically false. It is no accident that this idea has led to the greatest forms of cruelty and violations of justice; rather, it is grounded in the intrinsic falsity of the claim. A world which has to create its own justice is a world without hope. No one and nothing can answer for centuries of suffering. No one and nothing can guarantee that the cynicism of power\u2014whatever beguiling ideological mask it adopts\u2014will cease to dominate the world.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

a former atheist and convert to the Catholic faith has fun chewing over the embarrassing attempt of secularism to cobble a coherent moral philosophy out of the remaining rags and sticks stolen after the vandalism of the Christian tradition. I propose the following arguments: If secularism is true, all thoughts and ideas are manmade. Moral […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":92,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-51","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Invaluable John C. 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