Sunday, July 24, 2016

Blissful Incoherence

Work with me here: the secularist mindset prizes this life — and this life only — since it cannot reasonably contemplate any other.

Further, having dismissed notions of God, sin, righteousness and judgment, the worldview that begins from an evolutionary viewpoint is unconcerned with the moral quality of the lives it seeks to preserve. It only matters that life exists, and therefore the taking of it is always “wrong”. This despite a couple of glaring logical inconsistencies: (1) in a random universe with no Creator, nothing can be objectively immoral, only inconvenient or undesirable; and (2) many of the same folks who deplore capital punishment are perfectly fine with the taking of innocent life in and outside the womb.

Cognitive Dissonance

Cognitive dissonance like this explains why Corcoran State Prison is still feeding, clothing and housing Charles Manson at age 81, though there is no question of his murderous guilt. By the same logic, I suppose, Manson’s victims ceased to be worthy of society’s concern the moment they stopped breathing. After all, dead is dead. Nothing can bring a victim back or make whole the loss to families and friends.

In a universe without God, the concept of collective guilt cannot possibly have any coherent meaning. When we start from evolutionary assumptions, the idea that society can somehow do wrong” by a random collection of atoms (or group thereof) should make no sense at all to us. And yet Progressives rage about the unfair treatment of the various victim classes within society and tell us that reparations and apologies are owed generations after such wrongs are committed, and that to fail to acknowledge such violations is an immense injustice.

A Brief and Bloody Transaction

Injustice. Hmm. That’s a very biblical concept:
“But if anyone hates his neighbor and lies in wait for him and attacks him and strikes him fatally so that he dies, and he flees into one of these cities, then the elders of his city shall send and take him from there, and hand him over to the avenger of blood, so that he may die. Your eye shall not pity him, but you shall purge the guilt of innocent blood from Israel, so that it may be well with you.”
The guilt of innocent blood. Viewed from a biblical perspective, murder is not merely a brief and bloody transaction between violator and victim. It involves everyone around them. Justice must be served because the community at large is affected by the acts of individuals, and the moral character of a community is exposed by the way it responds to such incidents.

Collective Guilt

Old Testament laws like this one from Deuteronomy assume the ability to distinguish murder from manslaughter and to distinguish both from capital punishment, something of which the evolutionary mindset is largely incapable. Further, God’s laws assign the responsibility for carrying out justice to the community. When the community abdicates its responsibility, God fails to bless. “You shall purge the guilt of innocent blood from Israel, so that it may be well with you.”

It’s idle to argue that Israel was a theocracy (which Western nations manifestly are not), or that we are not under Law but under Grace. Innocent blood cried out for justice long before the existence of the Law of Moses and makes its claim on the basis that mankind was created in the image of God:
“Whoever sheds the blood of man,
by man shall his blood be shed,
for God made man in his own image.”
Accept it or not, at least God’s rule comes with a coherent rationale, a view of the value of life that depends on morality rather than mere biology.

Hand-Wringing For Almost Everybody

Modern society acknowledges the idea of collective guilt, only provided it is of a very restricted sort: guilt over the oppression of women, minorities, homosexuals, transsexuals, the poor, citizens of third world countries and even the steaks simmering on our barbeques. Again, only certain sorts of collective guilt may be acknowledged: meat is murder but dead babies are medical research subject matter, ingredients in cosmetics and an industry worth an estimated $350 million annually to those who profit from it in the U.S. alone.

There’s enough hand-wringing for everybody, but only if you’re the right sex and skin tone, and only over certain sorts of injustices. Society’s acknowledgement of collective guilt has very specific parameters, and our failure to avenge innocent blood lies well outside them. That, my friends, is blissfully incoherent.

For all that moderns deplore the Old Testament law as patriarchal, primitive, violent and unenlightened, it remains an absolute bastion of sanity, logic and rationality compared to current efforts to construct a just society in the absence of God.

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