Moral Outrage in a Philosophically Vapid Age

Everyone is outraged by something these days. Our secularist, left-leaning, and thoroughly woke friends champion three moral causes above all in our day.

Joining them are people who may not classify themselves as "secularists," but they are. They are the religious liberals, who affirm that a God of some sort exists, but language and distance have made Him wholly helpless to communicate with us. As such, we know God through various acts of interpretation. God is impotent to break through the fog of human conjecture, and so He (or Her or Zer) is lost within it. In short, religious liberals affirm the fatal flaw within Plato--namely, that there is such a thing as objective truth, but that we have no reliable tools by which to find it. As such, objective truth might as well not exist. If a pastor in a liberal church stands to speak on behalf of the Bible or God or even science, is it not still the case that he is only a man interpreting such things and could manifestly be wrong? Indeed the favorite pastime of the modern liberal Christian is pointing out to all their realist Christian friends that their understanding of God and morality and the world is "just your interpretation!" Which of course bends us back into human authority as the basis and foundation of all moral claims. In short, the Christian liberal is, at the very least, epistemologically secular (secular as it pertains to his claims to know anything). And that is what I want to discuss here for a moment.

This will be a philosophical analysis of these three moral causes in our day, championed most vociferously by secularists. I want to show again how easy it is to argue a moral position without having much epistemological right to do so. Surely this is the day and age when everyone is shouting some agenda or cause, but it seems to me that precious few know how to argue the why behind their ethics.

1. Climate Change:

Again, this is a philosophical analysis and not a scientific one. For the purpose of this short piece, I will assume that climate change is real and serious and caused by human agency.

Let us delve a level deeper, into the substructure of this matter. We have a fact of climate change, but then we also have something else. We have a moral claim. And under that we have an even deeper claim that there is no clear direction from God, because, either He doesn't exist or can't make His wishes known on the matter.

Thus, we are left with evolved primates and the ephemeral debris of their thinking, which is constrained to nothing. In a world that, according to men like Bertrand Russell, David Hume, Frederick Nietzsche and so many other secularists, is ultimately only governed by human ambitions and human plans, one is left to wonder how any singular and unifying moral system can ever be devised.

Or another way to think of this: Nature simply does things. Human beings are also only nature doing things. We create and we destroy, just like Volcanos and asteroids, and it isn't like nature cares or aims at anything. We subjectively care, but in a totally secular universe there are no patterns or plans or maps or morals that must be artificially and vainly protected. In that sense, morality in a godless universe isn't really morality. It is more like a subjective linguistic grouping mechanism. We animals are using it to survive in little animal groups while we shout at the other animal groups and even at the universe.

How is longevity a greater value than immediate pleasure? A secularist might answer that we want our children to enjoy pleasure too, but then why is their pleasure more important than mine? Surely our secular friends advocate abortion at least partially because it preserves this generation's pleasure at the expense of the next, or at the very least it staves off displeasure. Some generation will be the last. The point is that these are all just moral opinions, more ephemeral debris of subjective minds cobbled fortuitously together by a mindless process that will end with the ultimate scuttling of all things. We are in that sense wholly unanchored in our moral wanderings, interpretations, theories, conflicts.

And another point I raised elsewhere. In a godless universe why think that it matters that the global temperature is rising? Why think that the human species has some right to go on existing? As far as we can tell, thought itself is wholly ancillary to the universe, a vaporous chimera destined to disappear. Why think then that this generation has the right to a better existence than the next or vice versa? Why not think that creatures better suited to high temperatures are the most evolved on this planet and are due to replace us? But who can really care if this is a godless universe?

2. LGBTQ:

Who can help but marvel at the remarkable moral intensity of those who champion the morals of the LGBTQ community in our day, or of their success in bending the conscience of a society to their subjective moral leanings? Their success in doing so is further proof of the argument I'm advancing in this little piece. They have won the hearts of people and have done precious little to advance an argument as to why marriage and sexuality should be so radically redefined. But again, as secularists, they don't need to argue in the old classical sense of setting forth premises and conclusions. Sexuality and gender and marriage are simply what we make them to be in our experience. Passion is everything and logic is nothing!

A few years back, I tried to graciously argue the Christian position on the matter of gay marriage. How many people who disagreed with me on this matter took issue with the logic of my position and tried to argue it out with me? Of the hundreds I interacted with, I can think of two.

There have been those, like Matthew Vines and Jenn Hatmaker, who have mined liberal scholarship on the subject and tried to advance a more progressive Christian understanding of the subject. They have been decidedly unsuccessful in any attempt to square this "new" morality with the old.

But again, who really cares if they are right or wrong if in fact God's or nature's position on the subject cannot be known?

G.K. Chesterton once quipped that secularists have not destroyed religious things, but they have destroyed secular things. What he meant was that if things are reduced to mere human taste and opinion in these matters, then nothing is really sacred or meaningful in human life. Perhaps fundamentalist mormons are right on this and multiple marriage is correct. Perhaps Aldous Huxley's fictitious vision of the future where everyone belongs to everyone, and children are raised by the government in farms, is the correct vision. Perhaps my former student, who once wrote that marriage is a prison into which the oppressive ethics of Christianity would place us, is correct. Who are we to say? But surely if we cannot sort these questions out, if there is no correct way to structure human life and society as it pertains to sexuality and marriage and family, then much of the interest in life is exsanguinated from it.

The more dangerous logical reductio here is that if these matters are without any real moral guide posts, then no one can complain that the views of others are incorrect. It is the height of hubris to think that another human being is "wrong" for disagreeing with your particular view on this or any moral issue. But of course if that is true then even the most perverse ideas of human sexuality or marriage or family must all be regarded as equally legitimate. What I want to know is how on earth a person is going to take seriously a secularist's condemnation of polygamy or open marriage or prostitution or pornography or incest or serial promiscuity or bestiality or any deviant sexual practice? Animals with subjective moral leanings will do what they will do and there is an end of it! We may imprison or fine or carry on in blogs or legal documents, but that is just one animal group imposing its will against another.

3. Socialism and Student Loans and Equality:

The central moral principle here is compassion towards those with less. All the noise about white privilege in our day is clearly meant to be connected here. There are those who think that white men in particular have had their day and now deserve to be gutted, the fruits of their labor more fairly distributed to those in need.

But a secularist simply cannot carry forward such an argument with any philosophical meaning or merit. If there is no definitive set of binding moral principles or propositions, then why on earth should I care about my fellow man, except insofar as doing so disingenuously advances my own standing? I may--just may, because surely some people are set free from all economic pretense--need to appear compassionate, to play the game, but surely there is no reason to truly care about my fellow man, which is exactly why many socialist leaders throughout history lived like Donald Trump while boasting of caring for the people.

One must remember that the secularist is constrained to acknowledge that we are all gasping pathetic animals destined for annihilation. We have only our desperately brief claim to consciousness and pleasure and nothing else; or, as in the case of the Christian liberal, God surely isn't breaking through to contradict our suspicions. If that is true, then I simply cannot see any other program that makes more sense than a Nietzschean assertion of the will! If my fellow man is weak, then let him get out of the way, or find the will to fight, or go insane. In every pride there is a sickly lion. It's just bad luck.

It is fascinating to see how many poetic and passionate advocates we have of this or that cause in a philosophically meaningless world, a world filled with nothing but words. All our words echoing through the universe are meaningless writhing staccato noises. And surely that is what the universe is communicating to us. In other words, if this is a godless world (in reality or epistemologically), we are really saying nothing into the void, and the void is echoing it back to us.

But don't forget to recycle and seek justice for the oppressed. It is absolutely crucial!

Man Who Claims Humans Make Up Morality Morally Outraged by Christians

Saratoga, CA

Podcaster, Blogger, YouTuber, Entrepeneur, Motivational Speaker, Social Media Influencer, Lifestyle Expert, and public intellectual Tad Ryerson went viral recently, again. In a Ted Talk shared more than that cat video where the cat grabs the cord to the ceiling fan and is flung into the wall, Tad charismatically asserted that Christian morality is curiously inferior and "only another subjective view" of how to organize human communities.

In a passionate Jeremiad against Christian morality, Tad argued, "Christians pass themselves off as moral paragons, but their nationalism, homophobia, environmental obliviousness, and dark-ages sexual ethics are utterly ruining the spirit of equanimity and generosity required to sustain a forward-thinking and cosmopolitan society."

He continued, "The reason Christians can't see the inferiority of their view is that they think they are correct and have been running rough shod over various cultures since the inception of Christianity. If they could see that, in a diverse world, morality is ever evolving, ever changing, as we evolve and change, then they wouldn't be on the wrong side of history, stuck in the dark ages. They would help us advance women's rights, LGBTQ rights, and do other things that align with our superior morality."

We made contact with Dr. Ryerson (his doctoral degree is an honorary doctorate from George Fox University in Portland) and asked him about what he thinks of Muslim morality in America?

In reply, he wrote, "That is a great example of what I'm talking about in my Ted Talk that was shared a few million times and received with thunderous applause and which I am now sharing in a nation wide tour of college campuses. Hegemonic Christians in America are behind all this dreadful intolerance of Muslims. Muslims should be free to express their moral views as freely as anyone. They enrich the conversation. It is unfair to simply shut them down, as Christians no doubt would have us do."

Of course, we had to press a bit, and wanted to know how Dr. Ryerson could hold that the absolutist claims of Muslims in America on these topics are to be graciously heard and seen as equal to other views and that the Christian view is "inferior" and should be silenced through evolutionary "advancement" and even legislation. It seemed to us that there were at least two layers of contradiction in Dr. Ryerson's arguments.

Unfortunately Dr. Ryerson had to end our discussion, saying abruptly that he has chosen to take a different line with racists who are not "global thinkers" and wish only to "put people into oversimple compartments for ease of judgment," and also that he had to finish his research on activating chakras through CrossFit and developing these ideas into a new wellness program.