Whose Truth? Whose Morality?

On my website, I have a “Quotable Quotes” page. The quotes are loosely grouped by topic, and at the top is this one by Winston Churchill:

Truth is incontrovertible. Panic may resent it; ignorance may deride it; malice may distort it; but there it is.

This has long been a favorite of mine, and several years ago I had a poster-size version of it printed so I could display it in my classroom. It cost me less than $10 to do this—a real bargain when one considers that The New York Times wants you to spend $300 to sport a t-shirt ($450 gets you the hoodie) that bears their new slogan (purportedly written by Churston Winchill, a transgender Times intern who majored in angry protesting and vulgar tweeting)—Truth. It’s more important now than ever.

This replaces the old slogan, which of course was, Shut Up, You Racist, Homophobic Bigot! T-shirts bearing this can now be found at a discount price of only $50 in the LGBT section of Target stores. At least I think so. We stopped shopping at Target years ago when they couldn’t seem to grasp the truth about males and females.

Only really smart people—such as those who read “all the ‘truth’ that’s fit to print”—would ever spend $300 for a t-shirt. And as one astute observer noted, if you’re a liar, you’ll want to wear it every day. This means we should be seeing them daily all across bastions of liberalism—college campuses, Hollywood, Planned Parenthood lobbies, same-sex “weddings,” the offices of the SPLC, Red Hen restaurants, and the like.

Instead of its pasta, Red Hen restaurants are now famous for partisanship—and, like most every liberal these days, “panic, ignorance, and malice.” Instead of angry politics, the Virginia location that turned away Sarah Sanders claimed they were doing so based on “moral convictions.” How absurd.

Of course, as most now well know, the “moral convictions” of modern liberalism allow for the killing of the most innocent and helpless among us, the legal redefinition of the oldest institution in the history of humanity, the attempted redefinition of gender, the embracing of virtually every sexual perversion imaginable, and so on. In other words, a modern liberal clamoring about “moral convictions” is like Larry Flynt complaining about adultery.

This so-called “moral conviction,” this so-called “truth” has nothing to do with morality or truth at all, but rather is something nearly as old as humanity itself: the desire to rule one’s own world. As Francis A. Schaeffer put it in chapter one—The Abolition of Truth and Morality—of his seminal book A Christian Manifesto, such a worldview has placed mankind “at the center of all things, and making him the measure of all things.” And those who live according to this worldview “have no sufficient base for either society or law,” and thus, they certainly have no business in any positions of power.

This humanistic view of reality led even a former Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (1946-1953), Frederick M. Vinson, to conclude, “Nothing is more certain in modern society than the principle that there are no absolutes.” Vinson said this prior to 1950, and his ignorant proverb has indeed proven to be, as Al Mohler put it, a “dark prophecy” of things to come. For decades, liberals across the U.S. have embraced Vinson’s vision of a relativistic society.

Therefore, truth and morality are not eternal and from the One who made all things, but rather are merely a matter of taste. As the Humanist Manifesto II put it, “moral values derive their source from human experience. Ethics is autonomous and situational needing no theological or ideological sanction. Ethics stems from human need and interest.”

Thus, if one “needs” to kill her unborn child, or one is “interested” in “marrying” his homosexual partner, or if a man wants to “experience” what it’s like to live as a woman, so be it. If one “needs” to conduct an illegal investigation in order to win an election, or one has a vested “interest” in taking guns away from law abiding Americans, or one wants to “experience” college without having to pay for it, nothing or no one should stand in the way.

Whether in their personal lives, their politics, and even their theology, today’s liberals are blind to the notion that some things are settled for all time, and they have written their own moral code. While hypocritically touting “tolerance,” they insist that the rest of us either submit to their rule or “get the hell out!” Only God, or those operating under His authority, has the right to such an ultimatum, and—in spite of the insistence by fools like Maxine Waters that “God’s on our side,”—most liberals long ago decided that they didn’t want to play by His rules.

“Truth makes the Devil blush” wrote English historian Thomas Fuller. As liberalism has created a culture that is nearly bereft of shame, and in spite of their increasingly unhinged and immoral behavior, and because they are mostly ignorant of the “incontrovertible” truth, today’s liberals rarely blush. This usually happens only when someone becomes a political liability and not because some proper moral standard has been violated.

Again, what we are really dealing with here is competing views of truth. As noted apologist William Lane Craig put it when writing about the Christian perspective on homosexuality, “Today so many people think of right and wrong, not as matters of fact, but as matters of taste.” And if taste determines truth, then we’re all at the mercy of whoever’s in charge, because, ultimately we’re all intolerant. It’s simply a matter of two things: who’s right, and who are Americans going to put in charge.

Copyright 2018, Trevor Grant Thomas
At the Intersection of Politics, Science, Faith, and Reason.
www.trevorgrantthomas.com
Trevor is the author of the The Miracle and Magnificence of America
tthomas@trevorgrantthomas.com