“The sense that life makes sense is really the sine qua non for ethical behavior. If the larger thing — existence itself — means nothing, then individual acts performed within that meaningless scheme are themselves meaningless.”
~ William Kilpatrick, Why Johnny Can’t Tell Right from Wrong (New York, NY; Simon & Schuster, 1992), 196.
Consider this testimony by J. Budziszewski in light of Romans 1:21-22 For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools . . ..
“[E]verything goes wrong without God. This is true even of the good things He’s given us, such as our minds. One of the good things I’ve been given is a stronger than average mind. I don’t make the observation to boast; human beings are given diverse gifts to serve Him in diverse ways. The problem is that a strong mind that refuses the call to serve God has its own way of going wrong. When some people flee from God they rob and kill. When others flee from God they do a lot of drugs and have a lot of sex. When I fled from God I didn’t do any of those things; my way of fleeing was to get stupid. Though it always comes as a surprise to intellectuals, there are some forms of stupidity that one must be highly intelligent and educated to commit. God keeps them in his arsenal to pull down mulish pride, and I discovered them all. That is how I ended up doing a doctoral dissertation to prove that we make up the difference between good and evil and that we aren’t responsible for what we do. I remember now that I even taught these things to students; now that’s sin.
It was also agony. You cannot imagine what a person has to do to himself — well, if you are like I was, maybe you can — what a person has to do to himself to go on believing such nonsense. St. Paul said that the knowledge of God’s law is ‘written on our hearts, our consciences also bearing witness.’ The way natural law thinkers put this is to say that they constitute the deep structures of our minds. That means that so long as we have minds, we can’t not know them. I resisted the temptation to believe in good with as much energy as some saints resist the temptation to neglect good. For instance, I loved my wife and children, but I was determined to regard this love as merely a subjective preference with no real and objective value. After all, love is a commitment of the will to the true good of another person, and how can one’s will be committed to the true good of another person if he denies the reality of good, denies the reality of persons, and denies that commitments are in his control?
Visualize a man opening up the access panels of his mind and pulling out all the components that have God’s image stamped on them. The problem is that they all have God’s image stamped on them, so the man can never stop. No matter how much he pulls out, there’s still more to pull. I was that man. Because I pulled out more and more, there was less and less that I could think about. But because there was less and less that I could think about, I thought I was becoming more and more focused. Because I believed things that filled me with dread, I thought I was smarter and braver than the people who didn’t believe them. I though I saw an emptiness at the heart of the universe that was hidden from their foolish eyes. Of course I was the fool.”
~ J. Budziszewski, “Escape from Nihilism“
“Virtue may be defined as an activity of the whole person in conformity with love of God and love of neighbor.”
~ Benjamin W. Farley, In Praise of Virtue (Grand Rapids, Mi.: Eerdmans, 1995), 160.
Categories: Ethics · Love · Obedience of Faith
James Davison Hunter shows us something of the moral confusion that results from being made in the image of God on the one hand and sinfully suppressing the knowledge of God on the other. Morally, and in every other way, fallen humanity is a house divided against itself.
We want character but without unyielding conviction; we want strong morality but without the emotional burden of guilt or shame; we want virtue but without particular moral justifications that invariably offend; we want good without having to name evil; we want decency without the authority to insist upon it; we want moral community without any limitations to personal freedom. In short, we want what we cannot possibly have on the terms that we want it.
~ The Death of Character: Moral Education in an Age Without Good or Evil (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2000), xv.
Categories: Ethics · Secularism
