Moral relativism is the view that moral values and moral duties do not exist in reality, but only exist as opinions in people’s minds. When you ask a moral relativist where the belief that stealing is wrong comes from, he may tell you that it is his opinion, or that it is the opinion of most people in his society. But he cannot tell you that stealing is wrong independent of what people think, because morality (on moral relativism) is just personal preference.
So what’s wrong with it?
I found this list of the seven flaws of moral relativism at the Salvo magazine web site.
Here’s the summary:
Moral relativists can’t accuse others of wrongdoing.
Relativists can’t complain about the problem of evil.
Relativists can’t place blame or accept praise.
Relativists can’t make charges of unfairness or injustice.
Relativists can’t improve their morality.
Relativists can’t hold meaningful moral discussions.
Relativists can’t promote the obligation of tolerance.
Here’s my favorite flaw of relativism (#6):
Relativists can’t hold meaningful moral discussions. What’s there to talk about? If morals are entirely relative and all views are equal, then no way of thinking is better than another. No moral position can be judged as adequate or deficient, unreasonable, acceptable, or even barbaric. If ethical disputes make sense only when morals are objective, then relativism can only be consistently lived out in silence. For this reason, it is rare to meet a rational and consistent relativist, as most are quick to impose their own moral rules like “It’s wrong to push your own morality on others”. This puts relativists in an untenable position – if they speak up about moral issues, they surrender their relativism; if they do not speak up, they surrender their humanity. If the notion of moral discourse makes sense intuitively, then moral relativism is false.
I sometimes get a lot of flack from atheists who complain that I don’t let them make any moral statements without asking them first to ground morality on their worldview. And that’s because on atheism morality IS NOT rationally grounded, so they can’t answer. In an accidental universe, you can only describe people’s personal preferences or social customs, that vary by time and place. It’s all arbitrary – like having discussions about what food is best or what clothing is best. The answer is always going to be “it depends”. It depends on the person who is speaking because it’s a subjective claim, not an objective claim. There is no objective way we ought to behave.
So, practically speaking, everyone has to decide whether right and wrong are real – objectively real. If they are objectively real, that means that there is a right way for human beings to behave, and a wrong way for human beings to behave. It means that things that are really objectively wrong like rape are wrong for all times and all places, regardless of what individuals and societies might think of it. In order to rationally ground that kind of morality, you have to have a foundation for it – a cosmic Designer who decides for all times and places what the conduct of his creatures ought to be. And then our moral duties are duties that are owed to this Designer. It is like playing football or playing a boardgame – the person who invents the game decides the rules. But if there is no designer of the game, then there are no rules.
Without a designer of the universe, the question of how we ought to act is decided by people in different times and different places. It’s arbitrary and variable, and therefore it doesn’t do the job of prescribing behavior authoritatively. It’s very important not to get involved in any serious endeavor with another person or persons if they don’t have a sense of right and wrong being absolute and fixed. A belief in objective moral values is a necessary pre-requisite for integrity.
I received an e-mail from a woman who was telling me to drop my list of 10 worldview questions and just look for a wife who reads the Bible and has feelings about Jesus.
She wrote:
My suggestion to you is to consider a top-down approach. Just pray for God to send you your wife and pray that you recognize her immediately. You don’t seem like you really want to remain single…and your children are missing out on having you as their dad. Marriage is for children, remember? I know several young ladies who know their Scripture and who love Jesus but who, I don’t think, would pass your test because, in my perception, they aren’t cerebral enough.
Marriage is for children. Marriage is not for God, apparently.
I get this e-mail a lot, especially from women who have married non-Christians or who are divorced. Now the whole point of the list of 10 questions is to detect women who are not going to help me to produce effective, influential Christian children. If I am going to spend north of $100,000 per child + tuition, then I expect to get some sort of return on that investment for God. That money doesn’t earn itself, and it needs to be well-spent serving God.
It’s my wife’s job to help me to do that. My goal in choosing a wife is to find a helper to make the relationship serve God. Otherwise, it’s better for God if I give that money that I worked very hard to earn directly to effective Christian scholars. I don’t have money to burn “playing house” with someone who is guided by her feelings. I can just give the money to Reasonable Faith or Discovery Institute instead.
Let’s take a look at two parents who aimed at nothing and hit it with their daughter. The two parents run a ministry that is based around passionate preaching, prayer and Bible verses.
Excerpt:
The Lord spoke to Arise International Conference host Mary Hudson to encourage women to reach their full destiny in Jesus Christ. He wants women to rise up as trailblazers, to think outside the box and be bold in Him, of course putting God first, your husband second and then your family!
Mary’s ministry of Arise! International holds annual women’s empowerment and leadership conferences in Hawaii, Belgium, Colombia, France, Switzerland, Denmark and the USA. The river of glory is rising and we must flow with it.
2012 promises to be a break-through year to Arise! in who you are in Christ. Lean on Him for direction, don’t look to man. Knowing the signs of the times and hearing the voice of the Holy Spirit will be vital to being at the right place at the right time to reap the harvest of souls coming into the Kingdom.
Pray about being a part of Arise! this coming year. It just may be the meeting that propels you into the next level for your life. Remember, you are equipped with everything you need to fulfill your purpose. God’s assignments reveal your abilities and your capabilities, and He will provide both the potential and the provision to meet every assignment.
We call you blessed and highly favored!
I noticed that their “book store” offers nonsense books like this:
Keith Hudson “Looking and Seeing”:
Like this disciplined athlete, you need to learn how to look beyond your present situation and keep your eye on His Presence. God is ready to display His glory in your life as well in these last days, but it is going to take boldness for you to take the mask off and look at people and situations the way God sees them, not how man looks at them. What may stand in front of you may look too big for you to grasp; that what you see now is the way it’s always going to be. Or you look at the dream God has given you and think, “there is no way I can ever accomplish this with my resources at my age…” That is the moment you have to flip the switch from looking to seeing.
Mary Hudson “Smart Bombs”:
Smart Bombs is a book which will show you practically and with true life examples how to take God’s Word and let it explode strongholds in your life. When you read the Bible, He quickens particular passages or verses to your heart. You know it is God talking to you about your situation. Or when you receive a prophetic word, you sense in your heart this is speaking to you. But what do you do with these words when they bear witness with you? Let them fade away and disappear off of your memory? No, Smart Bombs shows you how to go on the offense with the anointed word of God, how to demolish strongholds and take back everything the enemy has stolen from you.
This easy read is a must for anyone who is looking for clarity on their destiny.
Keith Hudson “The Cry”:
The Cry will reignite you with new fire. Christians lose their passion when they let go of their zeal for God. We come into prayer meetings and we are so polished and perfected. But the Lord wants to hear the cry of your heart. The church has lost its cry: God is about to restore it. Why did the thirty people gathered for the Azusa Street revival have such a move of the spirit of God in their day? Because they had a cry in their hearts and in their prayers. The Cry will release a desperate longing in you for Gods intervention in your life. It goes way beyond your natural thinking into a spiritual hunger from your innermost being. When everything else has failed, a desperate cry touches the heart of God.
Now do you think that someone who reads books like that will produce the same kind of children as parents who read William Lane Craig, Stephen C. Meyer, Jay Richards, and Michael Licona? Of course not. Because the Hudson books are fluff and the books by real Christian scholars are not fluff.
Now let’s read an article from Christian Post about what sort of child the fluff approach produces. (H/T Mysterious Chris S.)
Excerpt:
Katy Perry, the 29-year-old singer and songwriter, is revealing that while she prays she no longer identifies with Christianity.
“I don’t believe in a heaven or a hell, or an old man sitting on a throne. I believe in a higher power bigger than me because that keeps me accountable,” she told Marie Claire magazine recently. “Accountability is rare to find, especially with people like myself, because nobody wants to tell you something you don’t want to hear.”
Perry, who took the Billboard charts by storm with her hit song “I Kissed a Girl” in 2008, told Marie Claire that she no longer considers herself a Christian despite being raised by Christian ministers.
“I’m not Buddhist, I’m not Hindu, I’m not Christian, but I still feel like I have a deep connection with God. I pray all the time – for self-control, for humility,” she told Marie Claire. “There’s a lot of gratitude in it. Just saying ‘thank you’ sometimes is better than asking for things.”
Despite her decision to perform music that may seem controversial to the Christian community, the chart-topping singer has never shied away from crediting the Christian church for giving her a start as a performer.
“The atmosphere I grew up in was 100 percent Christian,” Perry said her “Part of Me: 3D” movie which was released last year. “I started singing in the church, I never really had another plan.”
Their daughter is writing songs to promote homosexuality to young people. That’s their legacy. The legacy of spiritual gifts, God opening doors of mysticism and charismatic anti-intellectualism. That’s what they are going to present to God as their spiritual legacy. I noticed that Mary Hudson is now calling her daughter’s celebrity divorce after one year of marriage a “gift from God”. Her daughter married a heroin-addicted leftist non-Christian – but he was hawt. Tall, dark, handsome and a famous comedian, too.
The list of questions I use when courting helps me to avoid marrying a woman like Katy Perry’s mother. She could not answer any of my questions. None of them. And what’s more, she doesn’t want to answer them. She wants to live her whole life without learning how to answer them. She wants to stick with her Bible, her singing, her feelings, her passionate oratory and her crowds of gullible people. I will not marry a woman like that. It produces disaster and failure. It produces anti-Christian children.
In fact, you can’t succeed at anything worthwhile in life using the Keith and Mary Hudson approach to parenting. You can’t do a thing with that approach. Not writing software, not fixing cars, not making investments, not sending a rocket to the moon, not even evangelizing an apostate daughter. You do not want to be a Christian man who pumps 30 years of hard labor into a family that produces apostate children. If you are going to spend the money, then make sure you get the results.
Rolling Stone settled the defamation lawsuit filed by a University of Virginia fraternity over a false story about a rape on campus, agreeing to pay $1.65 million on Tuesday.
The lawsuit stemmed from the 2014 story “A Rape on Campus,” published in Rolling Stone by Sabrina Rubin Erdely. The story detailed the sexual assault of a woman identified only as “Jackie” at the Virginia Alpha Chapter of the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity.
The story was officially retracted in 2015 after a police investigation did not find any evidence to back up the story. News outlets also began to question Jackie’s story, and once again did not find any evidence to confirm her account.
The fraternity sought $25 million and settled for $1.65 million. Phi Kappa Psi plans to donate a “significant portion” to groups that provide sexual assault awareness education, prevention training, and victim counseling services, according to the Associated Press.
“Rolling Stone and Erdely had an agenda, and they were recklessly oblivious to the harm they would cause innocent victims in their ruthless pursuit of that agenda,” the fraternity’s lawsuit said.
Rolling Stone settled another defamation lawsuit against university administrator Nicole Eramo for $3 million.
Naturally, the liberal mainstream media – which anxiously reported on the hoax – is not nearly as interested in reporting on the correction. Because they have their agenda of blaming men for the free choices that women make. But it’s not just liberal mainstream media that pushes the rape culture myth. At the time this Rolling Stone story came out, I remember that traditional pro-marriage advocates like Brad Wilcox gleefully tweeted the false rape accusation story, and then had to take it back later. So this was by no means seen through at the beginning, except by men’s rights activists who were familiar with the nature of false rape hoax stories. “Pro-marriage” people are anxious to prove that they can fit in with liberals, and if they have to denigrate men to do it, they will.
So why do some women lie about rape? Let’s look at a study.
Studies show about 40% of rape accusations are false
Here’s a Fox News article from a prominent equity feminist, Wendy McElroy.
Excerpt:
“Forty-one percent of all reports are false.”
This claim comes from a study conducted by Eugene J. Kanin of Purdue University. Kanin examined 109 rape complaints registered in a Midwestern city from 1978 to 1987.
Of these, 45 were ultimately classified by the police as “false.” Also based on police records, Kanin determined that 50 percent of the rapes reported at two major universities were “false.”
Although Kanin offers solid research, I would need to see more studies with different populations before accepting the figure of 50 percent as prevalent; to me, the figure seems high.
But even a skeptic like me must credit a DNA exclusion rate of 20 percent that remained constant over several years when conducted by FBI labs. This is especially true when 20 percent more were found to be questionable.
False accusations are not rare. They are common.
If you would like to get an idea of how false rape accusations are handled by the police, here is an example. Usually no charges are filed against the women, or if charges are filed, then they get off without jail time. Meanwhile, men falsely accused of rape spend years in jail, until the women finally admits she made the whole thing up. The presumption is that women always tell the truth, and that evidence isn’t needed to prove her charges.
False accusations in divorce trials
False accusations of domestic violence and sexual abuse are also commonly made during divorce settlements in order to get custody of the children, and the attendant benefits.
Consider this article from Touchstone magazine, by Stephen Baskerville.
Excerpt:
Today it is not clear that we have learned anything from these miscarriages of justice. If anything, the hysteria has been institutionalized in the divorce courts, where false allegations have become routine.
What is ironic about these witch-hunts is the fact that it is easily demonstrable that the child abuse epidemic—which is very real—is almost entirely the creation of feminism and the welfare bureaucracies themselves. It is well established by scholars that an intact family is the safest place for women and children and that very little abuse takes place in married families. Child abuse overwhelmingly occurs in single-parent homes, homes from which the father has been removed. Domestic violence, too, is far more likely during or after the breakup of a marriage than among married couples.
Yet patently false accusations of both child abuse and domestic violence are rampant in divorce courts, almost always for purposes of breaking up families, securing child custody, and eliminating fathers. “With child abuse and spouse abuse you don’t have to prove anything,” the leader of a legal seminar tells divorcing mothers, according to the Chicago Tribune. “You just have to accuse.”
Among scholars and legal practitioners it is common knowledge that patently trumped-up accusations are routinely used, and virtually never punished, in divorce and custody proceedings. Elaine Epstein, president of the Massachusetts Women’s Bar Association, writes that “allegations of abuse are now used for tactical advantage” in custody cases. The Illinois Bar Journal describes how abuse accusations readily “become part of the gamesmanship of divorce.” The UMKC Law Reviewreports on a survey of judges and attorneys revealing that disregard for due process and allegations of domestic violence are used as a “litigation strategy.” In the Yale Law Review, Jeannie Suk calls domestic violence accusations a system of “state-imposed de facto divorce” and documents how courts use unsupported accusations to justify evicting Americans from their homes and children.
I often hear men, especially men in the church, complaining that young men won’t get married because they are too busy watching porn and playing video games. But maybe the real reason is that they don’t want to be exposed to domestic violence laws and divorced courts that are waiting to separate them from their earnings.
If the church isn’t speaking out against premarital sex (to women) and against no-fault divorce (to women) and against biased domestic violence laws (to women), then they have no one to blame for the so-called “marriage strike” but themselves. Unfortunately, it seems that no one who advocates for marriage has the courage to attack the root cause of the marriage decline: women’s own irresponsible choices. When women choose immoral men and then choose to have sex with them before marriage, they have no one to blame but themselves for the damage that results.
Domestic violence rates
Here’s a recent article in the radically leftist UK Guardian that summarizes the evidence that women commit domestic violence at the same rates as men.
Excerpt:
Domestic violence has traditionally been understood as a crime perpetrated by domineering men against defenceless women. Research spanning over 40 years has, however, consistently found that men and women self-report perpetrating domestic violence at similar rates. Professor John Archer from the University of Central Lancashire has conducted a number of meta-analytic reviews of these studies and found that women are as likely to use domestic violence as men, but women are twice as likely as men to be injured or killed during a domestic assault. Men still represent a substantial proportion of people who are assaulted, injured or killed by an intimate partner (50%, 30% and 25% respectively).
If the empirical research is correct in suggesting that between a quarter and half of all domestic violence victims are men, a question follows: why has women’s domestic violence towards men been unreported for so long, and what has changed in the last five years to make it more visible?
One reason may be the feminist movement. Feminism took up the cause of domestic abuse of women in the 1970s, with the world’s first women’s refuge being opened by Erin Pizzey in 1971. Feminism understood domestic violence as the natural extension of men’s patriarchal attitudes towards women, leading men to feel they had the right to control their partners, using violence if necessary. Feminists campaigned successfully to bring the issue into the public arena, thereby securing resources to establish services to help victims. This activism and advocacy led to governmental and public acceptance that “domestic violence” was synonymous with violence against women.
[…]The dual stereotypes of the violent man and passive woman have undoubtedly obscured the existence of male victims of domestic violence in the past. Men were also unlikely to view their own victimisation as either domestic violence or a criminal assault, and so were unlikely to seek help.
More domestic violence studies from multiple countries are discussed here. They confirm the study discussed above – the rates are similar for men and women. But all the taxing and spending is for women, not men. It’s a huge difference in how women and men are treated, just like there is a difference in concern and spending with breast cancer vs prostate cancer.
I’ve only met one unmarried woman in my entire life who was aware of all of these injustices against men. And yet so many women want to get married, and think they are qualified for marriage. What kind of friend could a woman be to a man, when she only knows about the trendy problems that concern leftists (global warming, rape culture, transgenders in bathrooms, etc.) but nothing about the problems that face unmarried men – especially if they take on the challenges of marriage and fatherhood? The typical young, unmarried woman today (Christian and non-Christian) is pro-abortion, pro-no-fault-divorce, pro-big-government, a radical feminist and anti-male. Why do they think that marriage is something they deserve? What exactly is it that they offer a man?
WINTERY KNIGHT 