Tag Archives: Moral Duties

Commentary

The New York Times explains why the leftist elite supports narcissism and divorce

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Here’s a wonderful romantic story endorsed by the New York Times, which represents the worldview of elite leftists. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

WHAT happens when love comes at the wrong time?

Carol Anne Riddell and John Partilla met in 2006 in a pre-kindergarten classroom. They both had children attending the same Upper West Side school. They also both had spouses.

[…]Mrs. Riddell was a reporter and anchor on WNBC television in New York and a mother of two.[…]Mr. Partilla, then a 42-year-old triathlete and a president of media sales at Time Warner, recognized a kindred dynamo. “She’s such a force,” he said. “She rocks back and forth on her feet as if she can’t contain her energy as she’s talking to you.”

The connection was immediate, but platonic. In fact, as they became friends so did their spouses. There were dinners, Christmas parties and even family vacations together.

So Ms. Riddell was surprised to find herself eagerly looking for Mr. Partilla at school events — and missing him when he wasn’t there. “I didn’t admit to anyone how I felt,” she said. “To even think about it was disruptive and disloyal.”

What she didn’t know was that he was experiencing similar emotions. “First I tried to deny it,” Mr. Partilla said. “Then I tried to ignore it.”

But it was hard to ignore their easy rapport. They got each other’s jokes and finished each other’s sentences. They shared a similar rhythm in the way they talked and moved. The very things one hopes to find in another person, but not when you’re married to someone else.

Ms. Riddell said she remembered crying in the shower, asking: “Why am I being punished? Why did someone throw him in my path when I can’t have him?”

[…]As Mr. Partilla saw it, their options were either to act on their feelings and break up their marriages or to deny their feelings and live dishonestly.

[…]“I did a terrible thing as honorably as I could,” said Mr. Partilla, who moved out of his home, reluctantly leaving his three children.

[…]The pain he had predicted pervaded both of their lives as they faced distraught children and devastated spouses, while the grapevine buzzed and neighbors ostracized them.

[…]All they had were their feelings, which Ms. Riddell described as “unconditional and all-encompassing.”

“I came to realize it wasn’t a punishment, it was a gift,” she said. “But I had to earn it. Were we brave enough to hold hands and jump?”

[…]“I didn’t believe in the word soul mate before, but now I do,” said Mr. Partilla.

[…]“My kids are going to look at me and know that I am flawed and not perfect, but also deeply in love,” she said. “We’re going to have a big, noisy, rich life, with more love and more people in it.”

Just FYI, I am using the word “adultery” for this because I consider carrying on an emotional affair while you are married to be adultery.

I think that this view is very popular among liberal elite circles, such as New York city. These elite liberals get very impatient with morality once they have risen to a certain level. They tend to want to elevate the pursuit of happiness (the “right” to be happy) over moral obligations to other family members who depend on them. There is no transcendent purpose for marriage, on their view – it is just another thing that is supposed to make them happy, like cars, vacations and careers. It doesn’t really matter what happens to the children. The leftist elites blunder their way into marriages thinking that marriage is just another accessory added to their exciting glamorous lives, like triathlons and careers in news media. (Or yoga, recycling, animal rights crusading, and vegetarianism in other cases). Then they find a way to weasel out of their marriages so that they can be happier and more fulfilled with more glamorous and exciting partners. But what is the deeper issue underlying this view of marriage? After all, people didn’t use to treat marriage as being about personal fulfillment… what happened?

The root cause

Obviously the people in our story are either functional atheists or outright atheists, since they are unrepentant adulterers. So why do atheists struggle so much with staying married? Let’s see.

You know how I am always talking about how atheism doesn’t rationally ground self-sacrificial moral obligations? Well this instance of adultery is exactly the kind of example that I am talking about. The problems with atheism and morality arises when an atheist is confronted with a desire to be happy that goes against what his society in that time and place considers to be moral. On atheism, right and wrong are relative to an arbitrary time and place in which the atheist was born – they are just like traffic laws and clothing fashions. It’s arbitrary. And no atheist in the world is going to sacrifice a moment of happiness because of arbitrary customs and conventions that change over time and place – as long as they can escape the consequences. The whole point of atheism is to dismiss moral obligations, to look down on those who are moral as stupid, and to pursue selfish happiness in this life. But what happens when atheists face a “moral obligation” (as defined by culture) that goes against their self-interest, i.e. – their feelings?  Well, the moral obligations go out the window – as long as they can avoid the social costs and punishments of their society (which is why the left is always so busy breaking down the Judeo-Christian morality of parents in the secular leftist public schools – they don’t want your kids to judge them for things like adultery and divorce). This is why the left support same-sex marriage – they want to redefine marriage so that it is based on the feelings and needs of selfish adults, not on moral obligations to children. The left doesn’t care about born children any more than they care about unborn children – they care about themselves. And they spin these self-serving “i’m the brave victim of your silly cultural prejudices” stories to minimize their culpability for the damage they cause. They are inventing a new standard of morality – one that glorifies selfishness and the triumph of the strong over the weak (children, born and unborn).

On the Christian worldview, God is real, and he has a design plan for us. Part of that design plan is that we were made to honor our relationship with him. Honoring that relationship with him means treating others a certain way, especially our spouses and children. We have to train our whole lives in order to be able to shoulder the burdens of family relationships – to our spouse and to our children. If a man neglects his education or his employment history or his investment portfolio, then he cannot be a provider. His feelings on those obligations don’t matter. If he wants to marry, he has a God-given obligation to provide. If a woman reads “The Shack” instead of “On Guard”, votes Democrat because she thinks that the Comedy Channel is more reliable than Fox News, and sleeps around a lot in college after freely choosing to make herself drunk, then she has failed to prepare for her role as a mother and wife. Denying yourself happiness as you prepare for moral obligations in a marriage is not rational in a godless universe. If God does not exist, then there is no way you ought to be, and no way marriage ought to be, and no way children ought to be treated. Children are the biggest victims of all – if the leftists aren’t killing them outright through abortion, then they are voting for no-fault divorce, single mother welfare, same-sex marriage, etc. in order to encourage selfish adults to deny children relationships with their two biological parents.

The problem with the left is that they want the prestige of marriage, but they won’t give up their selfish moral relativism. But how can marriage, which is built on the idea of vows and self-sacrificial moral obligations, be entered into by non-theistic self-centered leftists who are guided only by their self-interest and their emotions? It can’t. What they should have done is invented a new relationship, like cohabitation, and entered into that. But what they did, and what same-sex marriage activists are trying to do, is entering into marriage and then changing marriage into cohabitation by law. This is what conservatives mean when we say that no-fault divorce and same-sex marriage change marriage. If one party can dissolve a marriage unilaterally, then marriage has no meaning. If marriage can be had by people in non-exclusive relationships, then marriage has no meaning. They should have invented somethings else – something consistent with a worldview that denies self-sacrifice and moral obligations to children.

Anyway, read the whole disgusting, self-serving New York Times story, and leave me some comments.

Commentary

On women leaving marriages that don’t make them happy enough

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Don’t blame me! I didn’t write it. Alisha wrote it. She’s the meany, not me!

Excerpt:

I have a certain friend, a great guy I’ve known since I was a gawky teen, and who continues to be my friend in  my fully grown yet still gawky state. He has always been strong- fights hard, works hard, but loves the hardest.

When he married a few years ago, I was a little worried. Now that he’s divorced, I’m very hurt. And taken aback that he is not the only guy I know in this situation. In fact, I know about 4.

Now, these men are far from perfect. No one except God is. Yet in all these collapsed marriages, the women openly and willingly admitted the men they promised to be with until death had never hit, pushed, sexually or emotionally accosted them. They quite simply, no longer wanted to be married.

Of course, there is nothing really simple about dissolving one’s marriage, except for my simple-minded incomprehension as I sat at a showing of “The Devil Wears Prada” with one of these ladies a few years back. We had gone to the mall to do a little window shopping, and for what seemed to be the entire trip, this young lady- I’ll call her Amber- complained non-stop about what her husband wasn’t doing. He wasn’t buying her new clothes or shoes or taking her on vacations. She worked hard, many days 10 hours. And well, he worked, too, but it wasn’t fair he didn’t buy her more.

“Can he afford to buy you all that stuff?” I asked. She looked at me as if I were stupid. “MY FATHER works two even three jobs to make sure Mama gets everything she wants and deserves! Sometimes, he is away for weeks, working at construction sites to ensure it!”

[…]Another girl I know got hitched- only to ditch her groom before a tan line started to develop on her ring finger. The very same things she loved about him while they were dating- his commitment to God, desire to go into the ministry, his “good guy” sweetness- were instantly repulsive in marriage. Their marriage annulled, she jumped into a long term dating relationship which turned into cohabitation and a child together. But fortunate for her, no wedding.

I actually blame the men for choosing these women. Men have to test women during the courtship to see if what they are interested in is making a commitment and then acting self-sacrificially to honor their obligations. I could tell you nightmare stories about Christian women I know who can do the most amazing acts of selfishness and then totally refuse to make amends or accept any responsibility. But then, I’m not married to those women – because that all came out before I ever got serious about them. Many women are judging men today based on how amusing they are and whether their girlfriends will be envious and approving based on secular criteria supplied by TV shows and music videos. This all has to be detected during the courtship by the man. Courting is when the man has to detect if the woman is thinking anything other than “if I don’t like this – if it doesn’t make me feel happy all the time and impose no obligations on me – then I can get out of it”. Is she ready for a commitment? That’s the man’s job to find out.

What courtship is really about for men is communicating your plan and the challenges you’re facing and then standing back to see if she wants to help. I once met a Christian woman who would not so much as sit down with me to see what I did for a living. She wanted to have fun! And understanding my job so that she could help was not fun. (Presumably, spending my money that I earned from that job would have been more fun). So if a man marries a woman like that, then it is the man’s fault. If men are too stupid to know how to detect lemons then they deserve to suffer. Learning how to court is more important than playing video games. Knowing what laws strengthen men in their roles as husbands and fathers is more important than watching X-treme sports. Men are responsible to understand marriage, understand what women do in a marriage, and understand policies that strengthen or weaken marriage. Many men who are divorced today voted for the party of no-fault divorce (with the custody battles and fake charges of child abuse) and domestic violence laws (which criminalize criticizing your wife’s spending or weight) yesterday. And those men are fools. And they must be punished.

Men are terrible at knowing what they want from women. What matters to the stupid men about women today is not whether they are chaste and self-sacrificial and organized and goal-oriented, but only their physical appearance, how much they are willing to drink, and how far they are willing to go physically. Even Christian men have no idea what Christian women are supposed to DO in a marriage. Many men think that marriage will be 50% playing video games, and 50% sex or something. It’s just totally unrealistic. Not to mention that women are not inanimate objects. They are more like employees. If you bring a woman into your home and do not know how to motivate them, then they will not fill the role that they are assigned. Surely a wife is as entitled to as much “management” as an employee. Having sex with someone is not effective management. One-on-one eye-to-eye communication about current concerns and future goals is effective management.

I think that men and women really need to sit down and think about marriage and parenting as an engineering problem. What are the use cases? What are the requirements? What is the design plan? What are the possible solutions? What are the tradeoffs? What is the schedule? How much of this can we build ourselves, and how much of it can we purchase or outsource? If the woman is not on board with the seriousness of marriage, because she resents obligations, saving money and structure, then drop her like a hot potato. If she does not want a man to fulfill his roles in the marriage – protecting, providing and leading on moral/spiritual issues – then kick her to the curb. Spontaneity is good for a Sunday afternoon or a Friday night. It is not the way to run a a marriage, especially when there are kids. Spontaneity is not the way to produce quality software – with garbage in, you get garbage out. Can you imagine hiring an engineer based solely on their physical appearance and amusement value? Yet this is what men are doing. Christian men are doing this.

Polemics

Tangling with an atheist commenter on the grounding of morality

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An atheist named Moo went after commenter Mary in the comments to this post. So I decided to step in.

Moo wrote this:

Marriage is not about God. I am personally married, with 3 children and do not believe in the existence of a personal deity. You need to broaden your view of the world as most of the world does not believe the same as you do. Tolerance is a virtue that too many people underestimate. Your views of the topic should have any impact on the lives of people and their right to marry. This is an arrogant position as you assume that you have some moral authority.

Then I wrote this:

Are you tolerant of Mary’s view? Does Mary have a right to vote for policies like traditional marriage? Why is it “intolerant” when Mary thinks she’s right, and yet not “intolerant” when you think you’re right? Is Mary wrong? If you think so, then why aren’t you “intolerant”, according to your definition of intolerance? Where does this moral obligation to be tolerant come from, on atheism? To whom is the duty owed?

More important, let’s cut to the chase. My view is that atheists cannot ground morality rationally. If you disagree, you tell me where moral rules come from on your view, what is the means of existence of moral rules and moral obligations, and why should humans treat moral obligations as meaningful and prescriptive when it goes against their self-interest. Where does the free will necessary for moral choices come from? Why should an atheist sacrifice their live to save someone else – e.g. – by hiding Jews in Nazi Germany? Why is it rational, on atheism? Why is it rational for an atheist to do anything other than to pursue pleasure in this life? What else is there other than pleasure in an accidental universe than can be the motive for action?

Atheism is the negation of meaningful morality. (That’s my contention – it’s the denial of morality)

The statement “I am an atheist” is equivalent to saying “Morality is illusory”. Dawkins should have called his book “The Morality Delusion”, because morality is a delusion if atheism is true.

Then Moo wrote this:

Yes, I am tolerant of Mary’s views when they do not infringe on the rights of others. If Mary believes that her marriage requires a commitment to god then this is fine. Nobody other than her immediate family are impacted. A gay couple, atheist couple, whatever couple should not be impacted or offended.

As for morals, you have made a common mistake of tightly coupling these with faith. Morals have been around longer that religion, is evident (to a lesser extent) in the animal kingdom.

You seem to be implying that religious people are more moral than agnostic. Is that right? There is no need going into the evolutionary reasons for morals as i am sure that you will dispute the credibility of the scientist and science. Something for another debate ;-)

Then I wrote this:

What do you mean by the word tolerate? Please define tolerance and explain why supporting traditional procreative marriage is intolerant but supporting the re-definition of marriage to include any arrangement between any number of people, animals and anything else is tolerant. Why is Mary intolerant because she holds to a different definition than you do, but you’re tolerant and you hold to a different definition (“anything goes”) than she does?

I need you to answer my questions about morality, or I will assume that you think morality is illusory and there is no such thing as right or wrong. And no such thing as human rights. If that is true, then I will delete every comment you make that mentions morality or human rights. Either ground morality and human rights in your worldview or stop using moral language. Answer the questions. Ground the notion of morality or stop asserting how Mary ought to be.Ground the notion of rights on atheism or stop telling Mary that her ideas of morality violate other people’s rights.

Then Anon wrote this: (he’s smarter than I am, so he gets to the point faster)

Again, what is your view of the kind of relationship promoted by the like of NAMBLA?

Then I asked Moo to answer the question Anon asked:

Can you give Anon a direct answer on NAMBLA. Moral or immoral? And don’t forget to answer my questions about how you ground moral values, moral duties, free will, moral accountability, motivation for self-sacrifical morality, and ultimate significance of moral decisions. I want this all explained within the worldview of atheism. How does that all work on atheism?

Where do “rights” come from on atheism. Name a right and explain to me how it exists in reality. Where does it come from, on atheism? If you can’t ground it, then what do you mean by using the word?

Concepts like rights and morality and free will have no being in atheism. They don’t exist objectively. They’re not rationally grounded by an accidental, purely material, universe. You think you are referring to something real, but you won’t be able to explain those concepts. They are theistic concepts.

Then Mary wrote this:

Moo, on what basis do you say that impacting the rights of others (e.g. children) is immoral?

Then Moo wrote this:

The largest basis would be my upbringing. The values that were instilled in me by my parents, life experience, such as travelling extensively and living in other countries with a variety of cultural norms. I think that this is true for most people no matter what their beliefs are. You might want to acquaint yourself with “The Evolution of Morality” by Richard Joyce as it describes that the morals/values that we have are not contrary to other evolutionary factors. They are not a negative, in fact they are the things that have allows the human species to populate this world and flourish more than any other creature.

The specific issue I have with NAMBLA and generally people who could be deemed as “predators” is that they are impacting on the lives of others without their consent. There is a grey area around “what is the age of consent”, however I do not have firm position on that as I would have to do more personal research if this was of interest.

And I wrote this:

1) If the moral standards are valid depending on “how I was raised” then in what sense is racism wrong if that’s how the racist was raised. Or, to put it more bluntly, isn’t it true that on your view NOTHING is right or wrong, people are just fed a bunch of customs depending on the culture of the time and place they were born into – which is ARBITRARY. And on atheism, morality is just ARBITRARY CUSTOMS, like driving on the left or right side of the road. “How I was raised”.

2) Why is the population of this world by humans good, on your view? What makes humans so special, on your view, compared to any other creature who should “populate the world”? Explain where humans get their objective moral value compared to trees and snakes and maggots. And make sure that when you pick your criteria, that it isn’t just your opinion. It has to be objective – i.e. real.

3) Why is it wrong to impact the lives of others without their consent, objectively? Is that just your opinion? Is it how you were raised? How about the opinions of another atheist, like STALIN, who killed 100 million innocent people because it was his opinion and how he was raised. Why are you right and why is he wrong, on atheism?

And this is why I believe atheists think that morality is illusory on atheism. If they act nice, it’s because they are “aping” Christian morals that dominate the culture in this time and place. To find out what atheists are really like, go to North Korea and other communist nations, and look at what goes on there. That’s atheist morality. Nothing is really wrong or right – it’s just how you were raised. And that’s why Christians like William Wilberforce tried to stop slavery while atheists today kill unborn children and advocate for same-sex marriage to avoid being inconvenienced in the pursuit of sexual pleasure. They only think they think is “wrong” is that you’re making them feel bad for their selfish hedonism.

There is no self-sacrificial morality on atheism – just selfish hedonism. They are trying to have a good time before they die and to avoid feeling bad about their immoral actions. And that’s why they go along with any evil rather than fight it – because there is no right and wrong objectively on atheism. They want to use the force of law to stop you from making them feel bad as they redefine marriage in a way that denies children either a mother or a father. That’s atheist “morality”. Seek pleasure, and to hell with children’s right to life and children’s right to a mother AND a father. All that matters to atheists is that the strong are happy – who cares about the weak. It’s survival of the fittest – that’s atheist morality.

More about atheistic concepts of morality

Some debates on God and morality