A Very Misplaced Faith

Moral Dystopia - NYTimes.com

Like many "progressives", Mareen seems to be shocked at the wages of relativism. Can't we just worship "the human spirit"??

We are getting a lot closer to understanding the "base wetware and kernel memes" that make up the core of what Maureen might think is "the human spirit" -- sort of an bio-cultural semi-indoctrinated  daemon in the brain to "keep us good". A kind of randomly programmed "moral compass".

Nice wish, not really much of a substitute for an eternal God and eternal damnation.

Somehow she left of Slick Willie, patron Democrat saint who we no know was a serial abuser of women under his control or influence, very likely including rape in the case of Juanita Broderick -- Maureen, nor anyone else in the press even took the small step of "reporting it to Paterno" in that case, let alone standing up and saying "I don't care if he is President, women matter more, he has to be punished". Very very fat chance.

She did however drag out the Catholic Priests. Nobody is reporting it much, but the source of that problem is pretty well documented to being the big influx of Gays into the US church in the '60s as our nation became more "enlightened". Abuse of boys and young men is very old -- Greeks, Romans for example. Any culture that embraces homosexuality has also embraced the sexual abuse of boys -- they may just not know it right away. They apparently go together like "a horse and carriage".

We are pretty much a thin veneer of civilization on top of a massive nervous and limbic system that at best is under tenuous "control" ("training", "management", "coaching" ...) the old systems are very happy to be driven by seeking "pleasure" of all sorts. They aren't very selective systems. "Moral" only in the sense that your cat is an  equal opportunity killer. Equality and morality are only VERY recently associated -- history would find anything that has equality of result to be equally BAD as in lowest common denominator.

Here in the west, we used to have a few thousand years of Judaeo - Christian culture playing a very major role that included friends, neighbors, family, work, school, etc taking shared responsibility in the proper creation and maintenance of a very specific "small still voice" -- if you are just an honest sociologist. If you are a Christian or Jew, that voice becomes very real, and evidence of an eternal Spirit that exists forever and is the true value of each human. Killing that transcendent human Spirit is the most difficult task of the atheist.

Or, as was decided in the '60s, we are just "naked apes" whose best moral maxim is "if it feels good do it". Even atheists that have managed to get their transcendent spirit bludgeoned very close to death usually have to swallow hard to actually the utter the true label on the fruit of secular humanism.

There are many thousands of years of human history that could clue poor Maureen in on how the very social and political directions she so strongly espouses give us more and more Bill Clintons, Jerry Sanduskys, abusing Catholic Priests, etc. Night tends to follow day, flies tend to show up around filth and death. Some things really ought not be surprising.