The Great Divide
Commentary
Michael Kilpatrick
We are presented with a wide array of ‘oughts’ from people who are generally intolerant of the notion
that others may have a conflicting set of ‘oughts.’
You ought to do this or that thing, or you ought not to do that thing. But,
if there is no other basis for your particular set of ‘oughts’
than that they seem reasonable or beneficial to you, what is it (aside from
force) that compels me to heed your admonition? Why should my set of ‘oughts’ be set aside in favor of yours? If your ideas of personal
or societal benefits and detriments are abhorrent to me, on what civilized
basis do we reconcile or compromise? If your appeal is to yourself as a moral
individual, I can simply appeal to myself as an equally valid moral authority.
After all, although morals are the springboard for ‘oughts,’ they also fall prey to the insufficient 
legitimacy
of autonomous individual authority. In reality, the very concept of ‘morality’
is alien to secular thought, except when it is being challenged. It must be
kidnapped from Christianity and have myths fabricated to account for its evolution
into the family of the godless. Again, setting aside force, we are at an impasse.
This state of affairs transcends left and
right, liberal and conservative, or red and blue. “Ideas Have Consequences” as
Richard Weaver has said, and that is certainly true. Each idea we have stems
from another and another and reaching back, we find a core idea from which all
the rest spring. This idea, whatever it may be, will define all our beliefs and
cannot be disregarded without obvious duplicity or cognitive dissonance. There
seems to be an inordinate amount of people today who have little or no
difficulty in holding several conflicting, contradictory beliefs at the same
time. I don’t propose to try to analyze that phenomenon here for therein lies
madness. The core principle that births a frame of mind conducive to that
madness is my focus.
The very fallen nature of man leads him to
deny the concept of sin. Not only can there be no sin (at least not his own),
he must see himself as innately good...his faults the consequence of ‘others,’
along with his circumstances and environment. For those who deny the existence
of God, something must be constructed to take His place.
Christianity is perceived as hostile, or
intolerant, to the multiple varieties of relativists we live among today. The
claim of hostility offers insight into the mind of those with “feet planted
firmly in mid-air” (Relativism,
Beckwith and Koukl). The intent of their mental
utopia is to be able to throw themselves at the
unyielding ground of reality, and miss. Therefore, those kill-joy Christians, whose
very existence suggests a bad fall is imminent for Peter Pan’s ‘lost boys and
girls,’ are a threat to blissful, dreamy slumbers. They are a disturbance in ‘The
Farce.’
Now, who in fact seems practically
functionally ‘intolerant?’ When a single godless citizen can stroll past a
cross on a war veteran’s memorial in San Diego, California, and decide that its
existence offends him, the entire might of the Federal judiciary descends on
that spot to eradicate the disgusting symbol, regardless of what thousands of
the offended citizen’s neighbors may wish. By the way, the atheist’s suit rests
on his contention that the cross exalts one religion above the others. What
does an atheist care about religion? You can substitute any number of other
banned articles for the cross; Bibles,
the Ten Commandments, Christmas trees, public prayer...the list is long, but very specific.
In contrast, if a Christian has the temerity
to suggest that they would appreciate the opportunity to be notified when the
government school decrees that their ten-year-old son should be sensitized to
the wonderful world of homosexual practices, and could they please opt out...
now that’s intolerance. If, after the school officials huffily refuse, and the
parent then demands to be notified, and to be given the option to
decline their son’s instruction in the art of ‘fisting’, etc., he will be arrested
and banned from the school grounds. In case he still didn’t get the point, his
son will later be beaten in the school yard by other students who have been
successfully trained in the subtleties and nuances of tolerance and sensitivity
by the State.
Debate has long since ceased between the two
worldviews. It is a war now...a war of ideas (at the moment), but a war
nonetheless. It was inevitable in any case. The two competing philosophies are
utterly incompatible if carried out to their logical conclusions. On the one
hand there is the idea that there is a God who created Truth just as surely as
He created everything that is. That Creation is the vehicle which He chose to
be the stage on which the drama of life, death, sin, and redemption are to be
played out in a courtship dance between He, the Groom and we, the Bride. He, as
the Lover, longing for intimacy with us, and we the fickle object of His affection,
always tempted by the cheap thrill of unfaithfulness, by what looks enticingly
like the instant gratification of desires we were instilled with from the
beginning, but which can really only ever be fulfilled by the One.
On the other side is the idea that this vast
co-habited universe is nothing more than a cosmic accident - an uncaused cause,
appearing out of nothing, and without purpose or meaning. Men are no more than
accidentally animated pieces of walking autonomous meat, even worse than animals
because we foul our own nest. The cosmos is nothing but the inexplicable
manifestation of “blind, impersonal, pitiless indifference”(Richard
Dawkins). Reality, if there is such a thing, is a fluid concept at best, and
more likely simply a delusion. Self-consciousness ‘evolved’ out of the
primordial soup through our ancestor slugs by random, questionably beneficial
mutation, and carries with it no reprieve from meaninglessness.
The adherents of godlessness insist that we
teach all children this dogma. They claim it is a neutral stance, and have no
pangs of conscience doing so because in their world, one man’s lie is only
another man’s epiphany of humanitarian revelation. No matter that the premiere
examples of secular humanitarian revelations have so far slaughtered more
millions of erstwhile objects of this beneficence than any natural disaster in
all the ages. To cite an example in such staggering numbers as seventy million
Soviet citizens sacrificed to the purity of atheistic Communism gives one too much
to realistically grasp. The image of that many corpses is simply surreal to
sane people. To be sure they meant well, or at least we are encouraged to
believe them when they say so.
In the meantime what other fruits of their
labors are there that haven’t, as yet, led to more
killing fields that will be explained away as ‘unfortunate tragedies,’
unintended consequences, or some other innocuous prevarication? If the truth is
unacceptable, a lie must be concocted, and even knowing the lie for what it is,
one must choose to believe it anyway, or risk being ‘re-educated,’ or worse.
For those to whom reality is an inexorable force that one must accommodate, it
is plain that godlessness (so to with fanatic devotion to a false god) begets
undeniably, invariably, lethal results. There is an unequivocal choice laid
before all men in these ‘last days;’ will we bow to godless barbarism, or
defend and promote Western civilization, which is inextricably bound to
Christianity? The truth of C.S. Lewis’ immortal words are etched with
increasingly stark clarity each day that the earthly battle remains in
question, “We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise.
We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate
and then bid the geldings to be fruitful.”(The
Abolition of Man)
So, how do we now live? Your part, beyond living
your life in response to your Savior’s unconditional love, is essentially
to engage your neighbors, one by one, and in the words you hear you hear from
your Father, point and say, “Look! There’s the King!”
Michael
Kilpatrick is a painting contractor in Macon, Georgia. Husband of one, father
of nine home birthed, home schooled, and home churched
children.
