Silly paragraph of the week

Gaither Stewart, writing for the Online Journal, makes his feelings known about the man who is pope:

Shortly before he became Pope Benedict XVI in the year 2005, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the man behind the neoconservative politics of the World Church since the relatively liberal times of Pope John XXIII, delivered in his inimitable, sickly sweet style a ferocious denunciation of relativism: “We are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goals one’s own ego and one’s own desires.”

Wow, both "sickly sweet" and "ferocious"—that must take talent! Which is far more than can be said for Stewart's snippy insults.

Comments

[LJ]

I can hardly wait for Part 2.

"Authoritarians of all shades and complexions, in all societies, claim the contrary. Fundamentalist authoritarians claim an external source for moral judgments -- they especially claim religious faith. They try to impose their wills on everyone else."

This is the nonsense that always blows my mind. He cannot have it both ways. Either we have absolute lawlessness which he claims is only extreme relativism and which he cannot support, or somebody somewhere makes a law, or perhaps two laws or perhaps a library full of them. In each and every case, whether that law has been enacted by an authoritarian or liberal, it still imposes somebody's will on everyone else. Period. The only debate left is whose will and whose morality will be imposed.

He came close to admitting the real underlying issue, but ultimately, some real honesty would be refreshing from the proponents of "partial", or what is more truthfully called selective, moral relativism.

I wish one time, such people would just come out and say it. "I argue for moral relativism, not because I believe it, or would really want the kind of society it would eventually bring, but because you Christians want to tell me how I should conduct my sex life and want to hold me accountable for it, and you won't go along with my handy solutions like contraception and abortion. And, my sex life and satisfying my desires is more important to me than truth, my immortal soul, and anyone else's life for that matter."

That is what this is all about, and always has been about. The creativity of the human mind will never cease to astonish when it is applied to creating philosophies and scientific studies and moral systems that will enable what the boomers thought they had achieved in the Summer of Love. When it comes to assessing human motivation Freud wasn't too far off the mark, at least from the point of view of our culture.

The greatest irony of all is when pushed into a corner, these selective moral relativists will lash out that Christians, Catholics in particular, are obsessed with sex. Meanwhile the MSM sells sex and uses sex to sell, 24/7/365. If it wasn't so deadly serious we could laugh, but millions of babies are not laughing, sacrificed on the altar of sex without responsibility, their blood hidden behind this patchwork curtain of selective moral relativism.

[Carl Olson]

The greatest irony of all is when pushed into a corner, these selective moral relativists will lash out that Christians, Catholics in particular, are obsessed with sex. Meanwhile the MSM sells sex and uses sex to sell, 24/7/365. If it wasn't so deadly serious we could laugh, but millions of babies are not laughing, sacrificed on the altar of sex without responsibility, their blood hidden behind this patchwork curtain of selective moral relativism.

LJ: You've nailed it; nicely put.

BTW, both Part 2 and Part 3 of Stewart's series on moral relativism are now available.

[LJ]

GS reminds me of Mahammed Ali, dancing around the ring, bobbing and weaving. He's a true relativist in that sense. However, after hiding behind this and that bush rushing out to take quick jabs at the Roman Catholic Church, his real antagonist it would seem, he finally commits himself in part two;

"The answer is that there is a higher law than the civil law. This is natural law or moral law. In this sense, morality is not dependent on the government, but the government is dependent on the morality."

Fascinating. At one point he extolls the virtue of raising children to be critical thinkers with respect to morality, which the Church has no objection to by the way, but it would seem he missed that lesson. He spends 11 pages with no conclusion other than the one above (which is an objective moral law philosophically defended by Church thinkers and theologians through the ages) and a general attempt to defend moral relativism by redefining it to mean only "limited" moral relativism. All this, it appears, because the Pope has condemned moral relativism, which raises the issue once again; what is it really that he doesn't like about the Church and the Pope? I would once again submit it is all about sexual morality.

His is not critical analysis. It is convoluted "cake-and-eat-it-too"ism, but the one admission that he does make is sufficient if wants to follow it critically to the next philosophical step. For help with that he really should have a look at the first part of Mere Christianity, for it is precisely upon this natural moral law, or as C.S. Lewis calls it, the Law of Nature, that Lewis builds his argument for the existence of God and then from there the conclusion that Christianity is the only rational path to God.