The Post-ethical Society

"Nothing good ever came from Christianity." --Madalyn Murray O'Hair, atheist activist
"Morality is a nebulous thing; listen to the God within." (New Age philosophy)
"The summation of Christian ethics:  "Follow Me," Jesus
"The test of an idea is not whether it's true, but whether it works." --John Dewey, father of American public education and philosopher-author of A Common Faith
"Ethics is about not getting caught."  --Author unknown
"Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a disgrace to any people" (Prov. 14:34, NIV). 
"Morality is merely an extension of self-interest." --Karl Marx
"The Law of God is engraved in man." --John Calvin
"...[T]he propitious smile of Heaven" that fall only on that nation that does not "disregard the eternal rules of order and right which Heaven itself has ordained." --George Washington from Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville as quoted by David Noebel.  
"If we are not governed by God, then we will be ruled by tyrants." --William Penn
"Morality is not based on private opinion, but transcendent truth.  Morality is merely responsible decision-making [to the secularist]" --Charles Colson
"There is a way which seems right unto a man, but the end thereof is death" (Prov. 14:12; 16:25, NIV). 
"All a mans' ways are right to him, but the LORD weighs the heart" (Prov. 21:2, NIV). 
"... Hate what is evil; cling to what is good" (Rom. 12:9, NIV). 
"Let all things be done decently and in order" (cf. 1 Cor. 14:40).
"A person may think their own ways are right, but the LORD weighs the heart" (Prov. 21:2, NIV).  
"Who stands fast?  ..., not the man whose final standard is his reason, his principles, conscience, virtue but God." --Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a martyr in his own right during Nazi regime who opposed Hitlerism

By way of intro, Kant's moral argument for God is as follows: ethics exist, to be possible, justice must exist, because it must occur in the afterlife; therefore a Judge must exist; the one who is capable to render it must be all-powerful and all-knowing.

READ ON TO SEE HOW OUR MORAL LAXITY HAS DEVOLVED INTO MORAL PARALYSIS AND MORAL DEPRAVITY, DUE TO LOSS OF BIBLICAL VALUES AS OUR ANCHOR.


We have inherited a post-ethical world that doubts the very existence of any objective, absolute, and universal morals and ethics, but that they are only relative to society, culture, time, person, and situation.  This is called moral relativism and the ethics of situation-ethics.  Kant pondered the very existence of ethics too and concluded that they don't exist if one rules out God from the equation--they both necessitate the other. Kant reasoned that God must exist for ethics to be possible.   "If God does not exist," goes Dostoevsky's dictum, "then all things are permissible."  But we know ethics do exist and guilt is real, whether psychologists can explain it away or not.  We are responsible, moral creatures that will have to give an account of ourselves to God at Judgment Day.


Secular Humanism has ruled God out and will not let a Divine Foot in the door to interfere with their personal mores and standards of behavior, which allows them to live like animals because they believe they are, in essence, animals. You can rise no higher than your image of yourself!  And what you think about God, according to A. W. Tozer is the most important thing about you.  The thing about ethics to realize is that where you begin determines where you'll end up.  Doctors still take the Hippocratic Oath, but their interpretation of it is purely humanistic.  The basic command is: "First, do no harm!"  Christianity is the only worldview that gives dignity to man and thus purpose, meaning, understanding, and legitimate goals.


We are not headed toward a utopia and man is not perfectible, contrary to modern thought.  They reason that if a man is perfectible and always evolving then so is society.  The truth is that we now have more knowledge but less wisdom and that is a dangerous combo. Most people today believe they have a right to make up their own code as they go along and whatever "feels right" to them is the right thing to do.  This all started going into a downward spiral after the teaching of Dr. Timothy Leary, who said, "Turn on, tune in, drop out!"  A whole generation was lost in the quest to find themselves and gave no credence to religious feelings or interest.


The formula of Secular Humanism was "down with God, up with man!"  We deify man and dethrone God.  This kind of thinking goes back to Protagoras saying, "man is the measure of all things" or Homo mensura in Latin, WHEREBY WE BEGIN WITH MAN TO MAKE OUR CONCLUSIONS. NOTE THAT ATHANASIUS, FATHER OF ORTHODOXY, SAID, "The only system of thought Christ will fit into is the one where He is the starting point."  The conclusion of the matter is that without God there is no anchor to weigh in on and to tie everything together with, no grounds for commonality and unit and no common thread or unifying factor.  If there is no God, then there are no moral absolutes and all values, principles, ethics, and standards are relative.  In essence, this is to say that if we let ethics be the result of personal decision and whim, it's the same as denying any ethics at all--if there is no universal standard, there is no standard; this will lead to utter chaos and destruction of society, for no society has survived the loss of its gods, according to George Bernard Shaw.


There are many ethical systems and most people seem to think the ends justify the means, which is pure pragmatism and what communists embrace.  The New Morality says all that matters is the motive of love or good intent, not the results.  In reality, the motive and the end result must be righteous and pure in God's eyes for it to be ethical. Politics without principle is one of the Seven Deadly Sins named by Gandhi--that is our present reality, in which pragmatism and expediency rule.  And to most people, the Golden Rule has degenerated into the phrases:  He who has the gold, rules! Might makes right! Do unto them before they do unto you!  It is a proven fact that Americans follow the Brazen Rule, which says treat unto others the way they treat you!  They certainly don't go high when others go low, but stoop to their level and are a no better example of righteousness. Our contemporary intelligentsia believes ethics evolve with time and are suitable only for the age they are in, but morals are timeless: what was right in Moses' day, is still valid today--God's principles and laws don't waver, because God is immutable and never whimsical, arbitrary, nor capricious.


The whole premise of having ethics is that we are in God's image and are obliged to act like He would, just as Plato observed:  If I want to know how to live in reality, I must know what God is really like!  The good news is that Jesus came to explain God to us and to show us the Way!  We have no excuse not to know the highest ethic achievable:  The Sermon on the Mount highlighted in the Golden Rule.  But this can only be realized by believers living in the Spirit.  The Christian life has not been found unworkable and failed, but found difficult and not attempted.  Christianity is not the first choice of many because it demands so much--denying yourself, giving up all, and following Christ no matter the cost.  In religion, you can be good without God, and are already considered good by nature.


We have a president with no moral compass, it's alleged, is it any wonder that our nation is becoming numb to ethical dilemmas and growing apathetic and calloused toward ethical issues, with a gradual normalization of wrong?  When you have everyone doing their own thing, chaos results and it turns out like Israel before it had a king:  "Everyone did what was right in their own eyes" (cf. Jdg. 21:25). Our nation is in moral paralysis and it has little or no sense of "ought" to judge our laws by, which are only the vested interest of those with the most money, loudest voice, and most influence with the rich and powerful and/or ruling class.


People have traded morals for practicality and we live in a market-driven and results-oriented society that is not truth-centered or oriented.  According to pragmatism, the value of an idea is its result, not its truth, which cannot be ascertained.  They say we must be results-oriented.  The rich and powerful have succeeded, by and large, in eradicating God from the public arena and common marketplace of ideas, and the Christian voice has been muffled and nearly silenced, and even fallen for Satan's lies, as the Evangelical Right turns a deaf ear to political mischief.


Alas, the day when our nation decides that anything goes and we are answerable to no one and there's no Higher Power we are held accountable to--a day when God is dead in our nation, or no longer relevant and believable. We are approaching that day now when all we get is lip service and an occasional nod to God to satisfy the so-called Evangelical Right, who believe they represent God but have hijacked the faith. In the final analysis, morality matters simply because God is the moral center of the universe--He is our judge, we are not His judge.


The ultimate questions we must inquire concerning are:  Does man have a purpose?  Can man live without God?  Has man forgotten God?  The idea of Secular Humanism is being good without God, a religion without God in the picture.  We must rise to the occasion and fly our Christian colors and vociferously proclaim and spread the Word of our Great Commission. CAVEAT:  God is the only reliable anchor of society, the glue that holds it together via His divine institutions family, church, government--all meant to curtail and keep evil at bay.


A word to the wise is sufficient from Saint Aurelius Augustine, Bishop of Hippo: "Government is not a necessary evil, but necessary because of evil."  But then again, as an afterthought, I daresay our Bohemian and iconoclastic president has defied all norms of expectation and seems to be more of a Teflon president than Reagan, getting by with his unconventional M.O. without losing any of his loyal, devoted "base."      Soli Deo Gloria!

Answering The Ultimate Questions

All worldviews attempt to answer the ultimate questions of life:  where did we come from? how did we get here? why are we here? where will we end up? what makes life worth living?  Mankind has always asked these challenging questions.  This is where religion came on the scene, for God has put eternity in our hearts from the beginning and man has always wondered about life after death, as the ultimate issues and the big question.  All religions and worldviews attempt to give satisfying answers to these questions and to "save" mankind.  Some people think religion is just escapism or a crutch, but secular people have crutches too and just put their faith in science that it has the answer or can find them.





Everyone is a person of faith!  It just depends on what your presupposition is, i.e., it's not a matter of faith versus reason, but what you are willing to accept as truth, to begin with.  We must begin with God and explain our worldview, not start with some interpretative framework and explain away God--for where you begin usually determines where you will end up; even Darwin pondered, "Would you trust the convictions of a monkey's mind?" It has been said that if you teach a man he's an animal that he'll act like one; some men want to believe they are animals so they can have the morals of one.





Man is not an animal in the sense that he seeks the reason for being, meaning, purpose, and understanding in life--we wonder "why" and contemplate ourselves.  We not only know things but know that we know and ponder why we know it and what we can know even how we know things.  In other words, man is a natural philosopher, while animals don't wonder or think about the bigger issues in life besides their basic needs.  Even having an education, a higher standard of living, and freedom, man can be empty inside.  Man needs fulfillment and relationships, for we are a social, spiritual, moral, rational creature and have personalities that relate to others on a  personal level, giving man the unique ability to know and relate to one another.





Science can indeed give us the "know-how," but it cannot help us with the "know-why" of life, it cannot give us purpose in life and hope for the future, nor satisfy our longings for truth, identity, impact, importance, guidance, and meaning in life--animals have no such need. Do animals wonder who they are and try to find themselves or get in touch with themselves? Only man wastes time by worrying about the future and regretting the past.  Man is by nature a religious being too, and if he doesn't worship God he'll worship something or someone else; on the other hand, no one has ever observed a monkey building a chapel outside of The Planet of the Apes!




It is my premise that Christianity answers these questions better and fuller than any religion or secular worldview.  There is a harmony, coherence, and unity in the Christian worldview that lines up with the Bible as the authority.  Christianity outshines all other worldviews in reasonableness, personal experience, and foundation in fact and history. The Bible is the foundation upon which the faith stands.  Every worldview must have some authority or "scripture," and the Bible is the highest standard attained by man and it's self-attesting.  It appeals to no authority higher than itself for proof and proves itself.  This is not circular reasoning to say we believe the Bible is the highest authority because it claims to be, because God has the authority to speak through His Word and if He appealed to anything else or we did, like science or history, God would be taking a backseat to them and not be the ultimate authority figure.





Secularism believes that everything has a natural cause and can be explained naturally--there's no place nor need for miracles!  The supernatural is ruled out from the get-go and doesn't enter the equation.  Only the strong survive in this dog-eat-dog world of survival of the fittest and the law of the jungle--the real rat race.  We are just all lucky to be here due to some great cosmic accident eons ago.  They offer no explanation for life and their origin-of-life experiments (Miller-Urey experiments of 1952) fail to come off, and they must see the cosmos and life as mere givens, and incapable of being explained as common or natural phenomena.




In their view, everything is an infinite series of finite, efficient causes and there was no First Cause, which they refuse to accept as possible and necessary because it sounds too much like God.  But students of logic, science, philosophy, and mathematics know that an infinite series of causes is impossible--there must be a first cause!  This is called the impossibility of crossing infinity.  But they have no room for God in their equation and will not let a Divine Foot in the door, thinking that religion is a neurosis or delusion, a crutch for the weak.  


Much more they refuse to accept the spiritual dimension of life--everything is material and made up of matter and energy, without any spirit or Ultimate Mind behind it.  For instance, the brain is just a cog of machines, made up of electronic circuits, and the mind doesn't exist independently of it, just another name for the brain.  We have, therefore, no soul and no spirit worth saving.





The meaning of the cosmos hangs on which came first and which has precedence:  mind or matter.  Either one or the other preceded:  In the beginning ultimate mind; in the beginning ultimate matter.  The Bible starts out: "In the beginning God..." John elaborates as "In the beginning was the Word..." The Logos here referred to is the "expressed thought of God."  Either mind created matter or mind evolved from matter--there's no other option.  It's impossible for there to be nothing in the beginning, for "out of nothing, nothing comes." goes the axiom:  ex nihilo, nihil fit.





Cosmologists now reckon a beginning to time, as the Bible has always predicated (cf. 2 Tim. 1:9; Tit. 1:2).  Time, being the corollary of space and matter, didn't always exist, and God must be outside of the time/space continuum to be the First Cause and get the ball rolling (something timeless created time!).  What or who fired the shot of the Big Bang, who banged the Bang?  We conclude that there must be someone behind the cosmos who is responsible and intelligent and programmed the universal constants, called the Anthropic Principle or the fine-tuning of the universe.



All worldviews aim to save the world too and to make a brighter future for posterity.  Christians don't believe we can save society and do not attempt to save man through politics.  Most secularists are highly Utopian and believe man is capable of perfection and therefore so is society.  But this kind of dreaming is pie in the sky and gives false hopes, like believing someday man will know how to become immortal.  There are those who freeze their bodies in hope of man someday figuring out how to thaw it out and revive it. 



In the meantime, all members of the worldviews attempt to better themselves and their world and make it better for succeeding generations. "But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the LORD on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare" (Jer. 29:7, ESV).   Doing good works is a part of every worldview, it's the motivation that differs:  Christians do it out of gratitude and love for God and others, while other worldviews want to earn their way to salvation or just make themselves feel good, because of their unresolved guilt.  Soli Deo Gloria!