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Friday, October 21, 2016

Recommended Reading

See How C.S. Lewis Predicted Today’s College Campus Craziness—in 1944. There is more involved than "college campus craziness." Moral relativism pervades today's churches and homes, too, so as to "keep up with the times."

Excerpt from the above essay below the fold:
...Lewis wrote The Abolition of Man to warn people about the corrosive effects of subjective morality. He starts out by attacking a children’s book which teaches that judgments of value are not objective, but only statements about the speaker’s feelings.

By contrast, Lewis argues that morality is fundamental to humanity. He traces the principles of conscience, the reasoning behind calling something “right” or “wrong,” throughout different cultures and religions, from ancient Rome to Christianity, to Hinduism, and Buddhism. While many attack this “traditional morality,” it is the building block for all moral values, and such principles as the Golden Rule -- “do as you would be done by” -- are nearly universal among men.

Lewis admits that this universal moral law has many aspects and can be improved -- as with the discovery that slavery is wrong and the movement to abolish it -- but says that any attempt to build morality on a separate basis will fail.

Nevertheless, teachers -- and especially university professors and students -- try to present new moralities, more “in fashion with the times.” To this, Lewis responds, “There has never been, and never will be, a radically new judgement of value in the history of the world.”...
Read the rest HERE.

8 comments:

  1. AOW, You're not going to fit in very well in Hillary's Brave New World.

    To bring about the People's Progressive State of Amreeka, outdated morality must be snuffed and a new progressive one erected in its place. We won't even be granted the privacy of our consciences when they're through...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. SF,
      AOW, You're not going to fit in very well in Hillary's Brave New World.

      How well I know that!

      I'm coming to the end of my teaching days in a few years, anyway. I certainly will not be teaching in the classroom more than 5-6 years from now. If I can even hold out for that long (the problem now = my health issues).

      Since February of 1998, I have been working with classes of homeschoolers. I see the erosion of the ethos there, too, but not nearly as much as my fellow teachers in traditional classrooms see. My public-school teacher friends are having a helluva time, and, to a certain extent, so are my private-school teacher friends -- even in Christian schools.

      Boiling the frog has been ongoing for decades!

      Delete
  2. I am afraid I have moved on bit further and would suggest Golding's "Lord of the Flies.
    "The book portrays their descent into savagery; left to themselves on a paradisiacal island, far from modern civilisation, the well-educated children regress to a primitive state."

    ReplyDelete
  3. "Instead, they elevate their feelings of being victimized and offended into claims for illegitimate power. Rather than controlling their feelings and using their minds to understand what others are saying, they claim these words are aggressions and demand apologies."
    ----
    I leave it to you to explain why that passage from the article doesn't describe the thought of both extremes in contemporary America.

    We have lost our ability to listen, cooperate and compromise. It's all or nothing. So we spout meaningless tripe like "traditional values" or "microaggresion".

    Typical of the divide is the right's apparent belief that the left has abandoned the categorical imperative. Where the writer gets this idea is not apparent to me.


    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Nostradumbass pulls morally equivalent straw men out of his nostradumbass:

      "We have lost our ability to listen, cooperate and compromise."

      Yes you leftists most certainly have! Mostly by trying to redefine clear simple concepts. (Either that or you have a mouse in your pocket.) And do, please grace us with your Holy leftist list of what these Kantian unconditional moral obligations are, or are you only throwing around words and concepts that you heard in a lecture which you thought sounded intellectual but mean absolutely nothing to you?

      "Typical of the divide is the right's apparent belief that the left has abandoned the categorical imperative."

      No, what you call the "right" (truthfully conservatives), know that the left has tried to redefine the meaning of categorical imperative and created your own brand new "categorical imperative" that centers on moral equivalence, situational morals and "the end justifies the means".

      To you, Listen means for us to listen to you lecture us about how 'backward and stupid' we are, co-operate means for us to march blindly forward into the hell of your "social experiments" and embrace our sworn enemies while they attempt to destroy what our forefathers created for us. Compromise means to agree to stumble forward towards your hashish eaters utopian hallucinations, a half step at a time.

      "Where the writer gets this idea is not apparent to me."

      Of course not. As I have told you time and again, It's called cognitive dissonance. Either that or you are just another leftist liar. (Of course those are not mutually exclusive.)

      Delete
  4. KIPLING'S LITTLE MAN

    ________ ~ or ~ ________

    __ Bolshevism Revisited __

    A Leftist caught in doubt
    Lifts up his head to shout:

    Your treatment is unfair,
    You bully! How you dare
    To question my veracity
    With cruel, hard-eyed tenacity
    I do not know. My views
    Which boldly you accuse
    Of being falsely ranked
    In truth are sacrosanct.

    My thoughts are Holy Writ.
    Your thoughts are quite unfit;
    Based on selfish fears
    They inspire tears
    And dare to say the blame
    Lies squarely in the frame
    Of those whose failing lives
    Look to him who thrives
    And say: Your gold is mine,
    You greedy, bloated swine.
    You have more than you need.
    It's up to you to feed
    Me, the ill and weak,
    Else Heaven that you seek
    Will ever be denied.

    And I will see your hide
    Shredded, tanned and dried.
    And hung outside the gates
    Of each neighborhood that hates
    The needy and the poor,
    Who soon will storm your door
    And drag you from your bed
    And then lop off your head.
    While the masses you denied
    Will ever take great pride
    Your ignominious demise
    Was effected in the guise
    Of condign righteous wrath
    Giving Bourgeois digs a bath.

    With stolen food and goods
    We'll raze your neighborhoods
    And laugh to see you hurt
    Dying in the dirt.
    WE DO NOT CARE TO RISE:
    We live for your demise.
    We thrive on righteous hate.
    It is by now too late
    To make a plan to stop us
    End the Founder's opus.
    Our Marx destroyed your God.
    He's in - not on - the sod
    Feeding nematodes
    In their dark abodes.

    With mockery and shrill
    Sarcastic gibes we kill.
    We drool with sheer delight
    At the thought of endless night.
    Where everything that's witty,
    Charming, gracious, pretty
    Slumps to the nitty gritty,
    As we revel in the dung
    Corrupting all your young.

    For 'we are the little folk, we
    Too little to love or to hate.
    Leave us alone, and you'll see
    How quickly we'll drag down the state.'*


    ~ FreeThinke (2007)
    –––––––––––––––––
    * Rudyard Kipling


    And THAT, dear friends, whether you like it or not, is the PLAIN UNVARNISHED TRUTH. That is precisely WHO they are, and WHAT they fully intend to DO.

    ReplyDelete
  5. The two primary motivators of man are Greed and Fear. Wouldn't it be interesting if they were instead Improve and Protect.

    ReplyDelete

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