The Cost on Our Society of Substituting
Other Values for the Right Values

By Rod Hemphill

Good afternoon, Friends.

You may remember that I contend from time to time that God's commandments are given to us not to inconvenience our lives, but to guide us as we live in the real world . . . not in the unreal world of some utopian scheme, be that scheme economic, philosophic or even religious. In a word, what works in life is written into the universe as God created it, and the insistence of people that the rules are whatever we want them to be doesn't change a thing . . . except the eventual collapse of yet another false way of life foisted upon an unwary or uncritical public, and the innumerable devastated lives left in its wake.

Since what we are dealing with is reality as it is and not some evolution of a culture's morals and morés (where those of some cultures are more valid than others), we are dealing with objective standards of right and wrong, what works and what doesn't, what enhances life and what is injurious to it, and what strengthens a culture and makes it prosper versus what weakens a culture and leads to its disintegration.

All this doesn't set well with secularists and cultural elitists who find this to be "an inconvenient truth," who believe that the moral teachings of the Bible and its teachings on righteousness, justice, and wholesome personal attitudes are no less subjective than the failed ideas of secularism, and who fail to accept the obvious fact that for all our goodness and altruism, man is first and foremost a morally imperfect and self-centered creature.

So they determine again and again to solve society's ills and injustices with yet another philosophy of education or of prisoner reform or redefining marriage, etc., etc.. It's hard for them to acknowledge the scorecard of truth or consequences written large on the wall of reality. And this applies also to cultural libertarians who may believe in a morality similar to that of the Bible, but who hold as a prime directive that people are entitled to do pretty much whatever they want.

So it's difficult for secularists to admit the truth and their failure, or to connect the dots so as to identify their new philosophies, their new ideas about morality, and their New Age religions as being the cause of the decline in the integrity and permanence of America's families, or the disintegration of our culture and society, or the rise in crime and personal and corporate corruption, or the increase of children committing suicide and adult crimes or the rapidly growing trend of even young children to assume that sex is a normative and expected part of dating, and posting pornographic pictures of themselves on the internet, or the nihilistic attitudes that enable people to deny that there are objective standards of right and wrong, or if they do admit even to a subjective standard, to insist that such a standard is nothing more than a good idea for society as a whole, but that they personally are not bound by it and are free to devise their own morality.

But if all this that I've written is true and there is an objective standard of reality, then its truth should be culturally observable, and the consequences of violating this objective standard should be statistically demonstrable, whether or not one is a believer or an atheist. And it is!

There is now a growing abundance of statistical data that necessarily correlates virtually all of society's ills and problems with the violation of the applicable standards as taught to us in the Bible, and what we are seeing are the consequences of such behavior as predicted in the Bible. It is significant that many of these studies are perf ormed by people or groups with no apparent religious agenda, some of them being found in reports of government agencies.

For this reason, it should behoove all citizens to embrace and insist upon these values even if they believe that these values evolved over time rather than originating in the Bible, simply because even if they were not taught in the Bible, history demonstrates that these are the values, and the only values, that actually work! For the public good, if for no other reason, the American public --the whole mass of individuals like you and me-- should be working to see that these values become once again the personal values of the American public and define our culture, and then that these values come to be written into law, just as we have other (selected) moral values written into our laws, such as those pertaining to corruption, murder, stealing, lying under oath, etc.

In a pluralistic society, we must argue for the public good rather than as a religious concern, even though in our religious contexts we teach the same values as Biblical values. We need to be convincing others and changing the moral sentiments of the nation via rational argumentation backed up by empirical data and by our own personal example, especially when that integrity is costly to us. And we must be teaching people not only what the right values are, but why they are the right values. We must enable the public to see the results of righteousness and the consequences of other ways of thinking and acting because if we don't, the secularists will later change the hearts and minds of the people back to their defeatist and unrighteous values and reverse the righteous legislation.

The BreakPoint commentary linked below and the sources given at the end are just a sample of the studies and the conclusions of research which are available, and the mass of such studies should demonstrate the validity of this point of view even to a non-religious person or skeptic, provided such person is objective and honest with himself and the data.

His,
Rod

 

From Breakpoint: Costly Subsitutes.

Other Articles by Rod:
The Holy Bible? Who Says So?
Critique of the Da Vinci Code
On Celibacy and Marriage