The anti-Christian Morality of Ethics

[4est_4est_Gump]

How have political ethics have replaced Biblically based morality in the minds of educated young people?

Consider Alex. She is a 27-year-old woman in the process of earning a PsyD degree to become a psychologist. She mentioned she was having a difficult time finding appropriate men to date and was considering an online dating service. I suggested that if she goes that route she needs to be clear about what characteristics are unacceptable to her. She thought for a moment then said, “One thing I cannot tolerate is homophobia.”

Of all the advantages a worthy life partner could bring to this young woman, and of all the harm that an unworthy partner might inflict, the first thing she identified is a young man’s view regarding homosexuality.

I asked, “If you could date a rapist-murderer or a homophobe, you’d choose the rapist-murderer?” She laughed nervously. Feeling sorry for this daughter of a world gone mad, I said, “I’m serious, think about it. A woman is vulnerable to the men she dates. Do you really mean to find out about political sensibilities before criminal tendencies?” I asked if she believed the behaviors associated with homophobia were morally worse than sex crimes. She said, “Psychologists don’t make moral judgments!” She went on to explain that homophobia was as bad as any crime because it killed more people than murder by causing suicide, addictions, spread of HIV, and crimes against gay people.

I said, “OK, you don’t like the word moral. How did you learn your ethical code?” She said she had been taught tolerance toward gay people all her life. I asked her if she had been raised in a particular religion. She replied, “No. Most of the problems in the world come from religion!”

...

Alex’s political ethics of progressivism are based on unnatural deism: “I am my body, and my brain-based experience.” Unnatural deism is godlessness in which the needs and wants of the body, mediated by the brain, are elevated to pre-eminent, quasi-divine status. Because it is political, contemporary unnatural deism does not treat all bodies equally, unlike the unifying power of natural theism.

Ethics are morals for anti-immoral people. Nevertheless, Alex's viewpoint on homosexuality is not even a true ethical code – it is an affectation. An ethical code functions to inform difficult choices and modify behavior, often in the direction of giving something up. Alex's championing of sex and gender minorities (the darlings of psychology) enables her to feel good about herself without making any personal sacrifices.

...

Let's say she falls in love with a man of the 'proper' politics, but he starts cheating on her with another woman (or man), or perhaps drains her bank account before absconding. At that point, she might find his beliefs about homosexuality do little to assuage her broken heart. Nor is it likely Alex would enjoy being one of four wives, however politically correct her husband might be.

Deborah C. Tyler. American Thinker

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Below are the top ten reasons I am no longer a leftist. This is not a rigorous comparison of theories. This list is idiosyncratic, impressionistic, and intuitive. It's an accounting of the milestones on my herky-jerky journey.

10) Huffiness.

In the late 1990s I was reading Anatomy of the Spirit, a then recent bestseller by Caroline Myss.

Myss described having lunch with a woman named Mary. A man approached Mary and asked her if she were free to do a favor for him on June 8th. No, Mary replied, I absolutely cannot do anything on June 8th because June 8th is my incest survivors' meeting and we never let each other down! They have suffered so much already! I would never betray incest survivors!

Myss was flabbergasted. Mary could have simply said "Yes" or "No."

Reading this anecdote, I felt that I was confronting the signature essence of my social life among leftists. We rushed to cast everyone in one of three roles: victim, victimizer, or champion of the oppressed. We lived our lives in a constant state of outraged indignation. I did not want to live that way anymore. I wanted to cultivate a disposition of gratitude. I wanted to see others, not as victims or victimizers, but as potential friends, as loved creations of God. I wanted to understand the point of view of people with whom I disagreed without immediately demonizing them as enemy oppressors.

...

Danusha V. Goska, American Thinker

 

[about_average]

WTF?

I suggested that if she goes that route she needs to be clear about what characteristics are unacceptable to her.

Who the hell would answer, "Well, one thing I can't tolerate is a rapist-murderer"?

Could it be she was answering in the context of, "Let's see, what's a fairly common trait found in the population that I couldn't tolerate?"

Beginning and ending a piece (the last pargraph is just as bad) with such an asinine premise calls the whole thing in to question because the writer can't even think logically.

It would be better published in The American Non-thinker

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

9) Selective Outrage

I was a graduate student. Female genital mutilation came up in class. I stated, without ornamentation, that it is wrong.

A fellow graduate student, one who was fully funded and is now a comfortably tenured professor, sneered at me. "You are so intolerant. Clitoredectomy is just another culture's rite of passage. You Catholics have confirmation."

When Mitt Romney was the 2012 Republican presidential candidate, he mentioned that, as Massachusetts governor, he proactively sought out female candidates for top jobs. He had, he said, "binders full of women." He meant, of course, that he stored resumes of promising female job candidates in three-ring binders.

Op-ed pieces, Jon Stewart's "Daily Show," Twitter, Facebook, and Amazon posts erupted in a feeding frenzy, savaging Romney and the Republican Party for their "war on women."

I was an active leftist for decades. I never witnessed significant leftist outrage over clitoredectomy, child marriage, honor killing, sharia-inspired rape laws, stoning, or acid attacks. Nothing. Zip. Crickets. I'm not saying that that outrage does not exist. I'm saying I never saw it.

The left's selective outrage convinced me that much canonical, left-wing feminism is not so much support for women, as it is a protest against Western, heterosexual men. It's an "I hate" phenomenon, rather than an "I love" phenomenon.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

WTF?
Who the hell would answer, "Well, one thing I can't tolerate is a rapist-murderer"?

Could it be she was answering in the context of, "Let's see, what's a fairly common trait found in the population that I couldn't tolerate?"

Beginning and ending a piece (the last pargraph is just as bad) with such an asinine premise calls the whole thing in to question because the writer can't even think logically.

It would be better published in The American Non-thinker

The critique would go well and Non-Reason.com...



... the point is that of all the deal-breakers in the world, her go-to was that. That is not a normal human reaction and may go to the root of why she's having trouble finding men, I'll bet there are a whole list of things that she cannot tolerate, say, like, love of sports...

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

She must be at a University.



HOW CAN SHE NOT FIND APPROPRIATE MEN???

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

7) Leftists hate my people.

I'm a working-class Bohunk. A hundred years ago, leftists loved us. We worked lousy jobs, company thugs shot us when we went on strike, and leftists saw our discontent as fuel for their fire.

Karl Marx promised the workers' paradise through an inevitable revolution of the proletariat. The proletariat is an industrial working class -- think blue-collar people working in mines, mills, and factories: exactly what immigrants like my parents were doing.

Polish-Americans participated significantly in a great victory, Flint, Michigan's 1937 sit-down strike. Italian-Americans produced Sacco and Vanzetti. Gus Hall was a son of Finnish immigrants.

In the end, though, we didn't show up for the Marxist happily ever after. We believed in God and we were often devout Catholics. Leftists wanted us to slough off our ethnic identities and join in the international proletarian brotherhood -- "Workers of the world, unite!" But we clung to ethnic distinctiveness. Future generations lost their ancestral ties, but they didn't adopt the IWW flag; they flew the stars and stripes. "Property is theft" is a communist motto, but no one is more house-proud than a first generation Pole who has escaped landless peasantry and secured his suburban nest.

Leftists felt that we jilted them at the altar. Leftists turned on us. This isn't just ancient history. In 2004, What's the Matter with Kansas? spent eighteen weeks on the bestseller lists. The premise of the book: working people are too stupid to know what's good for them, and so they vote conservative when they should be voting left. In England, the book was titled, What's the Matter with America?

We became the left's boogeyman: Joe Six-pack, Joe Hardhat. Though we'd been in the U.S. for a few short decades when the demonization began, leftists, in the academy, in media, and in casual speech, blamed working-class ethnics for American crimes, including racism and the "imperialist" war in Vietnam. See films like The Deer Hunter. Watch Archie Bunker on "All in the Family." Listen to a few of the Polack jokes that elitists pelted me with whenever I introduced myself at UC Berkeley.

Leftists freely label poor whites as "redneck," "white trash," "trailer trash," and "hillbilly." At the same time that leftists toss around these racist and classist slurs, they are so sanctimonious they forbid anyone to pronounce the N word when reading Mark Twain aloud. President Bill Clinton's advisor James Carville succinctly summed up leftist contempt for poor whites in his memorable quote, "Drag a hundred-dollar bill through a trailer park, you never know what you'll find."

The left's visceral hatred of poor whites overflowed like a broken sewer when John McCain chose Sarah Palin as his vice presidential running mate in 2008. It would be impossible, and disturbing, to attempt to identify the single most offensive comment that leftists lobbed at Palin. One can report that attacks on Palin were so egregious that leftists themselves publicly begged that they cease; after all, they gave the left a bad name. The Reclusive Leftist blogged in 2009 that it was a "major shock" to discover "the extent to which so many self-described liberals actually despise working people." The Reclusive Leftist focuses on Vanity Fair journalist Henry Rollins. Rollins recommends that leftists "hate-fuck conservative women" and denounces Palin as a "small town hickoid" who can be bought off with a coupon to a meal at a chain restaurant.

Smearing us is not enough. Liberal policies sabotage us. Affirmative action benefits recipients by color, not by income. Even this limited focus fails. In his 2004 Yale University Press study, Thomas Sowell insists that affirmative action helps only wealthier African Americans. Poor blacks do not benefit. In 2009, Princeton sociologists Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Radford demonstrated that poor, white Christians are underrepresented on elite college campuses. Leftists add insult to injury. A blue-collar white kid, who feels lost and friendless on the alien terrain of a university campus, a campus he has to leave immediately after class so he can get to his fulltime job at MacDonald's, must accept that he is a recipient of "white privilege" – if he wants to get good grades in mandatory classes on racism.

The left is still looking for its proletariat. It supports mass immigration for this reason. Harvard's George Borjas, himself a Cuban immigrant, has been called "America’s leading immigration economist." Borjas points out that mass immigration from Latin America has sabotaged America's working poor.

It's more than a little bit weird that leftists, who describe themselves as the voice of the worker, select workers as their hated other of choice, and targets of their failed social engineering.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Get that?

In 2009, Princeton sociologists Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Radford demonstrated that poor, white Christians are underrepresented on elite college campuses. Leftists add insult to injury. A blue-collar white kid, who feels lost and friendless on the alien terrain of a university campus, a campus he has to leave immediately after class so he can get to his fulltime job at MacDonald's, must accept that he is a recipient of "white privilege" – if he wants to get good grades in mandatory classes on racism.

Talk about your compartmentalization!

 

[Saint Peter]

Liberal policies sabotage us.

So very sad.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

1) Hate.

If hate were the only reason, I'd stop being a leftist for this reason alone.

Almost twenty years ago, when I could not conceive of ever being anything but a leftist, I joined a left-wing online discussion forum.

Before that I'd had twenty years of face-to-face participation in leftist politics: marching, organizing, socializing.

In this online forum, suddenly my only contact with others was the words those others typed onto a screen. That limited and focused means of contact revealed something.

If you took all the words typed into the forum every day and arranged them according to what part of speech they were, you'd quickly notice that nouns expressing the emotions of anger, aggression, and disgust, and verbs speaking of destruction, punishing, and wreaking vengeance, outnumbered any other class of words.

One topic thread was entitled "What do you view as disgusting about modern America?" The thread was begun in 2002. Almost eight thousand posts later, the thread was still going strong in June, 2014.

Those posting messages in this left-wing forumpublicly announced that they did what they did every day, from voting to attending a rally to planning a life, because they wanted to destroy something, and because they hated someone, rather than because they wanted to build something, or because they loved someone. You went to an anti-war rally because you hated Bush, not because you loved peace. Thus, when Obama bombed, you didn't hold any anti-war rally, because you didn't hate Obama.

I experienced powerful cognitive dissonance when I recognized the hate. The rightest of my right-wing acquaintances -- I had no right-wing friends -- expressed nothing like this. My right-wing acquaintances talked about loving: God, their family, their community. I'm not saying that the right-wingers I knew were better people; I don't know that they were. I'm speaking here, merely, about language.

I bitched about Bush for six years, and through all that time the Republicans on this board never trashed me the way the Democrats do now that "their guy" is "in charge."

They were angry when Bush was President, but they seem even more angry now that Obama is President.

Maybe it's just disappointment.

Maybe, it's who they really are and have been all along.
A_J, the Wiser

 

[about_average]

... the point is that of all the deal-breakers in the world, her go-to was that. That is not a normal human reaction..

So you get to define what is "normal" for people? Everyone has different deal breakers. There is no "normal".
In the 60's she may have replied, "Well, I couldn't tolerate a racist".

Bigots often aren't shy about displaying their bigotry. If she didn't want to be with a bigot "homophobia" might be a good tell-tale sign the person is a bigot.

Maybe she's just not shallow, she could accept any income level, any race, any religion, even, gasp, a sports lover, but doesn't want to date a bigot.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

So very sad.

Wrong usage of the word Liberal.

This is what the Left does because they made the words Communism, Socialism and Progressivism so distasteful to those whom they desire to loot to fund their dreams of an Edonistic Return of the Primitive.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

I never met a low income leftie. Even Jesus came from a prosperous family.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

So you get to define what is "normal" for people? Everyone has different deal breakers. There is no "normal".
In the 60's she may have replied, "Well, I couldn't tolerate a racist".

Bigots often aren't shy about displaying their bigotry. If she didn't want to be with a bigot "homophobia" might be a good tell-tale sign the person is a bigot.

Maybe she's just not shallow, she could accept any income level, any race, any religion, even, gasp, a sports lover, but doesn't want to date a bigot.

I'm not defining anything.

I am pointing to what has become the cultural norms once we were successfully divorced from a Christian morality.

Hell, I'm not even saying that it is bad, just the it is a more broadly social form of Sybil.



(Which, btw, proved to be a fraud.)

 

[yossi]

So very sad.

Are you a rapist-murderer? I was thinking of doing the nasty with you, but I couldn't find that info on your internet dating profile. It should be in the drop down menu of the criminal history section.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Are you a rapist-murderer? I was thinking of doing the nasty with you, but I couldn't find that info on your internet dating profile. It should be in the drop down menu of the criminal history section.

okay, I LOLed...

 

[Saint Peter]

Are you a rapist-murderer? I was thinking of doing the nasty with you, but I couldn't find that info on your internet dating profile. It should be in the drop down menu of the criminal history section.

I like to call myself a murderer-rapist.

It is all about the order of operations.

 

[about_average]

I'm not defining anything.

If you have no definition for normal, how can you possibly say what isn't normal?

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

It's also an anti-Semitic Ethos...

A significant aspect to all these European and Middle Eastern Muslim “protests” and action-salted vilifications in the anti-Israel media in Great Britain and France and elsewhere is that, admit it or not, the Left seethes with resentment that Israel is not more injured and more bruised by their jumped-up fraudulent propagandizing. To read the Left's "facts" on anything anent Israel or even, stretching the story, Jews of any stripe but Left, is to tacitly swallow their millennial hatred for Jews and Israel. Over the past half-century, the Left has rarely been reliable in their rancid reportage where Israel is concerned.

Equally mystifying and repellent is the Left’s tropism toward obliviousness to even the most appalling and unjustifiable misbehavior by Arabs almost across the board. Abuse of minors, sex trafficking on a massive scale, current-day slavery in major Islamic states (Mauritania and Sudan), widespread and unholy female genital mutilation, abuse of blacks in general, sexual violations of women, beheadings, horror murders, mass exterminations as seen by Bashir el Assad and his equally abhorrent father, Hafez, forced conversions, destruction of Christians and their churches, rampages and rapes against Hindus and ravaging of property of Copts, despoliation of any minority or alternate view of Islam -- Sunni vs. Shi'a vs Alawite and so forth -- are all supremely ignored or, worse, rationalized away as just cultural elements to be indulged. Unworthy of global condemnation.

The Left has given short shrift to those condemning these savage manifestations of unacceptable primitivism and hatefulness; conscience-stricken humanitarians noting these abuses are dismissed and rendered suspect. The Left reserves its ire for democratic, if imperfect (who or what is not imperfect?) tiny Israel. And of course, not to be forgotten or forgiven, so many of these career atavists and haters are of Jewish birth, and their self-loathing seems to take this vitriolic form of flagellating their parents for some imagined ill or denied privilege while they were in swaddling.

Marion DS Dreyfus, American Thinker

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

If you have no definition for normal, how can you possibly say what isn't normal?

Do you have one?



It is a subjective valuation. I know what normal is in my community and in much of the region in which I live, but when I have lived in the cities, I saw a whole 'nuther form of normal, a lot of it purely self-destructive as if the hate for, for lack of better words, traditional normal had metastasized into a form of self-loathing.

 

[Ishmael]

WTF?
Who the hell would answer, "Well, one thing I can't tolerate is a rapist-murderer"?

Could it be she was answering in the context of, "Let's see, what's a fairly common trait found in the population that I couldn't tolerate?"

Beginning and ending a piece (the last pargraph is just as bad) with such an asinine premise calls the whole thing in to question because the writer can't even think logically.

It would be better published in The American Non-thinker

And just how does one approach a subject based on irrational behavior?

I would have wanted to ask her exactly what she meant by "Homophobia?" Was her definition that of an individual consumed by irrational fear, or was her definition that of an individual that disagreed with a particular life-style but accepted it as fact? The question was unasked but her response leads one to believe it was the latter. If it were the former I would tend to agree with her. And I would hasten to point out that her homophobia-phobia, by her implied definition, is just as irrational as true homophobia. Both are driven by irrational motivations.

Getting back to your critique, the author merely confronted the individual with a choice between two irrational scenarios. One that may be irritating but can hardly be said to be harmful, and a second that would potentially put her in jeopardy.

There is also something very telling in her response to the question, an open ended question that allowed her to respond in anyway she so choose, and that 'tell' was that she choose a negative trait(s) as opposed to a positive trait(s). And in that choice exposed quite a bit about her. Perhaps it is that she is so negative as an individual that no rational man would have anything to do with her in the long term. And in that context it's no wonder that she's having difficulty finding a suitable mate. I wonder if psychologists can heal themselves?

Ishmael

 

[yossi]

I like to call myself a murderer-rapist.

It is all about the order of operations.

But you didn't list necrophilia as a fetish. Internet dating is so confusing.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Great point, to the heart of it...



... what up-and-coming man would want to be saddled with years, perhaps a lifetime of total negativity and hatred of the special, promoted diversity of the moment knowing how fickle the standards are. Today homophobia, tomorrow the misogyny of any man turned off by aforesaid cultural, liberal negativity and exclusion.

 

[Saint Peter]

Stop being mean to the old, grumpy, straight (sometimes), burned out white dudes!

 

[Saint Peter]

But you didn't list necrophilia as a fetish. Internet dating is so confusing.

The ultimate deal breaker.