KneEmail - a devotional by Mike Benson associated with Forthright Magazine
Relativism
WHY ARE WE surprised that crime soars steadily among juveniles when parents fail to set standards of right behavior in the home, when schoolteachers will not offer a moral opinion in the classroom, either out of fear of litigation or because they cannot "come from a position of what is right and wrong," as one New Jersey teacher put it...?
Why are we horrified at the growing consequences of sexual promiscuity -- including a life-threatening epidemic -- when sex is treated as casually as going out for a Frosty at Wendy's? Why are we shocked at disclosures of religious leaders bilking their ministries of millions when they've been preaching a get-rich-quick gospel all along? Why the wonderment over the fact that, for enough dollars or sexual favors, government employees and military personnel sell out their nation's secrets? Why is it so surprising that Wall Street yuppies make fast millions on insider information or tax fraud? Without objective values, the community or one's neighbor has no superior claim over one's own desires. Whether we like to hear it or not, we are reaping the consequences of the decades since World War II when we have, in Solzhenitsyn's words, "forgotten God." What we have left is the reign of relativism (Charles Colson with Ellen Santilli Vaughn, Kingdoms in Conflict, 225-226).
KneEmail: "In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes" ( Judges 21:25).