Blurred battle lines - How can we know our enemies when we don't know ourselves?

jWorld Magazine ^ | (5-21-05) | Joel Belz

[Fam4Bush]

Every few weeks, on my way to visit my grandchildren, I drive by the garbage dumpster where 24 months ago terrorist Eric Rudolph was finally captured after eluding the FBI for the previous five years. Mr. Rudolph, of course, has now formally admitted his guilt in the murderous bombings of the Olympic park in Atlanta, an abortion clinic in Birmingham, and a homosexual nightclub, also in Atlanta. He awaits formal sentencing.

I look at that garbage dumpster and wince. It is so normal, nothing like the big military tank that was so vivid a symbol at Tiananmen Square. It is not like the nuclear-armed ICBMs that scared the daylights out of us as kids back in the '60s and '70s. The dumpster obviously occupies a coordinate on somebody's Global Positioning System—but for years, nobody had a clue to punch in the x- and y-values that might have led to that particular dumpster.

Is this the new shape of warfare? Or should we call it the shapelessness? [snip]

What has primarily changed is the worldview of our culture. Ambiguity reigns. Relativism as a philosophy of life, and pluralism as a means of accommodating that relativism, sound wonderfully attractive until you stop to recognize this irony: The more we have adopted relativism and pluralism as laudable goals, the tougher it has become for us all to live together. The boundary lines that used to mark out the good and the bad are all blurred now, and keeping an up-to-date map of the progress of the allies and the defeats of the enemies has become all but impossible. [snip]

...our enemies slip regularly and easily in and out of the places we used to claim as our own not because we're badly guarded at the borders—but because definable borders no longer even exist.

It would be one thing if modern multiculturalism taught only that you should tolerate A and B and C and D. But when it goes on to insist that you should espouse A and B and C and D as equally true and equally important—then get ready for confusion. When a society gets as mixed up in sorting out its own identity as our culture is today, we shouldn't be surprised that some of its citizens do the immoral and criminal kinds of things that Eric Rudolph did. We've concocted an explosive mixture of thinking—and when that explosive mixture erupts right in our own neighborhoods, it's hardly honest to pretend it caught us altogether off guard.

[trisham]

My point was that the opinion leaders in our society have reached consensus that there are no absolute values, or IOW that each person must decide for himself what is right and wrong.

Some, such as you and me, reject this idea, but we are swimming against a very powerful current running in the other direction.

***********

I may be wrong, but it is my impression that there are many of us who believe in moral absolutes, and that the number is growing.

I am optimistic about the future.