So let me see if I get this right, they who pride themselves for embracing multicultural pluralism will unabashedly
exclude the Holy Bible because it is not. History has proven that any time a world-view is excluded, it is replaced by another. By expelling a belief, one is not left with a position of neutrality. Removing good never stops with that one step.
Just as a blackmailer is never satiated, a rebellious heart will never feel that it has enough autonomy. Leadership that caters to the rebellious will find in them an insatiable demand for more. This is emminently illustrated in Scripture itself: for once Manasseh implemented his hell-born schemes of infant sacrifice to the god Moloch, he begat a downward slide he could not stop, for autonomy becomes addictive.
It is crystal clear what has been occuring for quite some time now. The fences are being torn down, the delimeters between right and wrong. This is exemplified no clearer than in the reign of Manasseh, the son of Hezekiah. If there's one word that even comes close to summarizing the effects of Manasseh's reign, it would be pitiful. Old Testament writers and commentators are united in describing his as one of the darkets periods in Judah's history, and tragically one of the longest reigns of Judah's history.
The people knew that they were on the path to destruction, and not only that, but complete destruction to boot. Although he belatedly realized the evil that he had wrought and tried desparately to stop the degenerative processes he had started, he found out that it is easier to destroy a a nation than to rebuild it.
The first thing that Manasseh did was to lead a reaction against his father's spiritual reforms. In four patently blunt verses, Scripture tells us of the course that Manasseh charted:
¶ Manasseh was twelve years old when he began to reign, and reigned fifty and five years in Jerusalem. And his mother's name was Hephzibah. And he did that which was evil in the sight of the LORD, after the abominations of the heathen, whom the LORD cast out before the children of Israel. For he built up again the high places which Hezekiah his father had destroyed; and he reared up altars for Baal, and made a grove, as did Ahab king of Israel; and worshipped all the host of heaven, and served them. And he built altars in the house of the LORD, of which the LORD said, In Jerusalem will I put my name. And he built altars for all the host of heaven in the two courts of the house of the LORD. And he made his son pass through the fire, and observed times, and used enchantments, and dealt with familiar spirits and wizards: he wrought much wickedness in the sight of the LORD, to provoke him to anger. - II Kgs 21:1-6
It has been rightly said, that prior to removing a fence, one should examine why the fence was put up in the first place. The moral law that God gave Moses at the Mount of Sinai was just that. It not only revealed the nature of God and His purpose for His creation, it also served as a boundary line for the people, a line that could not be crossed with impunity. Os Guinnes said it best: "'Just say no' has become America's most urgent slogan when 'Why not' has become America's most publicly unanswerable question." (see: The American Hour (New York: The Free Press, 1993), 29) It does not require a sophisticated moral sense to predict the outcome whenever a society pretends there are no ethical or moral fences; common sense alone should be sufficient in that regard.
Manasseh took a third and final step to qwell the voices crying out for a halt to what he was doing. Manasseh instituted a bitter persecution of the prophets, thinking that by silencing them he was doing the politically expedient thing. He did not even bother to look over the historical landscape and learn that he could never succeed in eradicating true spiritual passion by persecuting it. False and superficial beliefs can be stifled by law or power, but those etched into the concience or soul cannot be obliterated by decree. The very prophet that Manasseh killed, Isaiah, was the one who told us more of Messiah's triumph through suffering and of the everlasting nature of God's kingdom than any other prophetic voice. C.S. Lewis said, one of the most repeated lessons of history, It is possible for one person to lead millions into untold evil. One need only exmine Scripture with respect to Manasseh, or to Stalin and Hitler to see evidence of that.
Stamped upon our coins is the Latin inscription: E Pluribus Unum - out of the many, one; out of diversity, unity. Where else but in America can one find a fast-food outlet where a Korean is selling kosher tacos?
The assumption that all ideas are equally true is false. Philosophically it is very easy to demonstrate that falsity. Any society, however sincere, that believes in the equality of all ideas will pave the way for the loss of good ones. What is true, however, is that most people will be guided in life by merely a handful of ideas, and therefore it is all the more important that there be a way of measuring why one idea is chosen over another. This is the issue at the heart and soul of Western pluralism; on what basis have we surrendered ourselves to the ideas that govern our culture.
Paul Tillich, a noted liberal theologian, sums up my position most eloquently when he spoke of three kinds of cultures as they relate to religious knowledge. The names he assigned these cultures are distracting and the ideas are unwieldy. But the concepts are very accurate.
Heteronomy argues for a "different" law that comes from without; theonomy argues for "God's law" that is intuitively within ("god" being defined differently by pantheism than the Christian would define God); and autonomy argues for "self-law" as the only law. The question then arises: Can an autonomous culture absorb theonomous and heteronomous cultures and still remain autonomous? The answer to that is no, not without the compromise of major assumptions.
To illustrate the absurdity of trying to adhere to inherently contradictory multicultural plurastic philosophies, I present the following analogy:
There was a group of travelers aboard a plane on a turbulent flight. One of the fliers was greatly distressed, and as her dicomfiture continued, the flight attendent tried every concievable way to ease the the mind of this passenger to assure her that the plane could take an extraoridinary amount of pounding and still be safe. Noticing that her agitation was unabated, the attendent asked for the pilot's help.
Taking the hand of the nervous passenger, the cockpit crewmember said, "Madam, as you look outside the right windows, do you see the blinking light?"
"Yes," she said nervously.
"As you look outside the left window, do you see a light blinking?"
"I do," she murmured.
"As long as we stay between those two lights," the crew memmber said, "we are safe."
Like a train that laid its own track, this assurance was an illusory one, for obviously the plane could plummet headlong with its lights still blinking on either side. The path pluralization provides is equally unconfirming for safety, for the lights are not a path at all but are locked into the performance of the aircraft itself. Its safety is dependent upon itself.
G.K. Chesterton sums up multicultural pluralism brilliantly:
The new rebel is a skeptic and will not entirely trust anything. He has no loyalty; therefor he can never be really a revolutionist. And the fact that he doubts everything really gets in his way when he wants to denounce anything. For all denunciation implies a moral doctrine of some kind and th emodern revolutionist doubts not only the institution he denounces, but he doctrine by which he denounces it. Thus, he writes one book complaining that imperial oppression insults the purity of women, and then writes another book, a novel, in which he insults it himself. He curses the Sultan because Christian girls lose their virginity, and then curses Mrs. Grundy because they keep it. As a politician he will cry out that war is a waste of life, and then as a philosopher that life is a waste of time. A Russian pessimist will denounce a policeman for killing a peasant, and then prove by the highest philosophical principles that the peasant ought to have killed himself. A man denounces marriage as a lie and then denounces aristorcratic profligates for treating it as a lie. He calls a flag a bauble and then blames the oppressors of Poland or Ireland because they take away the bauble. The man of this school goes first to a political meeting, where he complains that savages are treated as if they are beasts. Then he takes his hat and umbrella and goes on to a scientific meeting where he prooves that they practically are beasts. In short, the modern revolutionist, being an infinite skeptic, is always engaged in undermining his own mind. In his book on politics he attacks men for trampling morality, and in his book on ethics he attacks morality for trampling on men. Therefore the modern man in revolt has become practically useless for all purposes of revolt. By rebelling against everything he has lost his right to rebel against anything. - Orthodoxy (Garden CIty, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1959), 41
The schizophrenia that this breeds is most glaringly epitomized with two front-page stories that ran at the same time. One described a professional basketball player who tragically had been diagnosed with AIDS; he conceded that he had lived a flagrantly promiscuous lifestyle. He was, nevertheless, hailed as a hero. At the same time another reknown individual was nominated for Supreme Court justice. Allegations surfaced that ten years earlier he had used some rather lewed or sexually motivated language towards a collegue, who was also a friend. This judicial nominee was publicly humiliated for these alleged remarks that by implication deemed him unfit for the office.
Whether or not one should be villified or not is not the point here. The point is that the opposite conditions of exaltation and humiliation did not come from a single standard. Invariably, when debating God's goodness, the challenge is presented by pointing out all the evil, and most especially gratuitious evil (seemingly at a whim), present in the world around us. In response, I ask, "When you arrogate the right to yourself to chose who may live within a womb, and who may die, you call it a moral right. But when God excercises the same right, you call Him evil. Can you explain this seemingly condtradictory position to me?" I'm usually met with nothing more than anger, and verbal denunciation or frustration. It is the torment of the contradictions inherent in multicultural pluralism that most of us are trying desparately trying to escape.
That there is a societal schizophrenia is self evident. On the one hand, a woman's right to kill her fetus is a right enshrined in the Constitution. On the other hand, the murderer of a pregnant woman is charged with double-homicide. There is a profound lesson to be learned from the foregoing, and from studying Manasseh's life. It is the ultimate test of any civilization is what we do with our children. When the soul of a nation is scarred, its children are part of the loss. Every culture today claims, in theory, to place the highest value on its love of its children. Some years ago a Middle Eastern leader was asked when the fighting in that part of the world would stop, she answered, "When they love their children more than they hate us." There is a pround expression of values in that statement. Our own criminals understand this, and draw a line there. Those whose crime was committed against a child are kept in protective isolation to protect them from the anger of other prisoners.
Why the seemingly enormous disconnect here? According to the law of non-contradiction, that which is true can not be false, and that which is false can not be true. Is it all right to torture babies? The increasingly steepening slope civilization is embarked upon, is being slickened with the call for tolerance; a position that itself is inherently intolerant of the message proclaimed by Christianity.
Secularization has led to the loss of shame, pluralization has led to the loss of reason, and privitazation to the loss of meaning. When secularization has bred its loss of shame it will generate evil even against those we love. Pluralization in turn has given birth to the loss of reason,, generating evil toward those whom we choose to hate. Privatization kills meaning and gives rise to evil within ourselves because the alienation within mutilates the soul.
Daniel Yankelovich wrote in Psychology Today Apr 1981, pg. 36, "New Rules in American Life: Searching for Self-fullfillment in a World Turned Upside Down" about an upper-middle-class couple, climbing the ladder to wealth and power. With all their gaining and getting, there was an internal ruptureing and bleeding. His run-on sentance uses "and" as the key word:
If yo feel it is imperative to fill all your needs, and if these needs are contradictory or in conflict with those of others or simply unfillable, then frustration inevitably follows. To Abby and Mark as well, self-fullfillment means having a career and marriage and children and sexual freedom and autonomy and being liberal and having money and choosing non-conformity and insisting upon social justice and enjoying city life and country living and simplicity and graciousness and reading and good friends and on and on.
This part of Yankelovich's essay demonstrates with grim lucridity the folly of adhering to "both/and" when "either/or" is often the only answer to life's decisions. "Either/or" is also known logically as the law of non-contradiction. A can not be non-A (and vice versa). The eradication of that difference may seem to be paying deference to both sides, but in reality it signals the death of all. It appears in our increasingly secular, pluralistic, rthnocentric multicultural privatized civilization that the rule being proselytized in all actuallity is:
Either all encompassing both/and or nothing
And yet, taking that presupposion to its logical conclusion is patently absurd.
The question boils down to whether or not absolute Truth exists, and if not, can that be stated absolutely? If it does exist, where may it be found and would it be beneficial in our lives to heed that Truth? What's most amazing to me is that offense is taken by the mere presence of the Bible in students halls of residence, lest - horror of horrors - somebody actually might read the despicable thing.
: Well, I don't understand why these people see fit to do away with Christianity. I mean, even though I'm the BUDDHA, I still have no problem with other people practicing another religion. 
: Nonsense! Doing away with Christianity has done wonders for diversity! (And it's made business good.) Ain't that right Allah? 
: Right you are Mr. Satan! 
: Don't I get a say?