The Revenge of Conscience (Very good article on moral relativism)

Things are getting worse very quickly now. The list of what we are required to approve is growing ever longer. Consider just the domain of sexual practice. First we were to approve sex before marriage, then without marriage, now against marriage. First with one, then with a series, now with a crowd. First with the other sex, then with the same. First between adults, then between children, then between adults and children. The last item has not been added yet, but will be soon: you can tell from the change in language, just as you can tell the approach of winter from the change in the color of leaves. As any sin passes through its stages from temptation, to toleration, to approval, its name is first euphemized, then avoided, then forgotten. A colleague tells me that some of his fellow legal scholars call child molestation “intergenerational intimacy”: that’s euphemism. A good-hearted editor tried to talk me out of using the term “sodomy”: that’s avoidance. My students don’t know the word “fornication” at all: that’s forgetfulness.

The pattern is repeated in the house of death. First we were to approve of killing unborn babies, then babies in process of birth; next came newborns with physical defects, now newborns in perfect health. Nobel-prize laureate James Watson proposes that parents of newborns be granted a grace period during which they may have their babies killed, and in 1994 a committee of the American Medical Association proposed harvesting organs from some sick babies even before they die. First we were to approve of suicide, then to approve of assisting it. Now we are to approve of a requirement to assist it, for, as Ernest van den Haag has argued, it is “unwarranted” for doctors not to kill patients who seek death. First we were to approve of killing the sick and unconscious, then of killing the conscious and consenting. Now we are to approve of killing the conscious and protesting, for in the United States, doctors starved and dehydrated stroke patient Marjorie Nighbert to death despite her pleading “I’m hungry,” “I’m thirsty,” “Please feed me,” and “I want food.” Such cases are only to be expected when food and water are now often classified as optional treatments rather than humane care; we have not long to go before joining the Netherlands, where involuntary euthanasia is common. Dutch physician and author Bert Keizer has described his response when a nursing home resident choked on her food: he shot her full of morphine and waited for her to die. Such a deed by a doctor in the land that resisted the Nazis.

Why do things get worse so fast? Of course we have names for the process, like “collapse,” “decay,” and “slippery slope.” By conjuring images—a stricken house, a gangrenous limb, a sliding talus—they make us feel we understand. Now, I am no enemy to word-pictures, but a civilization is not really a house, a limb, or a heap of rocks; it cannot literally fall in, rot, or skid out from underfoot. Images can only illustrate an explanation; they cannot substitute for one. So why do things get worse so fast? It would be well to know, in case the process can be arrested.

The usual explanation is that conscience is weakened by neglect. Once a wrong is done, the next wrong comes more easily. On this view conscience is mainly a restraint, a resistance, a passive barrier. It doesn’t so much drive us on as hold us back, and when persistently attacked, the restraining wall gets thinner and thinner and finally disappears. Often this explanation is combined with another: that conscience comes from culture, that it is built up in us from outside. In this view the heart is malleable. We don’t clearly know what is right and wrong, and when our teachers change the lessons, our consciences change their contents. What once we deemed wrong, we deem right; what once we deemed right, we deem wrong.

There is something to these explanations, but neither can account for the sheer dynamism of wickedness—for the fact that we aren’t gently wafted into the abyss but violently propel ourselves into it. Nor, as I will show, can either one account for the peculiar quality of our present moral confusion.

I suggest a different explanation. Conscience is not a passive barrier but an active force; though it can hold us back, it can also drive us on. Moreover, conscience comes not from without but from within: though culture can trim the fringes, the core cannot be changed. The reason things get worse so fast must somehow lie not in the weakness of conscience but in its strength, not in its shapelessness but in its shape.

No.

Of the 55 men working on the constitution, 52 considered themselves to be evangelical Christians. They envisioned school children praying in class as well as teachers using the Bible for educational purposes.

When Thomas Jefferson was made president of the Washington, DC, public school system he placed the Bible and Isaac Watt's hymnal as the two primary reading texts! This is why Biblical morality was taught in public schools until the early 1960's.

Government officials were required to declare their belief in God even to be allowed to hold a public office until Oct. 1960. God was seen as the author of natural law and morality. If one did not believe in God one could not operate from a proper moral base. And by not having a foundation from which to work, one would destroy the community.

So firm were they in their resolve that the same day Congress passed the first amendment (Sept. 25, 1789), they also approved a resolution requesting President George Washington to proclaim "...a day of public thanksgiving and prayer...."

America considered itself to be a Christian nation. Read your history. Even when we moved the American Indian to the reservations it was to evangelize them. Historically.

‘Of the 55 men working on the constitution, 52 considered themselves to be evangelical Christians.’

so these individuals did specify in the country’s founding document that it was specifically a Christian nation...?

They did it by the manner of their lives and by the society they created. They did so by the laws they passed.

Matt 7:21: Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven.

They proclaimed America to be a Christian nation by the things they did. And no one had to question that fact.

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