It is difficult to overstate the depth of the differences between the Judeo-Christian view of the world and that of its opponents, most particularly the Left. For example, it involves the very question of whether there is order to the world.
Basic to the biblical worldview is the proposition that God made order out of chaos -- order expressed largely through separation and differences. God separated light from dark and created day and night; separated the waters and created land; and so on.
Differences reflect the divine order, while attempts to abolish those differences represent a denial of that order and a yearning for primeval chaos, moral and otherwise.
Here are some of the differences that are central to the Judeo-Christian worldview that are under attack today:
Good and evil: Central to the Judeo-Christian value system is that good and evil are polar opposites and "Woe unto those who call evil good, and good evil" (Isaiah). Opponents of Judeo-Christian values have made war on moral absolutes, on God-based moral values.
This has been attempted through moral relativism ("What I think is good is good for me, what you think is good is good for you"); opposition to moral judgments ("Who are you to call the Soviet Union 'evil'?"); multiculturalism ("No culture's values are any better than any other's"); substituting psychological categories for moral ones (such as routinely labeling violent murderers "sick" rather than evil); dividing the world into the powerful and the weak rather than the good and bad; and through Marxism and all its leftist and liberal materialism-based offshoots that have substituted economic criteria for moral ones ("Poverty causes crime"; or as constantly heard since 9-11, poverty breeds terrorists, the point made by George McGovern recently at a symposium on world poverty at Princeton University).
God and man: God is God and man is man. There is an infinite gulf between man and God, and God is infinitely higher than man. For the Left, man is God and God is man (these were the very words used by Marx and Engels). Each man is the source of values and the measure of all things, unaccountable to any God.
Man and woman: "And God created Adam [i.e., the human being], male and female He created them" (Genesis).
This is the area of the greatest current cultural battle. The biblical view is that man and woman are entirely distinct beings, and human order in large part rests on preserving that distinctiveness. The Left is working to abolish this distinction. That is what its battle for the "transgendered" is about. "GLBT" means "Gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered." Transgendered is not transsexual. A transsexual has simply changed sexes, but he or she does not obliterate the sexes' distinctiveness. The transgendered, on the other hand, remains a member of his or her sex but acts out gender-roles belonging to the other (such as the man who wears a dress in public).
The Left advocates much more than merely homosexuality-heterosexuality equality. It is for obliterating the notion of fixed sex, of male and female. That is why in the last 10-20 years the word "sex" -- always used to describe male or female -- has been replaced by "gender." Sex is objective and fixed; gender is subjective and malleable. Thus some universities -- the institution in the vanguard of removing Judeo-Christian values -- are eliminating men's and women's bathrooms, as they imply a sex distinctiveness that is unacceptable to opponents of Judeo-Christian sex distinctions. Continued... |