Are We Creating a Culture of Moral Misfits?

Trying to make sense out of the senseless atrocity in Newtown, CT seems so futile at times. But this is the operative question that seems to come out of all events like this one or some derivative thereof:
"Are we creating a culture or moral misfits?"



from godfatherpolitics.com
Are We Creating a Culture of Moral Misfits?:

Our nation has a deep moral problem brought on by a belligerent secular worldview. And it’s not just religious people who have seen its impact. Yale Law Professor Arthur Allen Leff (1935–1981) put it this way:

“We are never going to get anywhere (assuming for the moment that there is somewhere to get) in ethical or legal theory unless we finally face the fact that, in the Psalmist’s words, there is no one like unto the Lord. . . . The so-called death of God turns out not to have been His funeral; it also seems to have affected the total elimination of any coherent, or even more-than-momentarily convincing, ethical or legal system dependent upon final authoritative, extrasystemic premises.”

 Put more simply, with God out of the picture, “everything is up for grabs.”[1]

'via Blog this'



This is the best response I could find and it flows out of the lessons we did not learn from Columbine and the testimony of the father of Rachel Scott, one of the students killed at Columbine.

Darrel Scott's speech to Congress:
http://www.americaspartynews.com/talk/forums/thread-view.asp?tid=3621

On that day, many students and teachers and administrators found themselves in gross violation of the Law of the Land handed down by the Supreme Court of the United States in 1962 -- one of many atrocities committed by this body -- and that is to remove prayer from the public schools.

I guarantee you on that day in 1999 at Columbine there were many who violated the law and asked for God's help openly and vainly. And I guarantee there were many in Newtown, CT who prayed in vain for help to a God they do not know very well and would not recognize if they met Him. They may as well have been praying to Santa or the Easter Bunny.

We have done of great job of bringing about The Naked Public Square (1984) that then-Lutheran pastor Richard John Niehaus warned us about (Niehaus subsequently became a Catholic priest in 1991).

(as an aside Niehaus was also on the correct side of the abortion (right to life) issue as well, standing in direct contrast to Chicago Cardinal (Chicago Values Suck) Bernadin when he compared the pro-life struggle to the civil rights movement of the 60's.)

It was a mistake to isolate abortion "from other issues of the sacredness of life" and to allow politicians to hide behind the skirt of the "seamless garment" argument provided to Catholic politicians by Bernadin. 

According to writer Joseph Sobran, "the seamless garment has turned out to be nothing but a loophole for hypocritical Catholic politicians. If anything", he adds, "it has actually made it easier for them than for non-Catholics to give their effective support to legalized abortion—that is, it has allowed them to be inconsistent and unprincipled about the very issues that Cardinal Bernardin said demand consistency and principle".^[11][12]

Regarding the Church's position on the death penalty, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI) wrote in 2004 that Catholics could have a legitimate diversity of opinions on the matter, but not on abortion or euthanasia.^[13]) 

from wikipedia.org:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Allen_Leff

Arthur Allen Leff (1935–1981) was a professor of law at Yale Law School who is best known for a series of articles examining whether there is such a thing as a normative law or morality. Leff answers this question in the negative and follows the consequences to their logical conclusions.

In these works Leff attempts to directly address whether a normative morality can exist without God. [2] Leff answers the question in the negative. Leff states that absent an ultimate authority figure (i.e. God) handing down moral laws from on-high there is no reason for any person to prefer one set of behavior identified as "moral" to another. Leff terms this "the Grand Sez Who." In particular, it is impossible to resolve the conflict between the rights of the individual and the power of the collective, even though much of the time we can pretend that, for instance, the Constitution tells us where to draw the line. There are bound to be cases where we are left on our own, with no authoritative referee; there is no "brooding omnipresence in the sky", in the words of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., whom Leff quotes approvingly.

 Leff was an agnostic but his writings have been influential on Christian discussions of morality in the modern Era. Phillip E. Johnson has suggested that Leff's work is really a critique of the God is dead argument. [3] Johnson argues that the presence of evil in the world is evidence that there is an absolute morality which requires an absolute authority. Other Christian scholars have also applied Leff's critique to secular arguments for a normative morality. [4]

Unspeakable Ethics, Unnatural Law, 1979 Duke L.J. 1229 (1979)
http://inklingz.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/unspeakable-ethics-unnatural-law-duke-law-journal3.pdf

Leff states as follows in the closing of UE, UL:

All I can say is this: it looks as if we are all we have. Given what we know about ourselves, and each other, this is an extraordinarily unappetizing prospect; looking around the world, it appears that if all men are brothers, the ruling model is Cain and Abel. Neither reason, nor love, nor even terror, seems to have worked to make us “good,” and worse than that, there is no reason why any thing should. Only if ethics were something unspeakable by us could law be unnatural, and therefore unchallengeable. As things stand now, everything is up for grabs. Nevertheless:

Napalming babies is bad.

Starving the poor is wicked.

Buying and selling each other is depraved.

Those who stood up and died resisting Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Idi Amin, and Pol Pot —and General Custer too— have earned salvation.

Those who acquiesced deserve to be damned.

There is in the world such a thing as evil.

[All together now:] Sez who?

God help us.

.

Basically, there seems to be two types of responses around the water cooler to events like this. There are those who respond "I don't understand how this type of thing could happen..." and those who respond "I not only understand why it happens, I'm only glad it doesn't happen more...". On one side are the secular progressives who worship at the shrine of moral relativism. On the other side are the evangelical conservatives and the religious understand moral absolutism even if they don't practice it to perfection in their own lives.

When we live in a country whose laws (morality) do not respect life much at the beginning or late stages, why do we even question why nobody has much respect for the lives (the ultimate human right -- life) of others during the middle or so-called productive stages?

I won't even discuss some of the immoral institutions (most reside in or are glorified by HOLLYWOOD) that totally disrespect the lives and dignity of human beings in the middle stages of life. So we do pretty much of a good job of shitting on the lives and dignity of life throughout all of its stages.

And then we wonder why incidents like Newtown and Columbine are prevalent in our society, in our culture? And we consistently point fingers in all the wrong directions. We are very well practiced at doing the wrong thing and instead of admitting our mistake and changing course -- we just continue down the same lost course, only faster and harder. The Lost Pilot Effect. (“Lost pilot” effect: If the correct strategy is not known or applicable, people will just do “more” of the wrong thing.)

for a more secular explanation of why we are where we are (LOST):
http://teaching.p-design.ch/mdm07/presentations/managerial_decision_making07_13_Retrospection.pdf

C'mon man. We can do better than this. We're smarter than this.

Unfortunately, for now my response to the question "Are we creating a culture of moral misfits?" is an unqualified "Yes!!"

We have become Amoral Nation. That slippery slope is a real SOB!