Secularization

Writing to the editors of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Michael Wedl, a consultant, argued: Right for is a form of semantic trickery that allows people to be perceived as good when they are merely reaping the most benefit for their cause.  I believe the writer is communicating a real point.  He uses the idea that if a mining venture is approved in a community as a right, so to increase employment in the area, perhaps to gain this or that additional advantage, but approved without consideration for persons in other communities where the drainage damages environments, there is no inherent right to the first group.  He is troubled that there seems to be an emerging use of rights to justify actions that may benefit minority groups, even very small minority groups, and that to the damage of larger context.  My only disagreement with the writer is that he asserts that the founding fathers built a system that relied on people being inherently good, honest and noble. Not true as stated, but wanted as an ideal.  The founding fathers had doubts about moral nature.  That doubt led to the three-fold government of President, Legislature and Court system so to catch the errors caused by faulty human beings.  George Washington sometimes despaired that even that plan would counter inherent problems.  We are currently in such a time. All branches seem to be stalled in the matter of interpreting law in morality’s context.  It is partly by morality that a nation is guided to effective order, government that balances through law so to protect both majority and minority views.  

Wedl, immediately after complimenting the founding fathers asked the question: Have our morals changed?  My response is that if they haven’t changed they certainly have been diluted, some quite extensively – as in the case of same sex marriage.  This could have been an example of Wedl’s semantic trickery point – gaining approval to a new legal lifestyle of genders by giving it: the same name as a morally approved lifestyle for different genders.  The style of marriage was so firmly made that it was interpreted as one male and one female.  The new approval related to same gender marriage is distinctly more related to issues of morality than was the matter of plural marriage.  Jesus also addressed the matter of marriage when he noted that it was designed of God as the joining of a male and a female in a permanent bond.  But the issues will never be well addressed until we are willing to face the awful truth that we try to evade morality in matters felt or distorted to be secular.  The fathers were rather well indoctrinated about the depravity of mankind, and worked on laws and systems to protect society from ourselves.  As we have moved along in plurality, secularization, in marginalizing concepts about a personal God, we have tended to identify human morality with keeping and breaking secular laws.  Without morality (growing from values higher than law) we will continue to make laws that violate our own objectives, will create a complexity that will build contradictions in society, will dim the lights of society needed to keep the laws, and so to cripple government and order.  Important here is that we will take away respect for law that lowers our beliefs and performance to a high form of animal culture.  Morality is a distinguishing factor of mankind, and holds from generation to generation.  When addressing the matter Jesus said about shift and change away from morality: In the beginning it was not so.  What God gave to make us moral is not changed – unless he changes it.  We have no evidence of moral change that permits us to change the order of society

Rightly managed some moral issues can be maintained, even when laws abandon traditional morality that is held by persons who have long lived and thrived under a moral system.  Law can and often does define differences for citizens in the application of laws.  For example: in some areas the laws do not require doctors to administer birth control systems, or the public to pay for them.  We can with faithful semantics pass laws that permit freedom, even to violate God’s morality.  To permit same-sex marriage, or abortion, or assisted death, or violation of money management, or whatever – the law, can be given names appropriate to the meaning.  I can then receive the persons in same sex marriage without the embarrassment of having male friendships wrongly interpreted, or confuse children on life orientation, or identifying as prejudice the exclusivity of generative marriage verified in history.  There is a better way for us than we are taking.