All mankind lives, acts, decides, relates, and forms a personal world view from a moral prejudice. A moral prejudice defines our right and our wrong. These two opposites determine our belief system. They are our truth parameters, what is and what is not permissible within my world view. Operate from a moral prejudice vacuum and anything goes, truth be damned. Cultures (from the most sophisticated to the the most primitive) profoundly influence one's moral prejudice. If that culture is dominated by a religious or spiritual factor, the prevailing moral prejudice will reflect that element for good or evil. So the moral prejudice of a Muslim, believing he is acting within the parameters of his belief system, allows him to shove a homosexual from the roof of a tall building, sending him to a deserved death, or behead one who is, to him, an infidel. While infrequent incidents of extreme violence - abortion clinic bombings for one - have occurred, today's Christian world expresses its' moral prejudice in terms such as "God doesn't want me unhappy". So leaving the wife of my youth for a hot young chick is justifiable and O.K. with God.
I am an unabashed follower of Jesus Christ. His time on earth clearly revealed how God desires to relate to us. His life on earth portrayed in living color that God comes to us full of grace and truth. (John 1:14). His life, death, and resurrection offers a "moral prejudice" introduced in grace - that God sees beauty in His creation and passionately desires man to experience His goodness and love. One complication though...God's goodness and love are anchored in truth. That truth confronts the reality (historically demonstrable) of the havoc man's self-determined truth and "moral prejudice" produces on earth.
Henley's "Invictus" captures this spirit in man.
"Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul
...
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishment the scroll
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul"
So how does this relate to Donald, Hillary, and Barack? From all segments of the political and religious spectrum prolific praise and blistering condemnation are heaped on them as though they were either our national savior or the devil incarnate. They are neither. The sub-surface current sense in the social media, that rescue from our national ills resides in the ballot box, overlooks three critical factors (again, my moral prejudice). (1) The world is not getting better and better, just more sophisticated in our ability and willingness to destroy one another. (2) "It's all about me" is the dominant Western personal philosophy. Ravi Zacharias nailed it when he said the Western world, including Christians, "think with their eyes and understand with their emotions"...whether or not it appeals to us and how it makes us feel. (3) No objective standard for truth or morality leaves humanity wide open for the destructive factors foisted on the world by people with unfettered moral prejudices. These three realities produce men, women, governments, nations, and movements who possess "...a moral prejudice which blinds men to the right choice of logical alternatives." (Robert Speer).
Logical alternatives, rational thinking, intellectual honesty, and common sense in our political scene are conspicuous by their absence. So is objective truth. Even 2 + 2 = 4 is suspect. The phrase "That's your truth" is true. But the truth authority for that "moral prejudice" will determine the outworking of that "truth". So a shooter with a self-confessed Isis "moral prejudice" kills 49 people, wounds 50 others, and according to our President, (with his own "moral prejudice"), the shooting, at least in part, was not born from the womb of the perpetrator's "moral prejudice" but the atmosphere of hatred our culture expresses towards the homosexual community. Listening (infrequently) to the current clamor re-enforces, to me, the paucity of principled politicians who possess a moral prejudice I can buy into.
Here is where we are as a culture. Our politics reflect it. Over 100 years ago Robert Speer, in his book "The Man Christ Jesus" penned these thoughts. Sounds as though he was commenting on our day. The style of writing and wording is not geared to our "nine second sound byte" attention span, but weighty and penetrating.
"Charity (God's love) holds fast the minutest atom of truth as being precious and divine, offended by even as much as a thought of laxity. Liberality loosens the terms of truth, permitting easily, and with careless magnanimity, variations from it; consenting, as it were in its own sovereignty, to overlook or allow them; and subsiding ere long into a licentious indifference to all truth and a general defect of responsibility in regard to it. Charity (God's love) extends allowances to men; liberality to falsities themselves." (p. 51)
Powerfully profound! And to me, the dominate "moral prejudice" in our political world.
Obama, Clinton and Trump?
"It is better to take refuge in the Lord than to put confidence in man." Psalm 118:8
