The Moral Values Article
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I’ve had it up to my nose with the post-election hoo-hah. I’m about to drown in the putrescence. I mean, one or two articles have been very salient. All the rest — and since I read a lot of conservative and Orthodox Christian blogs, I’ve just about vomited on them all — are just too much. Most of them revolve around this “duh! Big RED TRUCK!” epiphany: The Democrats just don’t get what makes religious folks tick.
It was only inevitable, then, that someone would pull out the old “moral values are relative” shibboleth. To which I invoke the Mighty Professor Mike Peterson: “My wife and I have taught our children that our values are the only values, by which I mean: There are things that are valuable, and there are things that are not. We may disagree about what is valuable, but values are not relative. Some things are valuable and some things are not.”
Some things are valuable, and some things are not. Life is valuable. Convenience killing is not. Marriage is valuable; pseudo-marriages pretending to be marriage are not. Recognizing all people as our brothers and sisters is valuable; patronizing those less fortunate — or being patronized by those more fortunate — is not. Freedom is valuable; slavery is not. The list is nearly endless.
The difference between people who disagree about what is valuable is just that: They are disagreeing about what is valuable. But we do not have, as a result, two different values. Nor do we have two different value systems. We have a set of things, some of which are valuable and some of which are not, and two rational people who disagree about their value. The point is, if one or both of those two rational people does not properly value the things that are valuable, they are wrong.