Right and Wrong.

I don't do many speeches here, but this piece by Craig Russell just took my breath away. Here's the heart of it, and I apologize for the length of the quote:

As modern members of the Twenty-first Century, however, we no longer believe in morality.  We call ourselves enlightened, intelligent, scientific and progressive.  We believe in matter, not spirit – in technology, not God.  Indeed, we sneer knowingly, condescendingly, at the very mention of God and of morality.  We consider ourselves beyond it, superior to it, rejecting in our supreme arrogance anything that even threatens to limit us in any possible way – in dress, in speech, in conduct – as a threat to our personal, individual freedom.  Others, we think, especially those in government, should have boundaries and restrictions, but never us!  We no longer believe in the very existence of right and wrong. 

But our impulses, our desires, our hungers, our lives, have to come under some form of control, and we all know this.  To say you have the right to do whatever you want whenever you want only disrespects others.  We need some kind of rules of conduct in order to live together.  Right and wrong do exist just as surely as life and death.  But how do we determine right and wrong?  What rules should we have?  Who should determine them?  Who should enforce them, and how? 

We must have some kind of discipline.  But does it come from within or from without?  We must realize that if we don’t discipline ourselves, someone else will do it for us.  In rejecting morality, we inevitably choose law – and don’t for a second think that the State has no awareness or understanding of this.

The last 40 years have seen a disastrous decay, a terrible decline in both public and private morality.  We no longer as individuals have either the strength or the desire to limit or to control ourselves in any way, large or small.  We live like greedy, half-wit children, totally without regard for others.  We weave in and out of traffic, risking the lives of ourselves and others in our desperation to beat the other guy to the next red light.  We pick our noses and fart in public without a shred of embarrassment.  We burp without excusing ourselves.  We dress like total slobs.  Obscenities pour from our mouths and litter what little reading we’re still capable of.  We become grotesquely fat by consuming everything in sight with no regard for, or even any comprehension of, the life it once possessed – of the Power it once had that we have now appropriated for our own.  We buy bigger televisions, faster computers, and require more and bigger explosions at the movies.  We divorce and we breed almost indiscriminately without any regard to what it might do to the children or to society as a whole.  We either ignore or excuse the mass murder we euphemistically call “abortion.”  We know next to nothing about anything at all and then we laugh at our ignorance.  Meanwhile, we worry about the war, about taxes, about money and “the economy,” mostly because we fear something might interrupt or interfere with our mindless, insatiable consumption of everything we can get our fat grubby little hands on.  We complain about and criticize the government and blame it for everything that’s wrong in our world.  “If only we could get rid of it,” we tell ourselves, “if only we were free again . . . .”

Well, we won’t be free again until each of us finds the courage and makes the effort to look life and reality objectively in the eye and see it plain and simple.  We won’t be free again until we accept total, unwavering responsibility for ourselves and our actions.  We won’t be free again until we realize that the dishonest, the immoral, can never live outside, or without, the law.  The question, in the end, comes down to a choice between morality or law: will control over your life come from within you, or from without you?

Thanks to Dr. Timothy Wilken for posting this in the first place, on "My World of 'Ought to Be'". I don't know what else Craig Russell has written (I should find out) or whether I would agree with everything he has to say, but this certainly resonated with me.

11:45:46 AM