BY MICHAEL BROWN , CP OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
- Michael Brown holds a Ph.D. in Near Eastern Languages and Literatures from New York University and has served as a professor at a number of seminaries. He is the author of 25 books and hosts the nationally syndicated, daily talk radio show, the Line of Fire.
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For the last few decades, our culture has warmly embraced
moral relativism, where right and wrong are determined based on our feelings,
and so there is nothing absolute. Morality is entirely relative, which means
that you can have your morality and I can have mine.
Today, we have moved from moral relativism to reality
relativism, where not only morality but everything is determined by how I feel,
so you can have your reality and I can have mine.
This is not a matter of a dangerous descent down a slippery
slope. This is a matter of falling off the cliff entirely.
Call it reality free-fall – or perhaps, reality
free-for-all, since anything goes these days.
The effects of moral relativism are
obvious.
Abortion may be wrong for you, but not for
me.
Living together out of wedlock may be wrong for you, but
not for me.
Name the sinful behavior, whatever it is – as long as it
allegedly doesn't hurt anyone, which also becomes a relative concept – and who
are you to judge? From porn to drugs to adultery to stealing, we can find
justification for our actions.
In the words of Scripture, "All the ways of a man are pure
in his own eyes, but the LORD weighs the spirit" (Proverbs
16:2).
When I was shooting heroin (1970-71) I began to hang out
with junkies, and they were a very different breed than my hippie friends. (Some
of the hippies wouldn't do chemically-based drugs, since that was not "natural,"
which is yet another aspect of moral relativism, but that's another
story.)
One junkie was telling me about a friend of his who was so
morally bankrupt that he would steal money from his own
grandmother.
I said to him, "But didn't you tell me you stole money from
your own mother?"
He replied, "Yes, I did, but I would never steal money from
my grandmother!" (To my shame, I had stolen money from my own
father.)
This confirms what Ravi Zacharias observed, namely, "With
no fact as a referent, what is normative is purely a matter of
preference."
Well, we have taken that concept one step further today:
"With no fact as a referent, what is real is purely a matter of
perception."
Who's to say Bruce Jenner isn't a woman. (As someone
tweeted me today, "Her name is Caitlin.")
Who's to say Rachel Dolezal isn't
black?
Who's to say that people suffering from species
dysphoria are not actually part animal? (A technical description of
this disorder is "the sense of being in the wrong [species] body... a desire to
be an animal.")
Who are you to judge?
Why must people be confined by the "gender binary" of
male-female? Why, for that matter, must they be confined by the confining
boundaries of skin color, ethnicity, or even humanity?
Why not transcend humanity and simply be who you really
are, which means, whoever you imagine yourself to be?
I recently had a conversation with a very sweet,
non-religious lesbian caller to my radio show. She insisted that gender
dysphoria (meaning, transgender identity) was different than species dysphoria,
just as others have told me that gender dysphoria was different than Body Identity Integrity
Disorder (sometimes
called "amputee identity disorder," or, more recently, being "transabled"), and
still others have argued strongly that being transgender is different than being
"transracial."
Yet all the arguments are based on perception vs. reality
(with the exception of those who are born with biological or genetic
abnormalities), and we are simply told that Bruce Jenner really is a woman
(after all, transgender is the "t" of the LGBT movement) whereas Rachel Dolezal
really isn't black. Based on what objective criteria? None.
I'm convinced that the LGBT war on gender will undermine
itself, being part of the larger war on reality, and that soon enough, sanity
will prevail in our society.
That being said, this is an issue I would gladly drop
for now if not for the fact that it continues to shout at us day and night,
calling for a response, the latest example being the outrageous interview with
Rachel Dolezal on NBC's Nightly News.
I was so grieved by her comments during the interview that
I prepared a special video response, which you can watch
here.
R. C. Sproul once wrote, "I do not want to drive across a
bridge designed by an engineer who believed the numbers in structural stress
models are relative truths."
In the same way, there's not much hope for a world in which
all reality becomes relative, but when we cut ourselves off from the one true
God, the ultimate source of reality, we really do lose our
bearings.
A return to divine truth – to reality – will deliver us
from our delusions.
Michael
Brown holds a Ph.D. in Near Eastern Languages and Literatures from New York
University. He is the author of 25 books, including Can You Be Gay and Christian,
and he hosts the nationally syndicated, daily talk radio show, the Line of Fire.
Follow him at AskDrBrown on Facebook or @drmichaellbrown on
Twitter.
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