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This is Undaunted Life! A Man's Podcast. I'm your host Kyle Thompson. Let's get into it.
0:45
All right, guys, we're going to start off with a question today. And this is the question.
0:48
How do we know that murder is wrong?
0:55
Now, some of you guys immediately came up with an answer. You already had it ready to go. If you
0:58
were sitting across from me at a table, you would have just given me your answer for others of you.
1:02
Maybe you didn't have an answer right out of the gate. Maybe it's not something that you just
1:06
knew right off the top of your head. Maybe some of you got a little bit philosophical with the
1:11
question. You wanted to break down how I asked it and then you would give me an appropriate answer
1:16
thereafter. But what if I told you you have to answer that question and the caveat being
1:22
that you can't use any religious writings or texts in your answer? How would you answer?
1:29
And that's what we're going to be getting into today because that's really hard to do.
1:34
What I just did do is I gave you an answer, but then I gave you one caveat that makes answering
1:38
that question incredibly, incredibly difficult. So today we're going to be talking about moral
1:43
relativism, okay? So this is a subject matter and this is a podcast that is going to be a little
1:47
bit philosophical for some of you guys. But any of you guys that are tempted to maybe get out
1:51
of this podcast, I guarantee you you're going to get some value out of this, even though this isn't
1:54
your normal cup of tea, because to be honest with you guys, even as I was researched doing
1:58
this podcast, moral relativism is not an easy subject to wrap your mind around. There's a lot
2:03
of different things that you can go into. There's a lot of different study. There's a lot of reading
2:07
that you can do. And I'm just going to go ahead and give you a little bit of a spoiler alert right
2:10
now. I'm probably not going to do the world's greatest job of giving you all the information that
2:14
you could possibly need and all the different intricacies. But as I always do, I'm trying to
2:19
break this down in a way that's going to be interesting to you guys, but also in a way that
2:23
you can use because at the end of the day, if you can't use this information, if you can't take
2:28
the some of the stuff from this podcast, share it around, discuss it with others, then what exactly
2:32
are you accomplishing? It's going to be a little bit difficult for you to give me an answer as to
2:36
what you're going to be able to accomplish. So that's what we're going to get into today.
2:39
But before we go too far into the podcast, we've got to start with definitions because
2:43
you know how it goes anytime you start looking at different things, you have to look at the
2:46
definition of something, or you're going to struggle to get into any of the nuance of it. So four
2:52
definitions we're going to look at here at the very beginning. The very first thing we need to
2:55
define is morality. Okay. And but just one little caveat before I give you the definition of morality,
3:02
all of these definitions, I found in different places. In some of these definitions, I had to
3:06
alter for our purposes here today, but I didn't author them in a way that would change the definition.
3:11
Okay, so let's go back to morality. So morality, they are principles, or I guess it's a now
3:16
and its principles concerning the distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behavior.
3:22
Okay, so that's morality. Then we talk about relativism. So relativism is a noun as well.
3:28
And it's the doctrine that knowledge, truth, and morality exist in relation to culture,
3:34
society, or historical context, and are not absolute. Okay. So obviously, if you take
3:40
elements of morality, the definition of morality and elements of the definition of relativism,
3:43
you get moral relativism. And this is the definition that we will be using for our purposes.
3:48
This is morality is not absolute, but only relative to individual feelings, the society
3:55
or circumstances. So there's a lot of different definitions of moral relativism out there,
3:58
but that's one that we're going to use. Again, morality is not absolute, but only relative to
4:02
individual feelings, the society or circumstances. But that's not the last definition that we have
4:07
to look at, because with moral relativism, that's one side of an equation. But the other side of
4:12
the equation is just as important and something that we will be discussing quite a bit today.
4:16
And that is objective morality. So here is our definition of objective morality.
4:22
And that is moral standards and truths exist independent of individual feelings, societal
4:28
standards, or circumstances. So I'll give you those last two again, just so they're fresh,
4:32
moral relativism, that's morality is not absolute, but only relative to individual feelings,
4:36
the society or circumstances, and objective morality, which is moral standards and truths
4:40
exist independent of individual feelings, societal standards, or circumstances. So automatically,
4:45
right out of the gate, you got to understand and know just from hearing those definitions,
4:50
there is a battle between objective morality and moral relativism. There just has to be,
4:56
they are two sides of the same coin. But the thing that's interesting for us,
5:00
and the thing that's going to really pay dividends for us as we continue on in this conversation,
5:04
is what the basis of both of those things are. Okay. So the basis of objective morality is some
5:12
type of theism. And and I meant to say some type of theism that I mean, because that's not just
5:16
necessarily the Judeo Christian God, it could be some any number of gods, but a theistic worldview
5:22
is what undergirds objective morality. And obviously, since they're on opposite sides of the same coin,
5:28
moral relativism, the thing that undergirds that is atheism, a belief that there is not a God or gods.
5:34
And some people would actually disagree with that. But I just got to be honest with you,
5:38
that is the most cogent way to put it. Theism and objective morality are in tandem. So is atheism
5:43
and moral relativism. But now let's get into a little bit more detail on one of these. So let's
5:48
go ahead and dig into objective morality. So again, this is attached to theism and just to give you
5:54
the definition just one more time, just so we can continue to hear it and repeat it in our heads.
5:57
Objective morality, those are moral standards and truths exist independent of individual feelings,
6:03
societal standards, or circumstances. So this is a pretty easy way of getting into it. But I'm not
6:09
going to be described describing it in its totality, because I could go a lot of different directions
6:14
on objective morality. And literally, I could suggest to you a dozen books that could get you
6:18
into the different nuances of objective morality. But I actually saw here recently,
6:23
a video clip of Ben Shapiro, obviously, you guys know who Ben Shapiro is. We've got some
6:27
more interesting and exciting things coming up from Ben Shapiro here. Pretty soon on this podcast
6:31
that we can talk more about later. But he was asked in a Q and A, because he normally goes to
6:36
colleges and he engages in Q and A with students and things like that. He was basically asked,
6:40
you know, how we can come to the person asked him, I was trying to remember exactly how the kid
6:44
worded it, but essentially he was in a conversation with somebody. And they were trying to ask this
6:48
person how he could find some objective morality without God being there. And so Ben Shapiro
6:55
understood the question, but then he kind of sidestepped it in a way, in a good way, to kind
7:00
of giving you an idea of, okay, how did we get to this point where we feel like we have objective,
7:04
objective morality and how we have that, and where did it come from? So Ben Shapiro gave a
7:10
very, very cogent answer. And he said, basically, we have two sources of where we get objective
7:14
morality. The first is the secular in Greek way. And the second is the Judeo-Christian way.
7:21
Okay, so let's go back to the first one, the secular Greek way. Basically, he's talking about
7:25
teleology. So that's going to be a new word for a lot of you guys. I know it was new for me whenever I
7:29
started digging into this, but teleology, T E L E O L O G Y. This is essentially, I'm going to
7:35
give you the definition of it here. This is the explanation of phenomena in terms of the purpose
7:40
they serve, rather than the cause by which they arise. But what he's making here, what Ben Shapiro
7:46
is making is essentially representing the teleological argument. And that is the argument for the
7:50
existence of God from the evidence of order and hence design in nature. So basically, we're given
7:58
this in the secular Greek view, we're given this argument for God's existence and basically for
8:05
objective morality and objective reality. And it's given by an unmoved mover. Okay, so it was given
8:11
to us by an unmoved mover, a godly being, right? So basically, the universe is the way that it is.
8:18
Nature is the way that it is. And so for us as humans, the highest of the created order or
8:25
evolved order, we get our hints for how we are to comport ourselves properly. We get that directly
8:32
from the universe and nature and the laws that are inside of that continuum, I guess would be the
8:37
easiest way to say it. So without getting too much into more detail there, that's essentially the
8:42
secular Greek way. But then the second way that we get our ideas of objective morality is the Judeo
8:48
Christian way. And this is essentially in the difference between the teleological argument. This
8:52
is the revelation argument that we as humanity, we got this, these ideas via revelation. Okay,
8:59
so the Judeo side of the Judeo Christian, that's essentially the Jewish background, which is that
9:04
God descended onto a mountaintop and gave us the laws by which we are to live by. Okay, so that's
9:09
Judeo side. And then he talked about how the Christian side is how Jesus came to humanity.
9:14
And he modeled the laws by which to live by, right? So he modeled it to us. This is how you
9:19
are supposed to live. So I think that Ben Shapiro did a very good job of giving us an idea of what
9:24
is the foundation of objective morality, which again is based in theism. But now we get into the
9:30
other side, which is the main subject matter for today's episode, which is moral relativism,
9:35
which again is attached to atheism. And I'll give you the definition one more time of moral
9:38
relativism here. Morality is not absolute, but only relative to the individual feelings,
9:43
the society or circumstances. Okay. So the thing is, is this worldview, you don't really need to
9:49
dig into exactly how we got to this worldview as much. And it's not going to be nearly as important
9:54
to you for us to do that. So we need to go ahead and from the very jump, we need to dig into the
9:59
philosophical issues with this worldview that everything within morality is relative. So there's
10:05
three things that I kind of came up with that I thought were philosophical issues that we should
10:08
cover. The first is you'll hear them say something like this, that there is no objective morality,
10:14
but we intuitively somehow know that things like murder, rape, pedophilia, theft, incest,
10:21
etc, are wrong. Okay. So so someone's going to say, yeah, there's no objective morality. This is
10:27
just something that we know. Somehow we just know that those things I listed in other things that
10:32
I'm sure you thought of are wrong. But the dilemma that we find is how, how do we know that those
10:40
things are wrong? How did we arrive at that? Right? Especially if you think that we're just, you know,
10:46
hairless apes that just bump around into other apes and, you know, converse with them using
10:51
language and whatnot. How did we get to the point where we figured out that those things were not
10:57
good? So that's a big philosophical issue with the worldview. The second philosophical issue,
11:02
this was pointed out by Dennis Prager in a video by Prager, you is that the terms good and evil
11:08
become like and don't like. So you can't say that something is good. You have to say that that's
11:14
something that I like. You know, you can't say that something is evil. You have to say that that's
11:18
something that I don't like. And so I thought a really, really good way of describing this is I
11:22
was listening to Ravi Zacharias do a Q&A episode on his podcast, actually. And there was a guy that
11:29
he was engaging with. And this guy was a, you know, he was a moral relativist, right? So evolutionary
11:35
biologists, like everything just happened by chance. And it is what it is. And so to try and get this
11:40
guy to think through his worldview completely, he gave him this scenario. And Ravi's on stage and
11:46
he says, Hey, what if I brought a newborn baby up on stage? And I took a hammer and I drove it into
11:53
that baby skull, killing it. Would it be evil? What I've done? Would it be wrong? And the guy
12:01
apparently thought about it for a second. And then he responded and said, you know, I wouldn't like
12:05
it very much. But no, I couldn't say that it was wrong. Again, think about that. So you want to
12:12
talk about philosophical issues? Man, I mean, that there's people like that walking around, right?
12:17
That's something that we have to be concerned about. And so the third thing in terms of philosophical
12:22
issues with this worldview is that strict moral relativists. So these are like the true believers,
12:26
right? The strict moral relativists cannot denounce any behavior or act as evil, wrong,
12:32
or incorrect. They just can't do it, right? And you saw the example right here with the
12:38
the guy that Ravi Zacharias was was interacting with. But the thing about it is, is we know,
12:44
we just know in our hearts that somehow certain things are just abjectly wrong to do, right?
12:49
But moral relativists don't even believe their own theory, right? Because if you challenge
12:55
to moral relativists, because let's take Ravi Zacharias as example, one step further,
12:59
let's say it wasn't just some random six, you know, newborn baby that he brought up on stage,
13:04
that he was going to bludgeon with a hammer. Let's say it was that guy's newborn baby,
13:08
or his newborn grandbaby or something, right? Don't you think that at that point you would
13:14
have a little bit more of an opinion on it? But again, if you're a strict moral relativist,
13:19
a true believer, then you can't really have it both ways. But the thing that we have to talk
13:23
about here, guys, is what the logical outcome of an atheistic moral relativistic worldview is.
13:30
And the thing about it is, is we've already experienced it as humankind, and we've already
13:36
seen it. And we've got pictures and we've got video. And that is the bloodshed that we saw
13:42
in the 20th century. So let me tease this out for you a little bit here. So Friedrich Nietzsche,
13:46
so in the late 1800s, he was, you know, a philosopher, he did a lot of writing and he's had a lot of
13:52
impact on people even to this day. But he very famously said in 1882, that God is dead. Okay,
13:59
so one thing to be really clear on this, he was using that phrase figuratively, right? He was
14:05
basically saying that the enlightenment had quote unquote killed the idea of God or gods, right?
14:12
But in doing so in making this prediction, there was there was in making this declaration rather,
14:18
he also made a prediction. And Nietzsche predicted that the 20th century again, because he died in
14:23
the late 19th century, he predicted that the 20th century would be the bloodiest in human history.
14:28
And it is absolutely stunning to see exactly how right that he was. So let's just do a quick
14:36
rundown. And guys, again, as, as most historians would tell you, a lot of these numbers are so
14:41
unbelievably hard to calculate. So I'm just going to give some generic stats on some of these
14:46
things. But in the 20th century, we have Chairman Mao killing around 70 million people. Joseph Stalin
14:53
killed around 20 million people. Hitler killed around 6 million Jews, just Jews. Then we have
15:01
Mussolini killing just under 1 million people. And then we have to look at World War one and World
15:07
War two, World War one killed anywhere in the range between 15 and 19 million people. And in World
15:14
War two, we saw 70 to 85 million people killed worldwide. Just think about that for a second. And I
15:23
mean, really, really think about that. And here's another thing that's interesting. And there's no
15:29
one that I think that has been able to absolutely prove this, but this is a somewhat verified rumor
15:35
that Adolf Hitler actually delivered copies of the writings of Nietzsche to Stalin and Mussolini.
15:44
Two of the biggest murderers in the history of the earth, they took this idea, these ideas from
15:51
Nietzsche that we live in a godless world that nobody is watching us. And that's the thing that
15:56
all these men that I just mentioned and all the regimes they're in have in common is all of them
16:01
were operating from an atheistic worldview. Okay, something that is a huge part of moral
16:07
relativism. So this is something that should be very, very concerning to us. And for any of you guys
16:12
out there that listen to or read Jordan Peterson, this is why he's so vehement about controlling
16:17
people that are trying to control speech or anything that is going to come out of these
16:22
socialist or, um, communistic regimes, because we've seen this before, right? That's the thing
16:29
that's so concerning to me about young people, Gen Z and millennials that think that these
16:33
socialistic ideas would be a great, great thing. And this is not a podcast about socialism today,
16:38
perhaps we'll do that on a future episode. But that's one thing that we've really got to
16:41
contend with guys is this is what people believe. And this is what happens when people believe in
16:47
that way, because it'd be hard, you'd be hard pressed to believe that, you know, Mao or Stalin or
16:52
Hitler or Mussolini or any of those guys that were doing those things that if they thought that
16:56
there was a God that was going to be judging them someday for the things that they did,
17:01
you can pretty much assume that if they had all their mental faculties there, that that would not
17:07
have been something that they would have done, the ways that they operated and the things that they did
17:11
would probably not have been been so bad, or maybe even not even happened at all. But to change gears
17:17
here just a little bit, I want to kind of put this question to you is, you know, why should
17:21
thinking Christians, right? So capital letter thinking Christians be concerned about moral
17:26
relativism. And for any of you guys that have been listening to the podcast for any particular
17:31
length of time, if you go back to episode 49 of this podcast, I talked about the state of theology
17:36
survey. Okay, and so for those of you who don't know exactly what that is or haven't listened to
17:40
that episode yet, I would certainly encourage you to do so. This was something that Ligonier
17:44
Ministries did that is our the late RC sprulls ministry. And it's done every two years. And in
17:49
2018, I think it was done in April or May of 2018. It's just something it's a it's a survey
17:54
that is done to kind of get a theological temperature for what's going on in America with Americans,
18:00
right? So this was conducted in 2018. And there were just over 3000 respondents.
18:05
And they were the respondents were broken down into two categories. Okay. So the first were just
18:10
Americans, right? So that's pretty much everybody. So all 3000 and two is actually 3000 and two
18:14
respondents. They were all Americans. But then there was a section, a section, a second category.
18:21
And those were evangelicals, right? So 581 about one sixth of the respondents were people that
18:27
consider themselves to be evangelicals. Okay. So in order for us to know it's just so we're all
18:31
in same page, there were four statements that these people had to affirm in order for them to be
18:35
considered evangelicals inside of that category. So here were the four statements. Number one,
18:40
the Bible is the highest authority for what I believe. Number two, it is very important for me
18:45
personally to encourage non-Christians to trust Jesus Christ as our savior. Three, Jesus Christ's
18:50
death on the cross is the only sacrifice that could remove the penalty of my sin. And four,
18:55
only those who trust in Jesus Christ alone as their savior receive God's free gift of eternal
19:00
salvation. So in the survey, there are a bunch of different statements. And so basically you
19:05
ranked what you felt about that statement and on the scale from strongly disagree, disagree,
19:10
neutral, agree, strongly agree. Okay. But for our purposes here today, talking about moral
19:14
relativism, we're only going to talk about one of the statements. And it was statement number 30.
19:18
And it was this, religious belief is a matter of personal opinion. It is not about objective
19:25
truth. So when we look at all the participants, so all 3000 or so of them, 61% of those people
19:34
agreed with 31% of them strongly agreeing. Only 29% people of Americans objected and
19:43
disagreed with that statement. Again, the statement was this religious belief is a matter of personal
19:47
opinion. It is not about objective truth. But this is a part that should really be scary for
19:52
everybody listening to this podcast, because I'm assuming most of you are Christians. And if you're
19:55
not a Christian, we are ecstatic that you're here. But this next commentary is just for the Christians.
20:00
When you go down to what the evangelical participants said, okay, so the almost 600 of
20:06
evangelicals that were participating in this 33% of the respondents agreed with the statement
20:14
that religious belief is a matter of personal opinion. It is not about objective truth.
20:21
Can you believe that? And 20% one fifth of those evangelicals strongly agree with that statement.
20:29
It's just like, what do you say to that? And again, when we go back to that old podcast,
20:35
episode 49, this is on pastors for in large part, because a lot of these evangelicals,
20:42
I'm assuming that most of them are well meaning, but they're sitting there in these churches and
20:46
they're basically being fed nonsense. They're being fed Ted talks with a few Bible verses sprinkled
20:51
over it. And they're being taught about Tinkerbell boyfriend Jesus. And they're not getting any sense
20:56
of what is true. And you can see this a lot with millennials, which I is one, right? I'm 32 years
21:02
old. So I'm considered on the older scale of millennials. But a reason for the shift and some
21:07
of these percentages is because of what millennials think, because they've grown up in this pluralistic
21:13
society where everything has been relative, right? And as of right now, we don't exactly know what
21:18
Gen Z is going to be like. There are some ideas and some, you know, forecast that they're going to
21:23
actually be more liberal than millennials are there. Then there's some that say they're going to be
21:27
more conservative than millennials that we basically don't have any idea what Gen Z is going to be
21:31
like. But the guys out there, they listen to me right now that you have kids that are, you know,
21:36
in elementary school, we don't even have a generational category for those people yet. What are they
21:41
going to believe? Because a lot of those kids are being raised by these dopes that think that there's
21:48
no such thing as objective morality or objective truth even. So that's something that we should
21:53
really be concerned about guys. But now let's move on a little bit here because there are some
21:58
major objections that people voice to a God given objective morality, right? This is why they run
22:05
to moral relativity because it's something that's just, you know, more comfortable for them. It's a
22:10
little bit easier for them to get on the other side of. So here are five of the biggest objections
22:14
to a God given objective morality. So here's the first one is what about atrocities made
22:20
in the name of God? That's a big one. So God, you know, the person that gave us this objective
22:25
morality, what about the people that do these horrible things in his name? The thing about it
22:30
is though, guys, it's just because it was made in the name of God does not mean that it was a
22:36
directive of that God or worldview. This is so simple, but this absolutely trips up so many people.
22:43
So if I say that I'm going to murder my neighbor in the name of Jesus Christ,
22:50
that doesn't, you shouldn't look at that as, oh, that's what Jesus told him to do, right?
22:56
And even look at this example, I know we talk about, you know, fundamentalist Islam a lot in here,
23:00
but what about when a Muslim murders somebody, but it's not because of apostasy or because that they
23:06
won't accept, you know, they won't become a Muslim. That's just considered murder, even to even to
23:12
Muslims, if they kill somebody and it's outside of what's described in the ninth sura, it just is
23:18
what it is. It's murder. So just because you say you're doing it in the name of God does not mean
23:24
that that is prescriptive, that that is what people would have done. People talk about slavery and
23:27
they're like, weren't there Christians that were saying slavery was okay? Yeah, because they were
23:31
exegeting the scriptures improperly. And some of them because they were ignorant and some of them
23:36
because they were evil, right? So that takes care of one objection. The second objection is
23:41
something along lines of this. Are you saying that you can't be moral unless you believe in God?
23:45
And the easy answer to that is absolutely not. I mean, duh, of course you can be moral and not
23:52
believe in God there. There are plenty of moral atheists out there. But the thing that you have
23:57
to understand and think that you have to ask it does beg this question is where do these nontheists
24:02
get their reference point for right and wrong or good and evil? Where does it come from?
24:09
Because we know there's not really good answer. They don't have one, right? They're just going to
24:14
kind of pretend that this isn't something that they need to wrestle with. So the third objection
24:18
that I want to bring to you is that you can have objective morality without God. It's called moral
24:25
realism. So moral realism is just basically, um, it's basically having objective morality
24:31
without God. So it kind of goes back to some of the things that we talked about earlier.
24:33
But I thought that William Lane Craig, so he's a obviously famous apologist and author,
24:37
he had a very, very good response to this when somebody was asking him about this. And it was
24:40
basically reasons why theism is a better explanation than objective morality that, you know, that it
24:48
just comes from us via moral realism. That it doesn't just come through the ether, but it was given
24:52
to us, right? So this is what he said. And it was, quote, one, the nature of moral obligation of moral
24:58
duty that we ought to do certain things that we ought not to do other things implies a divine
25:04
command because otherwise you may have that certain things are good and evil, but you don't have this
25:10
oughtness. Second, it would be a coincidence of extraordinary and probability and unbelievable
25:16
to think that if there are these objective moral principles that kind of exists, as you say,
25:20
that it would be just the kind of beings to whom those principles apply that would have happened
25:25
to evolved by chance in this universe. It would have been as if this moral realm knew that we were
25:31
coming, so to speak. And that to me calls for a designer, an author of both the moral and physical
25:37
realm. So that takes care of the third one. The fourth objection that we get is you say that we
25:42
get objective morality from God. So why does this God allow evil and suffering to exist? Obviously,
25:50
this is a huge philosophical philosophical question that writers and thinkers have been thinking about
25:56
and positing for a very, very long time. And the best response that I've ever heard to this
26:01
is something that Ravi Zacharias says almost all the time. I didn't really tell you who he was
26:05
earlier. I just assumed you knew who he was. So Ravi Zacharias is from Ravi Zacharias International
26:10
Industries. And so he is a world renowned apologist and goes around and does Q and A's and speeches
26:15
literally all over the place in all these different countries, even whenever he has to be
26:19
basically escorted in and out with armed guards. But this was his response to this, you know,
26:24
question of how could a good God or creator God allow evil and suffering to exist? So here he is,
26:30
quote, it's very critical to understand the nature of the question. Because when we say there's evil,
26:37
we assume there's good. When we say there's good, we assume there's a moral law on the base of
26:44
which to differentiate between good and evil. When we assume a moral law, we assume a moral law
26:51
giver, because without the moral law giver, there is no moral law. Without the moral law,
26:57
there is no good. Without good, there is no evil. The question actually ends up hoisting itself up
27:03
on its own petard. It doesn't know how to defend itself. But here's the killer point of that
27:10
argument, which leads us to the fifth objection that we get, which is why do we need a moral law
27:15
giver to have a moral law? Ravi continues. And the answer is very clear in this. Every question
27:22
raised about evil and suffering is either raised by a person or about a person, which means that
27:28
personal worth is essential to the question. Intrinsic worth is essential to the question. And in a
27:34
naturalistic framework, you cannot have intrinsic worth. You've got extrinsic worth. It's conveyed to
27:41
you. You are just a blip on the radar screen of time. You just happen to be here. But if you are a
27:46
person created in the image of God with intrinsic worth, then the question indeed is reflective of
27:52
the value that you give to personhood. So two things, the reality of good and the intrinsic
27:58
worth of a person are essential to the question. For the question to be taken seriously, those
28:03
assumptions need to be made, which the Christian makes, unquote. So those are a lot of objections
28:11
that you guys might get to this worldview in terms of why would there be some sort of objective
28:15
morality? Or those are five really kind of cogent ways to deal with that. So as we wrap up this
28:20
idea here, there's a couple of things that I think we should do in terms of being prescriptive,
28:25
because you know, guys, we'd like to be descriptive here and kind of give you guys an idea, but we'd
28:28
like to be prescriptive as well. So as thinking Christians, how should we respond to moral
28:34
relativism? So we've got two things that we need you to do. The first is we must call it what it is.
28:40
And that's cowardice. And you know, I got this idea from Jordan Peterson. This was actually a
28:46
quote from one of his, from one of his lectures whenever before he was Jordan Peterson, the author
28:51
and the world renowned thinker, just when he was Jordan Peterson, the college professor. And it was
28:54
this, this was his quote, quote, I'm not a fan of moral relativism for a variety of reasons,
28:59
partly because I think it's an extreme form of cowardice, unquote. But that's exactly what this
29:04
is. Most of the people that put this out there, they're not doing this because they're evil. There's
29:09
certainly some that are putting this this point of view out there because they are evil. But this
29:13
is just someone that just doesn't want to make a call, right, that they'd like to be able to sit
29:18
on two sides of a fence, no matter what, you know, what plot of land the fence is sitting on,
29:23
or what's on either side of the fence, they just rather straddle the fence. They don't really want
29:27
to judge anybody. They don't really want to say that this way of living is better than that way of
29:31
living. But what's interesting about that is they will certainly look on other cultures and even
29:37
past cultures and think to themselves, well, you know, we're better than they are. Or I'm certainly
29:42
more advanced than that group of people, right? But we have to call this out. When someone has this
29:47
worldview, they're being a coward. They're not wanting to put their flag in the ground and make
29:51
a stance about anything. So that's not appropriate. And the second thing that we as thinking Christians
29:56
should do in terms of a response to moral relativism is this, we must call it what it is untenable.
30:02
Guys, this is a worldview that is completely and utterly flawed. And for us to pretend that
30:08
it's not or to placate people that have this point of view, that is not really a good way
30:12
to operate. And we got to bring Ravi Zachari back in here because he has a great, great conclusion
30:16
for us. And it was this quote, truth cannot be all relative. To make a statement, all truth is
30:23
relative is a self defeating statement. It either includes itself or excludes itself. If it includes
30:31
itself, it means that statement is not always true. But if it excludes itself, then it's positing
30:37
an absolute while denying, but absolutes actually exist. So this is something that's incredibly
30:44
important for us to look about or to look at when it comes to this is if someone that you know
30:48
has this point of view, you've got to be able to sit down and talk to him about this.
30:51
You just ask him questions. You don't come at them and just fire off all these philosophical
30:56
statements at them because it's not really going to be well received. But we've got to really understand
31:00
where they came to this point of view. Because there's plenty of people out there that are well
31:04
meaning and good people that don't really have a good idea why they believe what they believe.
31:09
There's plenty of good smart people that think the earth is flat. I think it's okay to zig
31:15
when you should zag or whatever the thing might be, right? But it's not a tenetal pull position,
31:19
and they're being cowards by having this position. So let's go and go back to the initial question
31:24
that we started off the podcast with, which is this, how do we know that murder is wrong?
31:31
And the answer is pretty simple, guys. There is an objective moral law, and God gave it to us.
31:37
All right, guys, before we let you out of here, we're going to do a quick resilience boost.
31:41
As you know, by now we are a men's ministry and our mission is cultivating mainly resilience. And
31:45
specifically, we do that by providing you guys content like this podcast that helps you forward
31:49
spiritual, mental and physical toughness. So today we're going to work on mental toughness.
31:53
And just to go ahead and let you know, I'm going to put a whole bunch of YouTube links,
31:57
and I'm not exactly sure what all I'm going to put on there quite yet.
32:00
It might just be however I can get under the character limit whenever I go ahead and upload
32:04
this online. But I'm going to go and bring you a bunch of videos, probably some conglomeration
32:09
of Ben Shapiro, Matt Wall, Jordan Peterson, Ravi Zacharias, William Lane Craig, just a lot of different
32:15
things that we're going to put out there to you. But all these video clips are going to be very,
32:19
very short, but it's going to give you an idea of kind of where we got our thought process here,
32:23
and how we brought it to you in that way. So I think that'll be good for you.
32:26
All right, guys. Thanks a lot for listening to the podcast. As always, please subscribe on
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Guys, if we deserve a five star review, that is how this podcast will continue to grow. The
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can continue growing. All right, I'm currently booking speaking engagements for the entirety
32:48
of 2019. So if you want me to come speak to your men's group, come speak on your podcast or to
32:53
your men's event, whatever you want to do, hit me up info at undaunted.life. Again, the email info
32:58
at undaunted.life. Our website is www.undaunted.life. You can follow us on Instagram and Twitter @undauntedlife or
33:04
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undaunted life under plans. And we would like to thank the band August Burns read for allowing us to
33:14
use their entire music library for our content. The intro outro track on this podcast is our song
33:19
King of Sorrow, which is off their latest record entitled Phantom Anthem. The links to all of this
33:23
are in the description. I'm your host Kyle Thompson. Remember, keep cultivating manly resilience,
33:29
keep forging spiritual, mental, and physical toughness. Keep seeking the lion of Judah.
33:53
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