The Conservative Problem

Liberals/Progressives believe conservatives are the problem in our nation. Naturally. I mean who could fail to see the link between traditional family values and the explosions of teen sex, forcible rape, pornography, STDs, unwanted pregnancy, and abortions? Who could possibly deny the obvious causation between “thou shalt not lie, steal, lust, murder, and envy” and the tripling of the violent crime rate in the past 50 years? And who among us would dispute the fact that Sunday school attendance in Bible-believing churches obviously causes depression, isolation, anger, suicide, bullying, drug use, alcohol abuse, school shootings, and every other kind of anti-social behavior among our youth?

Of course I’m being facetious. But it requires these kinds of bizarre mental contortions to imagine that paying women to have children out of wedlock isn’t going to increase the percentage of children born out of wedlock, or that removing the most serious consequence for teen sex (by killing the resulting child) isn’t going to encourage our children to behave like animals in heat and result in a mountain of dead babies. It requires this kind of denial to imagine that any policy that is 180 degrees opposed to God’s instruction in the Bible is going to be anything other than a staggering failure—because what’s in the Bible works. And heaven forbid we would ever implement a program of following up on such policies to see what the results actually are. That might mean having to cancel all of these government programs, and then we couldn’t feel good about wanting so desperately to deliver the less fortunate from their basic human responsibilities.

Ultimately it comes down to this: which side is trying to obey God’s instruction, and which side is trying to get rid of God’s instruction? Which side has the greater percentage of healthy kids and strong marriages? Which side has all the STDs? Which side is successful? Which side continues to fail?

Will the Real Reality Please Stand Up?

Postmodern philosophy became popular a few years ago. Postmodernism is basically a denial that objective reality exists or can be known. It teaches that each of us has our own reality, because we cannot know objective reality through our senses. This is merely an excuse for people to behave as they wish, and is foolish in the extreme.

Objective reality really exists. This is why science works. If we each defined our own reality, then we could not find out how things work through experimentation. A given experiment would turn out differently for different people, depending on the “reality” of each. But this isn’t the case. The sun rises and sets for everyone, nuclear bombs really can destroy entire cities, and you really do exist. These things, like the science that has given us our unprecedented technology, are objectively true. I prove objective reality every time I push the play button on my DVD player; it works no matter what the button-pusher happens to believe about the machine.

Here’s the point: Our success or failure depends on how closely our values, decisions, and actions are aligned with reality. If we fail to correctly discern and identify objective reality, we will also fail to reach our goals.