Giant Pratfall: Our culture slipping on a banana peel

A couple of days ago, I posted a link to a post on why atheists can never be good, a post that argued that goodness for atheists always becomes utilitarian. I disagreed, in that I thought it was possible for atheists to be good, and to listen to that which is written on their heart by God, and not really rationally know why they are being good. Now I'm adding a caveat.

In theory, atheists can be good. However, as soon as someone gives them a seemingly compelling reason not be good that pulls at their heartstrings, intrinsic goodness is left by the wayside for presumed goodness, where human beings define what is good and what isn't. That isn't being good, that's being like God - the first temptation.

Today I came across a post by a blogger I had never heard of before, but thanks to NewAdvent he caught my attention. He started his post with reminiscing back to when he used to think it would be great to live during a time of cultural degradation, but now that he older and he realises he lives in such a time, it's not as fun as he thought it would be.  His whole post is worth reading, and I'm only pulling out a small section of it, so after you've read me, go read him.  In the meantime, when he gets to same-sex "marriage", and explains how Sister Margaret Farley can't just reinterpret Catholic sexual morality and expect it to be called Catholic by using the analogy of a person playing golf and deciding to make up their own game while still wanting it to be called golf, he says:

This is the stuff of comedy. It’s like a giant pratfall – not a person falling, but an entire culture slipping on a banana peel. Laughing at it is really the only fun left in a degenerate era, which turns out not to be so much fun after all. In fact, it is extremely dangerous to the health of one's soul.

The whole culture is turning traditional Western morality on it's head and thinks it won't matter.  And thus the absurdity that we see now, with the potential redefinition of marriage across the Western world, where the complementary of the sexes is no longer deemed important enough to keep marriage as it is.  But, there is harm in gay marriage, great harm. Harm that is not obvious, and in your face, and easily denied or minimised.  So, the atheist and the agnostic and the clueless believer will fall for it and other causes like it, because they don't have a strong enough reason not to.  They will also fall for gay marriage because it makes them feel good about themselves, and that tends to drown out the voice of conscience in their own being that connects them to infinite goodness.

I have to add in The Imaginative Conservative's summary of this whole situation, why we should not stop speaking out and why we should not also give in and go with the flow:

Why is it so very important not to be changed by this? What is the price of assent to and collaboration with Gay Pride? The answer is clearly spelled out in Romans 1. Saint Paul describes a situation eerily like our own in which those “who changed the truth of God into a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator” fell into “shameful affections. For their women have changed the natural use into that use which is against nature. And, in like manner, the men also, leaving the natural use of the women, have burned in their lusts, one toward another: men with men, working that which is filthy...” So those, “Who, having known the justice of God, did not understand that they who do such things, are worthy of death; and not only they that do them, but they also that consent to them that do them.” (Italics added) Gay Pride is that consent, the price for which is the death of your soul.

How to deal with this? A Jewish midrash has it that the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah were violent and godless, given over to every sort of sexual depravity, and even killed their own children. Abraham preached against them. They would not change, but he would not stop. One day a stranger approached him and asked, "You began preaching here so long ago. Yet no one has listened to you. Why do you continue?" Abraham replied, “At first I spoke out to change them. Now I speak out so that they do not change me.”

While as here is someone who has let himself be changed.

Related link: On the Way Down ~ The Imaginative Conservative