God & Honor

We've been having a discussion on why men in power act as badly—and stupidly— as they do. When did honor go out of style? When did virtue lose its grip?

We were speaking particularly about politicians who don't honor their marriage vows and who don't honor their oath to defend the Constitution any better, but the same argument applies to the rest of us.

It turns out Character matters.

If a man cheats on and lies to the person he vowed in public to be true to...his nearest and dearest, mother of his children...what makes anyone think he will behave honorably (when no one is looking) when dealing with anyone else?

We have convinced ourselves that duty doesn't matter, and that "self-fulfillment" is all that does.

It's loss of God.

If there is no God, no heaven or hell, no final reward or punishment, what is the point of being good? Why deny oneself the carnal and selfish pleasures of this world, when it is the only tiny moment of existence one will ever have?

A godless world is one of desperate people, living only for the present, seeking above all things for worldly pleasure, and the power and money to fulfill their appetites.

If there is no God, no final arbiter of good and evil; if virtue is merely a quirk or preference of human culture, there is no good argument for honorable—which often means self-sacrificial—behavior.

If there is no absolute good on which people are required to model their behavior, why would anyone behave honorably, when the spoils of the world will be lost to them, and they will spend their brief life on earth—the only life they believe they will ever have—with less gratification and less pleasure than those who are immoral, selfish, exploitive...bullies, liars and cheats?

If there is no God, how can there be honor? What would it look like? What would it mean? What would be its raison d'être?

Sappy human emotion that thinks it's "nice" to be nice to others will not stand against the intense pressures of life; the desperate times, the pain, the loss, the frustration, the envy, the greed, the rage, the hunger, the passion and the lust that comes with being human.

There must be some higher, stronger, firmer standard...that in the end, makes all the pain and sacrifice, the pity, the compassion, the selflessness, the love...the HONOR....worth it.

And when our culture's Anointed rejected that standard, and its Maker, they turned their back on the only mode of living that makes men Man, not merely Animal.

Lack of God is what's wrong.

In former times it was the Anointed...the elite...that kept the flame of the best of humanity burning brightly. Those who studied the true Liberal Arts of history, languages, literature, philosophy and religion were the ones that lead mankind out of the primeval darkness and into the light of higher human understanding and accomplishment...of the appreciation of the special differentiation of humans from all other creatures on earth by virtue of their minds and souls.

For over two thousand years, most of those Anointed of the West have been Christians, and their philosophies were consistent with belief in a higher authority, a divine judge, an intelligent designer—an absolute standard of good and evil.

And their cultures reflected those beliefs. Honor and Duty were understood to be the requirements of Privilege—in theory if not always in practice.

But today the Elite don't even bother to pretend that privilege has any accompanying responsibilities. And the culture reflects that fall from grace. It is coarser, stupider, greedier, shallower, lest celestial and more demonic. It is ignorant, rude, and in many cases beastly.

Man was never perfect. But there was a time when his face was lifted toward heaven and those bright faces led, ultimately, to the glorious apex of human accomplishment, the recognition that as equals before God, all men had the right to individual liberty—with the caveat, of course, that with individual liberty comes the responsibility and duty to be individually virtuous. Our Best knew that freedom and free societies can only exist when every man lives according to that Absolute Standard that God required.

Today's elites wrestle in the mud, back in the black, dark swamp of creatures without souls, fighting without the light of higher intelligence for their bigger chunk of the spoils, of power, of pleasure.

And they have dragged their societies down with them.

Forgotten are the responsibilities and duties of individual free men. Forgotten is the Absolute Standard of good. Forgotten is the censure of evil. And forgotten are the qualities that differentiate man from the animals. Among them, Honor.

Honor belongs to enlightened Man, not to snarling beasts fighting over carrion.

Only God can incite Honor. And without Him, there is only the bloody tooth and claw of Nature.

And we see where that gets us!

The Gunslinger