Or is my truth as valid as your truth?
I stumbled upon a blog written by an old high school friend and his wife admonishing a news commentator's suggestion that Tiger Woods convert to Christianity. She blathered on about how dare he this and how dare he that and on and on.
Now, in her defense as a psychologist a large part of her "job" is to "validate" others feelings. In the parlance of the common man this means whatever you are and whatever you do is ok . Over the last 15 years in family practice I have seen a variety of psychiatric ills and "validating" someone has its place within the context of counseling.
My problem comes when telescopic logic is used to apply this utopian dream to everything which has at its heart the lie of equality in all things.
In my experience "my truth" is equally valid as your truth ONLY until MY TRUTH conflicts with YOUR TRUTH.
Then YOUR truth suddenly and most amazingly assumes a position of "greater truth" and validity than "my truth."
For example ; how can you be so "judgmental" as to say that my truth which may include my preference for sexual relationships with small underage children - toddlers in fact - is any better or worse than your "truth" which includes a preference for monogamous relationship with adults and your ostensibly equal truth/reality including a desire to protect your children from people like me ?
Left wing lunatics like this are fine with other peoples reality until it intersects with their reality. I mean how could you be so "intolerant" and "cruel" as to impose your morality about the kind of a relationship I should have?
Of course one tried and true method is to change the language and try to control the argument altogether via linguistics. They seem to indict Christianity in general as being responsible for "judgementalness". I am sure this would be a lively discussion but not at all sure there is any factual or supportable credible evidence of any kind to support the opinion. It is in situations like this that I am always puzzled by two things:
1)The hesitance to assert the superiority of Western values which the very ability to publicly ponder points to the obvious answer in the affirmative.
2)The "critical gaze" extended to Christianity or traditional American culture is not being applied equally to other religions and cultures.
While my old high school friend rages about Christianity and its "harm" to society His opinion of perhaps a female's life under sharia law in an unnamed generic Islamic Republic is conspicuously absent.
I don't believe that people like my old friend have bad intentions. Quite the contrary -I believe they are good hearted people just severely misguided. They, like so many of us are the victims of good hearted well intentioned parents particularly of the baby boom generation that wanted to give us everything and not have to "suffer" the things that they did growing up. Yet unwittingly in many cases have to doomed us to a path that in modern political parlance is unsustainable for "civil society" free of tyranny.
We have sevral generations that honestly believe that they are entitled to all the trappings of success previous generations worked a lifetime for. They scream at their children's teachers for honestly grading their child and so we are left with teachers who hand out meaningless A's to all and everyone is a star.
Is it any wonder that mental illness in College students has increased dramatically? Can you imagine finding out that you are NOT the smartest most beautiful person in the world !?!?! They largely believe that objective truth is unknowable if it exists at all and frequently I see them use this as a rationalization for apathy in trying to make any choices. Their morality is purely relative and has been shaped by modern textbooks that undergo sensitivity and review - again resulting in a sanitized meaningless distortion of history that is fantasy. They have been taught more about the internment of Japanese in WWII as opposed to the nature of Hitler's evil.
Sadly, critical thinking and the traditional triumvirate of education is no longer taught in most schools and our test scores and recent history is evidence of the impact this has had. But then that's just "my truth"
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