Some truth in answer
Some truth in answer
20th century history repeats on todays streets
…And many shall follow their pernicious ways; by reason of whom the way of truth shall be evil spoken of. And through covetousness shall they with feigned words make merchandise of you: whose judgment now of a long time lingereth not, and their damnation slumbereth not.
2 Peter 2:2-3 KJV
What was written so long ago is still with us today; whether or not you agree with the book’s overall message. People have been busily about making merchandise out of each-other in our culture. The practice is the inevitable result of utilitarian logic, of a false view that teaches people to believe falsehoods like; no one owes you anything, morality is relative, truth is just whatever a given power structure is pushing at a given time, the only things that matter are pleasure and pain, or that there is no such thing as a human being (of a man or a woman), both are just social constructs, all distinctions are illusory (monism), and on and on and on the lies are told.
But here is some truth in answer:
You cannot mutilate and abuse the body without mutilating and abusing the soul that body gives shelter to.
People do owe each other respect simply because we are all people, morality is objective and knowledge of it is innate (as much knowledge is!).
Truth is distinct from power and a power that fights truth can only succeed for a while before it is defeated, pleasure and pain are not ends of themselves and goodness can only be the result of deeper commitments to human teleology; to chase pleasure and avoid pain at all cost is self defeat.
Distinctions are not illusory but real. Good is good and evil is evil; men are men and women are women. The driver of our societies vulnerability in this sphere lays in a false ontology (theory of what exist / has being). The material world has never been all there is to the story, and the attempt to force all of the story to fit in those too few pages has left people ignorant and vulnerable to the word games and unnoticed assumptions of sophist. In biology this error manifest when outliers and corruption is used to try and deny the reality of the human race as dimorphic by design. In moral theory it is manifest in all kinds of phrases which tend to reduce to a vain attempt to shove objective moral reality away and deny it, claiming that morals are a private thing that everyone gets to make up as they go along, that no moral obligations exist for all people because such obligations are a fundamental part of being a human being. In epistemology (how we know anything), it manifest in the smug and stupid assertion that there is no truth (which begs people with awareness to ask… is that true?).
The truth is that all this hatred, brutality, and ugliness we see in society; all the reduction of human beings to mere effluvia of race, or sexual (mal)practice, or age-group, or any other arbitrary and untrue imposition on people; all of it is a feature (not a bug) of bad ideas. Bad ideas dressed in language-games and cultish double talk to confuse and divide people, not just from one another but from their own selves too! Why? Not to help them, but to merchandise them, to feed the lust of the merchandisers in a death spiral.
One of the last times a cult invaded a peoples hearts and turned them from themselves.
Vietnam. Image known popularly as ‘Saigon Execution’.