I made the following claim in the thread on my Pigfest Postscript Post (say that 3 times fast) :
"The thing about our society is that it is on a collision course with a position that any objective moral truth is considered offensive, no matter how nicely it is stated."
Tgirsch begged to differ:
"I think this is a straw-man position. I don't think anyone seriously argues this. There may be differences of opinion as to what that moral truth actually is, but I can imagine lots of "truth claims" that people will disagree with without finding them offensive."
We may be talking past each other because my claim had to do with offense at the mere claim that any universal moral truths exist ... not a claim about whether people may or may not be offended by the content of those universal moral truths.
Regardless, my thread with Tgirsch reminds me of a discussion I had with my friend Brian at the weekend conference in D.C.
Brian told me, "I think some Christian leaders are guilty of fear mongering." By that, he meant the propensity for some Christian leaders to talk about problems in culture in the gravest of terms.
Brian has a point. I know God is sovereign. I know how it ends. God wins. Perhaps in my claims about truth in our culture, I am giving into a spirit of fear and seeing a trend line that does not really exist in our culture.
I realize asking the readers of a small blog to comment on a broader cultural trend is not exactly going to yield incontrovertible results -- but I am curious what you all think. Am I seeing a real trend line, or am I adding to a spirit of fear about rampant moral relativism in our culture?
Speak from your experience ... and speak nicely, of course. ;-)
UPDATE:
Point of clarification:
"The straw man fallacy is when you misrepresent someone else's position so that it can be attacked more easily, knock down that misrepresented position, then conclude that the original position has been demolished. It's a fallacy because it fails to deal with the actual arguments that have been made."
In the context of this discussion, tgirsch is making the claim that
"The thing about our society is that it is on a collision course with a position that any objective moral truth is considered offensive, no matter how nicely it is stated."
is a misrepresentation of moral relativism (i.e. a view of ethics that says it is right and proper for each person to decide what is right or wrong for themselves and that no objective standard of right and wrong truly exists).
My claim is that the trend line of our culture is in that direction ... more and more people get offended by the philosophy of moral absolutism (the position that there is an objective standard of right and wrong) because it is seen as extremism.