Truth Month - July 2024
Day 14 - All people have dignity and worth, but not all actions and beliefs are true or good.
Most people would agree that all people have dignity and worth. The Christian worldview grounds this belief in the fact that we are created in the Image of God, and thus have inherent value. However, it is a fallacy to assume that because of this status, criticizing the actions of a person or challenging their deeply held beliefs is out of bounds.
So what is good or evil? Intuitively, we know that all beliefs and cultures are not necessarily good or true, or at least some are better than others (e.g. cannibalism, torture of babies). But only a worldview that holds to objective morality has the grounding to justify calling something good or evil, right or wrong. Cultures that hold to relativistic morality lose the ability to fairly criticize others, since they have no objective basis to claim their views are morally superior. In fact, relativism results in moral claims becoming just preferences (e.g. "I don't like that").
For example, given relativistic morality, one can't claim that slavery is actually wrong, since slave owners can just as easily claim that it is right. The most that can be claimed is "I believe that you are wrong and I'd prefer that you don't do it". The problem is that we all actually have a moral intuition that tells us that it is wrong. The Christian worldview explains this insight as a reflection of the Image of God in all of us. Relativism fails to have that explanatory power.
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