Saturday, November 10, 2012

An Appeal to the Neurotypical

Please stop professing things that you don't believe---especially as regards moral universalism.  It's horrible for the children and the non-neurotypicals, and it has already and will continue to come back to bite you.

When I say 'believe', I'm speaking of the way Christians understand the word.  We don't mean believe in terms of 'give the mere acknowledgement of the existence of'----that's the kind of belief that the demons have, and tremble.
Instead, we mean the sort of belief that you demonstrate when you sit in a chair which you believe to be behind you---a reliance on the basic truth and goodness of what you are asserting.

Let's face facts.  You are NOT a good moral universalist.  Not even Singer is, and he'll fess up to it, even without a few drinks in advance.
You'll of course respond---yeah but the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.  To which I reply:
Bullshit
Observation of your actions and your gut reactions is consistent with one thing and one thing only:

Your ethics insofar as they exist are primarily duty-based.
What's more,
That is NOTHING TO BE ASHAMED OF.

You feel a greater duty to your cat than you do to the 'starving children of FILL IN THE BLANK HERE'.
You feel a greater duty to your own children than you do to anyone else's, even those of your neighbors.  The ratio of this duty is astronomical...off the charts.  If someone told you, and you believed them, that the benefits derived by the other children in a bad school that your child would normally be assigned to was 200 times the negative to your child from attending said school...guess what?
If you had the choice, you WOULDN'T send your kid there.  You might pretend to profess admiration for other parents who chose otherwise---although they're likely rationalizing their inability or unwillingness to make the sacrifices necessary to make the choice you favor.  But you wouldn't really feel it in your gut.  You'd feel they were something 'off'.  And, God bless you for feeling that way.  It means that you haven't 'denied the faith and thus become worse than the heathen'.  You see, God and Nature have given YOU the duty to care for YOUR children.  You are charged with it.  Your children are not means towards an end---you might say, they ARE the end.  Your duty to them is deep and profound.  A mere deuce from this suit of particularism trumps all four aces of moral universalism.  You know this in your gut.  This is why conspicuous displays of moral universalism make you so uncomfortable.  Yeah, there are a few people---VERY VERY few, who actually walk that walk sorta-kinda.  But the bootleggers in that crew so far outnumber the baptists that you probably couldn't find a Bible if you had the TSA strip-search the lot of them.

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