One thing about human nature is undeniable: we don’t like to be told what to do. Whether it’s children rebelling against their parents, adults agitated with their bosses, or all of us struggling with the dictates of our government, mankind’s common desire is to call our own shots. This innate desire to be in charge is precisely what makes the worldview and the philosophy of the modern left so appealing to people. The left’s worldview teaches that there are no absolutes, there is no truth, and reality is whatever you make it. In other words, taking a page out of the serpent’s playbook in the Garden of Eden, the left says to anyone who will listen: “accept our thought stream and you can be the god of your own little universe.”
Contrast that philosophy with the Christian worldview that teaches ethical restraint, demands moral responsibility, and promises eternal judgment for those who violate God’s laws, and it isn’t difficult to realize why so many gravitate to the supposed “liberty” of the left. To them, Christianity shackles individuals and holds them back from the freedom they could experience if they didn’t have to worry about moral accountability. Of course, the great irony is that the exact opposite is true.
A recent report from the Center for Disease Control provides just one example of this phenomenon. According to the CDC, there is a new strand of the sexually transmitted disease Gonorrhea that is resisting the antibiotics doctors have to treat it. What has occurred is this: someone who utilizes their “freedom” to engage in depraved sexual behavior develops the disease, and they are prescribed a powerful antibiotic like Cipro or others to treat it. But they fail to take the full dosage or complete the treatment as directed, allowing the disease to build up immunity to the drug. Then, engaging their “freedom” again, they infect someone else through promiscuity, and the resistant strand of the disease spreads.
The situation has become so serious that the CDC has told doctors to stop prescribing Cipro altogether, and medical professionals like Dr. David Stevens now predict a day when Americans will be dying in epidemic numbers from a disease that used to be treated by antibiotics. “The [drug] that they’ve moved to now is one of the last ones we have,” he said. “If this has resistance, doctors are very unsure what they’re going to do next.” So much for the “blessings of freedom.”
The truth is that freedom and liberty are great things, but if they aren’t tempered with moral responsibility (that comes from, say, religious principle), those very things destroy lives. In their thirst for absolute autonomy and independence from all authority, the left fails to recognize that just as there are physical laws that govern our universe, there are moral laws as well. No one with a brain would declare “I don’t believe in gravity today,” and then walk off the edge of the Empire State Building. Whether or not we in our ignorance choose to believe in the law of gravity, it unquestionably exists, and violating it brings consequences. In the same way, choosing not to believe in a standard of appropriate and inappropriate behavior…pretending that there is no right and wrong…doesn’t change the fact that there is one, and we violate that standard at our own peril.
This brings us full circle: the left would have us believe that following the commands of the Biblical God strip us of our rights and privileges. With Gonorrhea now infecting 700,000 Americans (13% of our population) maybe it’s time to get serious and recognize that the rules and regulations put in place for us by God (like heterosexual, monogamous sex within the bonds of marriage) aren’t there to destroy our freedom…they’re there to protect us from being destroyed by our “freedom.”
Peter W. Heck
