Poet's Corner

[Poet]

ROFL! Oh I see, so it's the fault of the academy itself, the internet, and the advent of "non-Christian" ethics. Interesting because, as a Christian, I was taught our moral underpinnings come from Judaism.

I'm seeing an awful lot of blaming the academy, particularly focusing on Berkeley and Harvard, these days on the internet. This puzzles me, as though the learning of critical thinking skills and the reading of literature from outside the Western Canon (not to mention the exposure to all those pesky foreign students)were somehow anathema to what's good about America.

What this poor fellow sees as a lack of a moral compass, I see as the elevation of the morality of defending family members to an unnecessary degree. I think we could all agree (to some extent) that defending members of your family is "moral"- and it is so written in most religions. The parents in this case simply carried it a bit too far. And then the author of the piece above, not only failed to see the competing morality, but he leap frogged over THAT to the fact that the "answer" to the question he failed to correctly interpret was Christian morality.

I'm thinking about what you said above. I like the metaphor for morality as being the defense of family (and thus the defense of self). And I agree that all religions establish a sense of 'tribe', which then leads to a sense of 'not tribe' wrt outsiders. And actually, what I see the author of the original post doing is some very simplistic xenophobic finger-pointing to 'explain' a behavior which has been with us throughout the ages (as you pointed out).