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Date Posted: 22:47:59 02/18/04 Wed
Author: Cheri
Subject: God's Moral Authority....Canine Parables



God's Moral Authority


One Summer Velvet dug up something that smelled like moldy newspaper. I had no idea what it was, but Velvet seemed proud of her find. She shook it and tossed it around the yard until it dangled from her mouth in ragged chunks. Of course, I took it from her. If she swallowed some, it would no doubt end up a dark stain on my beige carpet.

A few days later, she dug up something quite different - about a half dozen oyster shells that looked like small, pearl fans. I took those from her too but I cleaned them up and put them out for display on a shelf in the bathroom.

Velvet also collects ordinary objects - like sticks. I let her keep those because they're inoffensive and harmless, and not pretty enough to display on a bric-a-brac shelf. Basically, then, I make her give up the nice stuff or the nasty stuff and let her keep everything else.

My criteria for taking and leaving reminds me of the way some people look at morals. Some people reject the notion that there's any ultimate authority for judging what's nice or nasty behavior. So what one person considers evil behavior might be seen as acceptable to someone else, depending on the situation.

To those of us who say God sets the standards for niceness, the anything-goes culture says, "That's fine for you, but not everyone believes in God. So let's take God out of the morality question." That, of course, takes away the quaint notion of sin. Sin, after all, has the nasty quality

- like a dark stain on a beige carpet - of spoiling our view of ourselves and of the world we live in.
Moral tolerance, then, takes away both the spiritually nice and the spiritually nasty, and leaves nothing of value - no recognizable standard for niceness or nastiness.

Behaving without standards of right and wrong seems appealing - at first. But doing so would eventually erode the capacity for discernment. For instance, I felt pretty self-righteous when I turned in a wallet I found at Food-O-Rama.....until I read about the little boy who returned $10,000 that had fallen from a Brinks truck.

On the other end of the scale, if I don't feel bad about not paying back that dollar I borrowed, then why not neglect to report some income to the IRS.

Living as if there were no standard of moral niceness toward which to strive prevents me from developing moral character - the ability to recognize the right thing and then do it even when no one is looking. And worse, with no definite limits on nastiness, how will I learn to recognize evil? Do-as-you-please morality blurs the line between good and evil; it eliminates both God and the devil.

Velvet is unable to recognize the harm in consuming nasty garbage. Nor is she able to discern the niceness of an oyster shell. Following a code of moral tolerance will eventually lead to the inability to recognize neither nastiness nor niceness.

And just as Velvet is quite content to play with ordinary stick, those who follow the do-as-you-please culture content themselves with moral standards of no enduring value and are left holding nothing of significance.

In those days.....every man did that which was right in his own eyes. ~Judges 17:6 (KJV)

Taken from Canine Parables by Paulette Zubel

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