Improving the bottom line
There are times – pivotal moments in our lives – when we find ourselves ill-at-ease, filled with a pervasive, foreboding sensation that something is amiss, that what we are seeing and feeling, what we are experiencing is somehow not exactly as it should be. It is as if we are out-of-sync with the rest of the world, constantly shifting in and out of phase and we can neither discover the causes of our discomfort nor resolve any of its debilitating effects. We simply cannot make sense of it, wondering what is wrong, and finding no answers to sooth our soul or to calm those unsettling thoughts that fill our mind.
Producing Man
The forces and proponents of secular ethics and moral relativism have largely supplanted and suppressed the voices of those who would promote philosophies founded on objective reasoning and critical thought; God is dead and truth is in the eye of the beholder. According to the prevailing relativistic screed, man is nothing more than a product of his own thought, a commodity whose shelf-life is determined solely by its utility, its use-by date proscribed by the dictates and whims of others who find themselves in the position to do just so.
Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, in his preface to the latest edition of Introduction to Christianity writes, “But, as Nietzsche describes it, once the news really reaches people that ‘God is dead’ and they take it to heart, then everything changes. This is demonstrated today, on the one hand, in the way that science treats human life: man is a technological object while vanishing to an ever greater degree as a human subject, and he has only himself to blame. … But if man, in his origin and at his very roots, is only an object to himself, if he is ‘produced’ and comes off the production line with selected features and accessories, what on earth is man then supposed to think of man? How should he act toward him? What will be man’s attitude toward man when he can no longer find anything of the divine mystery in the other, but only his own know-how? … Deleting faith in God, however one may try to spin or turn it, ultimately deprives moral values of their grounding. If the world and man do not come from a creative intelligence, which stores within itself their measures and plots the path of human existence, then all that is left are traffic rules for human behavior, which can be discarded or maintained according to their usefulness. … But who can really make a judgment beyond the consequences of the present moment? Will not a new ruling class, then, take hold of the keys to human existence and become the managers of mankind? When dealing with a calculus of consequences, the inviolability of human dignity no longer exists, because nothing is good or bad in itself anymore.”
It is this act of valuation which most disturbs the soul: the cold, impersonal calculation that determines the value and price to be placed on any human life. And as with any product deemed of little or no value it can cost-effectively be tossed aside and discarded; doing so reduces the cost of inventory and improves the bottom line. It is a simply a matter of choice and anyone’s right to choose.
