America learned all the wrong lessons from the mass murders of 9/11, and perhaps the most tragic idea we could have settled upon is the false virtue of our pragmatic response.
Our leaders told us they would do whatever it took to defend us, and so they started wars and invaded nations and tortured people who had done us no harm.
In the process, we lost our liberty while we cultivated suspicions and rage.
The idea that a country has the right to take whatever steps are necessary in its own defense is but an example of the false moral system of pragmatism. Pragmatism seeks to justify immoral acts because they are deemed necessary to achieve a moral purpose.
Pragmatism says that the ends justify the means. It teaches that whatever is necessary to achieve a noble purpose is thereby justified and ennobled.
Pragmatism is just about the only moral principle America still has. We are a "can-do" people, and dislike the idea that our goals might be thwarted because some moral scruple stands in the way. Instead, we adopt whatever morality is necessary to get us what we want.
There is nothing wrong with being practical, so long as we understand that just because something works doesn't make it moral or just.
But pragmatism says that morality is determined by the goal we seek to achieve. Since self-defense of the nation is a proper purpose, we conclude that we can do whatever it takes to defend ourselves, even if we wantonly kill innocent people along the way.
Under pragmatism, all questions about whether our actions are moral and just are cut off by grand talk about the nobleness of our purpose and goal.
Thus we justify abortion, and other sorts of evil.
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John Pittman Hey was born in 1961 in Jackson, Mississippi, to Godly parents who from the beginning raised him in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. With child-like faith he came to Christ on his fourth birthday at his mother's knee. He received his education at church...