Yes, Virginia; liberals have values. But, yes; they are very, very different from those derived from the Bible. Star Parker has a fine review of the differences in this Town Hall piece....When I talk about values I am talking about right and wrong in an absolute sense. And I am talking about right and wrong that we know because we learn them from our Bible and tradition that have been handed down through the ages. This isn't information that a university professor discovered in research or the laboratory. We're taught it.
Needless to say, claims of absolutes make Americans nervous. I can hear the free spirits saying that Star wants to bring in the Taliban.
But, of course that's not the case at all. My claim is that we've lost perspective that behind the political freedom that we so dearly love, there will always be a sense of the values that we believe to be absolutely true that holds it all together. The issue remains: What are those values that we hold absolute, and where do they come from?
Conservatives, as I stated above, are clear about this. Traditional values we learn from the Bible. We can simply point to the Ten Commandments. And liberal values? The absolute here is that there are no absolutes. Everything is relative, and the only absolute is to welcome and tolerate everything.
If conservatives learn values from the Bible, where do liberals learn theirs?
I guess you can call it this: Make it up as you go along, do what you feel like, and get grants to fund university research to justify what you want to be true. Materialism. Relativism. Hedonism. Life as grass-roots activism. Anything you can muster enough votes for must be true...
