Is Canada a Moral Sinkhole?... or, the Making of a Moral Malaise

There have been 2 shocking decisions by Canadian courts recently that, disturbingly, don't seem to actually have many people shocked. I'm sure if I were to say that Canada is in a woeful moral decline there would be those that balk, and yet as I read about Canada taking the final steps into legally endorsing open prostitution and, far worse yet, barely punishing the  open murder of a healthy and fully born baby (to use only two examples), I can come to no other conclusion.

How Did We Get Here?!
How did we come to a place where people are not at their MP's and MPP's doors outraged at such legal decisions? How is it that a mother who strangled her baby to death and threw the body over a fence into her neighbor's yard is given barely any jail time* and Canadians nationwide barely seem to care? And even that short sentence is referred to by her lawyer as "unjust" and "almost mean".
And how has our nation come to the point where we don't see a problem with people selling themselves sexually? What possible line of logic is there that makes it acceptable amongst decent people to condone people paying women to have sex with them?


*Note: Through the various news articles I read I wasn't able to get a clear indication of exact time she spent in jail, but 3 year suspended sentence was referenced as well as references that seemed to indicate time spent under some sort of supervision at home.





Step by Step
Sadly, the progression down the ever lowering moral path seems to have a pretty easy history to follow. For decades we tell people that sex isn't really a sacred thing to happen only within marriage. That's old-fashioned, archaic even. We reinforce that constantly through movies and tv, with a sitcom that even has it's six main characters have 85 sexual partners altogether in just 10 years (cuz, y'know, that's healthy and normal). And as we're minimizing sex that way we also loosen up further by more and more freely dispersing explicit sexual material over the years. After all, if it's okay for people to get paid to have sex in order for porn to get made, how exactly is that meaningfully different from prostitution?
On the other issue it started decades ago with the argument that unborn babies weren't really babies, just "tissue", or "fetuses". So getting rid of that is okay. So by that twist of logic the door is opened. Years pass of it becoming increasingly normal and common, and suddenly I noticed in arguments that the old lie isn't even being used anymore. After all, with our increases in technology it's become ridiculous to still try and claim that the unborn baby isn't, in fact, a baby. Now it's just become so common and people so desensitized that we'll admit we're killing babies, but for some reason that's okay. So then the story of a mother strangling her healthy, newborn baby to death comes up and, instead of shock, we get a judge giving virtually no sentence and comparing what she did to abortion. And we get British ethicists saying that killing a baby is no different from abortion (to which I agree), and then concluding that we should never do either.... no that'd be silly, what they actually concluded was that people should have the right to do both. Yes, they actually argue that parents should be allowed to kill their newborn babies. This is what the bright minds of ethicists for Oxford University concluded.
After all, if we can kill babies in the womb, and we can kill babies in the middle of being born, why wouldn't it be okay to just kill them after they're born too? 

Brave New World
As I consider these two issues, and the many more I could have used as examples, I can't help but think of the atheists that I've talked with who insist that God isn't needed to have morals and a moral society, and there are better moral foundations than the long-held teachings of the Bible. And then I look at the "progress" our society has made and shudder. In just a few decades we've gone as a culture from valuing the morals of sex only within marriage, to mocking the idea and giving the okay to prostitution, pimps (we'll call them bodyguards for prostitutes though, because it sounds more civilized) and brothels. And we've gone from valuing life above all to throwing a suspended sentence to a person who threw her dead baby over a fence.


Unless there is a major spiritual re-awakening in our culture can we honestly expect things to get anything but worse?

Addendum
A friend of mine who read this suggested I should add in what the solution to all of this is, saying that if there isn't one it looks like I'm just complaining. I disagree in that trying to wake people up to the reality of what's happening around them is more than complaining, but nonetheless the common sense suggestions are also the obvious ones: First and foremost, prayer. Second, speaking up to your  government representatives in any way you can, until hopefully somebody somewhere starts to listen. Here's a handy website that lets you find your local MP using your postal code.

Book Review: Is God a Moral Monster by Dr Paul Copan

I haven’t done a blog post in a while, but I’ve been spurred into action by having read an excellent and provocative book by Paul Copan entitled “Is God a Moral Monster: Making Sense of the Old Testament God”. If you’ve ever heard about the supposedly terrible things that God did in the Bible, or ever wondered about the seemingly bizarre food laws, or if you’ve ever squiggled uncomfortably at the many mentions of slavery in the Bible, this book is for you. Many of the major attacks portraying God as a sadistic being or the Bible as a morally out of date relic are addressed in this work, and Copan manages to cover it all surprisingly in less than 250 pages.


Throughout the book Dr Copan strives to be  “reasonably popular-level” while dealing with the most challenging passages of the Old Testament, in particular with the issues and arguments as they are often spitefully phrased by the New Atheists. The comfortably low page count is probably a part of Dr Copan’s plan of keeping it as an easily accessible book, and for the most part he succeeds in that goal. Dr Copan reaches a comfortable middle ground of using a scholarly level of argumentation and citation while using language and phrasing that doesn’t require a philosophy degree to follow.

One of the first questions I ask when considering the content of a book is who the author is and what his qualifications are on the subject. In this case I’m pleased to say that Dr Copan is stands up to scrutiny. He earned his PhD from Marquette University and is the professor and Pledger Family Chair of Philosophy and Ethics at Palm Beach Atlantic University in Florida. He’s also the author of more than a dozen books on religious philosophy and editor of many more. Qualified? Check.

Content? There are many touchy subjects and the toughest Bible passages addressed here: God’s rage and jealousy, why in the world were clams and other seemingly random foods forbidden by God to the Israelites, multiple chapters are dedicated to addressing each slavery and supposedly ethnic cleansing ordered by God. Copan goes about this by pointing out the mistaken views that are held when one comes to the text either so casually as to not take other passages into consideration, or with a bias toward only proving the Bible to be barbaric. For a brief example: Copan points out when slavery is mentioned in the Bible people nowadays usually envision the slavery of southern States from a few centuries ago however the two are very, very different. Copan suggests they are in fact so different that it’s not even appropriate for us to use the term slave anymore with the Old Testament passages, but rather bond servant. One of many key major distinctions that Copan points out can be found by considering that slaves in the US context were kidnapped en masse from Africa and forced into slavery, whereas those referred to in the Old Testament were not kidnapped (to the contrary, kidnapping was actually punishable by execution!), but rather voluntarily made themselves a slave (or bond-servant) in order to work off their debt! This is of course just a taste of many subjects and arguments that he delves into, citing supporting passages and scholarly literary work as appropriate.

Overall Dr Paul Copan does an excellent job of addressing many of the toughest passages in the Bible and giving deeply insightful and satisfying answers to the attacks launched by the New Atheists. In a world growing increasingly comfortable with mocking the Bible I would recommend this book to anyone as a first rate resource, whether pastor or layman believer.