Wednesday, April 24, 2013

If God Is Dead Everything Is Justifiable

“As Dostoevski said, if God is dead everything is justifiable.
This, may I suggest, is North America’s predicament. This is the albatross around our educator’s necks. This is the goad that keeps stabbing away at us as we bleed one another. We continue to talk of values and ethics; we persist in establishing moral boundaries for others while erasing the lines that are drawn for life itself. If my happiness is a right and the ultimate goal of life, why worry about anyone else’s claims to happiness? And if I must worry about someone else’s happiness, whose?—and why his or hers and not another’s? If life is pointless, why should ethics serve any purpose except my own? If I am merely the product of nature and at the mercy of material determinism, why should I subject myself to anyone else’s moral convictions?”

[Ravi Zacharias, Can Man Live Without God? (Dallas: Word, 1994), 39-40.]

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