Justifying Fools

“Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest thou also be like unto him.” Proverbs 26:4.

The mindless justification of the insanity of sin represents the ultimate conundrum in human discourse. Practitioners of sin advance arguments that make no sense, and when the vacuous nature of their reasoning becomes apparent to any thinking person, they ratchet up the volume and press more bizarre ways of thinking times ten. Even this doesn’t measure the pervasiveness of the situation. I contend that the entire fabric of the contemporary pleasure and entertainment industry exists as a secondary and tertiary market to produce and package stupidity. Witness the delight of the fans at the fakery of the WWE, for example. Or the dizzying success of American Idol. Or the compulsive gamblers who break their necks to lose money in casinos, despite their knowledge that they are likely to lose 99% of the time! Or the fanatical followers of the outrageous and perverse make-believe plots on soap operas.
 

Give a pass to entertainment if you want, but there is no justifying the foolishness of our modern university education. This rundown of scandalous courses offered in schools today is given below, compliments of Young America’s Foundation:

1. Princeton University’s The Cultural Production of Early Modern Women examines “prostitutes,” “cross-dressing,” and “same-sex eroticism” in 16th - and 17th - century England, France, Italy and Spain (emphasis added).
2. The Unbearable Whiteness of Barbie: Race and Popular Culture in the United States at Occidental College in California explores ways “which scientific racism has been put to use in the making of Barbie [and] to an interpretation of the film The Matrix as a Marxist critique of capitalism.”
3. At The John Hopkins University, students in the Sex, Drugs, and Rock ‘n’ Roll in Ancient Egypt class view slideshows of women in ancient Egypt “vomiting on each other,” “having sex,” and “fixing their hair.”
4. Like something out of a Hugh Hefner film, Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania offers the class Lesbian Novels Since World War II.
5. Alfred University’s Nip, Tuck, Perm, Pierce, and Tattoo: Adventures with Embodied Culture, mostly made up of women, encourages students to think about the meaning behind “teeth whitening, tanning, shaving, and hair dyeing.” Special projects include visiting a tattoo-and-piercing studio and watching Arnold Schwarzenegger’s bodybuilding film, Pumping Iron.
6. Harvard University’s Marxist Concepts of Racism examines “the role of capitalist development and expansion in creating racial inequality” (emphasis added). Although Karl Marx didn’t say much on race, leftist professors in this course extrapolate information on “racial oppression” and “racial antagonism.”
7. Occidental College—making the Dirty Dozen list twice—offers a course in Stupidity, which compares the American presidency to Beavis and Butthead.
8. Students at the University of California—Los Angeles need not wonder what it means to be a lesbian. The Psychology of the Lesbian Experience reviews “various aspects of lesbian experience” including the “impact of heterosexism/stigma, gender role socialization, minority status of women and lesbians, identity development within a multicultural society, changes in psychological theories about lesbians in sociohistorical context.”
9. Duke University’s American Dreams/American Realities course supposedly unearths “such myths as ‘rags to riches,’ ‘beacon to the world,’ and the ‘frontier,’ in defining the American character” (emphasis added).
10. Amherst College in Massachusetts offers the class Taking Marx Seriously: “Should Marx be given another chance?” Students in this course are asked to question if Marxism still has any “credibility” remaining, while also inquiring if societies can gain new insights by “returning to [Marx’s] texts.” Coming to Marx’s rescue, this course also states that Lenin, Stalin, and Pol Pot misapplied the concepts of Marxism.
11. Brown University’s Black Lavender : A Study of Black Gay & Lesbian Plays “address[es] the identities and issues of Black gay men and lesbians, and offer[s] various points of view from within and without the Black gay and lesbian artistic communities.”
12. Students enrolled in the University of Michigan’s Topics in Literary Studies: Ancient Greek/Modern Gay Sexuality have the pleasure of reading a “wide selection of ancient Greek (and a few Roman) texts that deal with same-sex love, desire, gender dissidence, and sexual behavior.”

The picture should be getting clear. Modern academe idiocy owes its existence to passive and indulgent overseers of the culture, paying attention to quarterly financials and golfing vacations, while letting the children get away with murder. I liken it to Mom’s and Dad’s preoccupation with real work while the kids are out behind the garage torturing cats or experimenting with stolen cigarettes. The kids don’t have a clue why they have the freedom and opportunity to fully engage in stupid (albeit fun for them) endeavors. Leisure is their work! This is what they do for a living. The stupider, the better! While their immaturity prevents them from a thorough analysis of their activity, one might say that they take their play extremely seriously. Play is life for kids. There is a simple reason why they have this option—their parents ENABLE them. In fact, most parents take measurable pride in the entire setup. “We work so you can play,” they beam. “We are such good parents!”

One hundred years ago, in rural America, playtime was limited, and therefore precious. (I also venture to guess that it was more supervised.) Kids had chores to do along with the rest of the family, just so the family could survive. There was no disconnect between the kids activities and the parents livelihoods as there is today.

Back to twenty-first century culture. The kids in the above example are university professors, bureaucrats with self-determined job descriptions on guaranteed incomes paid by taxpayers and the elite sophists that our society seems to grow in abundance. They can plunge headlong into absurd and inane activities because Mom and Dad (we taxpayers) enable them to do so. We pay the food, gas, electric, housing, car, insurance and clothing bills so they can amuse themselves in asinine pursuits. We keep the terrorists out of the neighborhoods, the enemies out of our country and keep the economy hiccoughing along so they have the privilege of profligacy. And, like typical kids, they get mad at the parents for not giving them enough money, not granting them permission to do even more stupid things and making them do ignorant tasks like hanging up their clothes and taking out the garbage.

You cannot justify sin. Rename it, redefine it, whitewash it, pet it, coddle it, give it deference and space, embrace it…do whatever…and you will not change its basic nature. We now witness a Herculean attempt in our culture to do undo every denigration, every denial and every proscription of sin ever held by society. Is it true that black is now white, that up is now down and that left is now right? Of course not. It’s the kids talking. Insulated from the real world, they spout off illogical and unthinkable assessments of their wild imaginations. When they make a mess, they blame it on someone else. I did it as a kid. You did too. But, on a grown-up, society-wide scale, the repercussions are not cute. They become devastatingly wicked. Perversity may dress up in university language, professorial mannerisms and long lists of accreditations, but it remains perverse. Sin may look more appealing, more popular and more acceptable than ever before, but IT IS STILL SIN!

Mainstreaming pornography. Yes, that’s what we now see in the entertainment industry. Disgusting acts and displays of skin now get regaled with laughter. Audiences shriek with delight at shocking indecency and immorality. They can’t make it vile enough. Everything is a joke. The resulting message, however unintentional the writers and producers thought it to be, is that pornography is fine. In some shows, porn stars now have been given legitimate roles, not because they have renounced their former ways, but because they have the chutzpah and brassiness to be in porn and be proud of it. The laughter is small and hollow. Pornography cannot be justified because it cannot escape its involvement with rape, adultery, fornication, incest, bestiality and sexual abuse. Tell the rape victim that images that elicit animalistic behavior in people are fine. They know better. Tell mothers and fathers whose children have been sexually assaulted by a sex-crazed individual who traffics in porn that pornography is innocent entertainment. Tell victims who have emerged from the ravages of sexual promiscuity and have regained their lives that the magazines and DVD’s of the porn industry are legitimate businesses which have every right to exist. All of them know you are justifying the fool.

Alcohol and drugs. The clink of the crystal-stemmed glasses with the sloshing around of the amber-colored liquor, accompanied by a subtle smile playing on the model’s demure lips paints the picture for happy hour. Rich, full-bodied flavor, original taste and other euphemistic terms to entice consumers to drink alcoholic beverages have passed into the common vernacular. Social drinking purportedly enhances one’s life, opens up business opportunities, connects people with promising contacts and provides much needed diversion and relaxation from the day’s demanding duties. But the liquor advocacy industry gets even worse. Check this out. In answer to the question of whether restricting alcohol use would save lives, one “expert” says: Some lives would be saved from accidents now caused by intoxication and from health problems caused by alcohol abuse. However, many other lives would be lost from increases in coronary heart disease. For example, estimates from 13 studies suggest that as many as 135,884 additional deaths would occur each year in the US from coronary heart disease alone because of abstinence. 21 [see Alcohol & Health]. Running the reference used by the foregoing writer leads to this quote from his source, Thomas A. Pearson, MD, in an article he wrote for American Heart Association in 1996.

“It is unlikely that a randomized, controlled trial of alcohol consumption will ever be performed to establish a direct link between alcohol consumption and reduction in CHD and to define the risks and benefits of encouraging consumption of alcohol. In lieu of this scientific base, a number of scientific facts can be brought to bear on the development of recommendations about alcohol consumption. First, the beneficial effects of alcohol are limited to one or two drinks per day. Second, heavier consumption is related to a number of health problems. Third, it is clear that persons with medical and social conditions made worse by alcohol should not consume any alcohol whatsoever, including persons with prior diagnoses of hypertriglyceridemia, pancreatitis, liver disease, porphyria, uncontrolled hypertension, and congestive heart failure. Pregnant women and persons on certain medications that interact with alcohol should also refrain from consumption. Persons with a personal or strong family history of alcoholism are at risk for alcohol addiction and should avoid all alcoholic beverages.

These facts preclude widespread public health recommendations to either encourage or prohibit alcohol consumption. In the United States 100 000 excess deaths can be attributed to alcohol-related diseases each year.¹¹ On the other hand, if current consumers of alcohol all abstained from drinking, approximately 80 000 excess deaths would occur.² Most of the excess deaths due to alcohol occur in people younger than 45 years, whereas deaths reduced by alcohol are generally in age groups with high CHD rates, ie, 45 years or older. In either case, general public health education messages about alcohol may be difficult to develop, so that they target only persons for whom moderate consumption of alcohol would have a positive cost-benefit ratio.”

How might we gauge the impact of drinking alcohol on the population, especially the under-45 segment? Let’s start with carnage on the highways, scraping up body parts smeared across the pavement, extricating dismembered victims from vehicles twisted around trees. We could go on to talk about the innocent victims in the other car, you know the one with all the children whose lives are now lost due to an idiot who believed the beer commercials. An entire family of five was wiped out in Toledo this past Christmas by a drunk driver heading up the down ramp on US-23. Where is this tragedy spelled out in the glib statistics flung out there by an obviously paid alcohol industry spokesman?

Illustrations abound from the culture that reinforce my point over and over. Why do we pass tough DUI laws and yet laugh at people who drink themselves out of their minds? Why do we permit half-naked people to prance across magazines, catalogs and billboards and then crack down on the poor rubes who give into the temptation? Why do we rail against arsonists on the one hand and then supply them with the matches and kerosene on the other?

Fools are not worthy of reasoning. People will justify sin, not because they stand on solid footing, but simply because they want to commit the sin. Few murderers inhabit our prisons who did not claim some justification for their crime, regardless of how irrational and fatuous their deed may have been.

Some things do not bear reasoning. Paul admonished Timothy, “Flee youthful lusts.” In other words, don’t think you can subject raw emotion or carnal instincts to intellectual vetoes. It won’t work. Get out of the situation as fast as you can.

Don’t insult the intelligence of Bible believers that sin is good, that evil is righteous, that transgressing against God’s commands actually draws one closer to God, or that the teaching of the scripture can be followed by disobedience. Pure poppycock. Take your specious argumentation somewhere else. I will not answer a fool according to his folly. It will make me equally foolish.