Daniel Henninger: Saddleback ... where did all those questions come from?
...Can one imagine Dwight Eisenhower, FDR or JFK being asked to define marriage? Abe Lincoln or George Washington could have handled Jesus, but stem cells? Would we have had better presidents back then if we made them talk about their greatest moral failure?
Maybe not. One guesses Jimmy Carter would have aced the Saddleback quiz. Harry Truman probably would have said it's none of your ---- business.
The questions at Saddleback reflect the modern pull of the interior life. Barnes & Noble fills whole walls with guide books to solving the riddles of the Fantastic Self.
No such industry would exist to help people figure out "Who am I?" and "What should I do?" if the world wasn't filled with so much moral confusion.
This, I think, is what Rick Warren meant when he said, "Everybody's got a world view, a Buddhist, a Baptist, a secularist, an atheist, everybody's got a world view."
There was a time before the multitude of world views fell from the sky -- let's say every presidential election from 1789 to 1964 -- when one could assume that all the candidates shared a basic set of moral precepts, now called "values." They were Judeo-Christian precepts. Old Testament-New Testament. It was pretty simple. Some past presidents may have been closet agnostics, but when they were growing up, someone "wise" told them what the common rules were. Most people in public life felt no need to challenge this world view.
That's gone.
How we got where we are today was Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision wherein the nation's highest Court decided when a fetus became "viable," along the way discussing "mediate animation" and "ensoulment." In any event, it became the law.
How we got here as well was because science discovered it could manipulate embryonic stem cells.
How we got here was through a politics able to place on California's November ballot a Proposition H, which would amend the state's constitution to define as valid only a marriage between a man and a woman.
These, with much else, are contested matters now. Absent the settled mores that held sway in 1916 when Woodrow Wilson defeated Charles Evans Hughes, you get Rick Warren trying to open up the inner candidate. One has to ask if evil exists because even that is up for grabs....
Read entire article at WSJ
Maybe not. One guesses Jimmy Carter would have aced the Saddleback quiz. Harry Truman probably would have said it's none of your ---- business.
The questions at Saddleback reflect the modern pull of the interior life. Barnes & Noble fills whole walls with guide books to solving the riddles of the Fantastic Self.
No such industry would exist to help people figure out "Who am I?" and "What should I do?" if the world wasn't filled with so much moral confusion.
This, I think, is what Rick Warren meant when he said, "Everybody's got a world view, a Buddhist, a Baptist, a secularist, an atheist, everybody's got a world view."
There was a time before the multitude of world views fell from the sky -- let's say every presidential election from 1789 to 1964 -- when one could assume that all the candidates shared a basic set of moral precepts, now called "values." They were Judeo-Christian precepts. Old Testament-New Testament. It was pretty simple. Some past presidents may have been closet agnostics, but when they were growing up, someone "wise" told them what the common rules were. Most people in public life felt no need to challenge this world view.
That's gone.
How we got where we are today was Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision wherein the nation's highest Court decided when a fetus became "viable," along the way discussing "mediate animation" and "ensoulment." In any event, it became the law.
How we got here as well was because science discovered it could manipulate embryonic stem cells.
How we got here was through a politics able to place on California's November ballot a Proposition H, which would amend the state's constitution to define as valid only a marriage between a man and a woman.
These, with much else, are contested matters now. Absent the settled mores that held sway in 1916 when Woodrow Wilson defeated Charles Evans Hughes, you get Rick Warren trying to open up the inner candidate. One has to ask if evil exists because even that is up for grabs....