Deception and Deviancy
-
Dr. Everett Piper Everett Piper's Blog - Published Jun 16, 2011
Note: To listen to this blog on KWON radio go to http://www.bartlesvilleradio.com/caffeine/uploads/files/ON%20Demand/Ideas%20Matter/Ideas%20Matter%206-16.mp3 . To get a copy of Dr. Piper’s new book “Why I Am a Liberal and Other Conservative Ideas” go to www.whyiamaliberal.com or www.amazon.com .
Stephanie Samuel of the Christian Post cited aGallup poll recently that shows the number of Americans who believe the overall state of moral values in the U.S. is poor has dropped seven percentage points to 38 percent. Meanwhile, the number of those who believe the country's morality is excellent or good has risen eight percentage points to 23 percent.
“Fewer Americans” Samuel says “believe the country's moral values are getting worse: sixty-nine percent, down from 76 percent in 2010, while 22 percent (up from 14 percent) believe it’s getting better.”
Does any of this surprise you?
How could a nation that watches one elected official after another cheat on their wives, father illegitimate children, misappropriate campaign funds, post lewd photos of themselves on the internet and then shamelessly lie about all of the above possibly say morality is getting better?
How could a culture that is witnessing the wholesale degradation of women, the shameless disintegration of meaning of marriage and the near universal complicity in the theft of our national treasury say our country’s morality is excellent or good?
Is it possible that the late Senator, Daniel Patrick Moynihan (a Democrat I might add) was right when he warned that we were becoming a people incapable of seeing the moral forest of absolutes for the trees of our own deception and deviancy?
Is this uptick in our perception of our country’s moral health merely evidence that we have dumbed down deviancy to the point where we don’t even know what is right and wrong any more – where we’ve called evil good and good evil for so long that the cancer of self-deception eats away at our souls unawares while we actually tell the folks at Gallop we believe we’re getting better?
