With the epidemic of mass shootings over the past few
decades, there is a lot of hand-wringing over the question “Have we lost our
moral compass?” Which begs the question,
what exactly is a “moral compass” and where did it come from in the first
place?
A compass is known to be a source of reliable information no
matter where we find ourselves on earth, and it’s a great metaphor to describe morality. It might seem to describe morality as subjective
- something subject to changeable public or personal opinion. But in reality it describes morality as
objective – something unchangeable no matter what direction, culture, or
situation we might approach it from.
I don’t believe we as a culture or even the mass shooters
themselves have lost our moral compass. We’ve
just come up with lots of excuses not to take it seriously and to ignore it.
I talk about our moral conscience a lot during my gospel
outreach conversations, such as in a recent dialogue with Melissa and Ahjed, a
young couple who both said they grew up without much religious influence. Despite having no formal or religious moral
training they both strive to be good people, and struggled with the idea that
this desire to be good might exist because they are accountable to a higher
authority. They like the thought that
they are good people without the need for reward or punishment.
In my opinion this is the most common excuse people come up
with to ignore a moral compass that comes from a higher authority. Psalm 40 tells us that God has “put His law
on our hearts” – but many say that we can be good people just fine on our own,
thank you very much. This serves to give
us license to define for ourselves just what that “good” is. The current morality police known as
political correctness is certainly making good use of that license.
We know good from evil, but that doesn’t mean we follow
it. What it does mean is that we become
very good at coming up with excuses to use in our arguments with the moral
referee that is our conscience. And when
we use these arguments over and over again we become callous to the voice of
our conscience, to our moral compass.
Once that is accomplished, we define good for ourselves and,
unfortunately, the idea of “good” some people justify their behavior with
involves mistreating or even hurting and killing others.
Maybe we need to go back to where our moral compass came
from in the first place. There is a
higher authority we will be held accountable to. Maybe more of us need to remind our culture
of that.
See our conversation HERE
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