#relativism

Relativism poses as humble by saying: “We are not smart enough to know what the truth is—or if there is any universal truth.” It sounds humble. But look carefully at what is happening. It’s like a servant saying: I am not smart enough to know which person here is my master—or if I even have a master. The result is that I don’t have a master and I can be my own master. That is in reality what happens to relativists: In claiming to be too lowly to know the truth, they exalt themselves as supreme arbiter of what they can think and do. This is not humility. This is the essence of pride. ↗

— John Piper

#pride #relativism #life

That is always the way with stay-and-homes. If they like something in their own village they take it for a thing universal and eternal, though perhaps it was never heard of five miles away; if they dislike something they say it is a local, backward, provincial convention, though, in fact, it may be the law of nations. ↗

— C.S. Lewis

#home

The nerve liberal women today have, to take such an important educational tool as slapping men in the face and treat it like a common method of debate! Slaps in the face have become nothing more than idiomatic sophisms. They signify the relativism of values that infects our age. ↗

— Bauvard

#funny #humor #relativism #slapping #age

Babette looked too good for the place tonight, but then goodness is only relative after all ("Steps Going Up" aka "Guillotine" aka "Men Must Die") ↗

— Cornell Woolrich

#moral-relativism #men

Show me a cultural relativist at 30,000 feet and I'll show you a hypocrite ... If you are flying to an international congress of anthropologists or literary critics, the reason you will probably get there - the reason you don't plummet into a ploughed field - is that a lot of Western scientifically trained engineers have got their sum right. ↗

— Richard Dawkins

#life

Relativism is not indifference; on the contrary, passionate indifference is necessary in order for you not to hear the voices that oppose your absolute decrees. ↗

— Karel Capek

#contrary #decrees #hear #indifference #necessary

Truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with. ↗

— Richard M. Rorty

#relativism #truth #contemporary

The relativism which is not willing to speak about truth but only about ‘what is true for me’ is an evasion of the serious business of living. It is the mark of a tragic loss of nerve in our contemporary culture. It is a preliminary symptom of death. ↗

— Lesslie Newbigin

#business

Insularity is the foundation of ethnocentrism and intolerance; when you only know of those like yourself, it is easy to imagine that you are alone in the world or alone in being good and right in the world. Exposure to diversity, on the contrary, is the basis for relativism and tolerance; when you are forced to face and accept the Other as real, unavoidable, and ultimately valuable, you cannot help but see yourself and your 'truths' in a new - and trouble - way. ↗

— David Eller

#intolerance #relativism #tolerance #imagination

During the next hundred years, the question for those who love liberty is whether we can survive the most insidious and duplicitous attacks from within, from those who undermine the virtues of our people, doing in advance the work of the Father of Lies. “There is no such thing as truth,” they teach even the little ones. “Truth is bondage. Believe what seems right to you. There are as many truths as there are individuals. Follow your feelings. Do as you please. Get in touch with your self. Do what feels comfortable.” Those who speak in this way prepare the jails of the twenty-first century. They do the work of tyrants. ↗

— Michael Novak

#tyranny #love