There’s a phrase that Francis Schaeffer used: “feet firmly planted in mid-air.” It aptly describes the plight of the secular humanist left. Here’s a quote to familiarize yourself with the concept:
Since present day Humanism vilifies Judeo-Christianity as backward, its goal to assure progress through education necessitates an effort to keep all mention of theism out of the classroom. Here we have the irony of twentieth century Humanism, a belief system recognized by the Supreme Court as a non-theistic religion, foisting upon society the unconstitutional prospect of establishment of a state-sanctioned non-theistic religion which legislates against the expression of a theistic one by arguing separation of church & state. To dwell here in more detail is beyond the scope of this article, but to close, here are some other considerations:
In the earlier spirit of cooperation with the Christian church the ethics or values of the faith were “borrowed” by the humanists. In their secular framework, however, denying the transcendent, they negated the theocentric foundation of those values, (the character of God), while attempting to retain the ethics. So it can be said that the Humanist, then, lives on “borrowed capital”. In describing this stuation, Francis Schaeffer observed that: “…the Humanist has both feet firmly planted in mid-air.” His meaning here is that while the Humanist may have noble ideals, there is no rational foundation for them. An anthropocentric view says that mankind is a “cosmic accident”; he comes from nothing, he goes to nothing, but in between he’s a being of supreme dignity. What the Humanist fails to face is that with no ultimate basis, his ideals, virtues and values are mere preferences, not principles. Judging by this standard of “no ultimate standard”, who is to say whose preferences are to be “dignified”, ultimately?
What happens when “preferences, not principles” encounters a difficulty? The preferences will go out the window every single time. Call it a “preference” for “the ends justify the means.” Who needs moral principles when Obama has political pragmatism? And bye-bye, any professed principles.
“Feet firmly planted in mid-air,” and the abandonment of principles in favor of a constant stream of moral relativism and ends-justifies-the-means thinking has plagued the amoral Obama administration again and again. Obama damned Bush over Gitmo; but he’s doing the same thing. Obama damned Bush over military tribunals. What is he doing now? He damned Bush over the surge strategy in Iraq; what in the world would you call the strategy he’s employing now in Afghanistan? Obama damned Bush over the practice of rendition, but he’s doing it as much as Bush did. Obama denounced Bush for holding terrorist detainees without trial, but he’s doing the same exact thing. The list goes on and on. Obama attacked Bush over his lack of transparency, only to be far less transparent than Bush ever was. Obama criticized Bush for protecting the wealthy at the expense of the poor, but has since engaged in bailout after bailout of the rich and powerful. Obama blasted Bush for being partisan, but he has become the most partisan president in American history. Obama denounced the right for using reconciliation to pass key legislation, and then used it to pass the most significant legislation this country has seen in 60 years. For all Obama’s lefty rhetoric, he has abandoned virtually every principle he professed.
Quite possibly above everything else, Obama pronounced himself the man who would end the war on terror – if nothing else than by the sheer magnificence of his person – and restore all the principles of liberalism’s views toward constitutional protections to the enemies we would confront on the battlefield.
But when the rubber met the road, the amoral president demonstrated that his moral values amounted to dust in the wind, which would blow away in the face of the next challenge.
From the New York Times:
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration’s decision to authorize the killing by the Central Intelligence Agency of a terrorism suspect who is an American citizen has set off a debate over the legal and political limits of drone missile strikes, a mainstay of the campaign against terrorism.
The notion that the government can, in effect, execute one of its own citizens far from a combat zone, with no judicial process and based on secret intelligence, makes some legal authorities deeply uneasy.
To eavesdrop on the terrorism suspect who was added to the target list, the American-born radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who is hiding in Yemen, intelligence agencies would have to get a court warrant. But designating him for death, as C.I.A. officials did early this year with the National Security Council’s approval, required no judicial review.
“Congress has protected Awlaki’s cellphone calls,” said Vicki Divoll, a former C.I.A. lawyer who now teaches at the United States Naval Academy. “But it has not provided any protections for his life. That makes no sense.”
Obama and his supporters have routinely depicted Obama (somewhat falsely) as “a constitutional law professor.” But stop and think about it: this “constitutional law professor” now has the view that it’s okay to blow away an American citizen without any form of legitimate trial. He’s dogmatic about protecting the sanctity of the guy’s cellphone calls, but he has no compunction about ordering the guy to be blown to bits without a trial based on secret intelligence.
A pretty remarkable degree of chutzpah from a guy who once demagogued a president over his treatment of foreign terrorists.
Now, one might think that the political left and the liberal mainstream media would be frothing in outrage over all of these abandonments of principle, but the left is as incapable of genuine moral outrage as they are of genuine moral principles. Which is to say that the media damned Bush over every breach of constitutional ethics from a leftist perspective, but they largely never mention all of Obama’s myriad breaches of the very same ethics.
Whenever the left offered its next political Utopia, the mainstream media of the day sanctified the government takeover as wonderful. And then failed to speak out as the next regime, and then the next, and then the next, became a living hell on earth (as an example, here’s an article about the “hidden” history of evil in the Soviet Union. Why is it “hidden”? Because the left has steadfastly refused to look at the ugly face of socialism/communism).
Standing for nothing, with their feet firmly planted in mid-air, Barack Obama and the leftist radicals he champions have no principles to plant their feet upon. The result has been one abandonment of principle after another beyond anything I’ve ever seen in my lifetime.
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