The question, though, is how rational is this fear in terms of your average religionist?
Of course, it is approximately zero. Belief in God tends to create, again of course, a sense of moral absolutism, not moral relativism. Secular moral relativism exterminated well over one hundred million people during the 20th century, while those who believed in moral absolutes, Jews, died by the millions in the camps and languished in brutal police states run by the relativists who had planted its own agents within the ranks of the clergy within the religious system to which many belonged (in one of the relativists most imposing and long lasting creations).
It was the moral relativists, not the absolutists, who have killed on the alter of the golden calf, tens of millions of the unborn since 1973, not the absolutists. I have yet to see--anywhere in the world, Jews, Catholics, Baptists, Lutherans, Methodists, Mormons, Greek Orthodox, Seventh Day Adventists, or any other kind of believer in moral absolutes from within the Judeo/Christian tradition, flying planes into buildings, blowing themselves up in restaurants, firing rockets into cities, and setting up terrorist training camps in an effort to stamp out those with whom they disagree.
Indeed, Beastie's claim that belief in God creates an attitude of moral
relativism is so utterly preposterous on its face, and so patently ahistorical, that it calls into question, yet again, Beasties critical thinking abilities and her credibility on any other issue relative to the Church and its teachings. The degradations of some Christians and Christian nations in the historical past, when fused with the state, were the result of the fusing of moral absolutism with state power, which provided the means to impose moral and religious imperatives upon others by force. This is Islam's primary problem today and throughout history, not its belief in absolutes, but its theological and historical fusion with the state.
A belief in fixed, moral principles can become connected to violence and repression only if the very nature of those principles contain within them the seeds of such violence and repression. Christianity's theology and ethical teaching condemn utterly any such behavior, and hence, Christians acting to impose their beliefs on others by force have bastardized and distorted their religion. Islamists need not feel this way because such behavior itself-literal jihad to spread Islam-has always been an integral part of their theology and cultural milieu. This is not the case with Judaism and Christianity, nor with many other religions.
The Salem witch trials were the product of moral absolutists who also held unaccountable state power and who had removed themselves a great ways from the actual teachings of the New Testament which would have precluded such conduct. It is indeed paradoxical that the absolute moral standards of New Testament ethics would have condemned the witch hunters themselves not only to moral repudiation and legal sanction in this life, but to a fearful accounting before God in the next. Moral relativists, on the other hand, make up their own ethical rules as they go along, and change them every day, if need be, as required by expediency and the will to power's need to expand and remove resistance to its demands.
Beastie here, yet again, resorts to the same, tired old Madalyn Murray O' Hairesque shibboleths, cultural slanders, and slipshod philosophizing in an attempt to impugn the dreaded Christians (read "conservatives") who stand in the way of the glories that could be ours if only we would accept...moral relativism.
Secularist liberals do have good reason to fear conservative Christians alright, but not physically (indeed, as the history of the last century, and the last few decades of that century, make clear, the reality is normally precisely the opposite, especially if one has not yet been born and cannot as as yet defend oneself) The risk free world of consequence free indulgence, long sought by the cultural Left, remains the same adolescent fantasy it has always been, and is known to be because of the critique of it from an oppositional culture that believes in fixed, immutable standards governing human relations that are intrinsic to the universe and to which all with understanding of them are accountable.
This can be bastardized, because of human nature and weakness, but in and of itself is at the same time both a strong underlying internal restraint to such bastardization and a direct moral imperative against it.
Secular moral relativism involves no such restraints or delimiting principles. The individual will is sovereign. Islamists are not Nietzscheans but fundamentalist religious fanatics (much like western environmentalist) who believe, not that the ends justify the means (relativism), but precisely that the means have been prejustified by absolute divine moral sanction.
It is not then, the absolutism contained in morality, but the nature and context of that morality, that is important. Nazi morality was antinomian, inverted with respect to normative Christian society,yet is was still a moral system, an absolute one, even if turned upon its head (the Nazis, it should also be pointed out, were relativists, believing only in power, will, and ideology, but, as is usual, value relativism always ends in coercion and repression. That, after all, is precisely what "political correctness", especially as applied to "multiculturalism", is).
