Attempting the Overthrow of Natural Law

Although this is mentioned below, it deserves its very own post.

At bottom, there's only one moral rulebook. As C.S. Lewis wrote in The Abolition of Man, the project of creating a morality independent of Natural Law is self-defeating:

"This thing which I have called for convenience the Tao, and which others may call Natural Law or Traditional Morality or the First Principles of Practical Reason or the First Platitudes, is not one among a series of possible systems of value. It is the sole source of all value judgements. If it is rejected, all value is rejected. If any value is retained, it is retained.

"The effort to refute it and raise a new system of value in its place is self-contradictory. There has never been, and never will be, a radically new judgement of value in the history of the world. What purport to be new systems or (as they now call them) 'ideologies', all consist of fragments from the Tao itself, arbitrarily wrenched from their context in the whole and then swollen to madness in their isolation, yet still owing to the Tao and to it alone such validity as they possess.

"... The human mind has no more power of inventing a new value than of imagining a new primary colour, or, indeed, of creating a new sun and a new sky for it to move in.

"Wrenching" a small bit of truth from its larger context and "swelling [it] to madness" is the very definition of heresy. Truth is a synthesis of many truths; it is indivisible. Although each portion may be examined in relative isolation, that portion cannot stand on its own as a Primary; it must be a portion of the whole.

Thus the utter folly of Islamic Jihad...for starters.

HT, again: CWN