A simpleton admits he's a simpleton and goes on to give an overly simplistic explanation of what it is to be a simpleton.

Yes, I am simpleton. It is not a mental disorder, it is a worldview that recognizes real evil instead of rationalizing it and calling it a "different way to live". Simpletons do not need to understand and empathize with evil. We want to stop it from propagating. Simpletons do not need lengthy explanations from lawyers with loopholes, and we are not interested in understanding how Communism, Socialism, Marxism or Leninism might work if we try it again with a few tweaks.

At first I thought this was a farce, a site designed to lampoon christian conservativism by presenting a cartoonish picture of their simplistic thinking. But no...

Now I confess I do have fears, we all do. But what I fear more than the boogieman is moral relativism and its after effects in the way people think (or fail to think) through moral issues. Moral relativism makes the simplest things complicated. When defending a terrorists? right to kill innocent civilians of any country, moral relativists of the America?s 2004 Presidential campaign introduced us to ?nuances? aaahhhh. Well, [takes M60 out of safety] there is a simple way to negotiate with terrorists: Two in the chest and one in the head. There is also a simple way to deal with Congressional Democrats who do not like President Bush?s judicial nominees: make them vote. There is a simple way to deal with people like Jerry Hobbs, who repeatedly stabbed his own 9-year-old daughter in the neck and eyes along with her best friend: Firing squad, lethal injection, electric chair. Not necessarily in that order.

Cartoonish, but frightening. Following the Pope (who has yet to proclaim himself a simpleton), this writer has taken up the attack on moral relativism. Apparently it's relativism that fails to "think through" moral issues: thinking through is thinking less. For this simpleton nuance, subtlety, detail, context, and fine-grained distinction are simply wrong, ... I mean, evil. What is a moral relativist? No point in dealing with definitions, since that would complicate things. Instead, moral relativists are all lumped together and considered to be (get this!) evil absolutists.

Moral relativists do not distinguish between grades of good or grades of evil, but believe all forms of expression are equally wonderful, even if they in fact disrupt some one else?s freedom of expression, such as sexually profane heckling and pie throwing at people like Ann Coulter and David Horowitz. Instead of taking the moral high ground and condemning what is an obvious disruption of civility, a writer at Daily Kos calls Horowitz a "Sissyboy Racist." It is the moral relativists who equate George Bush who apologized for Abu Gharib with Sadaam Housain who hides behind lawyers while a growing list of his 300 mass graves of some 300,000 people are discovered. It is the moral relativist who says ?all wars are bad? and ?all sexual expression is good?, even when WWII stopped the wholesale slaughter of 6 million Jews, and forms of sexual expression may rob children of their innocence. The MSM moral relativists awards terrorists like Al-Zarqawi the title ?militant? as they report the video distribution of his live decapitations of unarmed civilian contractors working to rebuilt the first of two democracies in the Middle East.

By this point I've lost track of how the relativists are complicating things, but, having "shown" that moral relativists are really absolutists, this simpleton is careful to distinguish himself from that nonsense. He's going to venture into the land of nuanced distinctions. (Isn't that evil?)

There are degrees of good and evil; there are good people and bad people in the world. There are good people, there are great people. There are also bad people, and there are worse than bad people. All the above are facts not opinions yet they contain moral assertions. Yet when simpletons like me bring them to light, we are the ones ?sowing fear and hatred?....

So what is a simpleton? Ask one and he'll tell show you.

Christian Conservative [Hat tip to Daou Report]

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