“A spiritual desert is spreading:  an interior emptiness, an unnamed fear, a quiet sense of despair.” -BXVI, WYD, 2008.  Science can help us answer questions about the matter and energy of the Universe, but not its meaning.  The relativist has to admit he has not discovered the meaning of life, but invented his own.  Lack of a firm sense of purpose leads to either despair or the desperate attempt to avoid life’s most pressing questions through endless distraction or self-deception or self-medication.  It is torturous to be silent and reflective if it means facing the reality that underneath it all is nothing, a vacuum, a pure and absolute void.  Nothing at all.  Forever.  Some define Hell as such.  No Faith, no Hope, no Love, no Trust.  Nothing.  Forever.  Nihilism.

    “False teachers, many belonging to an intellectual elite in the worlds of science, culture, and the media, present an anti-gospel…When you ask them:  What must I do?, their only certainty is that there is no definitive truth, no sure path…Consciously or not, they advocate an approach to life that has led millions of young people into a sad loneliness in which they are deprived of reasons for hope and incapable of real love.” -JPII

2.  Relativism leaves it all up to us.  You are completely on your own.  All alone.  Forever.  Good luck.  (Yeah, right.)  In Relativism, there is no criterion for moral decision making save personal taste.

I love asking people the following question:  “In Genesis, what was the sin of Adam & Eve?”  Many will respond promptly, “They ate the apple!”  An apple is never mentioned, only the “fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil”.  But, Adam and Eve’s sin was they desired, wrongly, to be “like God”(Gen 3:5).  Now, isn’t that always the case?  The root of every and all sin?  We prefer to be gods unto ourselves, so much easier, instead of realizing God.  That is the very definition of sin:  the perversion of our relationship as creatures to the Creator.  We pervert our relationship to our Creator by not loving Him nor our neighbor who is a reflection of Him.

When asked what sin is, then-President-elect Barack Obama gave a perfect relativist answer saying, ”Being out of alignment with my values.” http://cathleenfalsani.com/obama-on-faith-the-exclusive-interview/.  Many felons, at the time they committed their crime were acting in perfect alignment with their then values.  Many tragedies among youth and misguided adults occur through their own choices while being in perfect harmony with their then values.  So, clearly, this is a false, wrong, incorrect and misleading answer as to what sin is.

3.  Relativism deprives children of moral formation.

One of the heresies of relativism is the proposition to allow children to discover themselves; to be free.  Rather than freeing our children, we morally abandon them, with the abdication of parental responsibilities, leaving those responsibilities foisted on the child to fend for themselves.  Easier, much easier on the parent, even if they don’t freely, readily, or openly admit this themselves.  Relativist parents say they are acting in the child’s interest, when clearly, even if unconsciously, they are only acting in their own and to the detriment of their children.  If emotionally healthy and mature adults struggle with moral decision making on a daily basis, children cannot possibly sift the complex and confusing moral questions.  It is the abandonment of parental responsibility.  Nothing less.  Those are lazy parents.  God help their children.  Love without truth and truth without love are both forms of unique cruelty; child abuse.  “Only in truth does love shine forth, only in truth can love be authentically lived…Without truth, love degenerates into sentimentality.  Love becomes an empty shell, a false pretense, to be filled in an arbitrary way.  In a culture without truth, this is the fatal risk facing love.” –Caritas in Veritate, 3.

4.  Relativism separates us from one another.

Relativism removes the notion that we need to conform to a reality that is bigger than our own opinions, values, and preferences.  It erodes the mortar that builds a society.  “…under the semblance of freedom [relativism] becomes a prison for each one, for it separates people from one another, locking each person into his or her own ego.  Relativism retranslates “E pluribus unum = out of many, one” into “E pluribus pluribus = out of many, many”.

5.  Relativism denies the right to life/the dignity of the human person.

Thinking is important, just ask the Nazis, or their victims.  Bad thinking leads to bad action, and tragic results.  When human rights are based on subjective principles – such as relativism offers – life is reduced to an efficiency equation, a utilitarian economy of human life, a dehumanizing of the human person, like calculating the commercial value of the human person, its convenience or inconvenience.  And decided by whom?  Under what criteria?  If you consume more than you produce, you are a liability.  If you’re a fetus, a disabled person, dumb, lacking talent, unattractive, socially awkward, old, uneducated, the wrong whatever, etc.  The Nazis had an expression for it, “Unworthy of life.”  Based on that, at some point, all of us become “unworthy of life”.  Carried to a logical conclusion, a relativist would have to conclude and say, “nothing is ‘wrong’.”  Hey, but we would never imitate the Nazis, would we?  “There is no such thing as truth, either in the moral or in the scientific sense.”- Adolf Hitler.

6.  Relativism makes it easy for those in authority to manipulate others.

“To educate without a value system based on truth is to abandon young people to moral confusion, personal insecurity, and easy manipulation.”  JPII, WYD, 8/12/93.

7.  Relativism threatens freedom of speech.

We see more and more opinions expressed contrary to relativism labeled as “hate speech”, with serious consequences.  We have been here before.  There will be glorious martyrs and saints in our future, I fear and dare to say.  To be so privileged.

8.  Relativism destroys faith.

The main difference between God and us is God never thinks he IS us.

“Everything I have said and done in these last years is relativism, by intuition.  From the fact that all ideologies are of equal value, that all ideologies are mere fictions, the modern relativist infers that everybody has the right to create for himself his own ideology, and to attempt to enforce it with all the energy  of which he is capable.” – Benito Mussolini, Il Duce