Tolerance: The Chief American Virtue

I was shocked when we got in the jury room. One guy piped up, "I can drink that much and drive safely. I think she's innocent." Others nodded understandingly. As the discussion proceeded, I was horrified that no one was going by the standard of the law. Everyone was deciding what was right based on how they felt about drinking and about the young woman (most felt sorry for her). It took another juror and me almost three hours to convince everyone of what was obvious, that this woman was guilty of violating the law.
But even then we had one holdout. She said that she could never vote "guilty" because she believed in the principle, "Judge not, lest ye be judged." Her maxim, "Judge not" (wrongly taken out of context from Matthew 7:1

This non-judgmentalism has gone to ridiculous extremes. A college philosophy professor recently said that ten to twenty percent of his students are reluctant to make moral judgments, even to say that the Holocaust was wrong! One student told him, "Of course I dislike the Nazis, but who is to say they are morally wrong?" (reported in Reader's Digest, February, 1998, p. 75). If this kind of thinking continues, we won't be able to convict mass murderers who were videotaped killing their victims, let alone drunk drivers!
Those who reduce morality to a matter of personal preference have not done away with moral absolutes. They have simply replaced the moral absolutes in the Bible (which used to govern our American moral and judicial systems) with their own. They have a hodgepodge of quirky moral standards that they use to judge those who do not conform. For them, judgmentalism is always a sin, tolerance always a virtue. It's okay to kill unwanted babies or terminally ill patients, but it's wrong to kill animals, even for food. It's okay to have any form of sex you want with as many partners as you want, even if it promotes the spread of deadly disease, but it's wrong to encourage school children toward abstinence until they commit to a monogamous marriage. The bottom line is, their politically correct views are absolutely right, but anyone who dares challenge those views as being wrong is intolerant and therefore absolutely wrong.
If morality is not a matter of personal preference, how then do we establish what is right and wrong? Let me leave you with one profound statement from the Bible that you must not shrug off: "[God] has fixed a day in which He will judge the world in righteousness through a Man whom He has appointed, having furnished proof to all men by raising Him from the dead" (Acts 17:31
