Each faith has its own rules for right behavior to which non-members are not bound. My Jewish friends don’t care if I eat a pork chop.  Whether or not non-Catholics eat a steak on Ash Wednesday or don’t go to church means nothing to me.  It’s one of the glories of our country that we respect these differences.  Tolerance and mutual respect help us live together in peace, but they constitute the seed of relativism with which every faith in our open society has to contend.

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How do we understand what values are particular to our faith group and which should be universal?  A chaste college freshman encountering free-love dorm life may think, “Although it is wrong for me to engage in promiscuous premarital sex, it’s not against the moral code of my classmates and is therefore not wrong for them.”  This perspective leads directly to rationalizing abortion on the same ground.  To adopt the “personally-opposed to abortion but won’t oppose a woman’s choice” position, by the nature of abortion, requires accepting simultaneous conflicting fundamental truths, and in turn requires that no essential truth exists.  If someone close to you has an abortion, it can’t be murder because your loved one is not a murderer. Morally, how do you square the near-universal revulsion at a mother killing her newborn baby with the large segment of society that will fight for her right to end the baby’s life a week or two earlier?

By continuing to allow legal abortion, we tacitly proclaim that abortion is not wrong.  If deliberately terminating an innocent baby is not wrong, then what is wrong?  The answer is “nothing.”  If nothing is wrong, then morality is just a construct, and no religion has any basis for claiming validity.

This nothingness is why we can’t rationally discuss important issues anymore.  The idea of a higher truth encourages debate.  No matter how firmly we hold our convictions, if we believe that there is an ideal truth which we desire to comprehend, it is possible to rationally argue, with the hope of persuading and/or learning from people with whom we disagree.

If we don’t believe in an ultimate truth, but only our own individual truth, then such a discussion serves no purpose.  It would be like arguing green is better than purple — utterly meaningless.

Excerpted from American Thinker)