"In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world." –John 16:33

Day: May 25, 2016

Oblivious to evil (moral subjectivism, Sacket Hall and Ted Bundy)

SacketHallI was a minor participant in a discussion where Ted Bundy the notorious serial killer was brought up as an example of someone who subscribed to the view that morality is subjective. The conversation itself was very interesting and a great illustration of the evil and ignorance of that sort of world view. Particularly interesting was the link one of the commenters made to something Ted Bundy said in a discussion with one of his victims about that very subject. You can find that here. It was his premise, and a true one I think, that if moral subjectivism is true, then no values are right or wrong. In what is characterized a paraphrase, he captures the true nature of moral subjectivism when he says:

…Then I learned that all moral judgments are “value judgments,” that all value judgments are subjective, and that none can be proved to be either “right” or “wrong.”

That “learning” was the seminal event that allowed him to throw off the shackles of morality and pursue his own personal pleasure without having to worry about whether he was encroaching on “the rights of others.” I had forgotten about my own personal physical and temporal proximity to one of Bundy’s horrific crimes. In May of 1974, it was the end of my freshman year in college and I lived across the street from Sacket Hall on the campus of Oregon State University. My mother had lived in Sackett Hall when she was a freshman in Pharmacy back in 1948. That was the last location Roberta Kathleen Parks was seen before Ted Bundy kidnapped and murdered her. It is believed he picked her up on the street between where she lived and where I lived at the time. They found some of her remains on Taylor Mountain in Washington State in 1975.

Life is good–maybe boring for others, but not for me

I think I have seen what is happening to me as sixty year old guy happen to other people who were working schlubs their whole lives. Over time, one tends to pick up knowledge. If somebody works at one thing, no matter what it is, they accumulate a lot of knowledge over the years, no matter what the field. Then, when they get toward the end of their career and are thinking about retirement, opportunities start coming out of the woodwork. It is not about intelligence, it is about experience. The older I get, the less irritating it is to hear about the importance of experience.

So now I have three active projects beside my day job that have to do with what I did in my career. I need to quit two of them and work on just one of them or I will do a bad job at all three. So, over the next few weeks, I am going to try to decide where it would be best to focus my efforts. This seems to be a very good thing partially because I love what I do, but also because it gives more to do now that the kids are gone. It makes me look back and wonder what life would be like if I had more focus on my career before I was forty. Maybe it would not have been much different and it does not pay to think about it, but it does make me thankful that we helped the kids remain focused on something that would last past their youth both in terms of work and spirituality.

I realize that what I do for a living must be supremely boring to everyone looking on and I have to remind myself that most people do not really care how I do what I do so I have to work hard not to talk about it too much. Still, there are people just like me and even more so. I have the good fortune of working on one of the projects with a guy who is ten years older than and with deeper skills than I. We talk the same language and really enjoy even the most trivial minutiae of our chosen field. I just hope I can get to that point in my relationship with God before I die.

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