A friend of mine and I were chatting online this morning about the anger and bitterness  that seems to be taking over our society.

I see two reasons for this- First, our culture no longer has any real baseline moral code that is generally agreed upon. There are moral events or ideas that are generally thought of as good, but no code which can be extrapolated from these ideas, or at least one that many people would accept. This can cause anger in people who have a more defined moral code, especially those whose code doesn’t respect those whose code can’t be more easily identified.

Secondly, the moral code that does exists in some groups are being violated in order to protect the group that holds to that code. This leads me to wonder if the confession that we say we have is actually the confession we really hold. Normally these kinds of violations would be considered hypocrisy but since there is no real moral code from which they are recognized as being birthed hypocrisy is either ignored or rejected. Hypocrisy is dismissed because I can alter the code to fit the situation as desired. This is somewhat unique because it is relativistic but also an attempt at a type of morality. It can also because the security of the group has become more important than the code they confess.

It is very possible this produces a cognitive dissonance in the people who are part of the group. The dissonance between what people say they believe and what their actions demonstrate can cause lots of different responses and misdirected anger wouldn’t be surprising.

There are several other possibilities we will try to examine in later posts.