Three hundred years ago, much of humanity was surviving under near-constant hardships; hardships that were a natural derivative of living in an unmitigated natural world. Take something as simple as a winter storm, something similar to the recent polar vertex, and imagine it occurring in the 1700’s. Riding through that storm for much of the population would be a genuine battle of life and death. Firewood, food, fresh water, adequate shelter & clothing, and nearly all the other necessities to sustain life were difficult to gather and maintain, exponentially more difficult than today. Back then, nature was the villain in a brutal battle for survival, and it made life itself an adventure.

Today the story is quite the opposite. Humanity has conquered a lot of that hardship with innovation and infrastructure: the fireplaces have been replaced by automated furnaces, fueled by automated supply systems; fresh water is literally pumped into houses all around the country, available at the mere turn of the tap; and shelters are not only abundant, but efficient, with only isolated areas lacking sufficient facilities for livestock. Life in general is no longer a struggle against nature. With it conquered, the streets are now full of people absent of adventure.

Intuition suggests that lack of adventure would be good for people, and a welcomed relief, at least when it concerns the type of adventure that natural hardships generally supply. And there is some truth in that, especially to those that have been overly subjected to it; but the truth is that people hunger for adventure, and particularly the purposeful kind that nature had provided. In its absence, people began to create their own adventures to fill the void. Great people pursued the creation of innovative products and services which helped humanity progress; good people built careers, and more importantly, morally and socially competent families, which in turn created similarly competent towns and cities; and bad people found adventure by simply being bad.

It might seem like the sum of those three groups would be all-encompassing, but they are not. There is a fourth; and that fourth group is an exceptionally dangerous threat to societies at large. That group is misguided, starving for purposeful adventure, and worst of all, lacks an objective morality. The first two characteristics are on their own relatively harmless, but the last allows people to subvert commonly accepted definitions of morality into virtually anything. Logic has no bounds on the subject when it is not constrained, and history has shown that unbounded logical distortions of morality have led to the worst atrocities in the history of man. This is especially evident in the last century.

It is those distortions of morality that convince people that it is right to allow mothers to murder their babies in the womb; those distortions drive people into supporting government-imposed redistributionism, which is basically legalized theft for personal gain; and it’s those distortions that people use to demonize good people, slandering and discrediting their characters in order to avoid debating differing positions. There are, of course, many more real-world examples to choose from, but these are a common few.

The combination of those distorted moral beliefs and the lack of adventure produces good but misguided people that found and fight for immoral quests in the name of goodness. Properly combating those quests stems from a realization that their fighters are misguided: meaning it is better to engage the ideas and show people they hold improper views of morality instead of assuming that it is the individuals themselves that are evil. Approaching these issues in this manner is the only real way to change minds through civil discourse. If we can convince people of the superiority of the objective morality found within the foundational Judaeo-Christian values, we can vastly improve our deteriorating society, and maybe even bring Jesus a few more followers in the process.