Should we eat babies?  Jonathan Swift, author of Gulliver's Travels, the delightful satirical tale of a man who travels to a land of very tiny people, a land of giants, and other places, may have thought so.  In his "A Modest Proposal," Swifts observed that perhaps the key to feeding the impoverished Irish of his day was to, as he saw it, eat their babies and subsequently sell their carcasses.
     Most of us would repel from such a suggestion today.  Why?  We believe it does not fit what we consider to be moral, that to kill and/or eat babies is always and everywhere wrong.  Besides, from a more practical standpoint, if the Irish were to kill their babies, there would soon be no one left to perpetuate the Irish people.
     But isn't that often how people tend to do morality?  We frequently made our moral choices on the basis of practicality, that is, what seems fair and what seems to work best at the time.  Although this method often works, it can lead to difficulties:  we are only moral to the extent that our cultural purview allows us to be.  Even if we agree that some things are always and everywhere immoral, morality inevitably becomes relativistic.  We are captives of ourselves.
     That's why the human race needs revelation.  As the writer of Proverbs 29:18 remarks, "Without vision, the people perish."  In other words, unless a larger, synoptic, and transcendent moral presence exists, we will always be little moral creatures pursuing our little moral dreams without never really knowing why we exercise morality in the first place.  We're acting in a dream, our vision large and real but never large--and real--enough.
     Otherwise, we may as well eat babies.