Why belief in God is essential to America's survival
Arguments can be made that the Founders were not only not Deists but were Orthodox Christians. In any case, their morality was traditional. At the Constitutional Convention, Benjamin Franklin uttered this warning:
The longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this Truth -- that God governs in the Affairs of Men. I also believe that without his concurring Aid, we shall succeed in this political Building no better than the Builders of Babel.
Both George Washington and John Adams were religious people who vocally supported religion. The latter described himself as "a church going animal." Washington referred to religion as the source of morality and, "a necessary spring of popular government," while John Adams cogently and pointedly stated that statesmen
"may plan and speculate for Liberty, but it is Religion and Morality alone, which can establish the Principles upon which Freedom can securely stand."
Now are the times when "human passions unbridled by morality and religion" have come to pass in our nation and it is destroying us. Videos of demonic, screaming women, violent men, murder, rape, drug abuse, unrestrained profanity, profligate sexual behavior and perversions of every kind pock the cultural landscape. We are a nation without the restraints that belief in God keeps at bay. A woman who can only be described as possessed, screams in the public square, "We love killing babies! We love killing babies!" This isn't immoral – it's amoral.
A "moral" people don't create their own morality, but rather they are a people who adhere to traditional ideas of what is "moral." Traditional ideas of morality underpin the Founding and the Constitution and taking it back as far as possible, traditional morality comes from Mosaic Law. The "golden rule" is not only moral, it is biblical. Matthew 7:12: "In everything, therefore, treat people the same way you want them to treat you, for this is the Law and the Prophets."
In many places, the guardrails are gone, the demonic are unleashed by diseased minds, and the hounds of hell roam our capitols, our streets, and our iScreens, unimpeded by any sense that a higher power watches them and is taking notes. The motto of our nation seems to have become, "There be demons here."
Our country will survive only with a code of morality that is not derived from the mind of man. Man's fallen nature precludes the structuring of a moral code that isn't self-pleasuring. With God removed, morality becomes not moral but carnal. Only a divinely-inspired Code will suffice. This is found in traditional Bibles, specifically in the Pentateuch. The New Testament draws upon Mosaic law specifically and often.
People seem to need and want guardrails. The meaninglessness of life is hitting home for many amid the chaotic swirling of amorality that we see around us. A return to biblical principles is not impossible. In fact, it seemingly pops up where the post-enlightenment morality vacuum is most noticeable; in colleges, in the streets, in entertainment, in government, in media and most clearly of all, in education.
The more amoral the Left becomes, there seems to be an equal and opposite reaction on the Right where "old-fashioned" morality is peeking out from behind the rainbow curtain and seeking its level among the young. Guardrails are being reinstated because people want and need them.
While many young people are leaving the church, many young people are also surprisingly joining churches that are nonwoke. Churches are creating schools that teach biblical morality, patriotism, real history, and actual non-woke courses in reading, mathematics, technology, writing, literature and the other eternal truly liberal arts. This is a good thing.
Without morality of the biblical kind, America will waste herself away in the desert, like Shelly's Ozymandias.
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert.... Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
America was blessed by God and will not become Ozymandias' cold, shattered, sneering visage in the burning desert. Only with a return to the God of holy Scripture can America stand. We can do this and not a single person would be hurt by it.
Does the world have a leader anymore?
I've been away from town a long time — pursuing a life in the West — and a lot of things have changed. For instance, there's the little white building that lights up at night to advertise "adult" things for the presumed entertainment of passing truckers. As I recall, it used to be painted blue.
Many other things have changed, quite disturbingly. I don't remember a town chock-full of pawn shops and loan sharks — excuse me, "cash advance" and "title loans." I don't remember the building where you go to apply for food stamps being large. I don't remember factories standing empty and bereft. And when I drive from place to place, I don't remember seeing the same thing over and over again.
How did America become so needy? I understand my parents and in-laws becoming more needy as they grow older, but my image of my country is that of "the one that won World War II single-handedly." It's the image from a famous railroad poster, where Uncle Sam with a determined look on his face is rolling up his sleeves — and there are muscles there. How did my country transform itself, in just a generation or two, from a paragon of industrial strength into a broke and broken-hearted debtor?
As I look around for reasons, I ponder Abraham Lincoln's quote, that "a nation divided against itself cannot stand." So I wonder about "red states vs. blue." I wonder if, when I cross a particular state line, the people on one side will be wearing a different-colored shirt from the others. I doubt it. Everyone I've ever talked to about matters political — those who actually had anything to say that didn't just come from the evening news — had complex and considered opinions that were nothing like what I hear on the evening news whenever I bother to actually watch TV. There was no "black and white" division, no "blue and red." But there was an often-voiced opinion that there is a serious problem here, and that it's getting worse, and that we had better do something about it.
From Washington, D.C., throughout the city and from shirts both red and blue, I hear nothing but "let them eat cake." When told that their countrymen are starving, they simply can't relate. Today, I see leaders throughout this land who don't really understand what's going on.
When you have entrenched business connections to the business of war, then war becomes your business, and a lucrative business it is. When you see pawn shops and loan sharks multiplying like rabbits — if your chauffeur is unwise enough to take your limousine down those streets — then you merely think the plebes must be unwise with their money, not that they are starving and their fellow men are preying on them. Or perhaps you happen to own those pawnshops and loan sharks, in which case, "so much the better."
Other men in other times were much more familiar with privation, and they wrote about it. Even though the resulting books sometimes made them wealthy, or at least famous, the candid stories of abject want and poverty, found in books like Great Expectations and Les Misérables and even A Christmas Carol, are grim and telling — and conveniently forgotten in the "let them eat cake" world that the United States — my country — has momentarily become.
"The rich get richer, and the poor will die." Maybe it has always been so, but sordid words like these do not get down to the essential question: "what do we do about it?" There's nobody else here. There's nobody here to ride in on his white horse and smash the oppressors, especially if the oppressors are we ourselves. There's nobody to tell us what we should do. Nobody to make our lives better if we don't care enough about our lives to make them better. No one to define a different set of priorities for our country, and for the global community of countries that we have built, if we do not first define them for ourselves.
It is obviously very easy to polarize a country, and thus divide it in two. But no amount of bickering and finger-pointing across an imaginary aisle — in Congress or in a statehouse or even in a local council — is ever going to bring lasting change. The only thing that will do it is a determination that things must be better, and that we are going to, single-handedly if need be, make it so. As it was once said, "tear down this wall!"
Another famous leader said that "we have nothing to fear but fear itself." During the famous world wars, but also in the times surrounding them, fear was not the regularly traded currency that it has become today.
Division also was not preached. In some of the darkest times of our country's past, the citizens were regularly told they needed to pull together. Today, the country is being pulled apart in many different ways.
America was never before told by its leaders that America is weak. The country was the world's bank, not its biggest debtor. If ever our nation was actually counted upon to be "the world's leader," today it is quite reasonable for the world to ask where its leader has now gone. We should be asking, too.
Image via Max Pixel.
WHERE DID ALL THE MONEY COME FROM? WHERE DID ALL THE MANSIONS COME FROM?
THE ENTIRE BIDEN FAMILY IN BED WITH RED CHINA
Jesse Watters: Joe Biden just proved he's compromised
What's behind the Biden family's 'opulent' lifestyle?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OKIvDDNAC8
THE BIDEN CRIME FAMILY OF PARASITE LAWYERS IN THE MIDDLE EAST
JAMES BIDEN RAKES IT IN!
Jesse Watters Primetime
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vt0iMhgtBmI
With no moral code, no center, nothing matters. You just read what’s in the teleprompter and hit the sack by 7:00 while your degenerate son collects piles of cash for the family until you’re free to do it on your own. All you have to do is what you’re told, your handlers and the media will take care of the rest. DEREK HUNTER
WHERE DID ALL OF GAMER LAWYER JOE BIDEN’S BIG BUCKS COME FROM?
video
Where did Biden's millions come from?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlS88MKI-DA
There it is. That's the issue. To begin, you have the corrupt family Biden. They've been scamming us and our system well for almost fifty years. The man is supposedly worth over 250 million dollars. How is this possible on his salary? It's not. So where did his wealth come from? Not from being a brilliant businessman. DAVID PRENTICE
Buckle down, the Biden recession has arrived
On July 28, the Bureau of Economic Analysis released the second quarter GDP report, which showed, “Real gross domestic product (GDP) decreased at an annual rate of 0.9 percent in the second quarter of 2022, following a decrease of 1.6 percent in the first quarter.”
Among the “highlights” of the report, “The second quarter decrease in real GDP reflected decreases in inventory investment, housing investment, federal government spending, state and local government spending, and business investment. Exports and consumer spending increased. Imports, which are a subtraction in the calculation of GDP, increased.”
And, perhaps most importantly, the report documented, “Real disposable personal income (DPI) -- personal income adjusted for taxes and inflation -- decreased 0.5 percent in the second quarter.”
In other words, the second quarter GDP numbers were abysmal across the board. Moreover, according to the classic definition of a recession -- two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth -- the report confirms that the U.S. economy has entered into a recession.
Of course, the bad economic news comes on the heels of the Biden administration’s recent attempts to redefine what constitutes a recession.
Over the past several days, in anticipation of the report’s release, several high-ranking Biden administration officials have been all over the airwaves trying to convince the American people that two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth does not constitute a recession.
For instance, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen explained on NBC’s Meet the Press that, “A common definition of recession is two negative quarters of GDP growth, or at least that’s something that’s been true in past recessions. When we have seen that, there has usually been a recession. And many economists expect second-quarter GDP to be negative. First-quarter GDP was negative, so we could see that happen, and that will be closely watched. But I do want to emphasize, what a recession really means is a broad-based contraction in the economy. And even if that number is negative, we are not in a recession now, and I would, you know, warn that we should be not characterizing that as a recession.”
White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre claimed, “the textbook definition of ‘recession’ is not -- is not two negative quarters of GDP. We have a strong labor market. We have business that’s investing. We have consumers that are also very much, you know, investing and purchasing. That is incredibly important.”
It turns out, based on the recent report, that much of what Jean-Pierre said concerning the economy is simply not true. As the report indicates, business investment is down. As is consumers’ real disposable income.
Yes, consumer spending increased. But so did Americans’ credit card debt, which now stands at a whopping $860 billion.
And, although the official unemployment stands at 3.6 percent, the labor participation rate remains low at 62.2 percent. Meanwhile, there are more than 11.4 million unfilled jobs and wages are not keeping up with inflation, meaning average Americans are getting poorer due to Biden’s inflationary policies.
What’s more, the U.S. index of consumer sentiment clocked in at a miserable 51.1 last month, down from 81.2 just one year ago. For more context, it was 101 before the pandemic.
Unfortunately, these trends are likely to become worse as the Federal Reserve continues to raise interest rates, which will deter business investment, reduce home purchases, increase Americans’ outstanding debt, and generally slow down the economy.
Just in case that is not enough bad news, we also learned today that the Democrats have come to an agreement on a bill laughably called the Inflation Reduction Act, which includes $739 billion in new taxes and $443 billion in new spending programs!
Just to be clear, raising taxes and increasing spending during a recession is a surefire recipe to make the situation worse, not better.
Chris Talgo (ctalgo@heartland.org) is senior editor at The Heartland Institute.
Image: QuoteInspector.com
