This sounds like it could be the start of a joke: What do
President Obama, ISIL, and gay marriage have in common? The problem is that those who get it won’t
think it is funny, and there are too many people who just won’t get it.
So what do they have in common? They all picture in some way the underlying problem
in our country, the problem that is at the root of all the other problems.
President Obama is an example of our nation having lost our
sense of right and wrong. When the
President was trying to get people to support his healthcare law, he lied. Not once, but over and over again.
Now I am the first to acknowledge that all lies are not
created equal. There is the response to
the angry voice about who took the last cookie out of the cookie jar. There is the response to the question about
the phone number found in your wallet or the woman who called you on your
phone. A President asked a question at a
press conference regarding the potential or planned government action to an
enemy threat might be less than straightforward or even entirely untruthful in
order to avoid giving sensitive information to the wrong people.
But this was a man who lied to people who were looking to
him for answers and help. He lied in
front of cameras and to the largest audiences that anyone would ever hope to
have. He knew the truth would eventually
come out, but he didn’t believe he would suffer any loss when it did.
My question is: where was the outrage? The public and our representatives in
Congress should have demanded his impeachment, and there should have been no
problem getting the votes in the Senate to convict him. Why?
Because once a person is known to lie, how will you ever
know when he is telling the truth? When the
President of our nation says that there are no immediate threats from ISIS, can
we believe him? When the President of
the United States says that Iran will not get a nuclear weapon on his watch, is
that true? When the President of the
United States says that the economy is doing better now than in his entire
presidency, is it?
What did the media say about his lying? He was overselling???? Were we supposed to know that he couldn’t
possibly be telling the truth, and we should have seen it as politicians just
doing what politicians do.
It used to be that when a person lied, it was called a
lie. We have lost as a nation the sense
of right and wrong. If something can
produce ‘good’ results or was for a good reason, then we overlook the act, even
if the act itself used to be considered wrong.
The end justifies the means. That
kind of thinking was a common plot in futuristic science fiction novels meant
to waken people to impending government control or novels raising moral
questions like 1984 and Crime and Punishment.
What? You never read those books? I am not surprised. The government is in charge of our education
now, and they have other books they would rather have you read. They have other things they want to teach
you.
But all politicians
lie. Actually no. But if that is the perception or the
expectation, then we have lost all sense of moral values in our country. We have lost something vital to the health of
our nation. If our politicians are
dishonest, then where are the calls for their resignation? Why are we not demanding better?
Simple answer: we accept lies as a part of doing business. We expect our politicians to promise us the
moon in their campaigns, but we don’t expect them to keep his promises after he
is elected. We expect lies, because we
lie.
A person’s word used to be his bond. If a person couldn’t keep his word, he would
be considered untrustworthy and somebody to avoid.
When the idea of right and wrong become blurred, we don’t
know how to respond to wrong anymore. We
have no grounds to judge the behavior of another, because we see all behavior as
self-motivated, self-serving, and generally quite justified. This person has a good reason in their eyes
to do what they did. So when something
happens that used to be called evil, we don’t know how to respond. Anger seems to be too judgmental. And we certainly don’t have any moral
authority to try to stop it. Who
appointed us to be the judge for the world?
And this is what happened with ISIS. ISIS finally did some things that angered
enough people to force our government to take action. Do I believe they are serious about what they
say they want to do? He lied about
health care. How do I know he is not
lying now? My personal assessment is
that much of this is for show, but that is for another article.
The point is that when they first appeared, their movement
was seen as political, not evil, disenfranchised Sunni Arabs in a Shiite
majority country. They essentially
declared war on us, but we didn’t see it as a real or imminent threat, so we
ignored it. They committed evil
atrocities on Christians and Yazidis, but we only did what was necessary to
feed some refugees trapped on a mountain and help expedite their safe exodus
off the mountain.
ISIS seemed more intent on getting our attention by beheading
several American journalists. And this
finally provoked our leaders to action.
But because our leaders were so slow in responding, the best time to
have confronted them had long passed. When
they were moving from town to town looking to gain new territory, they were on
the road, completely exposed. Now they
have control of cities and towns where any action from the air would have heavy
civilian casualties.
In fact there is no way now to defeat them without going
into these same towns we went into before on the ground a very high cost to our
troops. Now we, or somebody else, has to
do it again?
We have given ISIS plenty of time now to prepare for all
this. When our troops fought in Iraq,
they faced countless roadside bombs and booby traps, and whoever goes into
these towns can expect the same.
But because we no longer have clear ideas of right and
wrong, our leaders are hesitant in the face of evil, not knowing how or if we
should respond. What moral authority do
we have? We don’t even like to talk
about right and wrong anymore? Who’s to
say what’s right and wrong? Is it really
our fight? Do we really want to get
involved? Do we really have to? Until they beheaded these journalists so
blatantly, trying very hard to provoke a response from us, we would have
dithered about for months or longer, hoping it would all go away on its own.
Right and wrong invokes a standard, a universal standard of
how things are supposed to be. We used
to have such a standard, but its basis was religious. Among other principles, there were Ten
Commandments. Commandments is much too
strong a word for us to use today. After
all, who is doing the commanding? We
can’t appeal to a God, because that invokes religion, which is only meant for
private use, not public policies.
Gay marriage is becoming harder and harder to talk about,
because for more and more people this is their reality, their family, and in
the case of the children, this is all they have known. It is seen as being harder and harder to
oppose gay marriage, because this has to do with people loving each other and
not about evil people trying to destroy other people. These are just people who want to get on with
their lives and be left alone. There is another
larger agenda at work here as well, but for most I think they just want to be
validated by society and no longer looked upon as being somehow inferior to
everybody else.
The bigger issue goes back to the God question. Questions like right and wrong need somebody
to authoritatively answer. Who says
something is wrong, or right?
Christians believe that God created the world, that we were
created in His image, and that He gave us the directions, or the instruction
manual so to speak, on how all this is supposed to work. Our nation used to believe in those
instructions. We used to post the Ten
Commandments in our schools and in public places, and we used to teach the
Bible in our public schools.
Now that we have removed the Bible and the Ten Commandments
from public life, then there are no rules but what we make up along the
way.
I believe marriage has always been about children. If children grew on trees, there never would
have been a thing called marriage. Some
people would have paired up, but it is doubtful there would have been sexually
exclusive relationships apart from the issue of children, disease, or moral
constraints imposed by a religion. But
all living arrangements would have been considered equal, whether roommates,
lovers, or communes.
Now whether you believe in God or evolution, they both ended
up with the same thing. Children are the
product of a man and a woman and need all kinds of care, nurture, and training
for a long time until they are able to fend for themselves. For most of human history throughout the
world, this job was considered the primary responsibility of the natural
parents.
But then after our nation officially became secular, we
normalized sexual activity outside of marriage. Yes, I know, people have always
had sex outside of marriage, but sex was now considered recreation and a right
and a right that needed to be aggressively pursued, by women as well as men. A part of their equality.
Then we normalized abortion.
Human life was no longer considered sacred, but babies were seen along
the line of pets. You can have one if you
want one, but nobody can make you have one.
Your own life and comfort are the important things.
Then we normalized divorce.
Marriage just became a mutual relationship that could be dissolved when
either party failed to find it personally fulfilling.
Then we normalized cohabitation, where we don't even have the hassle of a no-fault divorce. Marriage itself is just a carry over from tradition and out-moded religions that are no longer relevant yet alone true.
Then we normalized cohabitation, where we don't even have the hassle of a no-fault divorce. Marriage itself is just a carry over from tradition and out-moded religions that are no longer relevant yet alone true.
Then we normalized single parenthood. If sex was a choice and having children was a
choice and being married was a choice, then why again did we need marriage in the
first place? Single parenthood became
the leading cause of poverty in our country, but the government was eager and
willing to help out to support the new family.
Then we normalized the two working parent family for those
families that did stay together. We
taught our daughters that it was more important to have a career than to have a
family. So children were the
afterthought, the career was the priority.
The children were viewed as pets, such that the only responsibilities of
the parents were feeding them, giving them a place to stay, and seeing that
they were housebroken. This is leading
somewhere, and we will get to that in a minute.
Then as our science improved, we could achieve pregnancies
without a man even being present or needed in the life of the child. And with the sacredness of life diminished,
women began offering to bear children for other people. Hey, the pay is good, and you could still
keep your regular job.
Now in gay marriage, we are taking a step further, yet
having coming this far, this is only one more step, and there is little or no
reason not to take that next step. With
gay marriage, we will now intentionally remove one parent from a child’s life
and call it good, normal, and equal to the way we used to have children and
families. Our society is formalizing the
break of natural parents from the responsibility of raising their own
children. We are normalizing the concept
that children just need loving adults rather than blood parents.
Sure, we have always had this with adoption, but now we are officially
saying that it doesn’t matter. One is just as good as the other.
And there are more steps to follow. The next step in the process, and there is a
process, is to increase the government’s role in the family. Since children no longer need their natural
fathers and mothers, and marriage is only a matter of mutual convenience and
fulfillment and not critical to the life of the children, the government will
become more responsible for the raising of our children. This same government that sent millions of
jobs overseas which now forces many parents to work who would rather be home
with their children, this government now wants to offer more after school
programs and before school programs, and child care, and mandatory
pre-kindergarten for all children.
The more the government can be involved in raising your
children, the more they are able to produce people who believe in and support
the work that the government does. They
will actually like government control. The
goal is to raise children who expect government assistance in every aspect of
their lives. Freedom is only for people who don’t like their chains. A nation that believed in freedom, that saw government
control as tyranny will now see government control as security, desirable, and
necessary.
Our nation was never ‘officially’ a Christian nation, yet it
was always Christian in the sense that there was a consensus on believing in
God, Jesus, the Bible, the Ten Commandments, the Golden Rule, and the need or
value of going to church. This also gave
our country a moral consensus, things like loving your neighbor, helping your
neighbor or someone in need, trust, honesty, integrity, loyalty, faithfulness, hard
work, responsibility, giving, compassion, mercy, courage, kindness, patience, sacrifice,
saving yourself for marriage, not having
children out of wedlock, and working through hard marriages
We have been told over and over in the last few years that
our country was intended to be a secular country, that there is a wall of
separation between church and state that makes it unconstitutional for anything
associated with the state, which now includes public schools, though originally
it didn’t, to even mention God except in curse words, that anything religious
has no place in discussions of public policy.
The problem is that there is nothing in secularism that
provides a moral framework telling us how we should live or behave, telling us
right from wrong or whether there even is a right and wrong. This is not to say that secularists cannot
exhibit love, compassion, and all the other qualities I mentioned, but it’s
just that there is nothing in secularism that says that anyone should.
There are no rules or codes of behavior but what society can
agree upon, and apparently it has settled on just three. Any other values seem to be holdovers from
more religious times and are subject to challenges at any time. So where there used to be Ten Commandments,
we now have three: equality, tolerance, and fairness.
For over three hundred years starting from the first
settlers to America until 1962, the Bible was taught in our public schools. Why? Because
it was believed to be true and because it was believed that it contained and
encouraged the highest human values and virtues. And even when there started to be doubts in
some places about the truth of everything in the Bible, it was still taught
because the Bible was at the root of much of the great literature in Western
Civilization. If you didn’t know who or
what Job was, or David and Goliath, a Philistine, Samson, Solomon, Jesus, Paul,
Pilate, Easter, Moses, the Ten Commandments, Passover, Noah, the flood, shibboleth,
the Golden Rule, an eye for an eye, turning the other cheek, the Good
Samaritan, the rich man and Lazarus, the other Lazarus, Adam and Eve, the
serpent, the apple, the Garden of Eden, the Sabbath, not only would you then not
understand much of the foundation of Western Civilization or much of its great
literature, but you would just be a poorer person. Not financially, though they were thought to
be related, but poorer in your soul, who you were as a person.
When our country was founded, the issue of separation of
church and state had to do with having a national church like they had in
Europe at the time. England had the
Church of England, Germany was Lutheran, France was Roman Catholic. Giving to church was a part of paying your
taxes. All of them, of course, were
Christian churches. That’s why it is
called separation of ‘church’ and state instead of separation of religion, or
God, and state. The very Congress that
passed the First Amendment saying the Congress shall make no law respecting an
establishment of religion also had Bibles printed to be used in our public
schools.
We used to teach values in our schools, but then it was
ruled unconstitutional because you couldn’t teach values without teaching about
God. Let the parents teach their
children religion at home.
But what home? We
have taught our women that it is oppressive and demeaning to stay at home to
raise children. They needed to go out
and work to find their true meaning and worth in life.
But what was first portrayed as a choice then became a need
as our government sent millions of good paying jobs overseas and allowed our
country to be to be flooded with millions more people than our immigration
system would normally allow. The results
have been that wages have gone down, good jobs are harder to get, and there is
no home life to speak of. The people who
have the morals are all working, as they still resist government
dependency. Those with moral values not
as strong are more willing to rely on the government to take care of them. So either way values are not being
transmitted to the next generation, because those who have them don’;t have the
quality time with their children and those who might have more time don’t have the
same values to transmit.
Wow, what this all intentional? You see policies over generations all leading
in the same direction, like there was some great plan in design to ruin our
country by breaking down the home life of our people.
It all comes down to the God question. If there is no God, there is no moral
consensus in a country like ours but the lowest common denominator, because
there is nobody who can or will tell us how things should be, at least anybody that everybody needs to listen to.
But if there is a God, then God is not just for private
consumption and enjoyment. There is a
way how things should be. We have lost our way as a nation, and we need
to get back what we have lost.
How? That’s for
another time, but I have already written extensively about this and posted my
articles on my blog, poligion1.blogspot.com.
Stay tuned.
