Whether you believe in God or evolution, they both ended up
in the same place: it takes a man and a woman to create a child. But that’s where the similarities end. Christians believe that children are gifts
from God, created in His image, and parents are privileged and entrusted with
the critical task of raising the next generation.
Secularists are working to break that link, essentially
relegating children to the status of pets with the ultimate goal of the government
raising our children. That way they can
be sure that they have a compliant populace, grateful and supportive for a
massive government controlling more and more of our lives, all for our good and
protection.
Christianity and secularism have very different views of
families, children, and all the various parts of the dynamic, like sex,
parenting, divorce, and cohabitation.
Secularism maintains that all these things have been inhibited by
unnecessary and needlessly restrictive traditions that keep people from fully
developing or from their true personal fulfillment.
Christians believe that God has given us the directions on
how life works, including all things relating to sex, propagation, and personal
fulfillment. As individuals prosper in
all areas of their lives, the society prospers as well. Secularists find these directions oppressive
and any supposed benefits outweighed by the loss of personal freedom. Picture an athlete who wants to win the prize
and who willingly and gladly gives up the party life, maintaining rigid dietary
rules and exercise routines so he can perform at the highest level.
Secularists would rather have the immediate
pleasures and see that as more important than any imaginary or possible long
future goals that are unattainable by most people.
Every time that our modern culture has rejected the Bible’s
views of children, family, parenting, or sex, it has come at a great economic price,
or cost, to society. I would say a moral
price too, but we no longer have a sense of morality to speak of. We keep being told that our nation is and was
always intended to be a secular nation, yet somehow our country didn’t see
itself that way for almost the first 200 years of our existence.
But 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 they knew they were crossing a boundary. Sex was now considered recreation, and a
right, and a right that needed to be aggressively pursued, by women as well as
men, as part of their equality.
Betty Friedan is usually credited with sparking the women’s
movement. I think someone often
overlooked here is Hugh Hefner, the founder and chief creative officer of
Playboy Enterprises. In the 1960s, he
published his Playboy philosophy that included the concept of women being
sexually free and active, apart from the constraints of traditional (read:
Christian) morality and marriage. I have
no doubt that a good part of the motivation of his philosophy was to vastly increase
the number of potential sexual partners for the men like him who had already
abandoned Christian principles.
Saving oneself for marriage, while often only an ideal, was
still in the consciousness of our nation.
But is this so important?
Actually, yes. And for at least
two reasons.
As much as women think they need to be sexually free as part
of their pursuit for ‘equality,’ that first sexual experience is still
different for women than it is for men.
Something happens that binds that woman to a man at the subconscious
level. This was seen over and over again
growing up when the hottest girls had the jerkiest boyfriends and often married
them or had their babies. This strong attachment
created in the sex act bound them to somebody who everybody but her knew was a
jerk. Maybe she knew, but she didn’t
care, because he was her first love. Those
who got married had high divorce rates, and many had children who grew up
without a father in the home.
As for men, sex can also cloud their judgment, where the
pleasures of sex keeps people together who would not stay together otherwise,
people who would not make good life partners, resulting again in higher divorce
rates, more parents trying to raise a child alone, and more people requiring
government assistance.
Then we normalized abortion.
All this sexual activity produced a lot of babies whose parents found
this quite disruptive to lives that weren’t intending to have children, at least
not then. With secularism, which had to
avoid religious concepts, human life was no longer considered sacred, but like
puppies, which you didn’t have to keep.
You don’t have to have one if you don’t want one, and nobody can make
you have one. Your own life and comfort
are the important things.
This same lack of respect for human life that would end a
pregnancy shows up later in life when we so easily kill people over drugs,
turf, or revenge.
Planned Parenthood was founded to provide many of these
abortions, and it has been receiving millions of your tax dollars every year
since. Schools also began extensive
sexual education programs, another government program at your expense. What time and money spent on these programs
is less time and money spent on other educational material.
Then we normalized divorce. Personal enjoyment, also to be known as
personal fulfillment, came to be the ruling philosophy, and marriage was often
seen as a major impediment. Besides
being hard work, resolving marital problems would involve compromises which is
certainly less than complete personal satisfaction. So dissolving marriages was made easy. Marriage became just a mutual relationship
that would last only as long as both parties found it personally fulfilling.
Children of divorced families have it harder in life. They have more adverse outcomes in life with
increased costs to society including lost productivity, the need for a much
larger legal system, and a higher likelihood of repeating the pattern.
We normalized the idea of cohabitation, because marriage was
seen as too much work and not rewarding enough in return. It just made sense to be able to have the
joys of marriage without the headaches. Marriage
was seen as just a carryover from outworn tradition and out-moded religions
that were neither relevant nor true.
Marriage was often seen as nothing more than a piece of paper, and
family was just the people who were a part of your life at the time. Lifelong commitments were considered
unimportant and unnecessary.
Marriage was postponed or avoided, and a new thing called
delayed or perpetual adolescence became common.
Besides those living together without the commitment of marriage, many
others stayed at home for longer than in the past. Our government even normalized children
staying on their parent’s medical insurance until they were 26 years old. All these things either delay or discourage
people from growing up, from taking full responsibility for their lives. This same disposition that would prompt
someone to rely on their parents for insurance at 25 is more inclined to rely
on the government for all the assistance programs that it can provide as well.
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? Of course, many of
these single parents had been married, but there was no longer a stigma for
people to have children with no plans or intent of getting married. Single parenthood also became the leading indicator
of poverty in our country, but the government was eager and willing to help out
to support this new family.
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. But what started out as a shift in values,
careers over children and the need for jobs as a essential part of equality,
soon became an economic necessity when our government essentially sent millions
of our manufacturing jobs overseas, leaving most people with lower paying
service jobs to try to support their families.
Children, being now of pet status, the only responsibilities
of the parents were feeding them, giving them a place to stay, and seeing that
they were housebroken. Schools would
teach them everything they need to know.
We can’t teach morality and values in schools, apart from tolerance, equality,
fairness, and diversity, because you can’t really do that without religion. We say morality should be taught in the home,
but there is no home to speak of anymore.
Everybody is working, and there is little time and energy for quality
time with the children. Let them watch
television and get their moral education from sitcoms and reality shows.
Our science improved; we could achieve pregnancies without
the presence of a man. And as 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. While
this was first used to help infertile married couples have children, there was
certainly no reason to limit these procedures to married people. Now anyone could have a child without the
confinements of a marriage or even another person.
“Gay marriage,” which was widely rejected in our society until
our President came out in favor of it, takes the process a step further. Up until this point, the value and need for
marriage was diminished as it became normal for people to have children without
it and even without that second person.
Now with “gay marriage,” we intentionally remove at least one parent from
a child’s life and call it good, normal, and equal to the way we used to have
children and families.
Before, a marriage broke up, or children lost their natural
parents through some misfortune, or people were in relationships that didn’t
work out, or people just chose the path of having children without the benefit
of a partner, but we never called these ideal or in the best interests of the
child. But now with “gay marriage,” we
are making a statement as a society that children don’t need that second parent
at all, and even any natural parent. The
child may never even know who its real parents are. And all this will be called good, normal, and
equal to the traditional form of marriage.
Children don’t need parents, just adults.
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.
So does this really cost society in any way? Does it make our nation any less prosperous? There are studies out that pronounce no
difference in outcomes from children raised in normal two parent families or
children raised by gay couples. I contend
it’s too early to make judgments based on statistics yet, and this isn’t the
time to contest the findings of those studies that have already come out.
But at the end of this long progression of events, and it is
a progression, it has led us to a place I consider unsafe for a country that
values freedom.
If parents are not needed in the raising of a child, just
adults, and that only minimally, seeing as they both work, there is still a great
need for child care. With the breakdown
of the traditional family and society, this need is being more and more met by
the government. 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.
Is that so bad?
Depends how you define freedom.
When the government raises your children, your children will be taught
the value of a large government that regulates every part of your life, except,
of course, your personal sex life, which it encourages you to maximize. This is all for your safety and protection, a
safety net against all those bad things in life. Our Founders revolted against the English government
over taxes mostly, but now we have become accustomed to having the government take
half our income. Essential services and
our safety net.
In the past, we used to rely on family, churches, neighbors,
and communities to protect us against tragedy, but more and more we have come
to rely on the government. And where we used
to rely on the goodwill of this support system, we now rely on the government for
an increasingly large amount of things.
And who pays for all this? You
do, through ever higher taxes.
When families are strong, people rely on family for
help. When families are weak, people
rely on the government, which means the government needs more money from you to
pay for all of this. When two natural
parents are able to raise their children, the children normally grow up with
values and a sense of responsibility, both for themselves and for others. When children grow up without their parents’
role modeling and guidance, they need more help from the government, whether
through financial assistance or the legal justice system.
But there is more.
You want to talk about a war on women? This is it, folks. And it’s not whether women can get free birth
control or government-subsidized abortions.
People are born, they live, and then they die. All of us.
The only reason there are still people left in the world is that women
have children. Now this isn’t something
like becoming doctors. Yes, both involve
choices, but one involves something where you have to train through years of
instruction and practice. The other is
the most natural thing in the world. Men
can become doctors, but they can’t become mothers. Only women can do that.
Becoming a mother and raising a child is the hardest and yet
the most fulfilling thing a woman can do in life. There are people in life, many of them in
politics, who would think that that is a sexist statement. I just saw a clip of a speech that the
President gave where he said that women should not have to choose between staying
home to raise a child and staying in the workforce. When they leave the workforce, for even a
little while, they decrease their earnings potential, and that would be
awful. They should put their children in
a government-run daycare and let some professional raise their child.
We have taught our daughters that it is more important for a
woman to have a career than to have a family.
A woman needs a career in order to be equal to a man, and this is very
important that she does. When she is
older, she can have a child if she wants, just to say that she did, but this
child doesn’t need all the time and attention that women have been led to
believe in the past. A few weeks off
work, and society can provide care for the child just as good if not better
than what she could do, and why on earth would she? She could be out in the workforce making
money, as much as a man in fact.
People who have done the math say that every women needs to
have on average 2.1 children just for our population to stay even. What does that mean? If we bear fewer children than that, then we
have an aging population, which will increase the costs to society to take care
of them. Which is what has
happened. When people had larger, solid
families, the cost of taking care of the elderly was often absorbed by that
family. Now more and more, the costs
fall on society, which means more money out of everybody’s pockets.
There are two remedies for this: encourage women to have
more children or bring in more immigrant workers to pay into the system. But wait.
Where we used to bring in more workers, now we bring in the whole
families, so we get more elderly and disabled, so the effect of more workers is
muted to an extent. Immigrants tend to
have larger families, at least for the first generation, so that helps a
little. But we have made it harder for
these new immigrants to get jobs, good paying ones, so we end up with more
people on government assistance, which is just as much of a drain on public
resources as the elderly.
As we have tried to break down the traditional family, all
in the name of personal freedom, the role and size of government has increased
many times over. Where our nation used
to be rich, it is now in debt, more debt than any nation in the world. Why?
What families used to do, now we pay the government to do for us.
What we call traditional values are really Christian
values. As we have discarded
Christianity as a society, government has increased to meet needs that used to
be met by families, churches, and neighbors.
Without Christianity and Christian values, we only have a government
that needs more and more of your money for our nation to be able to survive.
But we have been told and are
continually being told that our nation was always intended to be and is a
secular nation and that our government cannot so much as acknowledge God or
otherwise promote anything resembling religion.
And this was the conclusion of the highest court of our land, the one we
call supreme.
Yet the people who wrote and debated
and passed the First Amendment, which allegedly demands this, would surely have
a better understanding of what they meant by it than people who lived 200 years
after the fact.
And if schools are meant to produce wise, moral,
responsible, productive citizens, then prayer and Bible reading was always
considered the main instruments for doing that.
The Bible was considered absolutely necessary in forming character and
wisdom, and it was continuously and extensively used from the time of the first
settlers in our country in the early 1600s to the middle of the 1900s.
This was the time period which formed the foundation of our
country through the time of our nation’s greatest prosperity and rise to world
leadership. Since the Bible was removed
from our public education, the United States has become the world’s largest
debtor nation, and its status in the world is at the lowest point in our nation’s
history.
Is this merely coincidental?
No, because having rejected Christianity as its worldview, our nation
has replaced Biblical morality with a morality of the lowest common denominator
(tolerance, equality, fairness, and diversity), which lacks anything that
fosters responsibility, honesty, or social cohesiveness and promotes the role
of government as responsible for the wellbeing of our country and not merely
the promoter of it.
And it’s taking more
money than they are able to get in order to do this.
In this series, we are looking at how the Bible and
Christianity helped to make our country great and how much our abandonment of
them has contributed to our decline as a nation.
