Hi Emma
I hope you guys have a great Christmas. Christmas is special for kids. Yes, I guess a lot of that has to do with
getting presents. When I was a kid,
Christmas permeated everything, so that the entire country felt Christmas-y for
a good month and a half before Christmas.
Schools had Christmas trees and sang Christmas songs. Even the hymns.
I was thinking about this debate about whether parents
should tell their kids about Santa Claus.
There is this video online of a pastor telling kids in a Santa Claus
line that their parents were lying to them.
I think I would tell my kids that Christmas, among other things, is the
season where people give gifts to people they love or those in need. No mention of Santa Claus or emphasis on
getting gifts.
Thank you for your thoughts on my comments.
It looks like you understood me as saying that diversity
created or promotes post-modernism. You
see the causes for post-modernism as “technology,
philosophy, economics, our culture of busyness, the idolatry of
academia, [and] materialism.” It seems
also that you see these things as contributing to apathy in the churches and
among Christians in America, particularly perhaps more so among whites.
Christianity had always been an integral part
of American life. Beginning in 1947 with
a Supreme Court ruling that the government cannot aid or favor any religion,
secularism as a government policy was born, though it took a while to take
over. It wasn’t until the early 1960s
that the Bible and prayer were removed from public schools. The fight over the presence of the Ten
Commandments took years to play out, but the die was cast.
This created a moral vacuum in our country,
and political correctness developed to fill the void. Instead of favoring Christianity, all
religions were equal. Instead of an
American culture that was taught in our schools, and Western culture that was
taught in all of our colleges, all cultures became viewed as equal.
Prior to this time, almost all immigration was
from Western countries that shared our culture and that also shared the
demographics of those who already lived here.
That changed in 1965. While they
said they would not change the demographics of our country, almost all
immigration since then has been from non-European countries.
Since 9/11, Muslims have probably been the
single dominant group of immigrants.
Since they come from so many different countries, this doesn’t get
noticed much, because they all get grouped under ‘other.’
But I digress.
Post-modernism, with its rejection of
absolute truth, moral authority, divine revelation, all basic tenets of
Christianity, spawned the idea that diversity is good, a strength. A lot of people were expressing discomfort with
seeing growing numbers of people very different from them, and political
leaders needed to calm them down and offered this as their paternalistic
wisdom.
So post-modernism came as a result of
secularization, which came as a result of Supreme Court rulings, which frankly
had no precedents or case histories.
I had heard years ago that Obama was
deporting a lot of immigrants. Then I
read that the government changed its definition of deportation. The government has a practice of using statistics
to say things they’re not really saying.
Just like unemployment statistics don’t include the record number of
people who are no longer in the work force and inflation statistics don’t
include a lot of things that people regularly use, so deportation numbers have
been expanded to include people who are turned away at the border as well.
Which by the way has practically dropped down
to zero, it seems. Our southern border
is being flooded with people who have been coached to say that they are
refugees, and the government then whisks them to cities throughout the country.
As for diversity, certainly all people are
created in God’s image, and heaven will be filled with people from every
country, race, and language. Meanwhile, back here on earth, we have around
200 countries in the world. Many of
them, like Iraq, should be divided into more countries. There you have Kurds, Sunni Muslims, and Shia
Muslims, who don’t get along to the point that they only live together to avoid
a war to separate them. There used to be
a sizable Assyrian Christian population there, but since the death of Hussein
who kept the peace, that group has pretty much disappeared through killing and
emigration.
Why do I mention this? Countries developed as people of like minds
and like cultures formed governments to work for their common interests. We used to have an American culture based on
the principles of Western Civilization, our unique Constitution, and Christian
values as taught in the Bible and the Ten Commandments.
Secularism and post-modernism are not just
content with living in an alternate universe with Christianity. It wants to do away with it. If it can keep it confined to the four walls
of a building on weekends, that would work.
When we are talking about our government leaders attempting to diversify
our nation, we are not talking about bringing in Christians from all countries
of the world, but as much as possible non-Christian groups to make any attempts
of normalizing Christianity again impossible.
Diversity weakens and divides a nation when
there is no underlying common value system, moral code, worldview, and
loyalties. Language is important
too. Being an American used to mean a
lot more than simply the fact that a person lives here or was born here.
You mention the importance of having “a
leader providing guidance of how to honor and respect each other.” The Church has that; our schools and society
used to have that, but now the highest values of our country are not love your
neighbor but tolerate him. Which means
little more than ignore them.
You mention that Americans kill each other
far more than a terrorist does. That’s
because there are way more Americans than terrorists here, and we spend
billions of dollars a year tracking over a million people on terror watchlists
and over 1,000 open terror investigations at any one time to see that more don’t’
take place.
Why in the world should a country have to do
that? We didn’t used to have that
problem. And we didn’t used to have all
those killings either.
The problem frankly is Islam. Not radical Islam, but Islam itself. The way to tell is that there are about 50
majority Muslim countries in the world today.
The only ones a Christian or Jew would feel relatively safe in are those
run by strong secular rulers, like kings or dictators. Once the religious Muslims take over, persecution
is strong against Jews and Christians.
Bringing Muslims into our country may not cause immediate problems, but
it will create all kinds of problems for our kids, grandkids, and their kids
and grandkids. You can watch thousands
of videos coming out of Europe that show where we will be in a few years. If we were winning them to Christ, that would
be one thing. But they are changing
Western life far more than we are changing them.
This is probably far more than you were
hoping for in response. You will always
be my friend.
