The Most Important
Issue of our Nation, and Nobody is Talking About It
Our country has never been more divided or in more turmoil
than it is today, and I wanted to find out why.
How did we get here, and what can we do about it?
I have seen articles asking what it means to be an
American. I think we need to go back a
step and ask: what is America?
The reason for our being is found in the Declaration of Independence:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that
they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among
these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these
rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from
the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes
destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish
it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles
and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to
effect their Safety and Happiness.
”
Our nation was founded on two truths: all people are created
equal and God gave them unalienable rights.
The being created equal part means that there is no royal line of people
who are rulers because they were born different from other people.
It’s the second part that changes everything. God gave people unalienable rights. But wait.
What God? And how did they know
that God gave unalienable rights to human beings.
The courts would call this a religious teaching. The Founders called it a fact.
It was the God of the Bible who gave unalienable rights to
human beings. And it was the Bible and
Christianity from where the Founders came to know of these rights. Islam does not know of unalienable
rights. Nor does any other religion.
Without Christianity, you don’t have unalienable
rights. And without unalienable rights,
you don’t have the United States of America, at least the one our Founders
fought a war in order to be able to create.
But the courts have ruled that all this talk about God is
religion, and that is not permitted in the public sphere. So we haven’t been teaching this to our
children, and we certainly haven’t been teaching this to the millions of people
who have been moving here for generations.
So now when all these people start voting, getting elected
to public office, and making laws, they will do it without an understanding of
what our country is/was all about.
They know that we are all about rights, but unalienable
rights are very different from government-given rights. Unalienable rights require a Higher Power to
give them. Unalienable rights are things
that you can do without the government’s permission, interference, or regulation. Government-given rights are generally rights
that require the government to compel the behavior of other people in the
giving of these rights. All these rights
come at an enormous expense that requires more and more money from some people
to give to more and more other people.
New rights are being created with every election cycle. Since this shift in our country from unalienable
rights to government-given rights, the government has not been able to keep
spending even close to its revenues. And
it no longer even tries to, because public spending is now the highest good.
Along with unalienable rights came a necessary high moral
standard, because great freedom requires great responsibility.
For most of our nation’s history, the moral code was the Ten
Commandments, Love your neighbor as yourself, and Do unto others as you would
have others do unto you, all from the Bible.
Now since all that has been ruled religious sentiment, the new moral
code is tolerance, equality, fairness, and diversity. Only one part of this code applies to individuals
and that is tolerance, which can mean nothing more than ignoring your
neighbor.
One major consequence of this change in rights and values
has to do with gun violence. Guns have always
been a major part of American culture. In
the Federalist Papers, we were described as an “armed” people, unlike those who
were in Europe who were unarmed and ruled by kings and despots. We used to have gun clubs in high schools,
and you could buy guns at Sears or a local hardware store like you were buying
a screwdriver, but now guns are a problem.
Why? We have exchanged our religious
values for secular ones, and they are simply inadequate for governing a free
people. Instead of being taught to love
your neighbor, now we are taught simply to ignore them.
Our country is divided between those who know of a ‘traditional’
United States, who unfortunately are in most cases unable to define exactly
what that is or why that is good. And
the rest of the country wants to remake it according to a new secular value
system where they are still working out all the rules. The previous full-blown secular systems in the
world have been communism and socialism.
Government-given rights leads inevitably in that direction,
because it requires more and more things of the government and less and less of
its people.
This is why our country is divided, and compromise is
possible on only a very small number of things.
If we don’t go back to our roots, it’s only a matter of time before our
country morphs into an entirely different country. But because it is happening slowly, over generations,
few people will even know it.
