The Process of Marriage is Needed

Marriage requires more up-front and ongoing investment from the spouses and their extended families, notes James Q. Wilson, the veritable dean of social scientists today.  Without the process of marriage, "neither the man nor the woman has any strong [or external] incentive to invest heavily in the union," Wilson says.  "Marriage is a way of making such investments plausible by telling each party that they are united forever, and if they wish to dissolve this union, they will have to go through an elaborate and possibly costly legal ritual called divorce."  This reality is one of the sticking points in the glue of marriage.  Another is friends and family around us.

Glenn T. Stanton, The Ring Makes All the Difference, p.43

No Science Behind Psychology

Clinical psychologists used to argue strenuously that their discipline was a bona fide science in order to support its claim to truth (and to help it get millions of tax dollars in support and to justify insurance claims).  Today many are describing psychology in categories indistinguishable from those used for religious cures and conversions.

Paul C. Vitz, "Psychology As Religion: The Cult of Self-Worship," p.41

The Myth of the "Gay Holocaust"

The reason the Bible so frequently singles out homosexuality is because it is the most politically aggressive, and therefore the most socially dangerous, of all the sexual sins. Most sexual sins do not have a social component. Two adulterous men cheating on their wives or two women who have had abortions do not typically get together to form societies centered on their transgressions. They tend to keep their actions secret and hidden from public. But homosexuals, because of the very nature of their sin, do tend to get together and form societies. They agitate for public recognition and, because they are often talented and unburdened by the demands of family life, they are able to accumulate wealth and exert influence well beyond their limited numbers.

These characteristics endow homosexual movements with potentially revolutionary power. This is why almost every human society was permeated with homosexuality before the rise of Christianity, and why wherever and whenever the Judeo-Christian influence weakens, homosexual movements are able to reassert their strength.

Christopher Ziegler, “Lessons From the Nazi Experiment.”  Barbwire, 26 May 2015.

One is a Slave When There Are No Property Rights

Without property rights, no other rights are possible.  Since man has to sustain life by his own effort, the man who has no right to the product of his effort has no means to sustain his life.  The man who produces, while others dispose of his product, is a slave.

Ayn Rand, “Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal,” cited by Gregg Jackson, Conservative Comebacks to Liberal Lies, p.79

Think About Earth FIRST

Enormous sums of money have been invested in the space programme; I am not myself convinced, however, that we have a clear mandate to land people on the moon, let alone the other planets of our solar system, before we have completed our God-given task of filling and subduing the earth.

John Stott, Decisive Issues Facing Christians Today, p.125-126

Integrity of Marriage

The integrity of Christian marriage requires a man to exercise his will even in the arena of love and to commit all of his sexual energy and passion to the honorable estate of marriage, refusing himself even the imagination of violating his marital vows.

R. Albert Mohler, Jr., Desire and Deceit: The Real Cost of Sexual Tolerance, p.7

Hitler's Connection to American Eugenics

The intellectual outlines of the eugenics Hitler adopted in 1924 were strictly American.  He merely compounded all the virulence of long-established American race science with his fanatic anti-Jewish rage.  Hitler's extremist eugenic science, which in many ways seemed like the logical extension of America's own entrenched programs and advocacy, eventually helped shape the institutions and even the machinery of the Third Reich's genocide.  By the time Hitler's concept of Aryan superiority emerged, his politics had completely fused into a biological and eugenic mindset.

Edwin Black, "War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race," p.270

Psychiatric Over-Diagnosing

Human nature being what it is, the prevalence of any psychiatric diagnosis will rise artificially whenever it is a gatekeeper to something valuable.  In a simpler world, psychiatric diagnosis was once based only on perceived clinical need.  But now that it has gained powerful (and unwelcome) influence on many administrative and financial decisions, these decisions have also reciprocally obtained a powerful influence on the rates of diagnosis.  Diagnostic inflation is promoted whenever a physician provides an “up-diagnosis” to help a patient gain access to something valuable—like disability benefits or school services.  If autism, ADHD, or pediatric bipolar disorder is a prerequisite to being admitted to a small class with lots of individual attention, equivocal cases get shoehorned into these categories, and soon an epidemic is born.

In like fashion, “mental disorder” increases whenever there is a high unemployment.  Some of the people laid off will get a new diagnosis because they have developed symptoms, others because it will make them eligible for disability.  Because veterans’ benefits require a diagnosis of PTSD, PTSD gets over-diagnosed.  There is a paradox—trying to help by providing a diagnosis may wind up hurting.  Many returning vets from Iraq and Afghanistan are having trouble landing jobs because of the stigma associated with their diagnosis of PTSD.  And over-diagnosis distorts allocations across the system, reducing resources and benefits for those who most need them.

The most senseless drive of diagnostic inflation is the way medical insurance works in the United States.  To get paid, the doctor must make an approved diagnosis.  This is intended to prevent frivolous visits.  But the unintended effect is just the opposite of prudent cost control.  A premature rush to a reimbursable psychiatric diagnosis often results in unnecessary, potentially harmful, and often costly treatment for problems that would have disappeared on their own.  It would be a lot cheaper and better for insurance to reimburse the doctor for watchful waiting and counseling, rewarding him for not jumping to diagnostic conclusions that are very costly in the long run.  This perfectly sensible solution is the policy in the rest of the world.

Allen Frances, M.D, "Saving Normal," pp.84-85

Psychiatrists and Suicide

Recent data on suicide rates for professional people show that psychiatrists have an inordinately high rate--double that for other types of doctors.  They also are known to have a comparable high rate of drug addiction.  Whether these figures can be used to support a contention that psychiatrists are, as a group, more disturbed than the general population is another, and debatable, matter.

E. Fuller Torrey, M.D., Witchdoctors and Psychiatrists: The Common Roots of Psychotherapy and Its Future, p.49 (1986)

The Humanist Crusade Against Children

Seventy years ago, eugenics promised to cure America's social problems through better breeding.  Today, mental-health crusaders promise to eliminate behavioral problems among America's children by screening every schoolchild for mental illness and then putting millions of them on psychoactive drugs.  Like the eugenics crusade, the current push to dramatically increase the number of children on psychoactive drugs reduces all behavioral problems to a material basis.  And like the eugenics crusade, it is accompanied by grandiose claims that go far beyond the actual science.  Like the eugenics crusade, it is justified in humanitarian terms even while it raises serious issues about civil liberties and human dignity.  How many children will be hurt before this latest crusade runs out of steam?

John G. West, "Darwin Day in America: How our politics and culture have been dehumanized in the name of science," p.364-365

Creationism and Evolutionism Are Both Faiths

Most people have the wrong idea about what the creation/evolution question involves  Instead of perceiving the real issue, they have been deceived into believing that evolution is science.  It is not a science at all.  It is a belief system about the past.  We do not have access to the past.  We only have the present.  All the fossils, all the living animals and plants, our planet, the universe--everything exists in the present.  We cannot directly test the past using the scientific method (which involves repeating things and watching them happen) since all evidence that we have is in the present.

It is important to understand that special creation, by definition, is also a belief about the past.  The difference is that creationists base their understanding of creation upon a book which claims to be the Word of the One who was there, who knows everything there is to know about everything, and who tells us what happened.  Evolution comes from the words of men who were not there and who do not claim to be omniscient.  This whole issue revolves around whether we believe the words of God who was there, or the words of fallible humans (no matter how qualified) who were not there.

Ken Ham, "The Lie," p.5-6

Liberal Compulsory Propaganda

To those with the vision of the anointed, the public serves not only as a general object of disdain, but as a baseline from which to measure their own lofty heights, whether in art, politics, or other fields.  Systemic processes which offer channels of expression of the public's views and values are to be circumscribed and circumvented.  Art, music, and ballet are to be financed by compulsory exactions from the public, while ignoring or disdaining what the public itself wants or does not want.  Similarly, so-called "public television"--taxpayer-subsidized television--is in fact the least responsive to the public's desires and most reflective of the vision of the anointed.  Shamelessly one-sided propaganda for the environmentalist movement, for example, has become a staple of so-called "nature" programs on "public television" for years.

Failure to use tax money  to finance things not liked by the taxpaying public is routinely called "censorship."  If such terminology were used consistently, virtually all of life would be just one long, unending censorship, as individuals choose whether to buy apples rather than oranges, vacations rather than violins, furniture rather than mutual funds.  But of course no such consistency is intended.  This strained usage of the word "censorship" appears only selectively, to describe public choices and values at variance with the choices and values of the anointed.  If a  public library declines to buy some avant-garde book approved by the anointed, because either the librarian or the taxpaying public does not like it, that is called "censorship"--even though the book remains freely available to all who wish to buy it and no library can possibly purchase even a tenth of all the books published, so that discretionary preferences are inevitable and the First Amendment does not guarantee either an audience or money.


Thomas Sowell, "The Vision of the Anointed," p.20

The Key to Humility

We are the result of God's creation; what is more, we are the apex of that creation.  Trying to persuade ourselves that we are nothing carries two terrible risks.  One is that we laugh at the absurdity of thinking such fine creatures as ourselves to be nothing and we abandon the attempt to find humility.  The second risk is even worse:  We may actually come to believe that we really are nothing.  And if we are really nothing, then none of our actions could possibly mean anything either, could they?  So why worry about what we do?  If humans are nothing, then nothing matters.

Humility is attainable but not through considering ourselves to be utterly worthless.  Anyone who lives responsibly, and invests his time in durable values rather than in the frivolous pursuit of fun, has achieved something.  Such a person is not nothing.  They key to humility is not to denigrate what you have become, but rather to renounce any credit for it.  You are a real somebody.  To begin with, you are utterly unique.  You have thoughts that nobody else has ever had.  You have dedicated yourself to more than your own gratification.  You have supported your spouse.  You have labored faithfully at a job.  You are raising good children.  You have added to your store of knowledge about the world.  No, you are nowhere near being nothing.  You are somebody!

But who gets the credit for you being you?  Taking the credit yourself makes you arrogant.  First of all, God created you as a unique, fearfully-and-wonderfully-made individual.  Then there are your parents; after all, they endowed you with a pretty useful set of genes.  They also imparted crucial knowledge and habits as they raised you.  You probably picked up a thing or two as your formal education progressed, so there are teachers to thank.  How about that long-forgotten associate who gave you your first leg up in business?  You may not be nothing, but you probably had a lot of help in becoming a somebody.  For that we must thank others, most notably God Almighty, and avoid the folly of arrogance.


Rabbi Daniel Lapin, "America's Real War," p.70-71

Americans Did NOT Listen

The fundamental basis of this nation's law was given to Moses on the Mount.  The fundamental basis of our Bill of Rights comes from the teachings which we get from Exodus and St. Matthew, from Isaiah and St. Paul.  I don't think we emphasize that enough these days.  If we don't have the proper fundamental moral background, we will finally wind up with a totalitarian government which does not believe in rights for anybody except the state.

Harry S. Truman, cited by David A. Noebel, Understanding the Times, p.558

Marriage - More Than A Civil Contract

If it becomes respectable to think of marriage as a mere civil contract rather than as a sacred bond that is unbreakable except for extraordinary circumstances, then the incidence of divorce will surely increase, with consequences for society that have become evident in our time.

Phillip E. Johnson, The Right Questions: Truth, Meaning & Public Debate, p.152

The "Diversity" Craze

What about diversity? Diversity is nothing less than a craze on most college campuses. Despite budget squeezes, universities have created diversity positions, such as vice chancellor for equity, diversity and inclusion; director of diversity and inclusion; manager of diversity recruitment; associate dean for diversity; and vice president of diversity. Some diversity chiefs -- such as the vice chancellors of diversity at the University of California campuses in San Diego and San Francisco -- have annual salaries that top $250,000. That doesn't include the millions of dollars spent staffing and equipping diversity offices.

Walter E. Williams, "Some Odds and Ends," Townhall 5/13/15

Murderer Margaret Sanger

As the champion of the proletariat, Stalin saw to the slaughter of at least fifteen million Ukrainian kulaks.  As the popularly acclaimed Il Duce, Mussolini massacred as many as four million Ethiopians, two million Eritreans, and a million Serbs, Croats, and Albanians.  As the wildly lionized Fuhrer, Hitler exterminated more than six million Jews, two million Slavs, and a million Poles.  As the founder of Planned Parenthood and the impassioned heroine of feminist causes celebres, [Margaret] Sanger was responsible for the brutal elimination of more than twenty million children in the United States and as many as one and a half billion worldwide.

George Grant, "Grand Illusions: The Legacy of Planned Parenthood," p.46 (1992)

Darwinian Nonsense

According to Darwin, tribes banding together with the greatest measure of selflessness and altruism would have a selective advantage in warfare against their more selfish neighbors.  Since Darwin and many of his contemporaries considered altruism a biologically based instinct, the more altruistic tribe would be able to pass on its altruism to a greater number of offspring than the less altruistic tribe.  But they would do this by killing as many members of their neighboring tripes as possible!  In this way warfare not only selected the strongest and bravest, but also the "most moral."

Richard Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler, p.166

The World's Ideas Are Changed by Power

PC advocates deny the existence of objective knowledge and morality, and thus see no point in employing moral suasion and logical argument to convince their fellow citizens that their viewpoint is correct.  Their only means available is therefore using the instruments of political power, such as coercion, intimidation, marginalization, and name-calling.  To put it philosophically: Ideas are not the power by which to change the world, but rather, the world's ideas are changed by power.

Francis J. Beckwith and Gregory Koukl, “Relativism: Feet Firmly Planted in Mid-Air,” pp.95-96

Public Policy Needs Moral Grounds

In the end the debate over homosexual behavior and its implications for public policy can only be decided conclusively on moral grounds, and moral grounds will ultimately mean religious grounds. As the generally liberal Brookings Institution noted in a 1986 report, a representative government such as ours "depends for its health on values that over the not-so-long run must come from religion. . . .  Human rights are rooted in the moral worth with which a loving creator has endowed each human soul, and social authority is legitimized by making it answerable to a transcendental moral law."

Jeffrey Satinover, M.D., Homosexuality and the Politics of Truth, p.28

Psychologists and Astrologers

America has become a "psychological society" in which psychologists are allowed, even expected, to interpret what people say, feel and do, and to explain their words, moods and actions.  It has come to be accepted that what happens to people on the "outside" has an effect on the "inside" and that it is what happens on the "inside" that determines their lives.  This psychological concept holds remarkable similarity to the astrological idea that what happens in the sky determines what happens in people's lives.  Both rely on the assumed ability of trained, gifted or selected people who can see either what is written in the sky or what is hidden in the unconscious.  The practitioners of both speak and act as if they are members of a secret society in which they have been taught to see and hear at a deeper level.  They translate external events into their own esoteric language and attribute profound influences to them.  And in doing so, they cause themselves to be held in awe and their services to be in demand.


Dr. Tana Dineen, Manufacturing Victims: What the Psychology Industry is Doing to People, pp.43-44

The Cultural Current

I've observed, as I'm sure you have, the power of what I call "a cultural current."  That is, a dominant idea promoted by the media and willingly adopted by a critical mass of people who want to believe a myth so badly they will close their minds to all contrary evidence.  When such a cultural movement gains momentum, people will stare at facts and filter out what they don't want to believe.  Contrary evidence will be ignored or reinterpreted to fit their deepest wishes.  And the more people who believe the myth, the more difficult it is for those who wish to counter it.  In a spirit of euphoria, all warning signs are brushed aside.  Before we know it, we are in a world where facts do not matter.

Erwin W. Lutzer, When A Nation Forgets God, p.80

Destructive Consequences of Unlimited Sexual Freedom

During the first state of the [Russian Communist] Revolution, its leaders deliberately attempted to destroy marriage and the family.  Free love was glorified by the official “glass of water” theory.  If a person is thirsty, so went the Party line, it is immaterial what glass he uses when satisfying his thirst; it is equally unimportant how he satisfies his sex hunger.

The legal distinction between marriage and casual sexual intercourse was abolished.  The Communist law spoke only of contracts between males and females for the satisfaction of their desires either for an indefinite or a definite period, a year, a month, a week, or even for a single night.  One could marry and divorce as many times as desired.  Husband or wife could obtain a divorce without the other being notified.  It was not even necessary that marriage be registered.  Bigamy and even polygamy were permissible under the new provisions…. Premarital relations were praised and extramarital relations were considered normal.

Within a few years, hordes of wild, homeless children became a menace to the Soviet Union.  Millions of lives, especially of young girls, were wrecked; divorces skyrocketed, as did abortions.  The hatreds and conflicts among polygamous and polyandrous mates rapidly mounted—and so did psychoneuroses.

The results were so appalling that the government was forced to reverse its policy.  The propaganda of the “glass of water” theory was declared to be counter-revolutionary, and its place was taken by official glorification of premarital chastity and of the sanctity of marriage….

Considering that the whole cycle occurred under a single regime, the experiment is highly informative.  It clearly shows the destructive consequences of unlimited sexual freedom.

Pitirim Sorokin, The American Sexual Revolution, pp.113-115. Cited by Robertson McQuilkin, An Introduction to Biblical Ethics, p.234

A Pregnant Woman IS a Mother

After a woman is pregnant, she cannot choose whether or not she wishes to become a mother.  She already is, and since the child is already present in her womb, all that is left to her to decide is whether she will deliver her baby dead or alive.

Mary O'Brian Drum, "Meeting in the Radical Middle," Sojourners, November 1980, p.23

Psychology as Religion

Counseling/psychotherapy (psychology) no longer stands as the science of behavior, but as the guardian of the soul, the maker of value, the determiner of morality, the definer of freedom.  That which began as a true science of behavior has degenerated into a neo-religious cult.  In the place of God is man.  In the place of the priest (minister) is the psychologist.  In the place of the Word is psychotherapy.  In the place of confession//forgiveness is interpretation (or one of its many equivalents).  Counseling/psychotherapy (psychology) emerges as the practical twentieth-century religion.  Here the deception of neutrality is revealed.

Richard Ganz, PsychoBabble: The Failure of Modern Psychology -- and the Biblical Alternative, p.47

A Problem With Same-Sex Unions

Coupled homosexuals tend to practice more anal intercourse and more anal-oral sex than those without a steady partner.  They also forego safe-sex practices because they are “in love.”  In other words, coupled homosexuals tend to engage in more risky sexual contact than their single counterparts.  So while married men improve their health and life span by being faithful to their wives, there is no comparable benefit in homosexual couples.

Frank Turek, Correct, NOT Politically Correct, p. 32

Abortion Makes Man Into Meat

We have paid some high prices for the technological conquest of nature, but none perhaps so high as the intellectual and spiritual costs of seeing nature as mere material for our manipulation, exploitation and transformation.  With the powers for biological engineering now gathering, there will be splendid new opportunities for a similar degradation in our view of man.  Indeed, we are already witnessing the erosion of our idea of man as something splendid or divine, as a creature with freedom and dignity.  And clearly, if we come to see ourselves as meat, then meat we shall become.

Dr. Leon R. Kass, “Making Babies—The New Biology and the ‘Old’ Morality,” The Public Interest (Winter, 1972, p.53), as cited by John Powell, S.J.,  Abortion: the Silent Holocaust, p.40

What Homosexuals Want

What homosexuals want is not simply legal recognition but moral sanction.  How better to quiet one’s conscience and morally justify an immoral act than by getting public approval through law?

F. LaGard Smith, Sodom's Second Coming, p.34

We Are Back In Rome

Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-1788) said that the following five attributes marked Rome at its end: first, a mounting love of show and luxury (that is, affluence); second, a widening gap between the very rich and the very poor (this could be among countries in the family of nations as well as in a single nation); third, an obsession with sex; fourth, freakishness in the arts, masquerading as originality, and enthusiasms pretending to be creativity; fifth, an increased desire to live off the state.  It all sounds so familiar.  We have come a long road since our first chapter, and we are back in Rome.


Francis A. Schaeffer, How Should We Then Live?, p.227 (1976)

Ramifications of Roe V. Wade

Today’s quote is quite lengthy, but entirely necessary if the reader is to get the full depth of understanding of the subject.

[The Supreme Court ruling on abortion] is not only arbitrary medically but legally.  The ruling set up an arbitrary absolute by disregarding the intent of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments of the Constitution.  Quoting Professor [Joseph P.] Witherspoon:

Thus, the failure of the Court in Roe v. Wade to have examined into the actual purpose and intent of the legislature in framing the fourteenth amendment and the thirteenth amendment to which it was so closely related and supplementary thereof when it was considering the meaning to be assigned to the concept of “person” was a failure to be faithful to the law or to respect the legislature which framed it.  Careful research of the history of these two amendments will demonstrate to any impartial investigator that there is overwhelming evidence supporting the proposition that the principal, actual purpose of their framers was to prevent any court, and especially the Supreme Court of the United States, because of its earlier performance in the Dred Scott case, or any other institution of government, whether legislative or executive, from ever again defining the concept of person so as to exclude any class of human beings from the protection of the Constitution and the safeguards it established for the fundamental rights of human beings, including slaves, peons, Indians, aliens, women, the poor, the aged, criminals, the mentally ill or retarded, and children, including the unborn, from the time of their conception.

Supreme Court Justice White in his dissent to the Court’s action stated, “As an exercise of raw judicial power, the Court perhaps has authority to do what it does today; but in my view its judgment is an improvident and extravagant exercise of the power of judicial review that the Constitution extends to this Court.”  Upon this arbitrary ruling medically and legally, the Supreme Court invalidated the law on this subject of abortion of almost every one of the states in the union.

Further, this arbitrary decision is at complete variance with the past Christian consensus.  In the pagan Roman Empire, abortion was freely practiced, but Christians took a stand against it.  In 314 the Council of Ancyra barred from taking of the Lord’s Supper for ten years all who procured abortions or made drugs to further abortions.  Previously the Synod of Elvira (305-306) had specified excommunication till the deathbed for these offenses.  The arbitrary absolutes of the Supreme Court are accepted against the previous consensus of centuries, as well as against past law.  And (taking abortion as an example) if this arbitrary absolute by law is accepted by most modern people, bred with the concept of no absolutes but rather relativity, why wouldn’t arbitrary absolutes in regard to such matters as authoritarian limitations on freedom be equally accepted as long as they were thought to be sociologically helpful?  We are left with sociological law without any certainty of limitation.  

By the ruling of the Supreme Court, the unborn baby is not counted as a person.  In our day, quite rightly, there has been a hue and cry against some of our ancestors’ cruel viewing of the black slave as a non-person.  This was horrible indeed—an act of hypocrisy as well as cruelty.  But now, by an arbitrary absolute brought in on the humanist flow, millions of unborn babies of every color of skin are equally by law declared non-persons.  Surely this, too, must be seen as an act of hypocrisy.

The door is open.  In regard to the fetus, the courts have arbitrarily separated “aliveness” from “personhood,” and if this is so, why not arbitrarily do the same with the aged?  So the steps move along, and euthanasia may well become increasingly acceptable.  And if so, why not keep alive the bodies of the so-called neo-morts (persons in whom the brain wave is flat) to harvest from them body parts and blood, when the polls show that this has become acceptable to the majority?  Dr. Willard Gaylin (1925- ) discussed this possibility in Harper’s (September 1974) under the title, “Harvesting the Dead.”  Law has become a matter of averages, just as the culture’s sexual mores have become only a matter of averages.  

As the Christian consensus dies, there are not many sociological alternatives.  One possibility is hedonism, in which every man does his own thing.  Trying to build a society on hedonism leads to chaos.  One man can live on a desert island and do as he wishes within the limits of the form of the universe, but as soon as two men live on the island, if they are to live in peace, they cannot both do simply as they please.  …

A second possibility is the absoluteness of the 51-percent vote.  In the days of a more Christian culture, a lone individual with the Bible could judge and warn society, regardless of the majority vote, because there was an absolute by which to judge.  There was an absolute for both morals and law.  Bu to the extent that the Christian consensus is gone, this absolute is gone as a social force.  Let us remember that on the basis of the absoluteness of the 51-percent vote, Hitler was perfectly entitled to do as he wished if he had the popular support.  On this basis, law and morals become a matter of averages.  And on this basis, if the majority vote supported it, it would become “right” to kill the old, the incurably ill, the insane—and other groups could be declared non-persons.  No voice could be raised against it. . . .

Here is a simple but profound rule:  If there are no absolutes by which to judge society, then society is absolute.

Francis A. Schaeffer, How Should We Then Live?, p.221-224 (1976) (emphasis in the original)