The Power of Bad Ideologies

By the power of an ideology one does more than merely delight in such primitive emotions as hatred and love of violence.  No, with the help of an ideology one can perpetrate the most horrible mass atrocities on Jews, kulaks, or unborn infants in the sincere belief that one is benefiting mankind.

Joseph Keysor, “Hitler, the Holocaust, and the Bible,” pg. 234

Turning Tantrums Into Psychiatric Disorder

Child psychiatrists often dare to go where no one has gone before—and children wind up paying the price.  They keep inventing new ways to wildly over diagnose psychiatric illness in kids.  Perviously I mentioned a study that found 83 percent of kids qualify for mental disorder diagnosis by the time they are twenty-one.  Now the child researchers have taken it a step further—introducing a new DSM-5 diagnosis that may get the number even closer to 100 percent.  First called “temper dysregulation disorder,” then rechristened with the tongue-twisting “disruptive mood dysregulation disorder” (DMDD); the idea of turning temper tantrums into a mental disorder is terrible, however named.  We should not have the ambition to label as mental disorder every inconvenient or distressing aspect of childhood.

Allen Frances, M.D, "Saving Normal," p.177

Father and Child Bond is Important

The all-important bond between father and child is one of the crucial distinctions between man and animal.  All creatures maintain some kind of bond with their mothers; only humans recognize their fathers.  Which is why the growing number of young Americans who literally do not know their fathers is so troubling. 

Rabbi Daniel Lapin, "America's Real War," pg.185

Who Rules Over You?

H/T to J.L. Pattison

The Culture of Chastity-shaming

Fulton Sheen aptly diagnosed the modern sexual situation: “Sex is thought about as a medium of pleasure to such a degree that it has become an obsession.” Even in our sex-saturated culture, student organizations like the Love and Fidelity Network have formed in reaction to the college culture, which masks sexual libertinism in Slut Walks and speech against “slut-shaming”—efforts that often only lead to “chastity shaming” instead. Even women well versed in feminist theory find pop culture’s presentation of feminism unsatisfying, with its insistence on the bifurcation of the self—dividing the physical from the personal and the emotional from the sexual. . . .

The body is not merely our possession: It is a sacred property created and preserved by God. As temples of the Holy Spirit, created in the image of God, we are reflections of the divine. If our bodies were merely instruments, then pornography, sex trafficking, and slavery would be legitimate uses of the body. Yet as Fulton Sheen writes, “sex instinct in a pig and love in a person are not the same, precisely because love is found in the will, not in the glands—and will does not exist in a pig.”

To reduce our sexual being to a merely animalistic instinct is to diminish an integral aspect of the human person. Our sexual identity is bound up with much more than our glands: It is inseparable from our personalities, and most importantly, it is sanctioned by the will. The willed “yes” of spouses is so much more than sex between two animals. “One of the noblest projects of the race,” R.F. Trevett writes, “the subordination of the sexual passions to love and to generation through love—has been approved, ratified, consecrated, assumed into the union of Christ with mankind.” The human emotions tied to the sexual act go far beyond mere pleasure and pain, but instead include our most profound part: the spirit.

Samantha Schroeder, Personal Love and the Call to Chastity

Erotic Egotism and the Gift of Self

In today’s increasingly narcissistic culture, the focus on the ego is overwhelmingly pervasive. And the greatest victim of the age of narcissism is the family. The contraceptive mentality has become the scourge of Western civilization, creating a demographic crisis and poisoning modern man’s philosophical outlook. Contraceptives propagate erotic egotism, leading to its natural end—abortion, the deliberate destruction of a human life.

When sex begins and ends with the self, we make allowances for the technologies of narcissism: birth control pills, condoms, and abortions. This contraceptive attitude is fundamentally at odds with the attitude of true love: life-giving love as an expression of a full gift of self. “The body is a Temple of God,” writes Fulton Sheen; “with some modern minds, man is merely a beast.” Today’s cultural arbiters would have us believe that the deep spiritual communion of the conjugal act is merely sexual satisfaction for beasts. The contraceptive mentality violates the sanctity of the human person and the body as a temple.

Consider the outcomes of the two approaches. Viewing the body as a temple of God opens the way for a cultivation of both emotional and physical chastity, protected by prayer and bolstered by the promise of love while dating, and consummating your wedding night with a spouse who promises to love you until death. Viewing the body as a beast of pleasure embraces the pursuit of boundless sexual pleasures with strangers, protected by condoms and abortions, and maybe ending up married someday after you’ve sown your wild oats. Which story has a better ending?

Samantha Schroeder, Personal Love and the Call to Chastity

Addictions Can Not Be Cured as Diseases

Addiction treatment is a cash cow for the Psychology Industry, which has argued, in most cases successfully, that treatment of the “disease” ought to be covered by health insurance.  The state of Minnesota has declared alcoholism to be a treatable disease and adopted legislation against the firing of employees who are unable to perform their jobs because of drunkenness.  They must be treated at the employer’s (or insurer’s) expense, even though most of the data show treatment to be ineffective.  A survey of Fortune 500 companies indicated that 79 percent recognized that substance abuse was a “significant or very significant problem” in their organizations.  However, when asked whether the treatment programs did any good, “the overwhelming majority saw few results from these programs. In the survey, 87 percent reported little or no change in absenteeism since the programs began and 90 percent saw little or no change in productivity ratings.” . . . 

It seems that, whatever the results, addiction treatment is identifiably a business that ignores its failures.  In fact its failures lead to more business.  Its technology, based on continued recovering, presumes relapses. Recidivism is used as an argument for further funding rather than as evidence of an ineffective treatment.

Dr. Tana Dineen in, “Manufacturing Victims: What the Psychology Industry is Doing to People,” pg. 214-215

This demonstrates the whole problem of treating addictions as diseases — addictions are not illnesses, rather they are a result of poor choices and can be ended by choosing to end them.

Civics or Social Studies?

HT to Danny

How Would Same-Sex Fake Marriage Hurt You? #4

Your place of worship will be forced to hire homosexuals and play by new draconian rules that impose homosexuality.  A Catholic adoption charity recently closed its doors in Massachusetts rather than offer children to homosexual couples as the state mandated.  This new rule was the direct result of government-backed same-sex marriage.  Tolerance will become a one-way street—you need to tolerate and even advance homosexuality, but homosexual activists don’t need to tolerate your view.

Free speech and religion rights will be curtailed as opposition to homosexuality is criminalized as “hate speech” (as is now the case in Canada and Sweden).  This should wake up religious people who erroneously believe they ought not to be involved in politics.  Politics affects your ability to practice your religion!  Once same-sex marriage is approved, it will not be long before you will be fined or imprisoned for expressing any opposition to homosexuality.  People with religious moral convictions will be considered worse than racists.

Frank Turek, “Correct, NOT Politically Correct,” pg.54-55 (2008)

How Would Same-Sex Fake Marriage Hurt You? #3

Homosexual couples will be given legal preference to adopt due to their inability to procreate.  In other words, homosexuals will not be granted equal rights but superior rights—rights that will supersede your rights as a citizen.  Tragically, children will be treated as trophies that, in effect, validate homosexual relationships.

Your children will be indoctrinated, with or without your consent, to accept homosexual behavior and same-sex marriage as the moral and social equivalent of heterosexual behavior and marriage (we are seeing this in our public schools already, especially in California and Massachusetts.

Your workplace will attempt to indoctrinate you to the same ends—and if you refuse, you will either lose your job or not be considered a “team player.” (This is already happening through “diversity” training in many companies; it will become universal if same-sex marriage becomes law.)

Frank Turek, “Correct, NOT Politically Correct,” pg.53-54 (2008)

How Would Same-Sex Fake Marriage Hurt You? #2

Medical insurance premiums will rise to offset the higher health care costs associated with homosexual behavior (i.e., AIDS, colon cancer, hepatitis and other diseases) which will likely increase if we approve same-sex marriage.  Medical premiums would rise further if insurance companies are mandated to cover fertility treatments for lesbian couples (there’s sure to be some judge somewhere to order that!).

Employee benefits will be reduced as employers are mandated to spread their limited benefit dollars to include homosexual partners.  Limited benefit dollars given to homosexuals must come from somewhere; indeed, they are taken away from everyone else—married couples raising children.

Frank Turek, “Correct, NOT Politically Correct,” pg.53 (2008)

How Would Same-Sex Fake Marriage Hurt You? #1

Income taxes will be increased to make up for the marriage tax benefits given to homosexual couples and to pay for the social costs resulting from the increase in illegitimacy.  We provide financial benefits to married couples because they produce and care for children.  Why should homosexual couples get the same benefits as men and women raising children?  Moreover, providing financial incentives for homosexual unions would be doubly counterproductive.  First, taxpayers would be subsidizing, and thus encouraging destructive behavior.  Second, we then would pay for the results of that behavior in the form of increased medical and social costs.

Social Security taxes will be increased (or benefits decreased) in order to pay survivor support benefits to homosexual “widow” and “widowers.”

Frank Turek, “Correct, NOT Politically Correct,” pg.52-53 (2008)

How Could Same-Sex Fake Marriage Harm Children?

Same-sex marriage teaches children and their generation that marriage is merely about fulfilling adult sexual and emotional desire, nothing more.  Many approaches to and philosophies of heterosexual marriage already teach this, and same-sex marriage will only help solidify it.

Same-sex marriage—like easy divorce, cohabitation, pre- and extramarital sex, and unmarried childbearing—relativize family relationships.  It promotes a smorgasbord mentality for family life: choose what suits your tastes, and one choice is as good as another.  But no society has ever been able to sustain itself with such a view of family life.

Same-sex marriage will teach little boys that the idea of being a good family man—caring and sacrificing himself for one woman and their children—is not expected or even virtuous, but merely one lifestyle choice among many.  Same-sex marriage teaches our daughters that being committed to and helping socialize a husband and bearing and raising children with him is only one family lifestyle choice among many.

In short the entire meaning and significance of marriage itself, and what it means to be male and female, will be radically changed.  So will the choices and behaviors of those who grow up within that altered social context.

Glenn T. Stanton and Dr. Bill Maier, “Marriage on Trial: The Case Against Same-Sex Marriage and Parenting,” pg.55-56

Please Read and Learn!

HT to J.L. Pattison

Sex Should Never Be Casual

There is no possibility of having sexual intercourse without meshing a part of your non-physical self.  Sex is such a definite experience that a part of each of you remains forever a part of the other.  How many times and how casually are you willing to invest a portion of your total self and accept such an investment from another person, with no assurance that the investment is for keeps?

Stacy Rinehart and Paula Rinehart, “Choices,” pg.92 cited by Josh McDowell and Dick Day, "Why Wait?" p.258

Cohabiting Leads To Poor Relationships

Research is also discovering the process of cohabiting itself can influence couples to learn to communicate, negotiate, and settle differences in ways that are less healthy and honest than those of couples who didn’t cohabit before marriage.  This is probably because without a clearly defined relationship, the cohabiting couple can learn to be more controlling and manipulative with each other.  And this leads to relational resentment and mistrust.

Glenn T. Stanton, "The Ring Makes All the Difference," p.62

A True Solder

The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.

G.K. Chesterton

A Nation Cannot Survive Treason

HT to J.L. Pattison

Selling Souls for for Full Bellies

The Dragons in Our Culture

Dragons have a preference for the virgin flesh of maidens because they are not merely hungry but wicked. They desire the defilement of the pure and undefiled, the destruction of the virgin. Their devouring is a deflowering.  Parallels with human “dragons” in our own world are not difficult to discern. The war against the dragon is not, therefore, a war against a physical monster, like a dinosaur, but a battle against the wickedness we see around us in our everyday lives. We all face our daily dragons and we must all defend ourselves from them and hopefully slay them, which is only possible with the assistance of God’s grace which serves as a sort of St. George in the heart of man. The sobering reality is that we must either fight the dragons that we encounter in life or become dragons ourselves. There is no middle-path. No neutrality in this fight to the death is possible. We either fight the dragon or we become the dragon.

An additional problem is that we live in a dragon-culture, a culture of death, which pours scorn on the very concept of virtue and which has banned the very concept of “sin” from its vocabulary. Purity is equated with puritanism and is shunned. Chastity is ridiculed. And true marriage, in which the sexual union is united with the self-sacrificial desire for children, is being ripped apart. To make matters worse, Pride, the wickedest of sins, which rules the heart of every dragon, is now unfurled as an infernal banner and held aloft as a sign of the dragon’s war on Christian humility.

Joseph Pearce, “Rescuing Our Maidens from the Culture of Death.”  

Read the whole article!!

Coexist?

The Idea That Truth Is Not Absolute, But Relative, is a LIE

After undergoing relentless indoctrination by popular culture—movies, popular music, sitcom television programs, and network news, etc.—most Americans (yes, even many Christians) have become moral relativists, believing we ought not make any judgments at all on moral grounds.  Adultery, living together without benefit of marriage, homosexuality, no-fault divorce—all of these things are either protected “personal choices” or issues a person is seen as having no control over—“they were born that way”—and who are we to judge?  American sense of fairness has been exploited by “multicultural” moral relativists bent on brainwashing us to believe all personal choices are equal—that there are no truly right or wrong choices or lifestyles, just “different strokes for different folks.” . . .

While Americans generally may no longer hold tightly to “morality” in the sense that it was understood 50 years ago—i.e. chastity outside of marriage, marital fidelity, etc., we struggle valiantly to hold to our “values.”  We believe the powerful should not exploit the average man—think Enron.  The strong should not subjugate the weak—think rape and incest.  Minorities and women should be protected from the presumably racist, sexist majority.  The old should have their Medicare, the young should be provided with a good education. The handicapped should have special parking privileges, and slow learners should have Special Ed.  And perhaps our strongest value:  All children (those born at least) should be protected—from sexual predators to schoolyard bullies to low self-esteem. Yet, with Christianity discredited and Darwinian Evolution as the underpinning of our secular culture, we have no real basis for the “values” we hold dear, based, as they were, on “old-fashioned” biblical morality.  As the late, very popular evolutionist Stephen J. Gould pointed out in the PBS documentary A Glorious Accident, morals and values are about “oughts,” and the evolutionary process is not about “oughts.”  In Darwinian Evolution, the only thing that matters is surviving and reproducing.  The strong subjugate the weak, and that’s all there is to it. Nothing is right and nothing is wrong; nature knows only predator and prey. Yet, the majority of Americans accept as fact that we are mere products of evolution—that we clawed our way up the evolutionary chain by killing or subjugating the weak; but they also suppose we “ought” to behave in certain civilized ways that fly in the face of that belief!

Don and Joy Veinot, America At War With Herself, Midwest Christian Outreach blog

Roe v. Wade Unconstitutional

Roe v. Wade is the worst decision ever made by the Supreme Court.  It is the worst in terms of moral theory for obvious reasons.  The Court held that killing children in the name of freedom for women was more important than the freedom of the baby to live.  This decision is the worst in terms of constitutional theory as well.  The Justices really made a legislative decision, not a constitutional decision.  In order to make a constitutional decision, the Court has to base its decision on something written down in the Constitution.  There is nothing written in the Constitution which relates at all to a woman’s so-called “right to an abortion.”  Since the Court could not base its decision on any written provision in the Constitution, it is fair to conclude that seven Justices simply decided that abortion laws were bad laws.  Just as we believe the Bible (God’s written law) should guide our moral decision, so the written words of the Constitution should guide our Constitutional decisions and opinions.

Michael Farris, Esq., Constitutional Law for Christian Students, p.114

Comment:  This was written in 1995, but the Court’s ruling that same-sex fake marriage is a Constitutional right is just as much of a travesty as Roe v. Wade insofar as its destruction of society and for all the same reasons as Roe V. Wade.

Non-Believers Are Not Objective

Those who do not merely reject Christianity, but also refuse to admit the reality of any higher spiritual world, have no empirically verifiable data or laboratory experiments to substantiate their non-falsifiable faith opinions.  They imagine that they are objective, but they are not.  Others who do not dismiss the spiritual dimension altogether feel that it is beyond the boundaries of scholarly discourse.  It is so subjective, so impossible to prove, and leads so quickly into interminable discussions that have no end or benefit, that it is best discussed privately, if at all.  It certain has no place in a scholarly work, they will argue, the purpose of scholarship being to assemble facts and draw conclusions from those facts—conclusions which, if not certain, are at least plausible, clearly related to facts and evidence at hand.  According to this view, any effective analysis must be, as Kershaw claims, “confined to strictly scholarly parameters of analysis.”

Joseph Keysor, “Hitler, the Holocaust, and the Bible,” pg. 228

Humans Are NOT Animals

Regardless of how often fallen human beings seek to classify themselves as merely biological, they know on the basis of their common rationality, morality, and search for meaning that this is not the case.  No matter how many times Darwinians, for example, speak of humans as one more kind of animal, and no matter how many times some psychologists explain our behavior on the basis of evolutionary mechanisms, human beings know it just isn’t so.  We know there is something distinctive about us….

Russell D. Moore, “What Does the Bible Teach About Human Beings,” in The Apologetics Study Bible, p.795.

Communications and Truth

The speed of communication is wondrous to behold.  It is also true that speed can multiply the distribution of information that we know to be untrue.

Edward R. Murrow, cited in Special Features on DVD of “Good Night, and Good Luck.”

Dissent is NOT Disloyalty

We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty.  When the loyal opposition dies, I think the soul of America dies with it.

Edward R. Murrow, cited in Special Features on DVD of “Good Night, and Good Luck.”

More Wisdom?

Just because your voice reaches halfway around the world doesn’t mean you are wiser than when it reached only to the end of the bar.

Edward R. Murrow, cited in Special Features on DVD of “Good Night, and Good Luck.”

Don't Be An Accomplice

No one can terrorize a whole nation, unless we are all his accomplices.

Edward R. Murrow, cited in Special Features on DVD of “Good Night, and Good Luck.”

The Dislike of Truth

Most truths are so naked that people feel sorry for them and cover them up, at least a little bit.

Edward R. Murrow, cited in Special Features on DVD of “Good Night, and Good Luck.”