Medicating Behavior Problems Creates More Problems

By the [year 2000], an estimated 4 million American children were on [Ritalin] and doctors were issuing 11 million prescriptions for it each year.  In some schools, the proportion of students on Ritalin and similar stimulants has reached 30 or 40 percent.  America consumes nearly 90 percent of the world’s production of Ritalin, and the drug is now routinely prescribed for children below the age of three, despite the fact that it is only approved for use on children age six or older.  Pharmacologically related to cocaine, Ritalin is a potentially dangerous drug that can have serious side effects, including psychotic reactions.

Medical doctors as well as educators are apparently finding it hard to resist the lure of the materialistic quick fix offered by Ritalin and other psychiatric drugs.  Treating a behavior problem as solely a physical disorder of the brain is much simpler than trying to investigate a child’s dysfunctional relationships.  It also avoids the messy situation of having to get people to accept responsibility for their actions.  In the biological model, the child need not accept responsibility for his misbehavior because he is ultimately controlled by his disordered brain chemistry.  Similarly, educators need not take responsibility for creating a stimulating learning environment, because student boredom must be cause by organic brain disease rather than, say, the curriculum.  Above all, parents need never feel guilty about failing in their obligations as mothers and fathers, because in the biological model parents’ actions are unrelated to their children distress.

“When we diagnose and drug our children, we disempower ourselves as adults,” Peter Breggin testified at congressional hearings in 2000. “While we may gain momentary relief from guilt by imagining that the fault lies in the brains of our children, ultimately we undermine our ability to make the necessary adult interventions that our children need.”

John G. West, "Darwin Day in America: How our politics and culture have been dehumanized in the name of science," p.99

The World Hates Us

The world is unrelenting in its hostility to us, and determined to wipe out every divine principle for which we stand.  It seeks to supplant creationism with evolution.  It denies the sacredness of human life by abortion.  It achieves the breakdown of the family unit by divorce for any reason.  The purity of the marriage relationship is denied by premarital sex.  Homosexuality and lesbianism are looked on as acceptable alternative lifestyles.  God’s chain of command in the home and in the church is ridiculed by militant feminism.  Church and state are so separated as to band the mention of God and Christ from public life entirely.  Obscenity, pornography, nakedness, filth, and violence are treated with amiable tolerance.  And so, drugged and insensate, the world defies every law of God and hurtles on to its fiery doom.

William MacDonald, Worlds Apart, cited in The Berean Call, March 1994, “Quotable”

“Gays” and Child Sexual Abuse

The 98 percent of the population which is heterosexual accounts for somewhat more child abuse than the 2 percent which is homosexual.  However, that 2 percent tiny minority consistently accounts for one-third to one-half of all sexual child abuse, which it considers to be normal behavior.  A primary goal of the National Gay Task Force (NGTF) is the removal of all age-of-consent laws.  The most extensive study done to dated of male sexual child abusers reveals that the average homosexual victimized 7.5 times as many boys as the average heterosexual did girls.

The Berean Call, May 1993, “Q&A”

Rights Require Responsibility

Inherent in individual freedom and rights is the concept of individual responsibility.  In recent years the latter has been virtually ignored, especially in the United States, where the concept of rights is so heavily accented that little or no emphasis is given to individual responsibility.  Rarely does one hear people — for instance, teachers in schools — talk about the necessity of individual responsibility.  Yet people’s rights and freedom cannot be divorced from their responsibilities without eventually destroying both.

Alvin J. Schmidt, Under the Influence: How Christianity Transformed Civilization, p. 260

Minimum Wage Laws Kill Jobs

The last year in which black unemployment was lower than white unemployment - 1930 - was also the last year in which there was no federal minimum wage law.  The Davis-Bacon Act of 1931 was openly advocated by some members of Congress on grounds that it would stop black construction workers from taking jobs from white construction workers by working for less than the union wages of white workers.  Nor was the use of minimum wage laws to deliberately price competing workers out of labor market unique to the Davis-Bacon Act or to the United States.  Similar arguments were made in Canada in the 1920s, where the object was to price Japanese immigrants out of the labor market, and in South Africa in the era of apartheid, to price non-whites out of the labor market.

Any group whose labor is less in demand, whether for lack of skills or for other reasons, is disproportionately priced out of labor markets when there are minimum wage laws, which are usually established in disregard of differences in skills or experience.  It has not been uncommon in Western Europe, for example, for young people to have unemployment rates above 20 percent.

Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society, pp.450-451

Is War Ever a "Good" Thing?

The question one might pose to the postmodern skeptic who wonders whether war can ever be a good thing is “Would it be a demonstration of goodness to show no opposition to evil?”  Can we approve of a government that offers no resistance to the criminal, whether burglar, rapist, murderer, or child abuser?  This is an important question because both the Old and New Testaments present a portrait of a moral God who judges evil.  One of the means of God’s judgment in the pages of the Old Testament is war.  It is extremely important to note at this point that God’s chosen people, the Israelites, are not always the ones who bring about God’s will on the battlefield.  In fact, they are often on the receiving end of his judgment, finding themselves massacred and enslaved just as at other times they are militarily victorious over other powers. . . .

If God allows and orders war in the Old Testament, then the nature of God as just determines that there must be such a thing as a just war, since God cannot order what is immoral.

Amy Orr-Ewing, “Postmodern Challenges to the Bible,”  in Beyond Opinion, by Ravi Zacharias, author and general editor, p.14, 20

Pedophilia is Not Disordered?!?

In 1994, with little or nor public outcry, the American Psychiatric Association revised its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) so that neither pedophilia nor child molestation would, in itself, necessarily be indicative of psychological disorder.  To qualify as disordered, molesters must feel “anxious” about the acts or be “impaired” in their work or social relationships.  With little media reporting, and even less critical response from the psychological or psychiatric community, the American Psychiatric Association thus took the first step in changing perceptions of what have traditionally been regarded as among the most serious offenses in our society.

Anne Hendershott, The Politics of Deviance, p.91

Abortions Are For Convenience

There has been a very skillful public relations campaign form the powerful abortion lobby in this country to justify abortion.  That lobby has two major elements: intense ideological support from the Left who value radical individualism over all else, and significant financial backing from the beneficiaries of what is now a multibillion-dollar industry.  In fact, abortion is the most common elective surgical procedure currently performed in the U.S.  And 93 percent of all abortions in the United States are birth control (convenience) abortions.  They have nothing to do with rape, incest, health of the baby, or health of the mother.

Dr. Norman Geisler & Frank Turek, "Legislating Morality," p.149

If You Are A High Achiever, You Must Be "Privileged"

To think of some people as simply being higher achievers than others, for whatever reason, is a threat to today’s prevailing vision, for it implicitly places the onus on the lagging group to achieve more — and, perhaps more important, it deprives the intelligentsia of their role of fighting on the side of the angels against the forces of evil.  The very concept of achievement fades into the background, or disappears completely, in some of the verbal formulations of the intelligentsia, where those who turn out to be more successful ex post are depicted as having been “privileged” ex ante.

Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society, p.411

Majority Doesn't Mean Truth

As ten millions of circles can never make a square, so the united voice of myriads cannot lend the smallest foundation to falsehood.

Oliver Goldsmith,  cited by David A. Noebel in Understanding the Times, p.24

You Can't Avoid the Damage From Pornography

Whether you buy [pornography] or not, you will be greatly affected by those who do.  The aesthetic and moral environment in which you and your family live will be coarsened and degraded. . . . 

The externalities of depictions of violence and pornography are clear.  To complaints about those products being on the market, libertarians respond with something like “Just hit the remote control and change the channels on you TV set.”  But, like the person who chooses not to run a smelter while others do, you, your family, and your neighbors will be affected by the people who do not change the channel, who do rent the pornographic videos, who do read alt.sex.stories.  As film critic Michael Medved put it: “To say that if you don’t like the popular culture, then turn it off, is like saying if you don’t like the smog, stop breathing. . . . There are Amish kids in Pennsylvania who know about Madonna.”  And their parents can do nothing about it.

Can there be any doubt that as pornography and depictions of violence become increasingly popular and increasingly accessible, attitudes about marriage, fidelity, divorce, obligations to children, the use of force, and permissible public behavior and language will change?  Or that with the changes in attitudes will come changes in conduct, both public and private?  We have seen those changes already and they are continuing.

Robert H. Bork, Slouching Towards Gomorrah, p.151, 152

Diversity is a Crippling Weakness

Perhaps the most sinister and dangerous lie the left has beaten into the brains of unthinking Americans is that there is strength in diversity. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Diversity, as the first syllable in the word implies, divides. It does not unify. It fractures, debilitates, and diffuses. Energy that could be harnessed through unity of purpose and values is frittered away.

America became the greatest nation the world has ever known – freer, stronger, more prosperous, more stable – for one reason: an unshakable commitment to common core values and standards. That’s not diversity, that’s unity.

At the time of the founding, 99.8% of the population of our fledgling nation was Christian. And 98.4% of the population was Protestant. It is no exaggeration to say that the Protestant faith, particularly its moral values and its work ethic, made America what it became.

This fundamental spiritual unity also created a fundamental moral unity. Everyone agreed that the moral standards enshrined in the Ten Commandments were to be America’s guiding moral code.

We all worshiped the same God, the Creator God revealed on the pages of Scripture, and rejected spiritual counterfeits. We recognized the importance of language that was free from profanity. We recognized the importance of honoring parents. We affirmed the importance of marriage as the union of one man and one woman and stressed the importance of fidelity to the marriage covenant. We treated murder as a capital crime, punished theft, and punished perjury.

It was this common faith in Christianity and its Savior and our common adherence to a transcendent moral code that made America what it became. Our strength was not found in our diversity but in our unity.

When people migrated to America, regardless of their ethnic background, they came willing to embrace these transcendent values and leave behind customs and values that were contrary to these bedrock American principles.

Racial diversity is a strength only if it is subsumed under an overarching unity of values and purpose. Racial diversity at the expense of cultural unity, however, Balkanizes and divides. . . .

Because American unity is based on spiritual oneness (Christianity) and moral oneness (the Ten Commandments) all races and colors are welcome here if they embrace these fundamental values and are willing to become Americans rather than hyphenated Americans.

Our cultural unity is fraying to the point where the thread that ties us together is at its snapping point. Indeed, it may have frayed beyond repair. The one thing we can know is that those who are seeking to bring us back to spiritual and moral unity are doing the most important work any American can do.

Bryan Fischer, Diversity is Not a Strength But a Crippling Weakness, at Barbwire, 8/27/14

They Hate Christianity Because of Sex

For many, this all-consuming obsession with denying God, Judeo-Christian values, and our own immortal souls centers on one thing only.  Do you know what it is?  Do you know what the source is for most of the hostility we see toward Christianity in today’s culture?  It doesn’t have to do with Jesus Christ’s admonition that we must love one another, feed the poor, or comfort the sick.  No one is threatened by those things.  Rather, at the root of so much loathing toward Christianity and the Bible is what they have to say about sex.

David Kupelian, How Evil Works, p.42

Gun Control Doesn't Stop Gun Crime

As gun control laws were made ever tighter in Britain toward the ned of the twentieth century, murder rates rose by 34 percent, while murder rates in Canada and the United States were falling by 34 percent and 39 percent, respectively.  Britain, with its strong anti-gun ideology among the intellectual and political elites, was an exception to international trends.  Meanwhile, Americans’ purchases of guns increased during this same period, gun sales surging “to a peak in 1993 of nearly 8 million small arms, of which 4 million were handguns.”  Far from leading to more murders, this was a period of declining murder rates in the United States.  Altogether, there were an estimated 200 million guns in the United States, and rates of violent crime have been lowest in those places where there have been the highest incidence of gun ownership.  The same has been true of Switzerland.

Yet none of this has caused second thoughts about gun control among either the American or British intelligentsia.  In Britain, both ideology and government policy have taken a negative view of other measures of self-defense as well.  Opposition to individual self-defense by law-abiding citizens extends even beyond guns or imitation guns.  A middle-aged man attacked by two thugs in a London subway car “unsheathed a sword blade in his walking stick and slashed one of them” — and was arrested along with his assailants, for carrying an offensive weapon.  Even putting up barbed wire around a garden and its shed that had been broken into several times was forbidden by local authorities, fearful of being sued if a thief injured himself while trying to break in.  That such a lawsuit would be taken seriously is another sign of the prevailing notions among British officials, operating in a climate of opinion created by the British intelligentsia.

Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society, p.285

Beware of the PTA

The PTA…now does not even bill itself as an educational association for parents, but rather as “children’s advocacy” organization run by parents in conjunction with teachers.  Indeed, it has become the parent-volunteer arm of that union behemoth, the National Education Association.  Not that the PTA was ever particularly dedicated to heeding local parent constituencies in the matter of educational policy; the organization was formed more than a century ago for purposes of “parent education” by the wealthy, prominent, “progressive” women known today as the foremothers of the turn-of-the-century “social reform” movement.

Dana Mack, The Assault on Parenthood: How Our Culture Undermines the Family, p.273-274

The Wedding Dress

To my readers:

While this blog is normally for fairly short, thought-provoking quotations, now and then I might find something a wee bit longer but still thought-provoking.  Today’s entry is because I’m cleaning out files and came across this article from the “Lutheran Woman’s Quarterly,” Winter 1993.  It’s an excellent analogy, written by Jeanette Haberstock, who at the time was a teacher from Yorktown, Saskatchewan.  Enjoy.

=====================================

Betty and Sally were lovely, vivacious teenagers.  They recently became interested in boys.  At first it was shy admiration.  Boy-girl friendships developed, and soon they began to date.

Betty had a good time dating.  There were always fun things to do, and she liked being young.  Boys respected her and enjoyed her company.  In her early twenties, Betty found that special guy, the one she knew she would want to marry.  Their love blossomed.  Sure enough, he “popped the question.”  An engagement ring was on her finger and wedding plans began.

Betty and her mother spent hours choosing just the right dress.  Betty was thrilled with the exquisite gown and hung it in the closet.

From time to time, her fiancé  Bob asked to see the wedding dress.

“Why don’t you dress up in your gown and show me how beautiful you look,” he suggested.  Betty was firm in her refusal.

“But, why not,” he continued.  “We’re getting married soon; it won’t hurt for me to have just a peek.  I’m curious.  After all, you are my bride, and I love you.”

“That’s just why I won’t show you.  I love you enough to not want to spoil your anticipation.  That’s part of the excitement of our wedding day.”

Bob loved Betty enough to abide by her wish.  As he stood at the altar and gazed at his approaching bride, he knew it was well worth the wait.  She was gorgeous, and she was all his!

Betty felt wonderful in her beautiful, white gown.  She only had eyes for her beloved groom.  She knew, with gratitude, she had saved this day for him, and they would spend a lifetime loving one another.

Sally, too, enjoyed her dating days.  Her mind immediately turned toward marriage when she had her first real boyfriend.  She approached her mother with a confidential request, “I want to buy a wedding dress.”

Her mother was astonishes, “You’re too young to get married, Sally.”

“It may not be for a while,” Sally assured her, “but I want to be ready just in case.”

No matter how here mother tried to discourage her, Sally insisted and finally got her way.  They depleted her special savings account and found a most beautiful wedding dress.  Sally stored it in her closet until the day she would wear it.

One day Sally took her boyfriend to her room.  He caught a glimpse of the gown in the closet.

“May I see it?” he asked.

“No, you’re not supposed to see it,” she said, embarrassed.

But her boyfriend kept on begging until she finally agreed.  “Okay,” she said, “but just this once.”  She let him have a quick look, and then put it away.  

The next time they were in her room, he thought again of the dress.  “Could I see it one more time?” he asked her lovingly, “it’s so lovely.”

Since it was no longer a secret, she took it out of the garment bag and even let him touch it.

The next week he urged her to wear the dress for him, so he could see how she looked.  It took a while to convince her, but she finally gave in, because he was so sweet about it.  How beautiful she looked!  He openly admired her as she gazed at her reflection in the mirror.  Time after time she put on the wedding dress for her boyfriend.  

One day he didn’t call or stop in.  A few days later she saw him with another girl.  Sally was devastated.  She had shared something so special with him, and he deserted her for someone else.

When Sally got over her broken heart, she began dating again.  This time she showed her new friend the dress after their first few dates.  It wasn’t long before she was wearing if for him.  One day they had a serious argument while she was wearing the gown.  The result was a rip in the dress, and a relationship that ended in bitterness.

Sally had man more boyfriends.  Each saw her in the dress.  By this time the gown had lost its newness and charm.  It became soiled and worn.

Finally Sally met the man she wanted to marry.  They fell in love and planned their wedding.  She wore her gown many times for Sam.

As the day approached, Sally asked her mom if she could by a new gown for her wedding.  

“Remember, it was your idea to get your gown early,” her mother reminded her.  “The money is spent, and the dress is soiled and torn.  You’ll have to get it dry cleaned and repaired.  You have no other choice.

The dress looked almost new as Sally came down the aisle and approached her beloved groom.  However, Sam looked a little bored as he watched his bride wear the same dress he had seen so many times.  Sally lacked some of the exuberance she hoped to feel.  She silently wondered why she had spoiled this most precious moment of her life.

Cougars Are Not Wicked

If we got here by a process of unaided materialistic evolution, then we are not significantly different from animals, and everyone knows that animals do not have moral choice.  We do not punish a cougar for snatching a rancher’s sheep for dinner.  That is what cougars do.  We may find a way of protecting the farmer’s assets but we do not consider the cougar wicked.  If we are qualitatively animals, then mugging little old ladies is just what some people do.  Labeling their actions as wicked makes no sense, and you cannot punish humans who have done nothing wicked any more than you can punish cougars.

Rabbi Daniel Lapin, America's Real War, p.52

Open Mind?

The cult of an open mind is a way of camouflaging the poverty of an education which has no view of life to communicate.

M.  C.V. Jeffreys,  cited in “An A - Z of Christian Truth and Experience,” by J. Graham Miller, p. 21

Why We Need Property Rights

The ultimate consummation of the legal trends toward reducing property rights as restrictions on government action came with the 2005 case of Kelo v New London, in which the Constitution’s provision that private property could be taken for “public use” was expanded to mean that such property could be taken for a “public purpose”.  While a public use would include such things as the government’s building a reservoir, a bridge, a highway or some other such facility, “public purpose” could mean almost anything -- and in the Kelo case it meant confiscating people’s homes to turn the property over to developers who would build various upscale facilities.

Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society, p.280

Are Morals Relative?

People cannot function for even a few hours without making moral evaluations.  This holds true even for those who insist that morality is relative.  The famous atheist Bertrand Russell once expounded his theory that good and bad have no objective validity — then minutes later fiercely denounced someone for being “such a scoundrel!”  Ironically, moral relativists often even pride themselves on being morally superior to others.  After all, they are tolerant and non-judgmental.  They are not like other people who are insufferably bigoted and close-minded and deserve the harshest condemnation.  Every group draws a line in the sand somewhere that allows them to feel morally superior, like the Pharisee in Jesus’ parable who thanked God he was not like other people (Luke 19:11).  Moral relativism may claim to be about tolerance and humility, but in reality it often fosters a highly moralistic, condemning attitude.


Nancy Pearcey, "Saving Leonardo: A Call to Resist the Secular Assault on Mind, Morals, & Meaning,"  p.43

American Children Are Over-Medicated

While the empirical evidence for this contention is slim, the biological model of mental illness has been widely accepted in both the medical and educational communities, and it has serious repercussions for how we deal with antisocial behavior in children.  Once it is assumed that the causes of all mental disorders must be physiological, it naturally follows that the prescribed cures should be physiological as well.  Accordingly, Dr. Koplewicz champions drug therapy for children with behavior problems, seeking to fix their supposed brain abnormalities through psychiatric medications.  He dismisses worries that doctors might overmedicate children.  “I actually think we’re not medicating kids enough,” he told one interviewer.

Peter Breggin views Koplewicz’s comments at the White House conference as a prime example of what is wrong with the biological model of psychiatry.  Insisting on reducing every thought and behavior to its material basis, the biological model goes against both common sense and empirical research.  Referring to Koplewicz’s claim that absentee parents and childhood trauma (presumably including physical and sexual abuse) play no role in causing mental disorders, Breggin says he was “shocked that anyone in the mental health field would dare deny the mountain of clinical and research evidence that confirms the devastating effect of broken relationships and traumatic events on the lives of children.”

Yet Koplewicz is not a fringe figure, as his prominent role at the White House conference attests.  Nor is he alone in thinking that Americans do not medicate their antisocial children enough.  During the past decade [1997-2007], the number of children receiving psychiatric medications in the Untied States has skyrocketed.


John G. West, "Darwin Day in America: How our politics and culture have been dehumanized in the name of science," p.98

Why the USA is Coming Apart

By moral standards a society is held together.  When moral standards loosen, a community or nation begins to come apart.

Robertson McQuilkin, An Introduction to Biblical Ethics, p.37

Group Rights Trump Individual Rights

Political, economic, and religious freedom can only exist where there is liberty and freedom of the individual.  Group rights that determine a person’s rights on the basis of belonging to a given ethnic or racial group, as presently advocated by multiculturalists and by affirmative action laws, nullify the rights of the individual.  Group rights greatly reduce the freedom of the individual in that his rights stem only from the group; if he does not belong to the group, his rights are curtailed.

“Individual rights and group rights,” says Balint Vazonyi, “are mutually exclusive; we cannot have it both ways.”  Ethnicity, race, sex, or party affiliation today increasingly determine the person’s rights.  This is reminiscent of Hitler, who once said, “The individual is nothing.  The group [the Nazi Party] is everything.”  When group rights get the upper hand, gone are the “unalienable rights” given to the individual by his Creator so admirably expressed in the American Declaration of Independence.  Indeed, the great documents of freedom…know nothing of group rights, and neither does Christianity.


Alvin J. Schmidt, Under the Influence: How Christianity Transformed Civilization, p. 259

The Power and Danger of the Psychobabblers

Mental health practitioners in conjunction with the mental health advocacy community and the pharmaceutical companies appear to have gained control over conceptualization of mental illness.  Because of the power we have given to "experts" to redefine deviant behavior as medical problems, our lives are increasingly controlled by a medical elite.  Dr. Paul McHugh is among the few psychiatrists who have decried this development.  As he says, "Whether treating the bored little boy in a crowded classroom, the oppositional teen, or the overworked and angry adult, today's psychiatrists are like 'mental cosmetologists' ever ready to chemically normalize any example of human psychological diversity that exceeds the current limits of social tolerance."

Last year [2001], doctors wrote more than 96 million prescriptions for serotonin reuptake inhibitors, a class of antidepressants including Paxil.  The practice of medicalizing deviance has encouraged the dangerous fantasy that life's every passing imperfection can be clinically diagnosed and alleviated, if not eliminated, by pharmacological intervention through pushbutton remedies.  Practitioners like McHugh, at the risk of being called "old fashioned," maintain that a model focusing on growth, maturity and responsibility is the only rational response to the disease model of deviance that threatens to diminish us all.


Anne Hendershott, The Politics of Deviance, p.63

The Erosion of Property Rights

Those who take this dismissive view of property rights not only promote their own vision but often also filter out the opposite vision of property rights, or distort it as just a defense of existing “entrenched wealth,” so that much of the public does not even learn what the issue is, making the question of how to resolve the issue moot.  Once property rights are reduced by verbal virtuosity to simply a special benefit for a privileged few, these rights are then seen as less important than benefits to the larger society.  It follows from this that property rights must often give way in clashes with other rights, when the issue is posed as opposing courts’ exalting “property rights over human rights” or posed as property rights versus “the public interest.”

Such arguments, however, make sense only within the framework of the vision of the anointed.  Otherwise, there is no clash between property rights and human rights because (1) property itself has no rights and (2) only human beings have rights.  Any clash is between different sets of human beings.  Property rights are legal barriers to politicians, judges or bureaucrats arbitrarily seizing the assets of some human beings to transfer those assets to other human beings.

Those who see surrogate decision-makers with both the right and the duty to make “income distribution” more equal or more just see property rights as a barrier that should not stand in the way of that over-riding goal.  As the ideas of the Progressive era intellectuals became dominant in the law schools and in the courts during the second half of the twentieth century, property rights have been eroded by judicial decisions, and the ability of government officials to over-ride the rights of property owners has been justified on grounds of a greater public interest, supposedly for the benefit of the less fortunate.  However, here as elsewhere, because certain notions fit the vision there has been remarkably little attention to whether they also fit the facts.

Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society, p.279

Life Begins at Conception

But now we can say, unequivocally, that the question of when life begins is no longer a question for theological or philosophical dispute.  It is an established scientific fact.  Theologians and philosophers may go on to debate the meaning of life or the purpose of life, but it is an established fact that all life, including human life, begins at the moment of conception.


Dr. Hymie Gordon, professor of medical genetics and physician at Mayo Clinic, as cited by Norman Geisler & Frank Turek in, "Legislating Morality," p. 156

Materialistic Societies Decay

Societies with strong spiritual values tend to generate economic value and expand. Societies with too materialistic values ultimately fall into disrepair and decay.  Those that have tried to abandon religious or theological support for moral values, which are the key to self-government, have generally declined into despotic deprivation.


Economist Warren Brookes, "The Key to Well-Being," The Washington Times, 12/25/89, p.D1, cited by David A. Noebel in Understanding the Times, p.15

Morality is Essential for Good Government

Morality is an essential soil for free and democratic government.  A people addicted to instant gratification through the vicarious (and sometimes not so vicarious) enjoyment of mindless violence and brutal sex is unlikely to provide such a soil.  A population whose mental faculties are coarsened and blunted, whose emotions are few and simple, is unlikely to be able to make the distinctions and engage in the discourse that democratic government requires.

Robert H. Bork, Slouching Towards Gomorrah, p.142

The Importance of Property Rights

Property rights are seen in radically different terms by those with the tragic vision and those with the vision of the anointed.  Those with the tragic vision of human flaws and failings see property rights as necessary limitations on the power of government officials to seize the belongings of the populace, whether for their own use or for dispersal as largesse to various constituencies whose political or financial support the politicians seek. ... Those who founded the United States of America, and wrote the Constitution, saw property rights as essential for safeguarding all other rights.  The right to free speech, for example, would be meaningless if criticisms of the authorities could lead to whatever you owned being seized in retaliation.

Economists have seen property rights as essential to (1) keeping economic decision-making in the hands of private individuals -- that is, out of the hands of politicians, and (2) maintaining incentives for private individuals to invest time, talents and resources, in the expectation of being able to reap and retain the rewards for their efforts.  However, those with the vision of the anointed, in which surrogate decision-makers are better equipped than others to make wise decisions, see property rights as obstacles to the achievement of various desirable goals through government action. Property rights simply protect those individuals fortunate enough to own substantial property from the greater interests of society at large, according to those with this vision.  Professor Laurence Tribe of the Harvard Law School, for example, said that property rights represent simply an individual benefit to “entrenched wealth.”

Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society, p.278

Teach Your Children Well

What is remarkable in our age is not that half of our citizens believe it is wrong to kill the child in the womb, the child whose existence, except in the rare case of rape, is owing to our own voluntary actions.  That would be like congratulating ourselves for believing that it's wrong to steal someone's car, to lie under oath to hurt an enemy, to throw our aged parents into the street, or to desecrate churches.  Where is the great moral insight?  What's remarkable instead is that half of us believe it is all right to snuff out the life of that child – because nothing must be allowed to interfere with our “right” to pursue pleasure, as we use the child-making thing as a sweating-off spa on our way to money, prestige, a five-bathroom mansion for two, a tenured chair in Women's Studies, the mayoralty of Camden, another year of nights out on the town, whatever.

How have we come to this pass?  Our imaginations are stunted or diseased, that's how.  Continue reading

Anthony Esolen, "Tracts and sermons alone won’t form pro-life children. Here’s what will." Lifesite News, 7/29/14

Don't Let Emotions Run Your Life

Having turned our backs on Judeo-Christian morality and the inner conscience that testifies to it, many of us rely on emotional feelings alone to guide our way through life.  So, if childhood problems cause us to grow up feeling uncomfortable as a man (or a woman), instead of looking within for understanding and healing, we undergo barbaric sex change operations, and “hormone therapy” and pretend we’re the opposite gender for the rest of our lives.  If we feel sexually attracted to the same gender, we convince ourselves this uprush of inner feeling — often rooted in something gone wrong in our formative years — is actually genetic, or God-ordained, or the expression of who we “really” are.  If we feel badly about having an unintended child growing inside us, instead of looking for a moral and life-affirming solution, we kill the child.

Of course, choosing what’s principled and perhaps self-sacrificial over our selfish feelings — that is, preferring something noble and higher over something ignoble and lower — implies there is a God, the source of the higher, was well as evil, the source of the lower.

But according to today’s secular, de facto atheistic worldview, there is no good or evil, no heaven or hell — we’re all just highly evolved animals.  If that’s true, however, there is just no logical reasons adults shouldn’t be able to have sex with children or whomever or whatever else they please.

David Kupelian, How Evil Works, p.40-41

A Problem with Day Care

The large body of research on separation anxiety in working mothers supports the view that maternal attachment increases with the time a mother spends with her baby, and decreases when she spends less time. Thus, programs that essentially relegate parents to the role of part-time caretakers [e.g. day care] may inadvertently subvert the parental competence and healthy family functioning they purport to promote.

Dana Mack, The Assault on Parenthood: How Our Culture Undermines the Family, p.186-187

"Social Justice" is a Misnomer

In so far as the nebulous phrase “social justice” might have any discernible meaning, it seems to be that merely formal justice is not enough, but must be either supplemented or superseded by a kind of justice based on desirable social results.  In any event, the rule of law - “a government of laws and not of men”- is the antithesis of results-oriented “social justice,” for the results are to be chosen according to the preferences of particular individuals empowered to pick and choose desirable outcomes, rather than applying rules known in advance to all and binding on both citizens and judges.

Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society, P.271

"Which God Shall We Serve?"

We are contemplating whether we should place God and biblical morality in a neat little box labeled ‘religion’ or, as our founding fathers did, regard God and biblical morality as the core value for all of life.   It is imperative to know whether our god is the GOD of all time or a god created in modern man’s image, a got to be used merely as a photo ob or to justify our “enlightened” positions.

Rabbi Daniel Lapin, America's Real War, p.49

Truth Cannot Be Divided

Those who hold to the divided concept of truth typically consider themselves open-minded and tolerant.  But in reality, they are imposing their own narrow, limited, culturally conditioned, secular view of truth on the rest of society.  Recovering the unity of truth is the key to renewal, both in the church and in the culture.

Nancy Pearcey, "Saving Leonardo: A Call to Resist the Secular Assault on Mind, Morals, & Meaning,"  p.42

Commerce Clause Abused by SCOTUS

Ever wonder how a federal law can prevent carrying a gun near a school?  Commerce clause.  Yep, a convoluted trail leading to the law being valid under the commerce clause of the Constitution.  Thomas Sowell cites Justice Stephen Breyer (on p.256 of “Intellectuals and Society”):

Possession of guns in schools means violence, and violence means poor education.  Poor education means an unproductive, noncompetitive workforce.  And that kind of workforce negatively affects not just one state but all states.  School violence, of which guns are a part, arguably presents a national problem warranting a national solution.

As Sowell points out, activist judges first decide WHAT they want to accomplish, and then wrangle the Constitution to accomplish their goals.

Evil of Eugenics

In a letter to the Human Betterment Federation of Des Moines in 1951, Margaret Sanger of Planned Parenthood urged that the unfit be sterilized, because their “children form our army of delinquents and become social burdens, ending their lives in institutions, such as reform schools and penitenturies [sic].”

By 1931, more than twelve thousand Americans had been sterilized under various state laws, a figure that rose to more than sixty thousand by 1958.


John G. West, "Darwin Day in America: How our politics and culture have been dehumanized in the name of science," p.88

Welfare Becomes Slavery

State welfare…tends to create a permanently dependent class, really a new type of slavery.  The essence of slavery is being dependent on someone or some entity for one’s livelihood, and all forms of slavery demoralize human beings.  Thus, enforced social welfare programs, which at first may appear altruistic and generous, are, in the long run, often detrimental.  As George Gilder says, “Excessive welfare hurts its recipients, demoralizing them or reducing them to an addictive dependency that can ruin their lives.”

Alvin J. Schmidt, Under the Influence: How Christianity Transformed Civilization, p. 146-147

"Brain Dysfunction" is Only in the USA

Not surprisingly, the use of Ritalin in the United States has increased by more than 700 percent since 1990, as more than six million children between the ages of 3 and 18 have been labeled mentally ill and medicated with the psychotropic drug.  No other country in the world diagnoses its children with mental illness in this way.  Only American children appear to be suffering from an epidemic of “brain dysfunction” that has not yet begun to affect the children of Europe or Asia or Africa.  Today, more than 90 percent of the world’s supply of Ritalin is being used on American children. … 

In addition to Ritalin, there has been an increase in the use of other psychotropic drugs on children.  Between 1995 and 1999, stimulant drug use went up 23 percent.  The use of Prozac-like drugs for children under 18 went up 74 percent; in the 7-12 age group it rose 151 percent; for children under 6 it climbed up an astonishing 580 percent.  For children under 18 the use of mood stabilizers is up 4,000 percent and the use of new antipsychotic medications such as Risperdal has grown nearly 300 percent. . . .

A diagnosis of a brain dysfunction, moreover, removes any responsibility for the child’s behavior from the parents.  It is not their fault that their child is unhappy, is doing poorly in school, and cannot sit still in class; it is the child’s faulty brain function.  And so parents embrace a chemical shortcut to the behavior modification that in the past was recognized as a family duty.

Anne Hendershott, The Politics of Deviance, p. 51, 52

Is Your Reason Replaced By Emotion?

There is a big difference between processing information on a printed page and assimilating data conveyed through a series of moving pictures.  Images have a way of evoking an emotional response.  Pictures are effective at pushing rational discourse — linear logic — into the background.  The chief aim of television is to sell products and entertain audiences.  Generally speaking, television seeks to provide emotional gratification.  As a visual medium, its programming is designed to be amusing.  Substance gives way to sounds and sights.  Stirring feelings obscure hard facts.  Dramatic images drown out important issues.  Emotion replaces reason.

Arthur W. Hunt III, “Tomorrowland:  The Future Is Here — Isn’t It Mesmerizing?”  Christian Research Journal, Vol. 23/No. 1, p. 38

Activist Judges Make the U.S.A an Oligarchy

While there are many controversies over particular aspects of the law, the most fundamental controversy has long been over who should control the law and who should change the law.  American intellectuals, since at least the middle of the twentieth century, have overwhelmingly favored expansion of the role of judges, beyond that of applying laws created by others, to themselves remaking the law to “fit the times” - which is to say, making the law fit the prevailing vision of the times, the vision of the anointed intellectuals.

Where the Constitution of the United States is a barrier to this expanded role of judges, then judges have been urged to “interpret” the Constitution as a set of values to be applied as judges choose, or updated as they think appropriate, rather than as a set of specific instructions to be followed.  That is what “judicial activism” means, though verbal virtuosity has managed to confuse that meaning with other meanings.

Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society, p.254

Common Sense and Homosexuality

Virtually all societies throughout history have condemned homosexuality.  Why is this true?  How plausible is it to assume that virtually every society in the history of mankind has come to the same conclusion about homosexuality by chance?  Statistically, the chances of this conclusion are infinitesimal.  It is much more plausible to believe that they have come to the same conclusion because they've all been endowed with the same self-evident moral values, which are derived from the standard we've been calling "the Moral Law."  In other words, societies throughout history have condemned homosexuality precisely because this moral intuition has evoked a sense of guilt in those who practice it.

Dr. Norman Geisler & Frank Turek, "Legislating Morality," p.149

Intellectuals and Violence

The hideous crimes committed in Cambodia from April 1975 onwards, which involved the deaths of between a fifth and a third of the population, were organized by a group of Francophone middle-class intellectuals known as the Angka Leu ("the Higher Organization").  Of its eight leaders, five were teachers, one a university professor, one a civil servant and one an economist....

The association of intellectuals with violence occurs too often to be dismissed as an aberration.  Often it takes the form of admiring those"men of action" who practise violence.  Mussolini had an astonishing number of intellectual followers, by no means all of them Italian.  In his ascent to power, Hitler consistently was most successful on the campus, his electoral appeal to students regularly outstripping his performance among the population as a whole.  He always performed well among teachers and university professors.  Many intellectuals were drawn into the higher echelons of the Nazi Party and participated in the more gruesome excesses of the SS.  Thus the four Einsatzgruppen or mobile killing battalions which were the spearhead of Hitler’s "final solution" in Eastern Europe contained an unusually high proportion of university graduates among the officers.  Otto Ohlendorf, who commanded "D" Battalion, for instance, had degrees from three universities and a doctorate in jurisprudence.  Stalin, too, had legions of intellectual admirers in his time, as did such post-war men of violence as Castro, Nasser and Mao Tse-tung.

Paul Johnson, “Intellectuals,” cited by Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society p.236-237

The Ten Cannots

You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift. 

You cannot help small men by tearing down big men. 

You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. 

You cannot lift the wage-earner by pulling down the wage-payer. 

You cannot help the poor man by destroying the rich. 

You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than your income. 

You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred. 

You cannot establish security on borrowed money. 

You cannot build character and courage by taking away men's initiative and independence. 

You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves.

William Boetcker

A Pornographic Culture

Reflecting on where we have come, Maggie Gallagher wrote: "Sex was remade in the image of Hugh Hefner; Eros demoted from a god to a buffoon.  Over the last thirty years, America transformed itself into a pornographic culture."  Gallagher accepted Angela Carter's definition, stated in somewhat more basic Anglo-Saxon, that pornography is basically propaganda for fornication, and offered a definition of her own: "[A] pornographic culture is not one in which pornographic materials are published and distributed.  A pornographic culture is one which accepts the ideas about sex on which pornography is based."


Robert H. Bork, "Slouching Towards Gomorrah," p.138-139

Proper Sexuality Requires Proper Spirituality

Without the understanding of our spiritual origin and destiny - of who we are and what purpose our maker intended for us - we can't possibly understand sex and its intended role in our lives.  Instead, all we have driving us are the desires, the physical and emotional "needs," cravings, and compulsions we find welling up from within us.

Sometimes these desires are normal, the kind of sexual attraction to the opposite gender that God ordained, leading to bonding and marriage and children.  But for some of us, our sexual cravings are rooted in trauma, that is, generated from our emotional reactions to the cruelty, confusion, and seduction we've experienced along the path of life.  Remember, pain causes us to seek the relief of pleasure.


David Kupelian, How Evil Works, p.39

Sex "Education" Increases Sexual Immorality

For over a decade before the introduction of comprehensive sexuality education in the early 1970s . . .  teen pregnancy rates had been falling.  But with the infusion of federal funds into comprehensive sex education, pregnancy rates rose rapidly.  In the late 1970s alone, the teen pregnancy rate rose from 88 to 111 per 1,000 women, and the percentage of girls between fifteen and nineteen years of age who had engaged in intercourse skyrocketed from 27.6 to 42.2.

What happened next makes it difficult to attribute those increases to other factors, such as the general loosening of sexual mores in the culture at large.  In the early 1980s, the Reagan administration blocked federal funding for comprehensive sexuality education and passed federal regulations requiring parental notification when contraceptive services were rendered to teenagers.  Teenage sexual activity and pregnancy rates dropped radically.  Among young black women, the group most vulnerable to early, out-of-wedlock childbearing, sexual activity rates fell by mid-decade to below pre-1971 levels.  As funding for comprehensive sex education resumed in the mid-1980s, pregnancy and teen sexual activity rates shot up once again. . . .

The crux of the problem with comprehensive sex education . . . was freewheeling classroom sex talk that broke down all barriers of social and sexual inhibition.  Inhibition . . . is the safety valve that keeps teenagers from the obvious risks of casual sexual involvement.

Dana Mack, The Assault on Parenthood: How Our Culture Undermines the Family, p.157-159

Culture War

This time the culture war, thankfully, is not a bloody one [referring to the Civil War].  That makes it no less a war that will, in the end, yield a victor and a loser.  The two ideas struggling for supremacy in society today cannot coexist.  One needs to dominate. What are these two ideas?

Reduced to their simplest elements, one idea claims that public adherence to biblical values and acceptance of traditional godly direction are essential for the continued existence of this country.  The opposing view is that such religion, while perhaps laudable for individuals, is an impediment to progress in the public arena.

What do I believe is meant by the phrase “culture war”?  Author Russell Kirk was once asked the source of humankind’s many cultures.  His reply was that they originally came from cults.  While the word “cult” has not taken on a negative connotation, it originally meant a joining together for worship — that is, the attempt of people to commune with a transcendent power.  Therefore, when we say that people are unified by a common culture, what we really mean is that they share the same general view of God and His expectations.  Conversely, when we speak of a culture war, we are referring to a great rift over the issue of God.  What does this have to do with most Americans?  The role of God in society is somehow similar to that of sewers, telephone lines and gas pipes.  We don’t see them running invisibly beneath our streets.  We seldom even think about them.  However, their sudden removal would dramatically and horribly impact our lives.  Likewise, we never used to think about the invisible structure of morality and logic that lay reassuringly beneath our culture.  Now, however, it is being ripped up.

Rabbi Daniel Lapin, America's Real War, p.45-46

Cultural Diversity?

To automatically and non-judgmentally celebrate cultural "diversity" is to refuse to confront consequences that can affect not only the lives of individuals but the fate of society as a whole.  However clever tactical agnosticism may be as an exercise in verbal virtuosity, would anyone say that Nazism was just Hitler’s "lifestyle"?  Or would the consequences be too overwhelming to be finessed aside with a few phrases?  Non-judgmentalism is one of the most dangerous of all the arguments without arguments, for no reason is given for being non-judgmental*, unless endless repetition or peer consensus are considered to be reasons.

*To justify non-judgmentalism would be to violate the premise of non-judgmentalism itself, for it would say it is not just different to be non-judgmental, but better.



Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society. p.225

In a moral Vacuum, Power and Doubt Rule All

One of the disastrous effects of allegedly morals-free legislation is that it tends to produce deep and widespread doubt in persons across the culture about what is right and wrong, which leaves only a resort to power as a way out of our moral dilemmas.  In a moral vacuum, power and doubt rule all.  Doubt makes us unsure of ourselves and our beliefs; power makes those who have it despotic rulers over those who do not.  Without morality in law, we know less well and less surely what is right.  If we are ignorant about what is right and wrong, we can raise no compelling argument against evil, or even know it when we see it.  Our ignorance makes it so.

Michael Bauman, “Separating Morality From Law,” Christian Research Journal, Vol. 21/No. 3, p.40

Moral Outcomes Need Previous Cultivation

Moral outcomes are not to be expected from a legal system into which morality was never programmed, never cultivated.  Except by the happiest of chances, moral results — in other words, just results — do not grow from a field in which those seeds were never planted and nurtured.  If a society neglects to plant morality in the legal code, they must not expect to harvest it in court, or in the character of those citizens whose moral nurture is provided partly by the laws of the society in which they are raised.

Michael Bauman, “Separating Morality From Law,” Christian Research Journal, Vol. 21/No. 3, p.39

Stupid Arguments For Free Birth Control

Okay, look. Back in the day, the Sexual Revolutionaries told the State to get out of their bedrooms. And they did. But now, they want everyone back in the bedroom—approving of whatever sexual expression is taking place and paying for pills and rubbers to ensure that all the sex they’re having stays nice and sterile. If we don’t want to pay for such things and make the apparently offensive suggestion that the women who desire them are independent enough to obtain these products for themselves, we get berated by women like Jessica Valenti of the The Guardian, who gravely informs her readers that, “The Hobby Lobby ruling proves men of the law still can't get over 'immoral' women having sex.” Uh, no. Actually, it proves that people like Jessica Valenti can’t get over the idea that she has to fund her own sex life.

Jonathon Van Maren, “The 3 stupidest arguments made by pro-aborts against the Hobby Lobby decision,” lifesitenews.com, 7 Jul 2014

Morality of the Law Becomes Morality of the People

The morality in the law, whatever it might be, tends to become the morality of the people.  Law is always a tutor to morals and a shaper of national character, both for good and ill.

Michael Bauman, “Separating Morality From Law,” Christian Research Journal, Vol. 21/No. 3, p.36

Don't Complain That Laws Are Morals-Based

People tend to complain that laws are morals-based only when the law in question is based upon a moral valuation with which they disagree.  To be consistent, those who object to morals-based laws would have to raise the same objection to all laws whatsoever, including the laws they themselves support.  But they do not.  They never do.  When their own morals are encoded in law, they raise not even the faintest whimper of protest.  Yet when laws are passed that they dislike, they say almost nothing else.

Michael Bauman, “Separating Morality From Law,” Christian Research Journal, Vol. 21/No. 3, p.22

Families with Mother and Father are Best

To say that marriage, for example, is just one of a spectrum of lifestyles that individuals may choose is not only to state an empirical fact but to evade the question of the consequences that follow from these various lifestyle choices, not only to the individuals who choose them but for others, including a whole society.  Marriage and other living arrangements, after all, can produce children -- people who did not have a choice of what kind of living arrangement to be born into and raised within.  Empirical consequences of raising children in different lifestyles include not only higher rates of poverty in single-parent homes and costs to taxpayers who end up having to support many children raised in such homes, but also other third parties who become victims of higher crime rates by people who were raised in single-parent homes.  When poverty rates among black married couples have been in single digits, every year since 1994, this suggests that some lifestyle choices are not only different from others but produce better consequences.

Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society, p. 224

Religious Parents Lose Their Children to the Culture

Parents invest enormous amounts of time, money, and emotional energy into raising their children, only to lose them to secular world views pounded into their minds through public education and the entertainment culture.  A study in Britain found that non-religious parents have a near 100% chance of passing on their views to their children, whereas religious parents have only about a 50/50 chance of passing on their views.

Nancy Pearcey, "Saving Leonardo: A Call to Resist the Secular Assault on Mind, Morals, & Meaning,"  p.13

Results of Evolutionism

Although eugenics is sometimes regarded as a perversion of Darwinian biology, Charles Darwin himself praised the idea of voluntary eugenic restrictions on marriage in The Descent of Man . . ., and his sons George and Leonard actively promoted the eugenics agenda, with Leonard becoming the president of the Eugenics Education Society, the main eugenics group in Great Britain.

But it was Darwin's cousin Francis Galton who is justly considered the founder of the modern eugenics crusade.  Inspired by The Origin of the Species, Galton set about to apply his cousin Charles' theory to the rise of human genius.  After researching the family connections of members of the British elite, Galton announced in articles and then in books that intellectual and artistic talent was largely hereditary.  Thus, if society wanted to guarantee its future improvement, it needed more children from the "fit" and fewer from the "unfit."  By the 1880s, Galton had coined the term eugenics (adapted from a Greek root meaning "good in birth") and was urging efforts to improve the race through better breeding.

While Galton stressed the need for positive eugenics (in order to cultivate the geniuses needed for society to thrive and progress), he also favored negative eugenic measures and thought that those deemed unfit could be segregated in institutions where they would not be allowed to reproduce.


John G. West, "Darwin Day in America: How our politics and culture have been dehumanized in the name of science," p.86-87

Abortion is Child Murder

I deplore the horrible crime of child murder . . . No matter what motive, love of ease, or a desire to save from suffering the unborn innocent, the woman is awfully guilty who commits the deed; . . . but oh! thrice guilty is he who for selfish gratification . . . drove her to the desperation which impelled her to the crime.


Susan B. Anthony,  "Marriage and Family," The Revolution, 8 July 1869, cited by Alvin J. Schmidt in "Under the Influence: How Christianity Transformed Civilization," p.60