If God Does Not Exist

If God does not exist, they you are just a miscarriage of nature, thrust into a purposeless universe to live a purposeless life. …

If God does not exist, then nobody has any value. Only if God exists can a person consistently support women’s rights. For if God does not exist, then natural selection dictates that the male of the species is the dominant and aggressive one. Women would no more have rights than a female goat or chicken have rights. In nature whatever is, is right. …

If God does not exist, there can be no objection to using people as human guinea pigs. The end of this view is population control in which the weak and unwanted are killed off to make room for the strong.

William Lane Craig, “The Absurdity of Life Without God,” Radix, The Journal of the Apologetics Resource Center, January 2001, pg.31-35

Lawyers and “Rights”

It was inevitable that a culture that nourishes 70 percent of the world’s lawyers would be the one that would attempt to convert every desire into a right.

David F. Wells, “Our Dying Culture,” Radix, The Journal of the Apologetics Resource Center, January 2001, pg.15.

Want Marriage? Don't Cohabit

Because men and women differ somewhat in their sexual and mate-selection strategies, cohabitation often has a different meaning for each sex. Women tend to see it as a step toward eventual marriage, while men regard it more as a sexual opportunity without the ties of long-term commitment. A woman’s willingness to cohabit runs the risk of sending men precisely the wrong signal. What our grandmothers supposedly knew might well be true: If a woman truly wants a man to marry her, wisdom dictates a measure of playing hard to get.

David Popenoe and Barbara Defoe Whitehead, “Should We Live Together? What Young Adults Need to Know About Cohabitation before Marriage.”  A publication of The National Marriage Project, pg.15

Modern Marriage and Divorce

People used to marry not just for love but also for family and economic considerations, and if love died during the course of a marriage, this was not considered sufficient reason to break up an established union. A divorce was legally difficult if not impossible to get, and people who divorced faced enormous social stigma. In today’s marriages love is all, and it is a love tied to self-fulfillment. Divorce is available to everyone, with little stigma attached. If either love or a sense of self-fulfillment disappear, the marriage is considered to be over and divorce is the logical outcome.

David Popenoe and Barbara Defoe Whitehead, “Should We Live Together? What Young Adults Need to Know About Cohabitation before Marriage.”  A publication of The National Marriage Project, pg.10

What Culture Has Done

In the past thirty years [from 2002], with the advent of effective contraceptive technologies and widespread sexual permissiveness promoted by advertising and the organized entertainment industry, premarital sex has become widely accepted. In large segments of the population cohabitation no longer is associated with sin or social impropriety or pathology, nor are cohabiting couples subject to much, if any, disapproval. 

David Popenoe and Barbara Defoe Whitehead, “Should We Live Together? What Young Adults Need to Know About Cohabitation before Marriage.”  A publication of The National Marriage Project, pg.10

Cohabitation Not Good For Children

One of the greatest problems for children living with a cohabiting couple is the high risk that the couple will break up. Fully three quarters of children born to cohabiting parents will see their parents split up before they reach age sixteen, whereas only about a third of children born to married parents face a similar fate. ...

Parental break up, as is now widely known, almost always entails a myriad of personal and social difficulties for children, some of which can be long lasting. For the children of a cohabiting couple these may come on top of a plethora of already existing problems. Several studies have found that children currently living with a mother and her unmarried partner have significantly more behavior problems and lower academic performance than children in intact families.

David Popenoe and Barbara Defoe Whitehead, “Should We Live Together? What Young Adults Need to Know About Cohabitation before Marriage.”  A publication of The National Marriage Project, pg.8

Dangers of Cohabitation

Annual rates of depression among cohabiting couples are more than three times what they are among married couples. And women in cohabiting relationships are more likely than married women to suffer physical and sexual abuse. Some research has shown that aggression is at least twice as common among cohabitors as it is among married partners. Two studies, one in Canada and the other in the United States, found that women in cohabiting relationships are about nine times more likely to be killed by their partner than are women in marital relationships.

David Popenoe and Barbara Defoe Whitehead, “Should We Live Together? What Young Adults Need to Know About Cohabitation before Marriage.”  A publication of The National Marriage Project, pg.7

Cohabitation Is Mentally Harmful

Cohabiting couples report lower levels of happiness, lower levels of sexual exclusivity and sexual satisfaction, and poorer relationships with their parents. One reason is that, as several sociologists not surprisingly concluded after a careful analysis, in unmarried cohabitation “levels of certainty about the relationship are lower than in marriage.” 

David Popenoe and Barbara Defoe Whitehead, “Should We Live Together? What Young Adults Need to Know About Cohabitation before Marriage.”  A publication of The National Marriage Project, pg.6

The Effects of Cohabitation

The act of cohabitation generates changes in people’s attitudes toward marriage that make the stability of marriage less likely. Society wide, therefore, the growth of cohabitation will tend to further weaken marriage as an institution. An important caveat must be inserted here. There is a growing understanding among researchers that different types and life-patterns of cohabitation must be distinguished clearly from each other. Cohabitation that is an immediate prelude to marriage, or prenuptial cohabitation—both partners plan to marry each other in the near future—is different from other forms. There is some evidence to support the proposition that living together for a short period of time with the person one intends to marry has no adverse effects on the subsequent marriage. Cohabitation in this case appears to be very similar to marriage; it merely takes place during the engagement period. This proposition would appear to be less true, however, when one or both of the partners has had prior experience with cohabitation, or brings children into the relationship.

David Popenoe and Barbara Defoe Whitehead, “Should We Live Together? What Young Adults Need to Know About Cohabitation before Marriage.”  A publication of The National Marriage Project, pg.6

Cohabitation Makes Marriage Less Successful

The results of several studies suggest that cohabitation may change partners’ attitudes toward the institution of marriage, contributing to either making marriage less likely, or if marriage takes place, less successful. A 1997 longitudinal study conducted by demographers at Pennsylvania State University concluded, for example, “cohabitation increased young people’s acceptance of divorce, but other independent living experiences did not.” And “the more months of exposure to cohabitation that young people experienced, the less enthusiastic they were toward marriage and childbearing.”

David Popenoe and Barbara Defoe Whitehead, “Should We Live Together? What Young Adults Need to Know About Cohabitation before Marriage.”  A publication of The National Marriage Project, pg.5

Cohabitation Gives No Contribution to Marriage

No positive contribution of cohabitation to marriage has ever been found. The reasons for a negative “cohabitation effect” are not fully understood. One may be that while marriages are held together largely by a strong ethic of commitment, cohabiting relationships by their very nature tend to undercut this ethic. Although cohabiting relationships are like marriages in many ways--shared dwelling, economic union (at least in part), sexual intimacy, often even children--they typically differ in the levels of commitment and autonomy involved. According to recent studies, cohabitants tend not to be as committed as married couples in their dedication to the continuation of the relationship and reluctance to terminate it, and they are more oriented toward their own personal autonomy.

David Popenoe and Barbara Defoe Whitehead, “Should We Live Together? What Young Adults Need to Know About Cohabitation before Marriage.”  A publication of The National Marriage Project, pg.5

Homosexual Privilege

I would submit the real problem today, in our culture and in our politics, is not in fact white privilege but homosexual privilege. Despite their constant claims to martyrdom and victimhood, homosexuals have an entire array of privileges and powers that are based exclusively on their private sexual preferences, and they are privileges and powers that normal people do not possess. Homosexuals must be catered to by wedding vendors and be catered to in housing and employment, or those who refuse to cater to them will be demonized, vilified, and sued until they’re broke or out of business.  Today homosexuals belong to the most pampered, protected, favored, privileged demographic in all of America. . . . 

Homosexuality was once rightly known as “the love that dare not speak its name.” Those days are long gone. Now it is not a career-killer but a resume enhancer. Due to the decaying morals of the Republic, we have now made it possible for a man to boldly sin his way right into the White House.

Bryan Fischer, "The Problem Isn’t White Privilege, It’s Homosexual Privilege.”

When the Sexual Fence is Removed

The idea of sexual activity being limited to marriage, always defined as male-female, has been a fence erected in all civilizations around the globe. Throughout history, many people have climbed over the fence, engaging in premarital, extramarital and homosexual sex. Still, the fence stands; the limits are visible to all. Climbing over the fence, metaphorically, has always been recognized as a breach of those limits, even by the breachers themselves. No civilization can retain its vitality for multiple generations after removing the fence.

John R. Diggs, Jr., M.D., “The Health Risks of Gay Sex,” Corporate Research Council paper

Financing AIDS Detracts From More Important Issues

The impact of the health consequences of gay sex is not confined to homosexual practitioners. Even though nearly 11 million people in America are directly affected by cancer, compared to slightly more than three-quarters of a million with AIDS, AIDS spending per patient is more than seven times that for cancer. The inequity for diabetes and heart disease is even more striking. Consequently, the disproportionate amount of money spent on AIDS detracts from research into cures for diseases that affect more people.

John R. Diggs, Jr., M.D., “The Health Risks of Gay Sex,” Corporate Research Council paper

Encouraging Risky Sexual Behavior Is Unethical

Encouraging people to engage in risky sexual behavior undermines good health and can result in a shortened life span. Yet that is exactly what employers and government entities are doing when they grant GLB couples benefits or status that make GLB relationships appear more socially acceptable.

John R. Diggs, Jr., M.D., “The Health Risks of Gay Sex,” Corporate Research Council paper.

Spousal Benefits Should Be Reserved for REAL Marriage

The continued extension of spousal benefits to domestic partners further erodes the status and practice of marriage, ultimately reducing the well-being of children, increasing taxpayer costs, and retarding workforce productivity and economic progress. Domestic partnership benefits do not fulfill a large, unmet social need, but instead operate primarily on the symbolic level, as a signal that these relationships are marriage equivalents. …

Given the powerful advantages of marriage in protecting the well-being of children and the productivity of adults, responsible executives should be reluctant to embrace policies that suggest or imply to workers, their lovers, or their children that cohabitation is the functional equivalent of marriage, or that children do not really need both mothers and fathers.

Maggie Gallagher, “Why Supporting Marriage Makes Business Sense.”  Corporate Research Council paper.

Cohabitation Is Not Like Marriage

Living together is not just like marriage because marriage is not just a piece of paper. Marriage is a powerful social institution that changes the way adults behave towards each other and their children.  But institutions have this power only when their boundaries are protected. If society begins to treat other relationships as the equivalent of marriage, marriage loses some of it social power, especially the power to signal to young people and prospective parents that this particular kind of relationship—a lifelong legal and public commitment joining mothers and fathers in one family unit—is the most socially responsible and desirable context for having children.

Maggie Gallagher, “Why Supporting Marriage Makes Business Sense.”  Corporate Research Council paper.

When the LEFT Can’t Win Politically

[M]ost political scandals, sooner or later, are transformed into legal dramas. As legal dramas, scandals become understood in non-partisan terms. The way in which they are resolved can have decisive political impacts, but those in charge of resolving them are the “neutral” prosecutors, judges, and bureaucrats who make up the permanent (and unelected) government, not the people’s elected representatives. To resort to scandal in this way is thus a tacit admission that the scandalmongers no longer believe they are able to win politically. To paraphrase Clausewitz, scandal provides the occasion for politics by other means.

John Marini, Politics by Other Means: “The Use and Abuse of Scandal,” Hillsdale College, Imprimis, March 2019.

Marriage Protects Children

Marriage is a powerful protector of children. Children raised by their own two married parents live longer, are physically healthier, and show fewer signs of emotional distress and mental illness, than children in other family forms, even after controlling for race, income, and family background. They are mores likely to succeed in school and on the job. They are less likely to commit crimes, abuse alcohol or illegal drugs, engage in premature and promiscuous sex, have children out of wedlock, commit suicide and drop out of high school. 

Maggie Gallagher, “Why Supporting Marriage Makes Business Sense.”  Corporate Research Council paper.

An Importance of Boys Being Raised in Intact Marriages

Boys raised in single-parent homes are about twice as likely (and boys raised in step-families three times as likely) to have been incarcerated by the time they reach their early thirties. Teens raised outside of intact marriages are more apt to develop beliefs such as “most things that people call ‘delinquency’ don’t really hurt anyone” and “It is all right to get around the law if you can get away with it.” Combined with lower levels of parental supervision, these attitudes set the stage for delinquent behavior.

Maggie Gallagher, “Why Supporting Marriage Makes Business Sense.”  Corporate Research Council paper.

Marriage Reduces Tax Expenditures

Divorced and unmarried childbearing create substantial taxpayer costs, born by the public at large. Higher rates of crime, drug abuse, education failure, chronic illness, child abuse, domestic violence, and poverty lead to higher public outlays for a wide array of programs: e.g. welfare, food stamps and Medicaid, increased remedial and special education, high day-care subsidies, child support collection services, increased Medicare and increases in prison and police expenditures.

Maggie Gallagher, “Why Supporting Marriage Makes Business Sense.”  Corporate Research Council paper.

Married Families Affect Effectiveness of Schools in General

One study found that the proportion of single-parent families in a school was a greater predictor of school failure than race, income, or the student’s own family structure. Large proportions of students from single-parent homes reduce the academic achievement of both children in intact and children in single-parent families, even after controlling for race, income, and characteristics of the school, such as per-pupil spending.

Maggie Gallagher, “Why Supporting Marriage Makes Business Sense.”  Corporate Research Council paper.

Marriage Helps Children's Education

Stable marriage has a powerful impact on children’s education. Research has consistently shown that children raised by their own two married parents do better in school than children in other family forms. For example, about one out of four children in both single-mother and blended families repeat a grade in school, compared to only one in seven children in intact married families. About a quarter of children in mother-only families and 18 percent of children in blended families have been suspended or expelled, compared to less than 10 percent of children from intact marriages. A 15-year study of 2,000 married people and their children by Paul Amato and Alan Booth found that even after controlling for marital quality, income, race and family background, parental divorce reduced adult children’s educational attainment, occupational status, and increased the risk of economic hardship in their adult lives. Children in single-mother homes are significantly less likely to complete high school, attend or graduate from college than either children in intact married families or children in widowed families (even after controlling for race, gender, and maternal education). Children raise outside of intact marriages are also only half as likely to attend a selective college, even after controlling for income and parental education.

How can the marriage of parents contribute to their children's education and future productivity? Parents contribute to their children's development of social skills that are valuable to schools and employers--punctuality, self-discipline, honesty, tolerance for frustration, diligence, reliability, respect for others. On average two married parents have twice the time, energy, financial security, and personal skills as well, reading to young children, helping with homework, reinforcing patterns (like regular breakfast and early bedtime) that help children learn. The tastes, values and skills of parents influence their children's success in school and in the world of work.

Maggie Gallagher, “Why Supporting Marriage Makes Business Sense.”  Corporate Research Council paper.

Why Does Marriage Matter?

Why does marriage matter? First, married guys work longer hours, they have lower “quit rates” and therefore longer job tenure than men without wives. Married men tend to choose higher-paying professions, even if that means less pleasant work, or less control over working hours. Married men take advantage of the on-the-job training more often, and when unemployed they use more methods of job search than singe guys. In surveys, they rate pay as a more important job attribute than bachelors do. Marriage makes men, on average, more focused and motivated workers.

Second, married people adopt healthier lifestyles. Married people reduce consumption of alcohol and other substances. Married people also sleep more, eat more regular and healthier meals, visit the doctor, and take fewer stupid risks, like driving fast without seat belts. So married workers, on average, are less likely to show up for work from time-to-time hung-over, sick and/or sleep-deprived.

Maggie Gallagher, “Why Supporting Marriage Makes Business Sense.”  Corporate Research Council paper.

Character

A man's character may be learned from the adjectives which he habitually uses in conversation.

Mark Twain

The Future and the Past

You cannot successfully navigate the future unless you keep always framed beside it a small clear image of the past.

Jan Struther, Mrs. Miniver, pg.120

Economic Benefits of REAL Marriage

Scientific evidence makes it clear that marriage I a wealth-producing institution, not merely a cultural value or a consumer good. Marriage boosts wealth in part because it points men and women toward productive, sober, steady behavior that pays off for families, for businesses, and for society. But marriage also boosts wealth and productivity for the same reason that other partnerships do: By sharing the burden of domestic and market work, married persons actually produce more working together than either would alone.

Married workers are, on average, more productive workers. The marriage premium (higher wages) earned by married men is one of the most well-documented phenomena is social science. “Typically,” write labor economists Sanders Korenman and David Neumark, wage “differentials are in the 10% to 40% range—roughly as large as race, firm-size, and union wage differentials, as well as differentials across industries.” The longer a man stays married, the higher his marriage premium, even after controlling for other factors.

Maggie Gallagher, “Why Supporting Marriage Makes Business Sense.”  Corporate Research Council paper.

Only REAL Marriage Benefits Society

Studies show that marriage plays a powerful role in adult well-being; married people live longer and healthier lives, and exhibit fewer signs of mental illness. Marriage is also a productive economic relationship, a powerful generator of human and social capital. Married people earn more money than otherwise similar single individuals, and build more wealth than singles with similar incomes. Married workers (especially married men) are more productive and motivated, on average, than otherwise similar single employees. Married people experience less economic hardship than singles with similar incomes.

The failure to marry taxes society as a whole. Children whose parents do not get married or do not stay married, for example, are more likely to drop out of high school, commit crimes and display other conduct disorders, experience more infant mortality, childhood illnesses and disease, and suffer from mental illness. As adults, they achieve less academically and occupy lower-status jobs, on average, than children whose parents were able to forge a good-enough marriage bond, even after accounting for race and family background.

There is no scientific evidence to support the recent idea that domestic partnerships are the functional equivalent of marriage. Adults who merely live together more closely resemble singles than married people. Children who live with cohabiting parents do no better than children of solo moms.

Giving cohabiters the same benefits in law and policy as married couples does not therefore represent justice or fairness. By offering the social rewards of marriage but without its public responsibilities, domestic partnership benefits discourage marriage. Why marry the mother of your new baby if the society says living together is just as good--and may even increase the government subsidies available to your family?

Likewise, a same-sex domestic partner [or “marriage”] benefits send a confusing signal, giving the appearance of providing an appropriate context for having and raising children, when the social science evidence supports the idea that children benefit from having both a mother and a father.

Confining benefits to spouses is one way that the law, pubic policy and society point out to the next generation the unique importance of marriage. Extending marital benefits to other intimate couplings sends a message that is dangerously untrue. Living together and being married are just not the same, for children or their parents.

Maggie Gallagher, “Why Supporting Marriage Makes Business Sense.”  Corporate Research Council paper.

Socialism

Socialism depends on coercion and takings from the productive members of a society. That means those who can create wealth will usually either leave, or if they stay and refuse to cooperate, be killed.

Bill Walton, “Why Socialism Fails Wherever It’s Tried”

Art or Entertainment?

For centuries the upper crust had an appreciation for the arts. But to enjoy the arts required person to think, to meditate, and to engage the mind and the soul. This new brand of entertainment, increasingly being enjoyed by the masses, was mindless. It was “about gratification rather than edification, indulgence rather than transcendence, reaction rather than contemplation, escape from moral instruction rather than submission to it.” 

In other words, they new forms of entertainment gaining popularity with the ordinary man were nothing more than senseless fun—and loved for just that reason. The elite hated entertainment for the same reasons that the working class delighted in it. The elite loved art, Shakespeare, excellent, thought-provoking literature and classical music while the masses were swooped off their feet by dime novels, ear-splitting music, and trash of all kinds.

Gary Gilley, This Little Church Went to Market, pg.25

God’s Design for Sex

Our sexuality and our spirit are inexplicably and profoundly intertwined. We are--at our core--spirit beings, created in God’s image. So our sexuality is likewise at that same core--it must be, because we are more than animals in our nature. That is why sexuality cannot be perceived as some mere tangent for us humans, as if it were something removed from our spirit.

In order for the act of sexual expression between a man and a woman to be fully representative of the spectrum of the characteristics of God, a male and a female must be one in totality--and that includes oneness not merely physically, but oneness emotionally, spiritually, and psychologically. That oneness is not something experienced for a moment--it is lifelong. There is a phrase for this unique unity of being--it is called the covenant of marriage.

God is so thoroughly pro-sex that he has established boundaries by which to protect it, to maximize its joy. He has also designed ways by which to express this spectacular gift in order to bring fulfillment. His Bible consistently and clearly establishes heterosexual monogamy--“one flesh” marriage--as core to providing the security of enduring, growing, developing, nurtured, authentic sexual love.

This love stands in stark contrast to the throw-away, who-looks-the-best-for-the-moment type of lust that results in multiple partners and deep emotional pain and rejection.

James L. Garlow and Peter Jones, Cracking Da Vinci’s Code, pg.23

“One Flesh”

When a man and a woman come together sexually in “one flesh” (Genesis 2:24), they become a more complete expression of the infinite spectrum of God’s characteristics. This is a crucial aspect of the amazing power--the indescribable magnetism--of sex. It is meant to be a response to God’s potent stamp on the core of our beings. 

It is this spiritual dimension of the pleasure and pull of sexual expression that sanctifies sex. The result of the male-female union is not some androgynous entity. Men remain spectacularly male and masculine. Women remain wonderfully female and feminine. Unlike paganism’s fascination with androgyny, the Bible affirms fully the magnificent differences of maleness and femaleness.

James L. Garlow and Peter Jones, Cracking Da Vinci’s Code, pg. 22-23

Animals Have NO Rights

Animals, by their nature, don’t have free will (the power of self-determination), and they don’t act with any awareness of moral responsibility. Without such a capacity, animals don’t have rights.  Because humans have such a capacity by nature (through God’s gracious gift of the divine image), this confers upon them a certain moral shield or moral protection which animals don’t have.

Paul Copan, How Do You Know You’re Not Wrong? Pg.144

The Right Word

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.

Mark Twain

We Are Living in "1984"

Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped.

George Orwell, 1984

This perfectly sums up the ideology of the LEFT today.

The Ideology of the LEFT

For the common run of mankind, I suspect, the highest earthly pleasure is self-righteous moral infatuation.

Roger Kimball, “Shall We Defend Our Common History?,” Imprimis, February 2019

Librarians and College Presidents Set to Destroy Cultural Inheritance

In the bad old days, librarians and college presidents were people who sought to protect the past, that vast storehouse of offensive attitudes and behavior that also just so happens to define our common inheritance. In our own more enlightened times, many librarians and college presidents collude in its effacement.

Roger Kimball, “Shall We Defend Our Common History?,” Imprimis, February 2019

Acts of Cowardice

It will never be known what acts of cowardice have been motivated by the fear of not looking sufficiently progressive.

Charles Peguy.

The World Hates Non-Conformity

The world is a society of rebels. It finds it hard to tolerate those who are in joyful fellowship with Christ. There is a sense in which believers are aliens. They do not belong. They are different, and the world hates the difference. … Says [William] Barclay, “To put it at its widest—the world always suspects nonconformity. It likes a pattern; it likes to be able to label a person and to put him in a pigeonhole. Anyone who does not conform to the pattern will certainly meet trouble. It is even said that if a hen with different markings is put among hens that are all alike, the others will peck her to death.”

David J. MacLeod, “Destroying Our Illusions: What the Bible Says About the World: A Meditation on John 12:31,” The Emmaus Journal, Vol.5/No.1, pg.16-17

The Worldview of Humanism

Humanists claims to be humanitarian, i.e., caring about people. Yet as a world view humanism is atheistic and secular. This world is all there is. There is no divine revelation. Mankind is the only source of morals. The humanist will stand one night outside a prison protesting capital punishment, yet the next morning he will stand outside an abortion clinic defending the right of a doctor to kill and unborn baby. He loves humanity, yet he will fight for legislation to protect 40 or 50 spotted owls—legislation that will cost 50,000 people their jobs.

David J. MacLeod, “The Consecrated Christian and Conformity to the World: An Exposition of Romans 12:1-2,” The Emmaus Journal, Vol. 4/No. 2, pg.113

State Education System

A general state education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another; and as the mould in which it casts them is that which pleases the dominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, an aristocracy, or a majority of the existing generation; in proportion as it is inefficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by a natural tendency to one over the body.

John Stewart Mill, “On Liberty,” 1859

Truth is Not Desired by the Left

While probably no former time tolerated so many diverse opinions on religious or philosophical matters, factual truth, if it happens to oppose a given group’s profit or pleasure, is greeted today with greater hostility than ever before . . . The facts I have in mind are publicly known, and yet the same public that knows them can successfully, and often spontaneously, taboo their public discussion and treat them as though they were what they are not—namely, secrets.

Hannah Arendt, “Truth and Politics”

Lives of Married Couples vs Cohabiting Couples

Married couples have the possibility of maturing and evolving, but cohabitating couples typically succumb to relational inertia. Without the foundation of marriage vows and shared selflessness, they cannot build anything stable. They live “day to day,” and have to shut out the possibility of planning for the future because that future may not exist, and, theoretically, they should have everything they want already. …

People who cohabitate believe they will have the best of both the single and married life. They believe that they will have the freedom of single people, paying their own way, leading their own life, and having the option to leave, while enjoying the stability of married people, having steady company each night. In reality, they usually have the opposite: they are not free, and it is not stable. This is because people who have decided to live together cannot simply break up as though they were only dating. Cohabitation is commitment without commitment, and people invest a great deal of themselves (their time, their emotions, and their money) into a relationship when moving in together—even if they say and imagine otherwise. After a few months, or a few years, it is far easier to keep things intact than breaking up a bad relationship, so nothing changes.

Moreover, people who cohabitate for so long have increasingly fewer options available to them once they break up. Instead of dating and meeting different people in their 20s, they loafed around with a subpar mate and let the best years of their life pass them by. Once they seriously look for a spouse in their 30s, they will have to tote around some heavy personal baggage.

Auguste Meyrat, How Cohabitation Traps People Into Using Each Other

Do Not Base Romantic Relationships on Practicality

Forming or maintaining a relationship on the basis of practicality may serve well with classmates and coworkers, but this will not do for romantic relationships, which actually do require romance. Once practicality takes root as the couple’s primary concern, short-term material goods (money, chores, schedule, sex) supersede long-term immaterial goods (virtue, understanding, life goals, general happiness). In the practical arrangement of cohabitation, two people will mutually seek to maximize their own interests through each other. This may have the appearance of marriage, but it is only a parody: the love and generosity one would expect devolves into lust and greed.

By turning people in on themselves and their own interests, the focus on practicality essentially objectifies both parties in the relationship. Consider the analogy some give for cohabitation: just as one would test-drive a car before buying it, one should live (and sleep) with another person before deciding to marry. What, exactly, are people imagining when they think this? Do they really think they can test-drive a person by living with him or her for however many months or years? Only if they view other people as objects to be used and marriage as a material investment that will likely lose value over time.

Auguste Meyrat, How Cohabitation Traps People Into Using Each Other

When Children Do Not Honor Parents

A society in which children do not honor their parents will rapidly lose the means through which the society’s culture, religion, and ethics can be transmitted, and thus will soon disintegrate.

Rabbi Joseph Telushkin, Biblical Literacy, pg.431

Cults Separate Families

New religions usually want to alienate children from parents. When one thinks of cults, one of the first associations is the attempt to drive a wedge between parents and children.

Rabbi Joseph Telushkin, Biblical Literacy, pg.430

Fear Those Who Do Not Fear God

One major lesson the twentieth century teaches us is that one should particularly fear those who fear not God. A common characteristic of this century’s three most murderous leaders — Hitler, Stalin, and Mao — has been contempt for the notion of a God who punishes evil behavior. Few people are more dangerous than those who combine passionate hatreds with a lack of belief in a God whose primary demand of human beings is ethical behavior.

Rabbi Joseph Telushkin, Biblical Literacy, pg.416

A Society Without Capital Punishment

A society that lets premeditated murderers live—let alone paroles them from prison, as commonly occurs today—is, from the Bible’s perspective a polluted culture for “blood pollutes the land, and the land can have no expiation for blood that is shed on it, except by the blood of him who sheds it” (Numbers 35:33).

Rabbi Joseph Telushkin, Biblical Literacy, pg.407

Swords and Plowshares

History teaches us that he who beats his sword into plowshares usually ends up plowing for those who kept their swords.

Charles Pellegrino, cited by Rabbi Joseph Telushkin, Biblical Literacy, pg.286-287

Mercy?

Whoever shows mercy to the cruel ultimately will be cruel to those deserving of mercy.

Simon ben Lakish, 3rd Century Rabbi.

Pity?

People who don’t show pity to others, crave it for themselves.

Isaac Bashevis Singer, Yiddish writer and Nobel Prize winner. Cited by Rabbi Joseph Telushkin, Biblical Literacy, pg.12

Homosexuality in the Catholic Church

The sexual abuse of boys by Catholic clergy is now a mushroom cloud hanging over the Church. … But the Church invited this scandal when it began allowing homosexuals to enter its seminaries in the 1960s. They did so because of the difficulty of recruiting young men into the priesthood who quite naturally wanted to marry and have families. As more and more homosexuals flooded seminaries and then went into the priesthood, a culture of homosexuality was fostered in the church with all its attendant pathologies.

Bryan Fischer, The Inescapable Link Between Homosexuality and Pedophilia

Agendas Trump Biology and Ruin Men

Britain’s Telegraph recently reported that UK schools are teaching British children that “Trans boys and men and non-binary people may have periods” and that “menstruation must be inclusive of all genders.” You read that right.

In the span of 100 years, Britain has gone from producing men who were so eager to fight and die for their country that 16-year-olds lied about their age to enlist when the minimum age was 19, to teaching primary school boys that they can have periods just like girls and offering feminine hygiene products in boys’ bathrooms. This phenomenon isn’t unique to the U.K. U.S. colleges, like the University of Wisconsin, University of Minnesota, and Brown University offer menstrual products in their men’s rooms, in the name of “menstrual equity” and as a sop to a miniscule “transgender” population.

Can any culture—British, American or any other—raise “rough men” ready to defend it against a ruthless enemy when it cannot even fix in the minds of its developing youth what their sex is?

William F. Marshall, Peter Jackson’s Restored WWI Footage Underscores The Flaccidity Of Today’s Culture

The LEFT Seeks to Destroy Marriage

If you’re a leftist and your goal was to destroy, then remake society into whatever twisted image you had in your head of what it should be, you’d likely first go after its foundation. Could this explain why leftists have been going after marriage as an institution - and by extension the family - for decades? Destroy the means by which humans raise stable, functional, healthy members of the next generation, and you strike at the root of society itself. If you believe that traditional society (a.k.a. Western civilization) is evil at its core, as today’s leftists do, it’s a strategy that makes sense, at least in their own warped minds.

Scott Morefield, Rescuing Marriage From The Liberals, Because Civilization Is At Stake

Keep Sex Within Marriage

People:  get married.  Do NOT live together first.  Do life RIGHT.  Then be devoted to your spouse, no matter what.  ‘Til death do you part.  Keep your eyes, hearts, minds and flesh pure, your marriage bed undefiled.  And unite yourselves with your Creator, the Living God, who designed marriage to be the perfect and holy union of one man and one woman — where children are sought after, where children are a BLESSING.  You will find all this to be the GREATEST joy possible in this life.  SO MUCH MORE than the cheap imitation the devil offers. Lust and perversion is no substitute for a God-ordained sexual union within marriage.  So STOP IT!   Lord, have mercy on us, and open our eyes to see how far we have fallen from Your Holy standards.

Rob Pue, The Weed of Porn Bears Bitter Fruit

Viewing Pornography Violates Marriage

If you are a man trapped and addicted to pornography, just know that by viewing this stuff, you are not only contributing to this BILLION DOLLAR INDUSTRY that profits off the souls and lives of young girls (and the male actors as well), but you are ALSO engaging in FORNICATION, which God calls an abomination. And if you are a married man, make no mistake: you are committing ADULTERY every time you look at one of those young women with lust… you are CHEATING on your wife. You may never actually commit the physical act, but you are just as guilty. Is your wife not worth more to you than THAT?

Rob Pue, The Weed of Porn Bears Bitter Fruit

Cohabitation is More Stressful Than Marriage

According to multiple studies, cohabitation is considered more stressful than getting married.  Only about half of those who start out living together outside of wedlock EVER get married.  Those who do, are at a substantially higher risk for divorce than those who don’t live together before marriage — most divorcing within just seven years.  Co-habiting couples are also more likely to experience infidelity in their relationship, and the QUALITY of their relationship is of a poorer quality: more fighting, more violence, and less overall happiness.  Studies also show co-habiting couples have higher levels of depression and substance abuse, and also earn less money.

Rob Pue, The Weed of Porn Bears Bitter Fruit

God Did Not Create Sexual Orientations

God did not create sexual orientations. He created sexes. God gave each sex a body capable of giving physical pleasure and children to the other sex. All are heterosexual because everyone is born in the bodies of a man or a woman. This truth does not change even if one has very difficult feelings against which one must fight. Homosexuality has nothing to do with heterosexuality and the first does not equal the second. There are people who feel powerful desires towards the same sex. … But it does not change the truth that they are already heterosexual because God created them that way, so the Bible tells us. 

Robert Oscar Lopez, How Christians Confuse the Issue of Heterosexuality (What Christians Get Wrong about Heterosexuality)

Politics and Morality

Political action will not change people spiritually. Moralistic preaching did not help Sodom. The only thing that will change a Sodomite is repentance and faith.

David J. MacLeod, “The Judgment of Sodom,” The Emmaus Journal, Vol.2/No.3, pg.163

Sexual Revolution: Not a Revolt Against the Establishment

The Sexual Revolution never was a revolt against the Establishment. It was and is a revolt by the liberal Establishment against Christian morals. Indeed, such a massive, meticulous and carefully planned revolution could not progress without bad elites from decadent institutions to carry it forward. This Establishment forms a liberal culture that creates the myths, spreads the fashions and molds the opinions that eventually pressure all to conform to their ideological mindset. It pushes the more moderate elements of society toward its goal of total, unrestrained sexual license.

This revolt can also be documented and traced by the currents, media and figures that have long pushed this agenda forward.

Such an effort would never progress but for a cooperative State. Throughout history, revolutions are always carried out with State sponsorship. Even the States that the revolutionaries want to destroy often participate in their own destruction. The Sexual Revolution needs the vast resources and platform of the Sexual State because “the premises of the Sexual Revolution are false,” Dr. Morse claims. All the machinery of government must be brought to bear to override human nature. To assume the State is neutral in this great battle is the height of naiveté.

John Horvat,II, The Sexual State: A Report from the Battlefield

Men Looking For Sex are Not Looking for Marriage

A man who is looking for recreational premarital sex with a woman before marriage is not looking for marriage, but recreation. Marriage is a commitment to work hard, be disciplined, be self-sacrificial and to compromise with another person – all in close quarters. When choosing a mate, you need to look for someone who is good at commitments. Not someone who is good at fun. The ability to have fun with a man is not a good predictor of marital success because fun is unrelated to the things that a man really does in a marriage: protect, provide, and lead on moral and spiritual issues.

Wintery Knight, “New Study: Men and Women Have Different Goals and Expectations When Cohabiting.”

Freedom of Speech and Religion

There is also today a vast divergence between the liberal and conservative understandings of the First Amendment. Liberals are interested in transforming free speech into what they call equal speech, ensuring that no one gets more than his fair share. They favor a redistribution of speech rights via limits on campaign contributions, repealing the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, and narrowing the First Amendment for the sake of redistribution of speech rights from the rich to the poor. Not surprisingly, the Democratic Party’s 2016 platform called for amending the First Amendment!

There is, of course, also a big difference between the liberal Constitution’s freedom from religion and the conservative Constitution’s freedom of religion. And needless to say, the liberal Constitution has no Second Amendment.

In terms of government structure, the liberal Constitution is designed to overcome the separation of powers and most other checks and balances. Liberals consistently support the increased ability to coordinate, concentrate, and enhance government power—as opposed to dividing, restricting, or checking it. This is to the detriment of popular control of government. In recent decades, government power has flowed mainly through the hands of unelected administrators and judges—to the point that elected members of Congress find themselves increasingly dispirited and unable to legislate. As the Financial Times put it recently, “Congress is a sausage factory that has forgotten how to make sausages.”

Charles R. Kesler, “America’s Cold Civil War,” Hillsdale College Imprimis, October 2018

Israel and the United Nations

Israel is one of 193 members of the United Nations. As such, Israel is at a significant disadvantage. There is only one Jewish state in the U.N. as opposed to 56 Muslim states, virtually all of which take positions aimed at isolating, demonizing, and delegitimizing Israel whenever possible. The Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) is the largest single block of U.N. members, and its positions on issues vis-a-vis Israel are almost uniformly hostile.

American Center for Law & Justice, Israel’s Fate, Our Fight, pg.33-34.

We Are Nearing the Brink of Destruction

In most governments it has been the study of rulers to confine this right [to keep and bear arms] within the narrowest possible limits . . . and [when] the right of the people to keep and bear arms is, under any color or pretext whatsoever, prohibited, liberty, if not already annihilated, is on the brink of destruction.

George Tucker, 1803 Blackstone’s Commentaries regarding the Second Amendment.

The American Miracle

Since the days of the Pilgrims, leaders of the new society that arose in the New World have embraced the core concept of a divinely determined destiny. For nearly four hundred years, Americans nourished the notion that God maintained an intimate, protective connection to their singular nation. Only recently, with the emphasis on guilt over gratitude in our teaching of history, has the public grown uncomfortable with the idea that fate favors American endeavors. Today, the merest suggestion that the Almighty plays favorites among the nations of the world strikes contemporary sensibilities as offensive, outrageous, or at least controversial.

Much of that controversy involves a fundamental misunderstanding of the old idea of divine providence in the rise of the Republic. It confuses the reality of American exceptionalism with fantasies about American perfectionism. To argue that a higher power directed the United States to a unique and valuable role in the world isn’t the same as insisting that our national saga unfolded without flaw, folly, or failure. The confidence that this nation has been distinctly blessed doesn’t mean that it’s been exclusively blessed—or that it has provided an unmitigated blessing to each citizen, or to all nations, at every moment in its history. … The evidence for divine providence doesn’t prove that America is perfect, but it does strongly suggest that America is no accident.

Michael Medved, The American Miracle: Divine Providence in the Rise of the Republic, pg 359, 360

Thoughtfulness vs Thoughtlessness

In the age in which you will be living, if you’re a thoughtful person, if you ask questions, if you seek answers, if you’re willing to be honest with yourself, and if you’re willing to, as they say, call a spade a spade, you will be dismissed by the thoughtless with a label that was fed to them by a thoughtless culture, so don’t be surprised when it happens. It’s a self-defense mechanism designed to allow the name caller to acquit himself while indicting you. Evil will shout down everything contrary while providing a warm, cozy place for itself to incubate. It will counter a thoughtful, well-reasoned argument with a mind-numb chant. It will inlist the magistrate to outlaw opposing views in the name of freedom. It will enlist the court to decree what the majority rejects and declare it democracy in action, and it will actually believe its declaration. In short, evil will be thoughtless. Don’t you be.

Danny Wright, The Evil Of Thoughtlessness