On my hometown “Community Calendar” yesterday, the following two items:
It’s time again for the “annual Animal Spirit Guide Event,” featuring “Our clairvoyant medium.” Have you ever known a medium who did not claim to be clairvoyant? Also, “your Animal Guides will assist you in answering questions about any area of your life.”
In the next town over we have a meeting of the Citizens Climate Lobby, “a national grassroots organization working to build political will to address the challenge of climate change.” They try not to call it “Global Warming” anymore.
My town calls itself “the Brainy Borough.” There’s a rumor that the spirit of a cabbage worm gave it that nickname. We’re spending over $30 million this year to operate our four schools, just about everyone here is college-educated, or going to be–and we’re going to ask the Great Squirrel Spirit, “Should I unload this stock, or hang onto it a little longer?”
As for the Citizens Climate Lobby, “grassroots” means “funded by George Soros” or some other villain. They must think we all just fell off the potato truck.
But the presence of these two items on the same page teaches an important lesson.
When you desert the living God, and reject Jesus Christ the Savior, you don’t just stand there from then on without any god at all.
No–you wind up in the clutches of a false god; and the biggest false god of them all is the State.
“Pay higher taxes, sign away your liberties, and obey us in all things, and our experts will protect you from the dreaded Climate Change.”
Falling off the potato truck is bad enough.
Falling away from God is worse.
Your closing statement pretty well says it all. Pity the poor sucker who has not learned that lesson, for the final destination for them is worse than anything they can imagine. Even for these fools, I can’t help but feel some degree of pity.
Pantheism and paganism. Everything old is new again.
WELL SAID! As a matter of fact, falling off a potato truck might not be such a bad thing. I’ve always admired those who can grow things as I do not have a”green thumb.” I could starve!!!
That’s hilarious Sir. It just proves what the bible says! The fear of the Lord is the beginning of Wisdom. So much for education.
You definitely nailed the issue. It all comes down to one thing: worship. Reflecting back on my own lifespan, when I was a child most people at least acknowledged that there was One God. They may not have lived up to His standards of conduct (smoking and over-drinking were rampant back then), but they at least admitted that there was a Higher Power, a Creator behind the existence of all things. I don’t recall ever coming across mediums and animal spirit guides wer literally unheard of. Spiritism existed, but it was rare and confined to the fringes of society.
The most important instrument in an airplane is the compass. If you don’t know in which direction you are heading, that airplane is worthless. We all need a compass, some sort of guide to our overall direction in life. There are many gods, but only One True God. There are many compasses, but only one that aligns with the realities of life.
There’s one more important factor, the terrain of our society, which had become strange and confusing. If I was flying a light aircraft along the Front Range of the Colorado Rockies, it would be easy to remain oriented, because the mountains themselves form a distinct line running north and south. It’s actually pretty hard to get lost while in sight of the Fromt Range.
However, if you fly over the mountains, everything starts to look the same in all directions. You need a compass (usually abetted by some radio-based navigation tools) to remain oriented. Employing such would allow one to safely fly a great distance and end up at your destination. Without it, you could become a victim of your imagination and the subject of a search party.
That scenario is what our world today reminds me of. We live in a world that has ignored its moral compass, follows unreliable sources of guidance and is subject to any sort of whim that comes along. Succinctly, a world that is disoriented morally. That makes our need ever more acute.
I will remember that image: a whole world in need of a search party.
“When you desert the living God, and reject Jesus Christ the Savior, you don’t just stand there from then on without any god at all.
No–you wind up in the clutches of a false god; and the biggest false god of them all is the State.”
When I was perhaps nine or ten years old, the hippie counter-culture began to emerge in the U.S. and, at least from my perspective, the world began to change quickly. Many of these people saw their parents as being hypocrites and wanted nothing to do with the values their parents lived by. Initially, they were not particularly friendly to the State and made a lot of noise about doing their own thing. Vietnam, and the draft was a rallying point and they resisted the “establishment” while promoting anti-establishment candidates. Eventually, their values took hold and they gained political leverage. In a sense, they became the establishment, but the old revolutionary paradigm remained the warp and woof of their cause.
One thing that struck me about the counter-culture was how quickly it rushed towards vice. Smoking, drug abuse and total sexual freedom were part of the deal from day one. In fact, I think that was their drawing card. Put the word “free” in front of the words beer, sex, or drugs and you are certain to draw a crowd. The hippies weren’t so free with the beer and would be glad to charge you for the drugs, but if you were willing to accept the bacterial and viral risks, sex was usually easily obtained in their world.
While they may have sincerely been off-put by their parent’s values, the values they came up with were far from perfect and certainly not free from hypocrisy. I always felt that this new take on morality seemed a bit convenient in its application. It was greedy for a businessman to expect a profit, but not greedy for an individual to expropriate whatever suited their purposes without regard for the rights of anyone but themselves.
So here we are, fifty plus years later and this school of thought has now developed far beyond anything imaginable in the sixties. The rush towards vice has only accelerated and the drugs are far more refined, synthetic and dangerous. The sexual freedom of the sixties has made the nuclear family nearly obsolete in many places while individuals go from encounter to encounter, disenchanted and world weary. On recent visits to my home state of Colorado, the effects of legalized marijuana are seen everywhere. Government officials tout the benefits of legalization, citing increased tax revenues, but the sight of disheveled users is never far from view.
So there we have it. The imperfect morality of the WW II generation has given way to the worship of anything except the Creator. They certainly have not given us a more stable or prosperous world than that which existed in the fifties and sixties.