I heard Newt Gingrich the other day, on my car radio, discussing the failure of the country-club Republicans’ bill to replace Obamacare–the bill that was pulled without a vote. And what he said astounded me. I may not have it 100% verbatim, but I can give it to you close enough.
“What we [he means the government] have to do is provide for everyone to live as long as possible, with the highest quality of life as possible, at the lowest cost as possible.”
Whoa! Hit the brakes! What constitution did that come out of? The federal government is now charged with maximizing our individual life-spans?
Or, to put it another way, do you really, truly want to be dependent upon a lot of slimy pols and bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., for how long you live?
Gingrich, formerly Speaker of the House–why does that post always go to some kind of reptile?–is supposed to be some kind of conservative. I don’t know what kind. The kind with a total humanist mind-set that expects sinful, deluded, not all that intelligent human beings to do the things that only God can do. But then that’s no conservative at all, but a mere D.C. dyed-in-the-wool statist.
Where is it written that the federal government is to take charge of healthcare, anyway?
How’s about the government try something really revolutionary, and leave us alone?
If there were no such thing as Original Sin, we’d still be dealing with Original Stupidity. The more power we give people, the more they go wrong.
Basic facts of life, as listed in the article above, are routinely denied by statists, whose only goal in life is to expand the government–with themselves in charge of it all. It is a perverse and wicked lust that proves the doctrine of Original Sin is true.
At least Plato, when he was hallucinating about his superstate (The Republic), had the grace not to make his all-powerful philosopher-kings idiots and ignoramuses. Why would we, even for a matter of seconds, even think about giving more power to those jidrools in Washington?
We do have a new president, thank God, but a lot of those who were in power five years ago are still there today, still doing their level best to wreck the country–and who knows what they might not do, to get back the White House?
I have had occasion to re-visit R.J. Rushdoony’s book, Sovereignty (Chalcedon/Ross House Books: 2010). Published almost ten years after the theologian’s death, it poses an urgent question.
Who is sovereign–God or man?
There’s no such thing as “sort of sovereign.” Sovereignty is absolute and indivisible. Either God is sovereign Lord of all, or He is not. Either God is the source of law, or He is not. And if He isn’t, who is?
Oh, well, the serpent told us that–we are! “Ye shall be as gods,” Genesis 3:5. And then we have to decide whether each and every individual is to be sovereign–nah, that won’t work!–or if our sovereignty is to be collectivized in the form of an institution: a state, for instance. Yeah, that’ll work!
Rushdoony, analyzing history, saw the modern state perpetually expanding its powers. He perceived clearly that “the state” has no life in itself, but is rather the creation of flawed and sinful men: that is, an idol. And because one of the chief flaws of statists is an insatiable lust for power, the state devours its citizens’ personal liberties–because those who do not acknowledge God as God are unable to conceive of any authority higher than the state’s, to which the state and its representatives will be held accountable. For them the state, not God, is sovereign. And this, Rushdoony discovered, is a very widely-held delusion: even churches succumb to it.
So the state is sovereign, and next thing you know, they’re dragging people off to forced labor camps. First they try to punish every offense, said Rushdoony, because every offense is ultimately an offense against the state. But that’s not enough for them. From there they go on to punish all dissent.
He did not live to see them go even one step farther than that. From punishing dissent, punishing refusal or failure to hop on the bandwagon, the priesthood of the idol of the state goes on to punish at random. Like the Ontario Human Rights Commission says, you can offend against the Human Rights Code without meaning to, without even knowing that you’re doing it.
The image that comes to mind is some poor sod being hauled off to the guillotine crying, “What did I do? What did I do?”–and getting no answer.
Inalienable liberty is possible only under the sovereignty of God. Jesus Christ is King of Kings and Lord of Lords, and if we believe Him to be such, then we can only view the government as being under Him.
This is a matter to which Christians need to give more thought.
I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolved.” –Yamamoto
December 7–“a day which will live in infamy,” said President Franklin Roosevelt–well, here it is, and no one seems to have noticed.
This is Pearl Harbor Day. On Dec. 7, 1941, the Japanese Navy launched a sneak attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, while peace negotiations were being held in Washington. The attack wiped out America’s Pacific Fleet battleships and crippled our nation’s self-defense.
It also brought utter catastrophe to Japan, as Admiral Yamamoto foretold it would. Not only were his warnings unheeded: he was ordered to lead the attack.
On this day a few years ago, I was teaching at a public high school in the suburbs. When I noticed that Pearl Harbor was not mentioned by anyone else in the school, I told the college prep class what had happened on that day in 1941.
“My father and his friends, when they heard the news, all went down to the recruitment offices to try to sign up, but the military wouldn’t take them because they were too young. But they all went back when they were old enough to serve.”
The students stared at me as if I had a swarm of black beetles crawling all over my face.
“Why did your father and his friends do that?” a student asked me–genuinely perplexed that anyone should wish to defend his country in a time of war, after a ruthless sneak attack during peace negotiations. “Yeah–why?” echoed another.
When I finally found words, all I could say was, “This is truly amazing. For the first time in recorded history, the immense resources of the state–in this case, the school, the teachers, the materials, the insurance, all the costs of education–have been used to convince a whole generation that the state is not worthy of its loyalty. Not worth fighting for. Not worth defending. Do you think this experiment can possibly have a good result?”
I doubted my words had any impact. But several months later, one of the girls in the class came up to me in the hall and told me, “I can’t stop thinking about what you said to us, that day, Pearl Harbor Day.” So I like to think maybe I did a little bit of good.
Funny, isn’t it? Throughout their time in school, America’s children are taught that America sucks, it’s the source of all the world’s problems, it needs its karma leveled, yatta-yatta… and at the same time, the same teachers labor to instill in their students a reflexive obedience to any and all decrees of the state, a desire for the state to have more and more power over their lives, and a longing for a super-state to lord it over all the earth.
Father in Heaven, hear our prayers, and deliver us out of the hands of these ungodly rulers.
One of the helpful space aliens from the classic Twilight Zone episode of 1962, “To Serve Man.”
Okay… at the count of three, I’m going to wake up and none of this has really happened, it’s all just been a dream. One… two… three…
No! No! This is not happening! Say it ain’t so! But I’m afraid it is so, kid.
Remember when we used to be the United States of America, and we used to get new laws when our elected representatives publicly debated and then voted on them? When we weren’t herded around like cattle by a combination of judicial rulings and executive orders?
Says the Community Organizer-in-Chief’s latest executive order, “behavioral science insights–research findings from fields such as behavioral economics and psychology about how people make decisions and act on them–can be used to design government policies to better serve the American people.”
Uh-uh. Sort of like the aliens in that old Twilight Zone episode, “To Serve Man.” They came to our planet “to serve man”–serve him up for breakfast, lunch, supper, or a midnight snack.
Listen. This has been said before. Maybe this time you can hear it.
Our government is too damned big, too damned powerful, too damned costly, and has its nose stuck into too damned many places.
God will eventually destroy it. Unless we come to our senses and cut it down to size.
I grew up on World War II movies. My father served in it, and so did the fathers of most of the kids I knew, and TV played a lot of newsreel footage from the war: so it was very real to us who had only been born four or five years after the war ended.
I still think in terms of WWII imagery, sometimes. Like now.
I see the United States as a great ship separated from her protective convoy, with the U-boat wolf pack closing in. They’ve got her in their sights. The periscopes are trained on her. And then the U-boat captains launch the torpedoes.
“Fire one!” Allow illegal immigration, amnesty for millions of illegal aliens–and freebies, too.
“Fire two!” “Gay” rights and same-sex parodies of marriage. Take down the family, and you take down the nation. And you can use it as a hammer against Christianity, too. Both family and Christianity are obstacles to the absolute dominance of the state.
“Fire three!” Race-baiting from the top down. Politicians, teacher unions, hard-left college profs all trying to stir up violence. Liberals will never let the races live in peace.
“Fire four!” Transgender movement. “Fire five!” The Global Warming hoax, a biggie–biggest science fraud in history. “Fire six!” Feminism. “Fire seven!” “Eight!” “Nine!”
The water now is full of torpedoes, all streaking toward the great ship’s waterline. Their wakes scratch harsh white lines over the grey surface of the sea. Even if the ship takes evasive action, there are now too many torpedoes homing in on her, she can’t possibly escape.
And then the explosions. Boom! Boom! Boom! One after another.
Only then do the U-boats surface, to machine-gun the survivors.
