“Progressives” and Religious Liberty Written By Laurie Higgins

http://illinoisfamily.org/religious/progressives-and-religious-liberty/

And here's what the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. said in "Letter from Birmingham Jail":

You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court's decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, at first glance it may seem rather paradoxical for us consciously to break laws. One may well ask: "How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?" The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that "an unjust law is no law at all."

Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law.

…

More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co workers with God…. 

…

I have been disappointed with the church. I do not say this as one of those negative critics who can always find something wrong with the church. I say this as a minister of the gospel, who loves the church; who was nurtured in its bosom; who has been sustained by its spiritual blessings and who will remain true to it as long as the cord of life shall lengthen.

…

I have heard many ministers say: "Those are social issues, with which the gospel has no real concern." And I have watched many churches commit themselves to a completely other worldly religion which makes a strange, un-Biblical distinction between body and soul, between the sacred and the secular.

I have traveled the length and breadth of Alabama, Mississippi and all the other southern states. On sweltering summer days and crisp autumn mornings I have looked at the South's beautiful churches with their lofty spires pointing heavenward. I have beheld the impressive outlines of her massive religious education buildings. Over and over I have found myself asking: "What kind of people worship here? Who is their God?" 

…

In deep disappointment I have wept over the laxity of the church. But be assured that my tears have been tears of love. There can be no deep disappointment where there is not deep love. Yes, I love the church. How could I do otherwise? I am in the rather unique position of being the son, the grandson and the great grandson of preachers. Yes, I see the church as the body of Christ. But, oh! How we have blemished and scarred that body through social neglect and through fear of being nonconformists.

There was a time when the church was very powerful–in the time when the early Christians rejoiced at being deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed. In those days the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society. Whenever the early Christians entered a town, the people in power became disturbed and immediately sought to convict the Christians for being "disturbers of the peace" and "outside agitators."' But the Christians pressed on, in the conviction that they were "a colony of heaven," called to obey God rather than man. Small in number, they were big in commitment. They were too God-intoxicated to be "astronomically intimidated." By their effort and example they brought an end to such ancient evils as infanticide and gladiatorial contests. Things are different now. So often the contemporary church is a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. So often it is an archdefender of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church's silent–and often even vocal–sanction of things as they are.

But the judgment of God is upon the church as never before. If today's church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century. 

Charles Slavik

~;::::::;( )">  ¯\_( )_/¯   

Do the Patriots cheat? It sure seems like there's a lot of smoke according to SI.com

Some of this goes back a while, but it is a pretty lengthy article. This is what they do, this is who they are. It's in their DNA.

from SI.com:
si.com

They've created a culture where that type of behavior is encouraged and rewarded," one team executive says. "Everybody there is supposed to make the visitor uncomfortable—do everything that is borderline against the rules, but clearly against the principles of good sportsmanship."

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Tom Brady is a popular player, therefore he must be defended and the system attacked, I have said that all along. So we don't condone cheating under any circumstances when we're talking about an unpopular player, but it's somehow OK once a popular "baby dolphin" gets snared in the fishing net.

I don't entirely agree with the Brandon Marshall Theory that it's all about race, because in baseball they would have attacked the system just as virulently if Derek Jeter was ever snared in the net and I think they do the same for say a Russell Wilson. But I understand the sentiment.  It's more about popularity than race, but mainstream popularity is skewed somewhat by race. 

Pitchers' guide to cheating: How to do it right - Yahoo Sports

PED for pitchers!! "Let's just change the rules", right?

All those pitchers who were whining and all those bed-wetters in the media who carped on-air on their behalf have now been exposed for the hypocritical, morality-twisting frauds they truly are. I guess the message to kids should be, "When I cheat it's for  a good purpose, when others cheat, they're just cheating scumbags".

Very nice. Sorry folks, you can't have it both ways.

Plus, Pineda is should be banned for stupidity, at least Palmieiro never came up to the batters box with a needle sticking out of his ass.

from Yahoo Sports:
Pitchers' guide to cheating: How to do it right - Yahoo Sports:

Kids these days. It's just shameful. They have no respect, no sense of history, no appreciation for their forbearers. Used to be pitchers in Major League Baseball treated cheating like an art form. Nowadays they're happy to act like finger-painting kindergarteners in a smock.

Look at New York Yankees starter Michael Pineda on Thursday, with the giant mess of gloop on his hand – his pitching hand! – that he said, with a straight face, was "dirt." Note to cheaters: There is this thing called a high-definition camera. It shoots moving pictures at 1,080 pixels per square inch. Dirt is not viscous.

'via Blog this'

The importance of knowing where we are and how we got here...and knowing where the exits are ( just in case )

The Humiliation of the Emperor Valerian by the Persian King Sapor by Hans Holbein the Younger, c. 1521
Public Domain. Courtesy of Wikipedia.

Interesting stuff from  Prof. Jeffrey Sachs, Columbia Univ. and Nigel Farage. 

Sorry baseball fans -- but as I've often said  -- "sadly, some things are more important than baseball". 

SR 76 Wall Street

Published on Apr 18, 2013

This is Professor Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University speaking at the "Fixing the Banking System for Good" conference on April 17, 2013. This audio is absolutely EXPLOSIVE!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VOWnnEphjI

Jeff Sachs: The Pathological Environment on Wall Street - From the Philadelphia Federal Reserve on 17 April 2013

"I believe we have a crisis of values that is extremely deep, because the regulations and the legal structured need reform. But I meet a lot of these people on Wall Street on a regular basis right now. I'm going to put it very bluntly. I regard the moral environment as pathological. And I'm talking about the human interactions that I have. I've not seen anything like this, not felt it so palpably.

"They have gamed the system to a remarkable extent and they have a docile President, a docile White House and a docile regulatory system that absolutely can't find its voice. It's terrified of these companies."

"We have a corrupt politics to the core, I'm afraid to say. And both parties are up to their necks in this. It's nothing to do with Democrats or Republicans. It really doesn't have anything to do with right wing or left wing, by the way. The corruption, as far as I can see is everywhere. But what it has led to is this sense of impunity that is really stunning and you feel it at the individual level right now."

"I have waited for 5 years now to see one figure on Wall Street speak in a moral language ... and I've not seen it once. And that is shocking to me. And if they won't, I've waited for a judge...for our president...for somebody...and it hasn't happened. And, by the way, it's not going to happen any time soon, it seems."

-----

Fortunately, on the same day I came across this politician speaking out, albeit from across the pond in Europe. Pity that we don't have politicians with a strong enough spine to speak the uncomfortable truth about the sad state of affairs.

Nigel Farage, on the sad state of affairs going on in Europe. Coming soon to Amerika. 

EU Common Criminals

----

http://jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com/2013/04/gold-daily-and-silver-weekly-charts_18.html

Via Jesse's Cafe Americain, Professor Jeff Sachs speaking to a meeting at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, with regard to Hank Paulson, Goldman Sachs, and their ilk:

"I believe we have a crisis of values that is extremely deep, because the regulations and the legal structure need reform. But I meet a lot of these people on Wall Street on a regular basis right now. I'm going to put it very bluntly. I regard the moral environment as pathological. And I'm talking about the human interactions that I have. I've not seen anything like this, not felt it so palpably.

These people are out to make billions of dollars and nothing should stop them from that. They have no responsibility to pay taxes, they have no responsibility to their clients, they have no responsibility to people... counterparties in transactions. They are tough, greedy, aggressive, and feel absolutely out of control, in a quite literal sense. And they have gamed the system to a remarkable extent and they have a docile president, a docile White House and a docile regulatory system that absolutely can't find its voice. It's terrified of these companies.

If you look at the campaign contributions, which I happened to do yesterday for another purpose, the financial markets are the number one campaign contributors in the U.S. system now. We have a corrupt politics to the core, I'm afraid to say... both parties are up to their necks in this.

... But what it's led to is this sense of impunity that is really stunning and you feel it on the individual level right now. And it's very very unhealthy, I have waited for four years... five years now to see one figure on Wall Street speak in a moral language. And I've have not seen it once. And that is shocking to me. And if they won't, I've waited for a judge, for our president, for somebody, and it hasn't happened. And by the way it's not gonna happen any time soon, it seems."

---

This is the guy who asked the question at the 12:00 minute mark of the Sachs video. Good question 

Dennis Peacocke:

http://www.gostrategic.org/index.cfm?pageID=216

... and one of his articles. 

http://www.crossrhythms.co.uk/articles/life/At_The_End_Of_The_Road/35469/p1/

Dennis Peacocke comments on 5 major wrong decisions the USA has made

Liberalism is dead...the reality of human corruption killed it. The idea of "good" men leading mankind into a peaceful and affluent future by simply redistributing wealth and letting each person do his own thing, was doomed from the start. Outside of Christ, the sin nature of man will always compel him to construct fairy tale worlds of reality which ignore God and glorify man. However, such dreams invariably lead to cultural dead ends, and such is the place where we find ourselves today.

Wallowing in aborted babies, sexual diseases, budget deficits, and international terrorism-the results of having cast off our Christian heritage-we may finally be realizing that we are at a point where we must choose between two options. We can either continue to pile up human despair into an ever greater monument to the false god of "human freedom," or we can turn around and retrace our steps to where we made our worst choices. Of course, choosing the latter is humbling since it means admitting we are wrong, and that we cannot survive without obedience to the laws of an absolute God. We have come to the end of the road and are now faced with a choice - humble repentance or societal collapse.

Five Wrong Turns

As I see it, we made at least five major wrong turns along the way. We need to repent for these deviations and pray that the Lord's judgment on us will be merciful.

1. As a nation, we lost our belief in any absolutes.

When we discarded the scriptures for being "too intellectually and sexually confining" and instead put our faith in science and man's unending progress, we were destined for disaster. Confusion first set in when seminarians challenged the Bible's inerrancy, and preachers indicated that modern times required us to view man in a new way-a way which took into account his complexities and gently pushed aside the "old fashioned" concept of personal sin. In a relativistic society, the worst thing you can do is hold absolute convictions about anything or anybody. What has resulted is a public philosophy of humanism that trusts man in general, but is powerless to trust him in particular. Man's behavior becomes unpredictable because his values are relative. The irony of humanism is that the more it promotes the supremacy of man, the more it reveals how untrustworthy his behavior is. A society's divorce rate will always tell you how much its citizens trust each other, and how relative their values and commitments are.

2. As a nation, we lost our belief in cause and effect.

Medical specialists in the transmission of AIDS told a group of homosexual leaders in Seattle that the only cure they could offer was for homosexuals to change their sexual preferences. The indignant response was one of, "There's got to be another way!" This is a perfect example of where we are. If we don't like the consequences of something we're doing, we steadfastly refuse to stop doing it if it means cutting across our personal convenience and pleasure needs.

And what has contributed to this distorted perception? A large amount of the blame must go to the preachers who have twisted and turned the gospel of Christ into a gospel of personal convenience where God serves us and is dedicated to making man happy rather than holy and whole. And society has followed the Church's lead-for good or ill. A "bless me" gospel in the pulpit produces all manner of moral suicide both in the pews and society-at-large.

3. As a nation, we lost our belief in the need for personal discipline.

Led down the garden path by permissive theology, Doctors Freud and Spock convinced at least two generations of parents to totally spoil their children by not disciplining them for fear of bruising their little egos. Unfortunately, unresolved family problems become society's problems, as can all too clearly be seen in the virtual academic collapse of our schools, severely overcrowded jails, soaring divorce rates, personal bankruptcies, drug addiction, drunk driving deaths, burgeoning welfare roles, and the growing societal disease which believes that "society owes me," and that "most of the bad things that have happened to me are someone else's fault."

4. As a nation, we emphasized the rights of our citizens rather than their responsibilities.

If we preach just people's rights, we'll eventually have a revolution because we are promoting primarily selfishness. If we preach people's responsibilities, we'll have a revival because our message demands self-government and sacrifice. By virtue of the debris, it doesn't take much to figure out which of these two gospels has largely been preached. Liberalism buys votes by promising people their rights and then morally and economically bankrupts them in the attempt to make good the promise. At the end of the road we must preach people's responsibilities . . . or suffer societal collapse. The road goes no further.

5. As a nation, we decided to protect the deviant and deprecate the normal.

Taken to their logical conclusion, both humanism and liberalism end up worshiping deviant behavior. Since they are built on deviance (total departure from God's law), deviance is what they must produce. Initially they seem to enjoy a degree of success as man worships and explores his own potential. At the end of the road however, they turn man into a degenerate who kills his children and aged parents while hopping from bed to bed, spreading disease, and breaking promises in the process. What begins as pleasure becomes bondage, and then man finds he must justify and protect his bondage to spare him the shame of admitting he was wrong. Since the legal system itself has broken God's laws, it can't help but promote the "rights" of the lawbreaker.

The End Of The Road

And so we stand at the end of the road. Although there seems to be a trend toward a more biblical view of reality, if the philosophies and theology which convinced us to take the wrong turns are not utterly destroyed, society, as we know it, will indeed collapse and spiral downward in an ever tightening circle of its own corruption. The battle hinges upon the Church having the courage to say to a selfish and prideful society, 

"Man is not to be worshiped, and now it's time to pay the dues for having done so!" Nicer words will only help push us into the ravine beyond the last remaining guardrail at the end of the road.

...the axe is already laid at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down... Matthew 3:10

Are We Creating a Culture of Moral Misfits?

Trying to make sense out of the senseless atrocity in Newtown, CT seems so futile at times. But this is the operative question that seems to come out of all events like this one or some derivative thereof:
"Are we creating a culture or moral misfits?"



from godfatherpolitics.com
Are We Creating a Culture of Moral Misfits?:

Our nation has a deep moral problem brought on by a belligerent secular worldview. And it’s not just religious people who have seen its impact. Yale Law Professor Arthur Allen Leff (1935–1981) put it this way:

“We are never going to get anywhere (assuming for the moment that there is somewhere to get) in ethical or legal theory unless we finally face the fact that, in the Psalmist’s words, there is no one like unto the Lord. . . . The so-called death of God turns out not to have been His funeral; it also seems to have affected the total elimination of any coherent, or even more-than-momentarily convincing, ethical or legal system dependent upon final authoritative, extrasystemic premises.”

 Put more simply, with God out of the picture, “everything is up for grabs.”[1]

'via Blog this'



This is the best response I could find and it flows out of the lessons we did not learn from Columbine and the testimony of the father of Rachel Scott, one of the students killed at Columbine.

Darrel Scott's speech to Congress:
http://www.americaspartynews.com/talk/forums/thread-view.asp?tid=3621

On that day, many students and teachers and administrators found themselves in gross violation of the Law of the Land handed down by the Supreme Court of the United States in 1962 -- one of many atrocities committed by this body -- and that is to remove prayer from the public schools.

I guarantee you on that day in 1999 at Columbine there were many who violated the law and asked for God's help openly and vainly. And I guarantee there were many in Newtown, CT who prayed in vain for help to a God they do not know very well and would not recognize if they met Him. They may as well have been praying to Santa or the Easter Bunny.

We have done of great job of bringing about The Naked Public Square (1984) that then-Lutheran pastor Richard John Niehaus warned us about (Niehaus subsequently became a Catholic priest in 1991).

(as an aside Niehaus was also on the correct side of the abortion (right to life) issue as well, standing in direct contrast to Chicago Cardinal (Chicago Values Suck) Bernadin when he compared the pro-life struggle to the civil rights movement of the 60's.)

It was a mistake to isolate abortion "from other issues of the sacredness of life" and to allow politicians to hide behind the skirt of the "seamless garment" argument provided to Catholic politicians by Bernadin. 

According to writer Joseph Sobran, "the seamless garment has turned out to be nothing but a loophole for hypocritical Catholic politicians. If anything", he adds, "it has actually made it easier for them than for non-Catholics to give their effective support to legalized abortion—that is, it has allowed them to be inconsistent and unprincipled about the very issues that Cardinal Bernardin said demand consistency and principle".^[11][12]

Regarding the Church's position on the death penalty, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI) wrote in 2004 that Catholics could have a legitimate diversity of opinions on the matter, but not on abortion or euthanasia.^[13]) 

from wikipedia.org:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Allen_Leff

Arthur Allen Leff (1935–1981) was a professor of law at Yale Law School who is best known for a series of articles examining whether there is such a thing as a normative law or morality. Leff answers this question in the negative and follows the consequences to their logical conclusions.

In these works Leff attempts to directly address whether a normative morality can exist without God. [2] Leff answers the question in the negative. Leff states that absent an ultimate authority figure (i.e. God) handing down moral laws from on-high there is no reason for any person to prefer one set of behavior identified as "moral" to another. Leff terms this "the Grand Sez Who." In particular, it is impossible to resolve the conflict between the rights of the individual and the power of the collective, even though much of the time we can pretend that, for instance, the Constitution tells us where to draw the line. There are bound to be cases where we are left on our own, with no authoritative referee; there is no "brooding omnipresence in the sky", in the words of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., whom Leff quotes approvingly.

 Leff was an agnostic but his writings have been influential on Christian discussions of morality in the modern Era. Phillip E. Johnson has suggested that Leff's work is really a critique of the God is dead argument. [3] Johnson argues that the presence of evil in the world is evidence that there is an absolute morality which requires an absolute authority. Other Christian scholars have also applied Leff's critique to secular arguments for a normative morality. [4]

Unspeakable Ethics, Unnatural Law, 1979 Duke L.J. 1229 (1979)
http://inklingz.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/unspeakable-ethics-unnatural-law-duke-law-journal3.pdf

Leff states as follows in the closing of UE, UL:

All I can say is this: it looks as if we are all we have. Given what we know about ourselves, and each other, this is an extraordinarily unappetizing prospect; looking around the world, it appears that if all men are brothers, the ruling model is Cain and Abel. Neither reason, nor love, nor even terror, seems to have worked to make us “good,” and worse than that, there is no reason why any thing should. Only if ethics were something unspeakable by us could law be unnatural, and therefore unchallengeable. As things stand now, everything is up for grabs. Nevertheless:

Napalming babies is bad.

Starving the poor is wicked.

Buying and selling each other is depraved.

Those who stood up and died resisting Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Idi Amin, and Pol Pot —and General Custer too— have earned salvation.

Those who acquiesced deserve to be damned.

There is in the world such a thing as evil.

[All together now:] Sez who?

God help us.

.

Basically, there seems to be two types of responses around the water cooler to events like this. There are those who respond "I don't understand how this type of thing could happen..." and those who respond "I not only understand why it happens, I'm only glad it doesn't happen more...". On one side are the secular progressives who worship at the shrine of moral relativism. On the other side are the evangelical conservatives and the religious understand moral absolutism even if they don't practice it to perfection in their own lives.

When we live in a country whose laws (morality) do not respect life much at the beginning or late stages, why do we even question why nobody has much respect for the lives (the ultimate human right -- life) of others during the middle or so-called productive stages?

I won't even discuss some of the immoral institutions (most reside in or are glorified by HOLLYWOOD) that totally disrespect the lives and dignity of human beings in the middle stages of life. So we do pretty much of a good job of shitting on the lives and dignity of life throughout all of its stages.

And then we wonder why incidents like Newtown and Columbine are prevalent in our society, in our culture? And we consistently point fingers in all the wrong directions. We are very well practiced at doing the wrong thing and instead of admitting our mistake and changing course -- we just continue down the same lost course, only faster and harder. The Lost Pilot Effect. (“Lost pilot” effect: If the correct strategy is not known or applicable, people will just do “more” of the wrong thing.)

for a more secular explanation of why we are where we are (LOST):
http://teaching.p-design.ch/mdm07/presentations/managerial_decision_making07_13_Retrospection.pdf

C'mon man. We can do better than this. We're smarter than this.

Unfortunately, for now my response to the question "Are we creating a culture of moral misfits?" is an unqualified "Yes!!"

We have become Amoral Nation. That slippery slope is a real SOB!