Traditional Historic American Values - Part 7: Leadership
21/October/2009 11:54 Filed in: Weekly
Column
Volume 11, Issue 41
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As we begin wrapping up this series on Traditional Historic American Values, we come to the zenith on why the United States has come to the banana republic crossroads. I suppose zenith is probably not really what we are trying to explain, but terms like nadir, canyon, rock-bottom, pits - really do not do justice to the current situation either.
America’s true crisis is really a crisis of leadership. In that respect, void, black hole, and vacuum seem much better descriptions. Republicans point to President Obama as the power taking us to the banana republic standard. The Democrats point to George W. Bush as the creator of the path. The problem is that all the name-calling is really just that and it is decisively counter productive to doing anything but letting the forces of gravity do its thing.
Gravity is a Natural Law and it is the major force behind the current situation. The failure of leadership is that they truly fail to understand the gravity of the situation. The prosperity of the United States has been understood as a universal law for so long that those who are the self described leaders think a little application of warm fuzzies to the problem will make everyone feel better and therefore everything will soon be better.
In the bygone days warm fuzzies were created out of material and understood as such. Today warm fuzzies are created out of deficit spending and the spin goes, “Don’t worry, be happy.” Of course that is a 1988 song from Bobby McFerrin quoting Indian mystic Meher Baba.
That concept seems to be especially true for the current stock market. The financial powers of the United States have created so much funny money and pumped it into too big to fail financial institutions that they really have no need to worry, they can be happy. As long as things continue to go up they get paid, and if things go down they get paid also. If they really screw up again they will get another bailout. In other words the funny money goes round and round and in the process, the process becomes the perpetual money making machine. How cool is that?
Since Wall Street is really a machine, all that is needed is a little routine maintenance, a little grease to the wheels, and it will run forever. Well at least until it runs out of gas. Running out of gas, thereby allows gravity and friction to again bring Natural Law into play.
“Don’t worry, be happy” has become a four word philosophy that means that we are all to live beyond our means. The cool thing is there is so much stuff available to make it all happen. It seems a little moronic to think that if excessive debt got us individually and corporately into this mess, that continuing to inoculate the economy with more and more debt will somehow save the system. That surely isn’t a Natural Law, because it defies all logic.
Of course if the stuff doesn’t sell then the economy will collapse and we will all starve to death, or be killed or saved by global warming, or die in the swine flu pandemic.
The real problem is not with the creation of money; the real problem in the United States and the rest of the world is the creation of real wealth. How hard is it to understand that wealth and money may be related, but they are not just one entity? The United States was once known as the wealthiest nation in history, that has now all changed and we have become history’s greatest debtor and therein lies the true failure of leadership.
Giving someone something that costs them nothing is not leadership. At the founding of the American Republic and throughout much of her history such a concept would have been considered treason. Today we call it real clear politics.
The goal of war and games is to win. Winning therefore becomes the mission. So what is the current mission of the United States?
You won’t hear this in any of the name-calling rhetoric and spin, but the clear deductive mission of recent American leadership has been to take away the constitutional power vested in the people of the United States by the nation’s founders and give, sell, or allow elites to manage the world, our world.
In recent history, it seemed that the Bush Administration defined those elites as large corporations. In the Obama Administration it seems as those elites are defined as big government bureaucrats that will share the wealth with our corporate oligarchy. In other words the elite few will tell the dumb serfs what to do and what to buy.
On each extreme you hear that the conflict is between capitalism and socialism, or communism. This spin is much of the time, spun with personal attacks against those who hold a different point of view.
So when you hear someone promoting an agenda that establishes an elite organization to control whatever, and then hear that those who disagree are not truthful in some fashion, you can definitely assume that the someone is not a leader in the truest sense. In fact, to use an old nineteenth century term, these attacks are sinful, much like pornography, rape, murder, and theft.
However the mission is not achieved by spin, talking points, and name-calling. That is especially true because Traditional Historic America Values put an emphasis on substance over style. The five points of this series are: Natural Law, Religion, Freedom & Liberty, Opportunity, and Leadership. These are codified in the Constitution as Peoples’ Law contrasted with Rulers’ Law. Peoples’ Law is truly the historic law of the land, even though it has been slowly eroded over time. This is still true because politically the country is still populated by the center right majority.
Freedom and liberty are assumed in this country and this puts elitists at a definite disadvantage, as is freedom of religion, and the right to opportunity achieved by hard work, not special interests and government interference. The guardians of these inalienable rights are God’s common Natural Law and human leadership willing to put personal comfort aside to bring about real change, not just wishful thinking change.
The elite don’t understand the linkage between Natural Law and leadership, because evolutionary materialistic atheism is the basis for their worldview paradigms. Hence gravity and entropy will eventually bring down quickly the various forms of human oppression. As an example, look at the rapid demise of the former Soviet Union.
President Obama is presently taking deserved heat for not making a decision on what to do about sending more troops to Afghanistan. But never in the talking points is any discussion on what really is our mission in Afghanistan. Is it social justice or revenge for 9-11? How about nation-building like what now seems to be happening in Iraq? How about is it the United States obligation to police the world, or to be its peacemaker?
In a global economy all of these are very important questions that should guide our focus and our mission. However this misses the reality that maybe an enlightened world economic system based upon non-sustainable material consumerism is not a viable economic model. The American Declaration of Independence speaks to the “pursuit of happiness,” not the pursuit of stuff, or money, or power.
It seems to this writer that happiness is traditionally measured in terms of family, friends, and purpose, not the size of our flat screen TV, or even the total carbon footprint of our hybrid vehicles, Prius or Escalade.
In a material worldview, the more toys the better, even if you don’t have the time to use them. Much of the current requirement for larger and larger homes is the need to store your stuff. In Christianity the emphasis on having “your best life now” must focus upon materialism because alternatives are not simple to find. Chances are if you pursue these alternatives you will be subject to some form of name-calling by those who never have taken the time to really understand why they are taking up space in this universe.
Christianity, or religion in this series, is the only human attribute that truly addresses the high intrinsic value of humanity. Focusing in on the real cause of this current economic mess is really the failure of religious leadership. This parallels or perhaps is the leading indicator in the progression of gravity, to entropy, to running out of gas that we now see in the broader civil society.
A church, which has its focus on creating moral beings, misses the true point that God created humans to be moral beings. In other words their church mission is redundant or oxymoronic. In traditional historic Christianity, the answer to immorality is an external righteousness that empowers righteousness. That external power is present in the completed life, death and resurrection of Jesus the Messiah.
The recent incarnation of this erroneous moral church mission is codified in another four word philosophy: What Would Jesus Do? (WWJD). In contrast the true mission of the church is “What Jesus did!” Problems with the implications of WWJD are really the underlying reasons why many of the Founding Fathers are today considered Deists rather than Christians. It is also why the Constitution miraculously creates the concept of freedom of religion.
WWJD moralism has been the driving force behind the distinctly American created and exported form of evangelicalism. It could be argued that it also strongly influenced the creation of Mormonism and what are defined as other Christian cults and sects. In Traditional Historic American Values, the citizens of the United States for the most part work hard at some type of moral behavior because they realize it is there ticket to the eternal.
What is codified in the Constitution, which makes it unique still in our world, is the acknowledgment that our Indians, Islam, and other religious people had a right to their moral beliefs also. In other words the Constitution created a free market in religion as well as for commerce.
What has brought about our current economic problems is with the rise of the political Religious Right and its predecessor the Moral Majority. They could not compete in free market religion so they attempted to diversify into politics and economics.
Through their mission’s leadership Christianity, as understood in the broader culture, became just another path to morality. Just one moral spin on morality among the diversity of all human religions. Furthermore the level of piety required, really had no basis in the moral standards of the culture. In other words Protestant Christianity became associated with religious intolerance rather than God’s grace.
Because it was fundamentally a political movement to basically establish heaven on earth, the Religious Right, lost the right (correct) focus and quickly became the power base of the Republican Party. In the historic context time will show that many of the problems that George W. Bush had with the broader American culture related directly to his strong ties to the Religious Right rather than his policies. So those unwilling to believe that anyone would truly desire to please God through public service, had to resort to name-calling to shift the focus from their own immorality.
Here in lies the fundamental failure of Christian leadership. They want to be perceived as relevant and they want to be liked. If your ministry is based upon human morality and good works, it does not have access to the true power of God’s grace. Hence being called a knuckle dragging, Bible thumping, religious bigot has power, because it is based upon an element of truth.
However, a ministry based upon the grace of God, is capable of understanding these derogatory comments in the broader context. In that light these types of comments are somewhat amusing and at the same time very sad, for they are shallow attempts to discredit deeper things of which are hidden from the eyes of the derogatory commentator. Hence the comments can be accepted through grace for there is no reason to digress to that inhumane level.
So through these continuing depressing economic times for the common people of the United States and the world, will gain a deeper understanding of diverse principles of traditional values. We have discussed but five in this series. Those of us blessed to live in the United States have those values codified in a political document called the Constitution. As a consequence Americans have standards by which to understand the current situation that has begun to refocus our values on what is truly important.
The self appointed elite of any organization do not have a basis of power beyond a limited collective human will. Hence in a world created and sustained by God, they are attempting to win an impossible war with very paltry weapons.
Leadership overtime will arise from the chaos and order will be restored. As pointed out in the Genesis creation account, universal chaos is refined into individual unique diversity. All that the elitist have is the false hope that a universal collective will in some hopeful sense bring order to worldly chaos. In common terms that just won’t work for long in a world which is governed and sustained by Natural Law created by a Nature’s Creator.
Podcast
>>PDF copy
>>Print view
As we begin wrapping up this series on Traditional Historic American Values, we come to the zenith on why the United States has come to the banana republic crossroads. I suppose zenith is probably not really what we are trying to explain, but terms like nadir, canyon, rock-bottom, pits - really do not do justice to the current situation either.
America’s true crisis is really a crisis of leadership. In that respect, void, black hole, and vacuum seem much better descriptions. Republicans point to President Obama as the power taking us to the banana republic standard. The Democrats point to George W. Bush as the creator of the path. The problem is that all the name-calling is really just that and it is decisively counter productive to doing anything but letting the forces of gravity do its thing.
Gravity is a Natural Law and it is the major force behind the current situation. The failure of leadership is that they truly fail to understand the gravity of the situation. The prosperity of the United States has been understood as a universal law for so long that those who are the self described leaders think a little application of warm fuzzies to the problem will make everyone feel better and therefore everything will soon be better.
In the bygone days warm fuzzies were created out of material and understood as such. Today warm fuzzies are created out of deficit spending and the spin goes, “Don’t worry, be happy.” Of course that is a 1988 song from Bobby McFerrin quoting Indian mystic Meher Baba.
That concept seems to be especially true for the current stock market. The financial powers of the United States have created so much funny money and pumped it into too big to fail financial institutions that they really have no need to worry, they can be happy. As long as things continue to go up they get paid, and if things go down they get paid also. If they really screw up again they will get another bailout. In other words the funny money goes round and round and in the process, the process becomes the perpetual money making machine. How cool is that?
Since Wall Street is really a machine, all that is needed is a little routine maintenance, a little grease to the wheels, and it will run forever. Well at least until it runs out of gas. Running out of gas, thereby allows gravity and friction to again bring Natural Law into play.
“Don’t worry, be happy” has become a four word philosophy that means that we are all to live beyond our means. The cool thing is there is so much stuff available to make it all happen. It seems a little moronic to think that if excessive debt got us individually and corporately into this mess, that continuing to inoculate the economy with more and more debt will somehow save the system. That surely isn’t a Natural Law, because it defies all logic.
Of course if the stuff doesn’t sell then the economy will collapse and we will all starve to death, or be killed or saved by global warming, or die in the swine flu pandemic.
The real problem is not with the creation of money; the real problem in the United States and the rest of the world is the creation of real wealth. How hard is it to understand that wealth and money may be related, but they are not just one entity? The United States was once known as the wealthiest nation in history, that has now all changed and we have become history’s greatest debtor and therein lies the true failure of leadership.
Giving someone something that costs them nothing is not leadership. At the founding of the American Republic and throughout much of her history such a concept would have been considered treason. Today we call it real clear politics.
The goal of war and games is to win. Winning therefore becomes the mission. So what is the current mission of the United States?
You won’t hear this in any of the name-calling rhetoric and spin, but the clear deductive mission of recent American leadership has been to take away the constitutional power vested in the people of the United States by the nation’s founders and give, sell, or allow elites to manage the world, our world.
In recent history, it seemed that the Bush Administration defined those elites as large corporations. In the Obama Administration it seems as those elites are defined as big government bureaucrats that will share the wealth with our corporate oligarchy. In other words the elite few will tell the dumb serfs what to do and what to buy.
On each extreme you hear that the conflict is between capitalism and socialism, or communism. This spin is much of the time, spun with personal attacks against those who hold a different point of view.
So when you hear someone promoting an agenda that establishes an elite organization to control whatever, and then hear that those who disagree are not truthful in some fashion, you can definitely assume that the someone is not a leader in the truest sense. In fact, to use an old nineteenth century term, these attacks are sinful, much like pornography, rape, murder, and theft.
However the mission is not achieved by spin, talking points, and name-calling. That is especially true because Traditional Historic America Values put an emphasis on substance over style. The five points of this series are: Natural Law, Religion, Freedom & Liberty, Opportunity, and Leadership. These are codified in the Constitution as Peoples’ Law contrasted with Rulers’ Law. Peoples’ Law is truly the historic law of the land, even though it has been slowly eroded over time. This is still true because politically the country is still populated by the center right majority.
Freedom and liberty are assumed in this country and this puts elitists at a definite disadvantage, as is freedom of religion, and the right to opportunity achieved by hard work, not special interests and government interference. The guardians of these inalienable rights are God’s common Natural Law and human leadership willing to put personal comfort aside to bring about real change, not just wishful thinking change.
The elite don’t understand the linkage between Natural Law and leadership, because evolutionary materialistic atheism is the basis for their worldview paradigms. Hence gravity and entropy will eventually bring down quickly the various forms of human oppression. As an example, look at the rapid demise of the former Soviet Union.
President Obama is presently taking deserved heat for not making a decision on what to do about sending more troops to Afghanistan. But never in the talking points is any discussion on what really is our mission in Afghanistan. Is it social justice or revenge for 9-11? How about nation-building like what now seems to be happening in Iraq? How about is it the United States obligation to police the world, or to be its peacemaker?
In a global economy all of these are very important questions that should guide our focus and our mission. However this misses the reality that maybe an enlightened world economic system based upon non-sustainable material consumerism is not a viable economic model. The American Declaration of Independence speaks to the “pursuit of happiness,” not the pursuit of stuff, or money, or power.
It seems to this writer that happiness is traditionally measured in terms of family, friends, and purpose, not the size of our flat screen TV, or even the total carbon footprint of our hybrid vehicles, Prius or Escalade.
In a material worldview, the more toys the better, even if you don’t have the time to use them. Much of the current requirement for larger and larger homes is the need to store your stuff. In Christianity the emphasis on having “your best life now” must focus upon materialism because alternatives are not simple to find. Chances are if you pursue these alternatives you will be subject to some form of name-calling by those who never have taken the time to really understand why they are taking up space in this universe.
Christianity, or religion in this series, is the only human attribute that truly addresses the high intrinsic value of humanity. Focusing in on the real cause of this current economic mess is really the failure of religious leadership. This parallels or perhaps is the leading indicator in the progression of gravity, to entropy, to running out of gas that we now see in the broader civil society.
A church, which has its focus on creating moral beings, misses the true point that God created humans to be moral beings. In other words their church mission is redundant or oxymoronic. In traditional historic Christianity, the answer to immorality is an external righteousness that empowers righteousness. That external power is present in the completed life, death and resurrection of Jesus the Messiah.
The recent incarnation of this erroneous moral church mission is codified in another four word philosophy: What Would Jesus Do? (WWJD). In contrast the true mission of the church is “What Jesus did!” Problems with the implications of WWJD are really the underlying reasons why many of the Founding Fathers are today considered Deists rather than Christians. It is also why the Constitution miraculously creates the concept of freedom of religion.
WWJD moralism has been the driving force behind the distinctly American created and exported form of evangelicalism. It could be argued that it also strongly influenced the creation of Mormonism and what are defined as other Christian cults and sects. In Traditional Historic American Values, the citizens of the United States for the most part work hard at some type of moral behavior because they realize it is there ticket to the eternal.
What is codified in the Constitution, which makes it unique still in our world, is the acknowledgment that our Indians, Islam, and other religious people had a right to their moral beliefs also. In other words the Constitution created a free market in religion as well as for commerce.
What has brought about our current economic problems is with the rise of the political Religious Right and its predecessor the Moral Majority. They could not compete in free market religion so they attempted to diversify into politics and economics.
Through their mission’s leadership Christianity, as understood in the broader culture, became just another path to morality. Just one moral spin on morality among the diversity of all human religions. Furthermore the level of piety required, really had no basis in the moral standards of the culture. In other words Protestant Christianity became associated with religious intolerance rather than God’s grace.
Because it was fundamentally a political movement to basically establish heaven on earth, the Religious Right, lost the right (correct) focus and quickly became the power base of the Republican Party. In the historic context time will show that many of the problems that George W. Bush had with the broader American culture related directly to his strong ties to the Religious Right rather than his policies. So those unwilling to believe that anyone would truly desire to please God through public service, had to resort to name-calling to shift the focus from their own immorality.
Here in lies the fundamental failure of Christian leadership. They want to be perceived as relevant and they want to be liked. If your ministry is based upon human morality and good works, it does not have access to the true power of God’s grace. Hence being called a knuckle dragging, Bible thumping, religious bigot has power, because it is based upon an element of truth.
However, a ministry based upon the grace of God, is capable of understanding these derogatory comments in the broader context. In that light these types of comments are somewhat amusing and at the same time very sad, for they are shallow attempts to discredit deeper things of which are hidden from the eyes of the derogatory commentator. Hence the comments can be accepted through grace for there is no reason to digress to that inhumane level.
So through these continuing depressing economic times for the common people of the United States and the world, will gain a deeper understanding of diverse principles of traditional values. We have discussed but five in this series. Those of us blessed to live in the United States have those values codified in a political document called the Constitution. As a consequence Americans have standards by which to understand the current situation that has begun to refocus our values on what is truly important.
The self appointed elite of any organization do not have a basis of power beyond a limited collective human will. Hence in a world created and sustained by God, they are attempting to win an impossible war with very paltry weapons.
Leadership overtime will arise from the chaos and order will be restored. As pointed out in the Genesis creation account, universal chaos is refined into individual unique diversity. All that the elitist have is the false hope that a universal collective will in some hopeful sense bring order to worldly chaos. In common terms that just won’t work for long in a world which is governed and sustained by Natural Law created by a Nature’s Creator.
Podcast