Traditional Historic America
Values, Part 1
9 September 2009
Volume 11, Issue 35
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From very recent history it
seems as if the traders on Wall Street believe that their rapidly increasing
fortunes are again just a few months away. To a certain extent they are correct
because it really doesnÕt make a whole lot of difference to them because they get
paid as long as the markets continue to function, up or down. The only time
they really lose is when nothing happens. Furthermore it really doesnÕt matter
if the dollar weakens and inflation soars, market making is an exempt
operation, always exempt from real world restrictions.
This brings up two questions
you might like to ponder, because the future of Wall Street traders really is
of no interest here, but for your intellectual musings they may be:
Does Wall Street any longer
reflect the true prosperity of the country (and the world), or is it just an
exclusive special interest, determined to extract monetarily its due no matter
the greater social costs?
Since the recent inception
of a new enterprise model called ÒToo Big to FailÓ has government intervention
in big business essentially sown the seeds of future economic stagnation, or
worse, that will eventually have to be treated as weeds and eradicated, to
again restore the diversity of the free market system?
Moving on, a few weeks ago I
was reading a Wall Street Journal interview with the current Governor of Texas,
Rick Perry. The essence of that article discussed present Texas prosperity
while the rest of the nation languishes in prolonged recession, budget
deficits, and essential despair. Early in the interview, the governor pointed
to a table with three books that outlined his programs for the current Texas
prosperity. Those three books were ÒThe
Road to SerfdomÓ by F. A. Hayek; ÒThe
Forgotten ManÓ by Amity Shlaes, and ÒThe
5000 Year LeapÓ by W. Cleon Skousen.
Both HayekÕs and ShalesÕ
books are favorite references at Wonder Springs, and over time we have written
reviews and quoted frequently from their pages, however I was not aware of ÒThe
5000 Year Leap.Ó At that time I was in Spokane so I stopped at a bookstore and
picked up a copy. I normally write a review of a book, music album, or article
and pretty much leave it at that, but after taking in The Leap, I decided a
little more depth was needed. What I read in the pages was what I long believed
about the Founders and the Constitution of the American Republic, but had never
read anywhere, or heard properly discussed in context. So today we begin that
journey, but before we begin, I shall digress for a little personal testimony.
When you load the Wonder
Springs Chronicle Front page you see right away the continuation slogan, ÒA
Biblical Creation Worldview.Ó Why that line instead of a ÒChristianÓ or similar
worldview? Probably most importantly, we live in a world today where the term
Christianity has lost any relevant meaning and understanding in the broader
society. To put it in a more common worldly context, the term Christianity no
longer really stands for any specific set of doctrines or absolute standards.
Christianity has become relativistic, just as in the world it attempts to reach
with a gospel. Hence Christian teachings today are really not that much
different than the moralism you see taught in many secular arenas.
My first experience with
Christian relativism goes back to the days of Lutheran catechism. There we were
taught that the creation story in Genesis had to be interpreted through the
ÒscientificÓ lens of evolution. My pre-adolescent view that the straightforward
reading of scripture that seemed to imply a young earth, must therefore be
adapted by faith to include millions and billions of years. In later years I
found out that other Christians had even more bizarre theories, like a
multimillion year gap between Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 1:2, but IÕm getting off
track.
When I went to college, I
really didnÕt know what I wanted to do with my life, but I was good at science
so I thought I would give that a try. I soon learned that the abysmally poor
mathematics I was taught in high school would be a definite handicap in any
other field of science other than biology, so that is where I sort of ended up.
Not only could I handle the math, mostly statistics, which they donÕt teach in
high school, I really liked the classes, especially classes related to ecology.
In the spring quarter of my
senior year I took Field Botany, which was a class where you went out and
gathered a broad variety of plants, identified them according to their
taxonomy, and then dried them putting them into your own small herbarium. Being
interested in mountains and the nearest mountain to Cheney, Washington being
Mount Spokane, about every two weeks I made a collecting excursion to find new
and varied plants I could not find on the prairie. When I made my first trip,
most of the ground was covered in snow, by the time I made my last trip in late
May that same snow covered area, was a meadow of more plant diversity than I
could apprehend.
As I bent down to collect
that one unique plant specimen, I was so overwhelmed with the complex
diversity, I had to offer a little prayer that went something like, ÒLord, this
spectacle is way too complex for me to believe that this occurred through
evolutionary processes, if that means I have to be a bad scientist, then that
be so.Ó For about the next twenty years I continued alone in that bad scientist
belief. Then I learned others shared a similar creationist view, there was an
organization called the Institute for Creation Research located in California.
Shortly thereafter I also
found another organization known as Answers In Genesis, again made up of those
weird people who believed that the Bible was inconsistent with evolution and
with true science. In fact there are now so many of us bad evolutionary
scientists that last year a Jewish guy, Ben Stein made a movie called
ÒExpelledÓ which dealt with the growing numbers of Creation Scientists and the
price they were paying in their jobs for being bad scientists and not believing
in either the scientific merit, or the atheistic dogma of evolution.
All this is to point out
that I pretty much feel the same way after reading ÒThe
5000 Year Leap, A Miracle That Changed the World.Ó I, as well as the whole
American public, have been fed a line of until the cows come home rhetoric,
about the founding of the United States and particularly about the writing of
the United States Constitution. Those exaggerations of the truthful reality for
the most part come from well meaning people who sincerely, but fallaciously
believe in the relevance to society of their propaganda and brainwashing
attempts. However as with the true Christian gospel, once you hear the truth it
sets you free, from the bondage of ignorance.
Much confusion came from the
Religious Right and particularly now dead Jerry Falwell, likewise James Kennedy,
well-aged Pat Robertson, and others that have bombarded the airwaves with the
fact that this country was founded as a Christian nation and all we need to do
is return to Puritan religious values and everything will be heaven on earth.
It is true that many of the early colonists to American shores were devoutly
Christian, trying to produce heaven on earth, but it was always their
particular vision of heaven on earth. One does not have to delve too deep into
history to find that Roger Williams, founder of the state of Rhode Island, was
asked to leave Massachusetts because he was a Baptist and not a Calvinist or a
Congregationalist.
On the naturalistic
evolutionary atheist side of the debate, if they acknowledge at all any
traditional religious values of the founding of the United States, they are
quick to point out that that was back then and we have now evolved past that
point, to some type of fundamentalist liberal progressive world, in which
everyone does as they please, and peace and prosperity just sort of emerge out
of the slime of anarchy and chaos.
Perhaps these people need to
go back to their religious roots and see that even their evolving religion
requires millions if not billions of years for the undirected evolutionary
leaps to occur, a decade or two, even by their most optimistic elitist agenda
just doesnÕt have enough time, and definitely not enough information or
energetic resources to make it happen.
In the context of Biblical
creation as well as what I learned in reading The Leap, was that the Founding
Constitution Writing Fathers basically prepared a secular document, meaning in
theological terms – common grace. However the Fathers also understood that
without religious ethics, morality, and an understanding of Natural Law, common
to all civilized people, the nation would quickly degenerate into anarchy and
chaos. Their miraculous product has served this nation and the world well for
over two hundred years. It is only recently that this underpinning has begun to
evaporate and we are now beginning to see the economic fruit of these atheistic
enterprises.
Of course these enterprises
include not just the business sector, but also politics, and the judiciary. The
current worldwide recession was caused almost entirely by cancerous attempts to
get something for nothing without risk. The resulting collusion of both the
Bush and Obama administrations, to bailout too big to fail big business
enterprises clearly is an attempt to circumvent Natural Law for the benefit of
a few, and the will of the people be damned.
So we really donÕt live in a
time of economic uncertainty, that is just a symptom of a deeper disease. What
is taking place are planned attempts to replace creationÕs Natural Laws with
elitist favoritism to the politically powerful who control the monetarily
wealth, whom it is believed hold the chaos at bay, rather than being the
primary source of that developing entropy.
We will close this week with
five fundamental points outlined on page 78 of The Leap, describing the
required religious beliefs of a free society that must be taught in schools to
maintain a viable republican form of government:
When I think back of all the
stuff I learned in school I cannot recall being taught any of the above. Even
scarier is that in my life in Christian churches of varying persuasions, these
five points most of the time generally were of secondary importance compared to
some other religious agenda of social relevance.
Looking closely at the above
values you clearly see that they are basic tenants of all human religion from
the most primitive paganism to the most highly evolved emergent Christian sect.
Even atheists recognize the need for a moral code for society to function. It
is just that their religious preference has no way of developing or maintaining
that code, either through philosophy or some other path. The difference between Biblical
Christianity and other religions, in Christianity Jesus Christ is not only the
Creator, He is also that moral judge, and is also the propitiatory sacrifice
that justifies mankind as keeper of that good life lived moral conduct.
So next week we will get
more specific in our analysis of ÒThe 5000 Year Leap.Ó If you have the
opportunity to get the book definitely make the purchase and read it. There has
been a lot of talk this year about ÒChange You Can Believe In.Ó Contrary to the
current agenda flowing out of Washington, DC, as well as Wall Street, that
change is going to come about by the reemergence of traditional historic
American values. Why is that going to occur? Because these values are based
upon Natural Law and moral principles that interpret and function in a way
Creation and human institutions actually work.
The other sort of change,
hoped for by others more progressive, is really just a fantasy creation, of
those who have lost touch with true human roots, and they desire to create a
counterfeit reality. Not only is the moral fabric not there, neither is the Natural
Law, or the energetics to make their vision functional.
ÒThe 5000 Year LeapÓ is
about the American Constitution that in a couple of short centuries, so greatly
surpassed all combined human progress in the previous 5000 years, that the
contrast is awe inspiring. In the context of our last episode on music, it was
the words of the Constitution that allowed for the development of music, beyond
a limited sphere, to the point where you can listen to virtually any genre of
music, anywhere, on a device so small that it would have thought to have been
impossible even a decade ago.
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