DeeGeesLifeBlog ~ Life as Art ~ Or is it Heart?

THE STARK REALITY OF A GODLESS SOCIETY – NO RELIGIOUS ASSOCIATION

You do well to wish to learn our arts and ways of life, and above all, the religion of Jesus Christ. These will make you a greater and happier people than you are. While we are zealously performing the duties of good citizens and soldiers, we certainly ought not to be inattentive to the higher duties of religion. To the distinguished character of Patriot, it should be our highest glory to add the more distinguished character of Christian. ~ The Writings of George Washington

I now make it my earnest prayer, that God would have you, and the State over which you preside, in his holy protection. ~ George Washington

The collection of facts and statistics that you are about to read is highly controversial.  A lot of people are going to be greatly upset by it.  Why?  Because they don’t like to be confronted with the truth about America.  Most people tend to believe that we can “fix this country” by getting the right politicians into power or by implementing certain economic or social reforms.  But the reality of the matter is that our problems go far deeper than that.  Just consider a few of the news stories that we have seen recently in the past couple of years…

What would cause a high school kid to take two kitchen knives and go on a stabbing rampage through his school?

What would cause a topless woman to ransack a McDonald’s in St. Petersburg, Florida?

What would cause two 18-year-old boys to beat a 30-year-old mentally-disabled man to death with a baseball bat just so they could get his XBox?

What would cause a new father to put his 6-week-old daughter in a freezer to keep her from crying?

A lot of people regard those kinds of stories as “isolated incidents”, but as you will see below, they are actually representative of a much larger trend, beginning with the Johnson Amendment of 1954 which basically forced the churches of America to claim a tax-exempt status known today as “501(c)3” prohibiting (in its broadest sense) pastors from across America preaching political positions from their pulpits. This led to prayer and Bible teaching being taken out of schools in 1963; abortion on demand through the Warren Burger Supreme Court decision of 1973; and escalating ruinous court decisions ever since that have led up to the recent decision on Sodomite marriage between people of the same sex; an abomination by any stretch of the imagination in God’s eyes (in case you missed last week’s blog, go here…)

As Silvio Canto wrote in American Thinker just the other day:

Back in 2005, David Brooks wrote this about Roe v. Wade and the Alito confirmation for the Supreme Court:

Justice Harry Blackmun did more inadvertent damage to our democracy than any other 20th-century American. When he and his Supreme Court colleagues issued the Roe v. Wade decision, they set off a cycle of political viciousness and counter-viciousness that has poisoned public life ever since, and now threatens to destroy the Senate as we know it.

When Blackmun wrote the Roe decision, it took the abortion issue out of the legislatures and put it into the courts. If it had remained in the legislatures, we would have seen a series of state-by-state compromises reflecting the views of the centrist majority that’s always existed on this issue. These legislative compromises wouldn’t have pleased everyone, but would have been regarded as legitimate.

Instead, Blackmun and his concurring colleagues invented a right to abortion, and imposed a solution more extreme than the policies of just about any other comparable nation.

Religious conservatives became alienated from their own government, feeling that their democratic rights had been usurped by robed elitists. Liberals lost touch with working-class Americans because they never had to have a conversation about values with those voters; they could just rely on the courts to impose their views. The parties polarized as they each became dominated by absolutist activists.

In addition to the 60,000,000 and rising genocidal abortions that have been conducted since 1973, consider these other relevant facts which have arisen as a direct result of prayer and Bible study being removed from our halls of learning…

CORRUPTION, CRIMINALITY, and SLOTHFULNESS

• Corruption is rampant throughout our society.  In fact, America leads the world in money given to fake charities.
• Without strong families, our young people are constantly in search of an identity.  According to the FBI, there are now more than 1.4 million gang members involved in the 33,000 active criminal gangs in the United States.
• In 2012, the latest full year that we have numbers for, the rate of violent crime in the United States increased by 15 percent.
• The average young American will spend 10,000 hours playing video games before the age of 21.
• One study discovered that 88 percent of all Americans from age 8 to age 18 play video games, and that approximately four times as many boys are addicted to video games as girls are.
• Average SAT scores have been falling for years, and the level of education that our kids are receiving in most of our public schools is a total joke. At this point, 15-year-olds that attend U.S. public schools do not even rank in the top half of all industrialized nations when it comes to math or science literacy.
• We live a time when most employers no longer care about their employees.  As I wrote about the other day, a company that Warren Buffett has a controlling interest in has decided to shut down a factory in Kentucky and move it to Honduras just so that he can make a little bit more money.   As a result, 600 workers are going to lose their jobs.
• There are more than 3 million reports of child abuse in the United States every single year.

A FALLING AWAY FROM THE CHURCH and THE BIBLE

• According to a recent Pew Research Center survey, 60 percent of all Americans believe that “humans and other living things have evolved over time”, while only 33 percent of respondents rejected this statement.
• Nearly one-fifth of all U.S. adults have no religious affiliation whatsoever.  Back in 1972, only 7 percent of all U.S. adults had no religious affiliation.
• The number of Americans with no religious affiliation has grown by 25 percent over the past five years.
• The younger you are, the more likely you are not to be affiliated with a religion.  9 percent of all U.S. adults that are 65 or older have no religious affiliation, but a whopping 32 percent of all U.S. adults under the age of 30 have no religious affiliation.
• 73 percent of the religiously unaffiliated support gay marriage and 72 percent of the religiously unaffiliated support legalized abortion.
• The religiously unaffiliated now make up 24 percent of all registered voters “who are Democrats or lean Democratic”.
• For the first time ever, Protestants do not make up a majority of the U.S. population.  In 2007, Protestants made up 53 percent of the U.S. population, but now they only make up 48 percent of the U.S. population. Way back in 1972, Protestants made up 62 percent of the U.S. population.
• 29 percent of all U.S. adults “seldom or never attend religious services”.

THE CREEPING THREAT of SECULARISM and ANARCHY

• 51 percent of all U.S. adults believe that churches and other religious organizations “are too concerned with money and power”.
• 66 percent of all U.S. adults believe that religion is “losing its influence on American life”.
• According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the number of Americans with “no religion” more than doubled between 1990 and 2008.
• According to the American Religious Identification Survey, only 76 percent of all Americans identified themselves as “Christian” of one type or another in 2008.  Back in 1990, 86 percent of all Americans identified themselves as “Christian” of one type or another.
• A study conducted by the Barna Group discovered that nearly 60 percent of all Christians from 15 years of age to 29 years of age are no longer actively involved in any church.
• It is being projected that the percentage of Americans attending church in 2050 will be about half of what it is today.
• One survey conducted a while back found that 52 percent of all American Christians believe that “at least some non-Christian faiths can lead to eternal life”.
• According to LifeWay Research, 46 percent of all Americans never even think about whether they will go to heaven or not.

An all-time high 59 percent of all Americans believe that the traditional definition of marriage needs to be changed.

CONVICTION

So in summary, both from last week’s feature and this one here, I leave you with this reminder from Paul’s Letter to the Romans, Chapter 1:21-28…

Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, And changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things. Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonour their own bodies between themselves: Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen. For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature: And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another;

A watchful eye must be kept on ourselves lest, while we are building ideal monuments of renown and bliss here, we neglect to have our names enrolled in the Annals of Heaven. ~ James Madison

Men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet. And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient; Being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity; whisperers, Backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, Without understanding, covenantbreakers, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful:
Who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them.

I have sometimes thought there could not be a stronger testimony in favor of religion or against temporal enjoyments, even the most rational and manly, than for men who occupy the most honorable and gainful departments and [who] are rising in reputation and wealth, publicly to declare their unsatisfactoriness by becoming fervent advocates in the cause of Christ; and I wish you may give in your evidence in this way.  ~ The Papers of James Madison

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Source material h/t from Michael Snyder and his website The Truth where he has DVDs available as teaching aids…

The American Thinker article by Silvio Canto can be read in full right here…

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Soli Deo Gloria!