The oligarchy will always have the limos, mansions, and private jets. Down on the Marxist "Animal Farm" some animals are always more equal than others. The little people get the barn. The pigs live in the farmer's house.
At least 2 generations have now been educated in government schools controlled by hard core Marxists. Before that every child since the mid 1800s to the early 1900s who attended government K-12 school learned socialism every day. They knew, simply by attending, that the government had the power to take money from their neighbor to pay for a school service that their parents wanted for tuition-FREE!
It was those of my great grandparents, and grandparents' generation ( educated in socialist K-12 schools) who voted for: the IRS, the Federal Reserve, the failed League of Nations, direct election of Senators, and put FDR in office. My parents' generation is entirely responsible for: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Johnson's Great Society, and a thousand other socialist programs.
If three to four ( and now four to five) generations of children attend schools EVERY DAY that are **SOCIALISM** in action, why are we surprised that these generations feel it also OK for government to take money from their neighbor for retirement, medicine, health care, food, housing, and a thousand other give aways? The latter generations are now thoroughly comfortable with **Marxism**!!!
If we are to save this nation, conservatives MUST MUST MUST work to get every child into a **conservative** private school! We MUST MUST MUST shut down the Marxist-socialist government K-12 schools that teach children to be comfortable with socialism simply by attending every day!
Conservatives must set up private education foundations. The foundations would award grants to conservative teachers who would open tution-free one room schools. They would be run in home or small building just as day care is run today. The foundations would certify the teacher, approve the curriculum, and test the students. The foundations break the government monopoly on team sports, theater, music, and art by running free, conservative, and community programs for its students.
Marxism is our nation's greatest threat. Schools are the Marxists' most powerful weapon. If we set up private conservative alternatives we will win back this nation in a generation or two.
Guilt for not being compassionate enough. Guilt for being fallen creatures, guilt, guilt, guilt...
But if it comes down to feeling guilty and having money stolen from you for strangers or feeling guilty and keeping your hard earned money, then people will want keep their guilt ridden money... as well they should. Now if you offered people free money and that they should keep their guilt — most would still take it and keep their guilt. That is the American way — feel guilty and keep the free money that is offered. Like free money, guilt is a luxury many people don’t want to lose. Guilt is a sign of their compassion; or a sign that the system is compassionate to them. It means they — with these guilty feelings — are very moral creatures.
When is there guilt for being too compassionate? Never happen unless to Satan.
Guilt has won elections, has done almost everything that can be done and will never go away. There is no getting rid of our pointer stick that both beats us and shows the way. Under our degeneracy we are moral creatures after all.
Your article is well-written, but I must disagree with you on one point. While it is true that Inshallah invokes the concept of the will of God, there are in fact many Christians who believe in the sovereign will of God who are the very opposite of your irresponsible person template. Indeed, there are a number of concepts in Scripture which, if extracted and isolated from their original theological context would become grotesque and misleading caricatures of the underlying truth they represent. Remember, Satan is unoriginal. He cannot operate from truth; therefore he cannot create valid, new ideas. As a result, all of his systems are toxic rearrangements of good and beneficial ideas. Marxism is a case in point. It certainly would be good if everyone had all their needs met, and it would be equally good if everyone made a fair contribution to the effort.
Now comes the departure from reality. People, as you say, are imperfect, and often are unwilling to contribute to the needs of others on a voluntary basis. They need motivation. Free markets motivate individual effort by rewarding it, but Marxism has a void here, and defaults to using the brutality of state force to compel contribution. It has such a void because it has borrowed incompletely from Christianity. The early Christians are sometimes accused of being “communist” because they shared all things in common. But they were not, because their sharing was totally voluntary. It had to come from the heart. Remember that Annanias and Saphira were told, before they were judged for lying to the Holy Spirit, that they had, as Christians, retained the right to withhold from the communal resources as long as they were honest with God about it. Marxism, like Satan, takes the living heart out of goodness and makes it a mechanical function powered by threat of force. No wonder the analogy to zombies keeps surfacing in this context.
But my broader point is this: Inshallah, i.e., the notion of the will of God governing all things, in isolation from the totality of Islamic doctrine, is not the cause of irresponsible behavior. People are irresponsible because that is the nature of human sinfulness. Rather, I contend an implied belief in unbridled human free will can be found in any and all persons who are “brave” enough to assert their own little will against the divinely inspired dictates of conscience. Sin would have no foothold at all if we fully accepted the authority of God over everything.
Furthermore, the will of God does have a proper role in Christian theology, and in that role has led to many positive benefits. First, with respect to salvation, if we are in fact dead in our trespasses and sins, as Paul teaches, it requires the life-giving work of God in the soul to awaken us to our need of redemption. There are countless Scriptures which put the initiative for salvation in the hands of God, not humans. We love him, as it says, because he first loved us. When you can successfully explain how a dead will is a free will, I may change my position on the matter.
And more than that, there are many Scriptures that assert God’s providential role in events well beyond personal salvation. God sent the plagues on Egypt. They fought and fought but the outcome was never in doubt. God’s people would be set free. There is no uncertainty or incomplete understanding in God about the consequences of anything he does. As Isaiah says, he is the God who knows the end from the beginning. Even in political affairs, we are told that God sets up kings, and God takes them down. The will of God, as Spurgeon said, really is the axle upon which the wheel of the universe turns.
However, the pertinent question is this: How has that understanding of the will of God, in the context of Christianity, and often referred to as Calvinism, affected human responsibility among those who believe it? Some have, it is sadly true, devolved into irresponsibility, but only because of abandoning the full compliment of Christian truth, not because of their belief in the will of God per se. Paul says we are to work out our salvation in “fear and trembling,” not because we think it all depends on us and we will likely blow it, but precisely because we know that it is God working in us both to will and to do what lines up with his purposes. As Nebuchadnezzar declared, if God wills it, no one can stop it.
That concept, that we have the backing of God himself in the pursuit of good, inspires an indestructible courage to face all obstacles. If one is a Christian, that courage takes the form of consistent allegiance to the truths of the Gospel. If, however, this truth has been isolated from a Christian context and set down in the company of murderers to justify them in vigorous pursuit of their evil ways, an entirely different result may be expected.
So I would not rush to judgment so quickly that a belief in the will of God will automatically produce irresponsibility. Otherwise, how can a Christian pray the Lord’s Prayer, which specifically hopes for the will of God to be as manifest on earth as it is in Heaven? No, hold them responsible who abandon their duties of conscience simply because of the evil resident within them. Sin can take many disguises, including a partial acceptance of the highest truths. That is no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
You are a very intelligent person. I appreciate your stand point on this issue. After all, the dems didn’t out right have to kill us in the streets to get their way. They did it through the process of diligence, and a unified front that never wavered, never doubted their core, albeit insane beliefs. Does anyone here actually believe that we, as a free people, can fight them with force? Does anyone here think that we can form militias with enough organization and expertise from military commanders, to even make a tiny dent in their armor? Anybody who thinks that a hand gun is a match for an army, has just seen too many movies. In the movies, Rambo kills hundreds of bad guys, lives without a scratch, and wins the war. In real life, a self professed Rambo is shot dead within seconds. Does anybody remember the movie “Mars Attacks?” If you do, you’ll remember the scene where that idiot brother of the hero runs up to the alien, takes aim, and his clip falls out. He is soon made into a smoldering pile of green bones. Well, friends here at FreeRebublic, that’s what you will be if you think your measly pistol is going to get you anywhere. I say this from the standpoint of a concealed carry permit holder. Guns in the hands of citizens is a God given right, but in today’s day, the effectiveness of carrying a weapon is limited to protecting one’s life from someone trying to kill you. It is ridiculous to think that just because you own guns, that you will make it past square one, in a fire fight with the law, or even worse, the armed forces. We, as a group of responsible and sane people must act with our brains, our rights, and our tenacity, instead of our emotions to “do something”. I am the first to admit that I’m totally lost right now. I want a plan. I want a leader. I want to stand behind a movement that’s going to have a chance at taking back our country. I will support, financially and otherwise, any such movement that in my opinion has a chance of succeeding. Knowledge is power. Never show up to a gunfight, with a knife. We all want to be alive and able to say we beat them at their own game. Let’s keep thinking here about how to proceed peacefully.
Yep.
But I suspect we're coming up to the limits of government growth.
Given international competition there's a limit to how much we can tax and how many burdens we can put on American industry.
And given our debt burden the limit is even closer than one might have thought.
So health care may be the last gasp of the philosophy of ever-increasing entitlements.
C. Northcote Parkinson, a British writer marvelled at how the Colonial Office of the British government grew as the empire shrank. He saw massive new buildings built for the bureaucracy as Britain's resources and overseas responsibilities shrank, and the new capital of British India completed in what would be the final years of the Raj.
Health care may be that sort of thing -- the last gasp of an earlier way of thinking, the last flare-up of a dying star.
Whether the country will be better off when we have to pay the piper, I can't say.