Posted on 10/22/2001 8:58:52 PM PDT by Mercuria
In 1830 Alexis de Tocqueville toured the United States, and stated that he had found the secret of American greatness and strength. It was not in the textile mills, the shipyards, anything we had built, in fact, he didn't even mention our precious founding documents, although those documents permitted the activity that de Tocqueville discovered.
He found that America's greatness lay in the fiery preaching of the Gospel in America's churches. Simplicity of life, humbleness of mind, and a pervading sense of the presence of Almighty God and the accountability of His creation, mankind, to obedience to the faith, gave America her character and her strength.
Once the land was noted for her many churches, preaching the Bible as truth. We still have churches, but what are they preaching? Tolerance? Diversity? Something bland and inoffensive? The Gospel is offensive to sinners. All men are born sinners until they are reborn, so says our Gospel. Forgiveness of sins, absolution from guilt, accountability to the Creator of the Universe, keeps man from becoming proud, self-sufficient, rebellious toward God to the point of denying Him and desecrating His standards by flaunting man's achievements and sinfulness.
Before we try to rebuild America, or the Twin Towers site, perhaps we should first rethink America.
Isn't it time to reject the theories of the evolutionist, the babble of the secular humanists who offer no hope, and the globalists with their planetary village?
Americans aren't educated in spite of billions of taxpayer dollars spent on education by the federal government. Government itself dictates education, and the people have become stupid. That may be the point of government education, but it is not the goal of education itself. It should not be the goal of parents to bring up blathering nitwit children.
Americans are a particularly proud people, but God says that pride goes before destruction. Have we seen the beginning of the humiliation of America because of pride? Let the evidence speak for itself.
A once-honest people who could name its criminals ... Capone, Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde ... now have overcrowded prisons and folks who could care less about human life, whether they abort it before birth or shoot a teen/adult in a driveby. We've become a people with "relative" morality, which is no morality at all. And we're told these miscreants had a bad childhood. If they weren't told about God and His standards, imbued with a sense of personal responsibility and the relationship of cause and effect, they had a bad childhood. That applies whether they grew up in the ghetto or in an upper middle class home without values.
We were able to put fifty thousand workers in twin towers but we cannot fill a church on Sunday morning. We could draw fifty or sixty thousand to a ballgame, but couldn't get the family together around the dinner table.
It's time to rethink America.
We were founded on Christian principles, we were settled by Bible-believing Puritans and Pilgrims, we were established as a nation by God-fearing men who believed in the liberty that is proclaimed by our religion: ours was the liberty to be what God wants, not license to do as everyone pleases. We've forgotten what was once our original understanding of liberty.
We can't haul people to church at sword's point or baptize them at the point of a gun. That doesn't make character, it makes intimidated subjects. Christianity is a religion of freedom, of liberty, but within the boundaries of the "thou shalt nots" set down by the Almighty for our good.
It's time to rethink America.
American greatness was built on solid character, universities established for the education of students of theology (Harvard, Yale and Princeton weren't always wildly liberal, they were chiefly seminaries), and a belief in our founding documents. We were to permit others to worship as they pleased without harassment, but we were also to proclaim the Gospel at every opportunity in the faith that many would hear and understand.
Now we build monuments to man's achievements. We build towers, automobiles, resorts, great theaters, mansions, amusement parks and stadiums. We build, but to the glory of man and not to the glory of God, whose Name we desecrate.
To be sure, Christianity has suffered dark moments at the hands of politically-minded men who hid behind religious fervor. There were the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition, and the Salem Witch Trials on our own soil. But our faith also produced St. Augustine, John Newton, John Calvin, Martin Luther, Charles Haddon Spurgeon, Andrew Murray, David Livingstone and D. L. Moody. One Supreme Court, in the 19th century, proclaimed that the United States is a Christian nation.
At present, from the American Civil Liberties Union to the Supreme Court, we're trying to prove it is not Christian. The trash on media, the burgeoning of topheavy, oppressive government and the moral decline (particularly in women's liberties to do as they please from sexual freedom to active combat roles in war) all testify to the fact that if we were once a Christian nation, we no longer can claim to be such.
It is time to rethink America.
Why would what once made us a great nation ... belief in the Bible and our accountability to God ... not make us great once again? It depends on whether one believes that man is accountable only to himself (humanism) that produces a vacuous sense of morality and endless tributes to self, or whether one believes man is created in God's image.
The churches are always full after a great disaster. Man's need for God was put there by God so that we would always have a great void until we came to rest in Him. But after we resign ourselves to the fact of tragedy, the churches are seldom full. That isn't Christianity ... it is bombshelter religion.
The Bible as God's written word was what was once preached from America's pulpits. Now we hear trivia. It is time to speak of sin and judgment lest they come upon us unawares, as did the events of September 11, 2001. It is time to speak of redemption and why we need it, every one, lest we step off into eternity suddenly and without remission of sins.
We must rethink America. While it is still here.
Dorothy Anne Seese was born in Southern California where she obtained her degree in political science. For the past forty years, she has made her home in Arizona where her primary career was a business systems analyst. Dottie is now retired and makes her home in an Arizona retirement city. She is the editor of The Flagship Log. Her e-mail address is dottie@politicalusa.com.
No, it is a consensus of opinion until a subsequent discovery creates a new consensus. This is how science works. The theory of relativity is still called a theory even though it has been proven true time and again in scientific experiments. Most things in science are theories, which is to say that we can see how something works and to a great extent why it works but there are still WHYS.
Oh POO! I meant "Evolutionists!" I readily accept my tendency to err at this hour! ;-}
Let me guess...you've got "issues", right? **g**
de Tocqueville was not given the last word on America.
No, but he debates and expresses himself a lot better than you do! LOL!!
There are sill "NOTS." The Bible clearly states that man was created in God's image. I, for one, do not believe that God was a monkey who evolved into a Deity! God has no beginning and no end. He is the Alpha and the Omega. With no room in between for George the Curious Monkey.
Notwithstanding the complexities of the human body, the overwhelming complexities of the human brain are entirely too sophisticated for me to believe that they "Oops -- just kinda happened!" Evolution is one theory to which I do not subscribe. The fossilar evidence is entirely too incomplete to provide a viable argument.
I am not hostile to religion...pal. I am just tired of seeing you creationists denigrate other Christians, like myself because we happen to posses enough reason to accept evolution over creationism.
Many have abandoned God and abandoned personal responsibility and have ignored the law of sowing and reaping. A favorite Christian artist wrote a song years ago "Black and White in a Gray World." We have lost black and white to relative gray. What's wrong has become right, if it meets our personal needs. We can murder to preserve our own self-interests. We have no absolutes. And so when faced with a crisis, we have no foundation on which to stand.
We put bumper stickers on our cars and signs in our windows and on our billboards "God bless America." But do we bless Him? Do we honor Him? Do we abide in Him? Or do we do so only when it is to our convenience.
We are the last great nation where His word is still freely available, but it is waning. Will God continue to bless America if Americans grow worse in their pursuit of their "Bless me" campaign.
Yes, He wants to bless us, as harvest for obeying His commandment to love one another: to love is to uphold God, at the cost of self-interests, to put the needs of others, of which knowing God is the foremost, ahead of everything else.
May God bless America with the wisdom of knowing the source of the blessing and its price!!!!
I really doubt that. Hey, I mean even the ACLU says you can pray in schools and government buildings (or wherever you want). Maybe you should contact the ACLU to help you if you and your nieces are denied that right ;-)
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