Alamo-Girl to exDemMom: Perhaps you have misjudged your correspondents on this thread?
Spirited: It is not so much a case of misjudging as it is of a freely made choice to accept one set of conceptions (i.e., Godless evolutionism, something from nothing) rather than another, special creation ex nihil-—God IS.
Tragically, America increasingly resembles the now dead Marxist Communist Soviet Union.
Though Marxist Communism billed itself as scientific and of course evolutionary it was in fact attempting to “scientifically” annihilate the Christian conception of man made in the spiritual image of the Triune God and replace that with a Buddhist conception of a collective unconscious, a quiet type of pantheism.
Central to this attempt is absolute mind control. This being the case, scientifically-engineered New Soviet Man is no longer an individual soul/spirit with a mind of its’ own but rather a part of the collective unconscious for whom the Party (Orwell’s Big Brother) is the One-Mind.
Natan Sharansky, a dissident in the former Marxist-Communist Soviet Union refused to “lose” his individual soul/spirit and was as a result accused of non-conformist thought. Sharansky describes the Soviet Union as a spiritual tyranny where,
“there were no dissidents (because) they were simply killed immediately.”
As a result of psychological and physical terror-tactics-—inversion of meaning, propaganda of the lie, re-education, hate crime laws, speech codes, and other mind-control tactics, everyone became double thinkers.
To outside observers notes Sharansky, double thinkers appear as true believers:
“everybody says the same thing, everybody votes the same way, everybody speaks with passion.”
But it is an illusion caused by fear of speaking the truth. These people, he noted,
“live with self-censorship throughout their lives. Since the regime demands loyalty right from childhood, many don’t even notice. They just automatically control how they express themselves.”
But when a “fear society disappears or becomes weak, people suddenly start saying what they feel,” Sharansky commented, and “It’s such a big relief.”
To determine if a society is fear-based, Sharansky applies what he defines as the “town square test.” In this test, if you,
“can go to the center of town (i.e.,Free Republic) and publicly express your views without being punished (by FR’s thought-police), you have a free society” even though that society may not be just.
However, if you are “punished for your views you live in a fear society,”said Sharansky.
“In such societies there are always three types of population:
True believers, who accept the ideology...dissidents, who take risks to speak publicly; and double thinkers, who have doubts or disagreements about the official ideology but are afraid to express them publicly.”
In conclusion, Sharansky notes that the level “of dissidence is always a function of how tough the regime is.” (The Power of Freedom, published in The American Enterprise, Apr/May 2005, pp. 38-39)
Measured by Sharanskys’ town-square test we can see that America has been descending into a fear-based society for over eighty years. Already we can see the three types of population.
1. Those “who take risks to speak publicly” exemplified by Free Republics ‘truth warriors”
2. those “who have doubts or disagreements about the ideology but are afraid to express them publicly.”
3. true-believers who serve as “gate-keepers” and/or thought police. It is their job to publicly shame, rebuke, and ridicule all who dare to speak truth to lies.
In this light we can see all three types right here in FR.
There is one other group of people-—Big Brother, also known as the West’s Progressive ‘elites.’ The real evil comes from within this group.
simultaneously replaced by green-progressive totalitarianism, the three types of population described by Sharansky come into focus. In general, Progressive Liberals are the true believers. Rabid zealots, brazen liars, rebels against all authority, they freely destroy, transgress, scoff, demean, blaspheme, demonize, and otherwise psychologically terrorize the large body of fearful double thinkers.
Well said, Spirited.
And, of course, central to this “absolute mind control” you mention is what passes as “education” in Western Civilization.
I would prefer that government, particularly federal government, have nothing to do with education. I would prefer to ban governmental authority from asserting any control over the minds of the people. I do not trust government to discern (intellectually) the true from the false. I do not trust government to honestly report what is true and what is false, in the unlikely event it does stumble over them in the dark. This has always been true, and it is doubly true with respect to the “One-Mind” indoctrination you describe.
We are discussing, among other things, state control of science education at the elementary and secondary level. In a representative republic, you don’t get a categorical edict from the appropriate governing board or commission; so a representative republic must be done away with, and be replaced with a Socialist/Progressive regime. Welcome to the new USSSA . . . comrade.
But, if it seems the only way to resolve what we believe to be a critically important interest in the teaching of science is to violate a critically important fundamental principle of representative government, then that sort of circumstance ought to impress us with the serious need for a reappraisal of our understanding of the relationship between government and education, or to surrender to the local ruling Progressive Commissar.
Our universities have become cesspools of Socialist/Marxist thought control and I don’t see any groundswell of resistance coming from the ‘Science Community.’
Yet, many a Darwinian Imam would claim that the right of conscience says exactly nothing about where we should look to find intermediate fossils, or to know which animals offer good prospects for the development of drugs and vaccines. Nor does it bring us any insights on antibiotic resistance or the practical applications of DNA sequencing. Likewise, the same criticism is directed against the idea of government by the consent of the governed and many another liberal concept of Eighteenth Century Enlightenment. These ideas, they (many of our scientist friends) say, are mere useless, nay even harmful, philosophical concepts, and so inferior therefore as to be unworthy of contemplation at all.
Why should we not, in many instances, believe that our Scientist friends are “hopeless dogmatists of some forlorn doctrine seeking to evict all non-phenomenal or spiritual reality from human cognizance altogether”?
Whenever they are overcome by a momentary seizure of candor, are we not regaled with thinly veiled threats of jail or the removal of our children from their homes for abuse? Or, failing that, a threat to deny our children the benefits of a higher education unless we unreservedly embrace Darwinism and eschew all Christian beliefs that might be construed as contrary to the Theory of Evolution?
Despite the multitude of blessings that The Enlightenment has reigned down upon their heads, many of our science friends still have not come to appreciate that you cannot have freedom of inquiry without freedom of conscience (I’ve said it before . . . expect the likelihood that I’ll say it again).
We have witnessed people in this forum suggest that raising a child in a Christian home is a form of child abuse, and threaten the removal of the child from its home as a reasonable protective action (if, of course, all opposition to secular Darwinian philosophy does not cease immediately). In Pop Cult, witness the estimable Dawkins say the same thing.
Similarly, we have witnessed people in this forum declare that homeschoolers should just flatly, with or without benefit of an entrance exam, be denied entrée to any accredited college or university.
Likewise, it has been proposed that the states regulate homeschooling entirely out of existence.
In the meantime, we find ourselves subjected to the usual sensitivity malarkey, the standard Marxist/Socialist bromides, maladroit history studies, the ubiquitous PC bravo sierra, and always (ALWAYS) in the name of diversity we must all think alike. If all else fails, check your nearest university, and, increasingly a public school near you.
Indeed, one poster on this forum (since departed from same), well known to many of us, went so far as to declare himself one who is not a friend of academic freedom (and he, I think, is not alone in this sentiment). This is an astounding declaration to come from an adherent of a discipline so completely dependent on the right of free inquiry for its viability and its integrity, and on Western Civilization for its very continued existence.
Yet, when one raises these issues, the response is at once the familiar sound of crickets. Our friends who count themselves as among those who are Darwinian Mullahs wish only to argue philosophy and religion under the colour of science in an effort to inoculate themselves from rebuttal.
Everyone knows it is Stalinist Progressives, not Christians, who infest the campi of our universities like maggots on a carcass, and who have seized control of research funding. Everyone knows that it is these same Progressives who represent the totalitarian thinking we hear endlessly from the cultural cesspool that Western Civilization has become, and that is meant to destroy the freedom of inquiry so painfully erected by Western Civilization these past two thousand years. And, finally, everyone knows that this savagery has now spread into our general popular and political culture and that we stand but one or two elections away from complete socialist subjugation.
In the meantime, our erstwhile friends, these same Darwinian Mullahs, stand mute.
More than once, I have stated that I would be very glad to know that I am mistaken in my assessment, and to receive directions where I may go to join in the desperate struggle to reclaim Western culture from Marxist/Socialist savages, but I think no such place exists and that there is no such desperate struggle, other than among Conservatives and Christians.
I have received, sadly, no invitation in response.