I posted this comment this morning at the Rott, in response to the blockquoted comment within, made in response to the same video in the post below this one. For those of you who aren't regulars at the Rott, "Muzzy" is the closest thing the Rott has to a regular troll. His comments originate in the UK, although I don't know what citizenship he holds. I fully expect a vehement response from him in which he will use generalities to marginalize everything said, but his remarks, like so many comments there, helped me to better put into words my thoughts on these matters.
Muzzy,
I have to admit, you are something of a cypher to me. Sometimes, I read your comments, and I conclude that you choose to come here and leave the equivalent of intellectual vomit for the sole purpose of being contrarian, and then you say things like you have today which make me believe that you fundamentally misunderstand so many things about this nation that are necessary components of our historical core beliefs. I’m not surprised about this, and it saddens me to say that many young people in this country no longer understand it either since the teaching of history and government in our schools took a back seat to building esteem and taking over the various parenting roles that the boomers abandoned in their never ending quest for ‘personal fulfillment’.
“Separation of Church and State, yes. Separation of God from public life? Never intended by your Founding Fathers”
Doesn’t the former, rather entail the latter? And what, I wonder, would be this guy’s response to a burgeoning (hypothetical) movement to interpret “God” as “Allah”? It’s easy to advocate tainting the public discourse with religious metaphysics when it’s your God everybody’s talking about. Someone else’s? Not so much.
No, the former does not entail the latter. The nation and its government were established by a people who had attained a certain degree of religious homogeneity, that is to say, were overwhelmingly of a “Christian” extraction, and therefore possessed a common morality and code of conduct, yet many were not so far removed from recent experiences where only a certain stripe of Christianity was considered to be the approved brand by the state in which they dwelled, and the rest were relegated to a status less privileged than the rest. They recognized that the STATE could not establish a religion if the grand experiment were to succeed, but there never was an intent exile God or religion from daily social or political discourse. You are free to dispute this is much as you wish, in fact, I would likely be disappointed if you didn’t. It doesn’t change the facts that are evident for all who read. The founding fathers were “mindful of him” in the texts of the very first documents. Every word was labored over, every phrase is deliberate. No single word was intended to be superfluous or ‘dicta’. The tenants of christianity were understood to be the starting point for the laws that we would all live under, and even those who did not subscribe to christianity itself understood that the intellectual underpinnings of our law were rooted in common judeo-christian beliefs, and accepted this as necessary for the society to function. The Ten Commandments is as much a part of the law of Western Civilization as the Magna Carta or Bill of Rights, because it is a codification of conduct delineating what society will and will not deem acceptable from its citizens. Later waves of immigrants with different religious backgrounds still came, at least implicitly understanding that our society worked and our nation was the destination of choice, because despite varied backgrounds, histories, and beliefs, we had accepted and lived by a common set of principals and morals that allowed predictability, intellectual and societal advancement based on the diligence and intellect of the individual, not a person’s lineage and race.
The Progressive or secular movement in the early twentieth century strove to upend the core beliefs of this society for a variety of reasons, and found many willing acolytes because the idea of a world without God, or his rules freed them from any sense of accountability or shame for going their own way and doing whatever they pleased, even if it was damaging to the society that had been so successful under the rules and mores of God. You have stated that secularism is not a religion. I submit to you that secularism is indeed a religion, and the most dangerous one that any society seeking to avoid anarchy can be presented with. Even muslims, who violently react to any perceived slight or disrespect of their beliefs, and are therefore considered backwards savages by most thinking people who long ago learned that violence is one of the last resorts rather than the first, surpass the secularists in terms of preserving a society, because the common core of beliefs remain relatively unchanged, and believers acknowledge an accountability to something outside of themselves. Secular humanists believe only in the primacy of man, which means that they can only believe in themselves. God is removed as authority, and each Secular acolyte usurps that throne for himself. There is no predicable result and no common belief. There is no anchor for the boat called society; by banishing a common belief in God, that boat is going out to sea on a rising tide.
We have ourselves to blame. This attitude could not have gained the upper hand in today’s society without a generation or two that believed that the desire and pleasure of the individual was more important than discipline, sacrifice, and the preservation of this nation’s finest legacies for the generations coming after them. This dovetailed nicely with “Progressive” agendas, and it allowed for the perversion of the legal and political traditions that had helped this country grow and prosper. Constant legal action and decades of subversion in academia allowed for the transformation of not having a state religion to the vigorous and zealous pursuit of what is still acknowledged to be the dominant religious view in this country from the public and political discourse; the ascendancy of the cult of self allowed made an individual’s desire to reject moral authority more important than the common religous heritage of the nation. And the cult of self busied itself with its own commandments and edicts, many of which are gathered under the diaphanous aegis innocuously titled “Political Correctness”.
Political Correctness is so poisonous to society because it first would take away the ability to engage in honest discourse about matters of import to society. It chills speech. Many find themselves afraid to speak up about pursuits and directions that have no redeeming social values for the very fear that some person or group that voluntarily chooses to identify themselves by a condition, race, ethnicity, or lifestyle choice might be offended and use that offense to squeal, cry, stomp its feet and shout until others come to their aid and sanction the offender for the crime of not recognizing the primacy of that identification and the person’s right to be free from offense, the central right of the church of secular humanism, from which all other doctrines and tenants flow.
As a result, we cannot refer to anything and anyone by commonly understood terms because those people and things did not get to name themselves. This has lead to a condition of low-grade anarchy which continues to this day and is a distraction from any attempt to actually address any matter of national or societal import as we are daily presented with a new list of words that cannot be uttered, or may only tumble from the lips of certain people and are strictly forbidden to be used by others, and only certain people are allowed to determine what words, topics, or opinions are to be allowed. No predictability, other than the secular religious expression of offense, for “crimes” that change daily, and are decided by individuals and not the body politic.
Lincoln was right, a house divided against itself cannot stand. The genius of the American Experiment was neatly summed up in E Purblis Unum. From many, one. By banishing God, and yes Muzzy, I mean the Christian God, as he is common to Western Civilization, and by constant chiseling, his rules, from the public square and public discourse, we have glided to a precipice whereby we now allow newcomers to dictate their rules to us, and 30 years of indoctrination to the tenant of diversity in our schools, colleges, and universities, which by its very nature sanctions continuing to be separate rather than assimilating, we are morphing in to “From Many, Many”, which invites continuing division, mediocrity, and eventually, death as a society. What the nice gentleman in the film was trying to tell those of us who care is that there is still time to reverse this trend before the bloodshed that this trend places us on an inevitable collision course with.
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