LH Morality
Morality and virtue are not small things. They are the bedrock of Western Civilization and the foundation of what became the greatest country in the history of the world. A country that went from worst to first in just a few generations. A country that is now in a free-fall, just as every great empire fell because they became decadent and abandoned what made them great.
America is unique among the great powers of history in that we are the only country in the world built upon a set of ideas. First among those ideas is that our rights come from God and His Word is the foundation of law. We are "endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights." Historians call the ideas that Western Civilization is founded upon "scholasticism", which is the blending of the philosophy of great thinkers such as Aristotle with the wisdom of the Christian Bible.
So much did The Founders believe in this idea that they included God in every state constitution and lectured the American people repeatedly that our system of government is wholly inadequate without the public observation of His Word. They were clear that without the spirit of The Lord liberty cannot endure.
America's enemies were paying attention.
We are witnessing the deliberate eradication of the American memory and civic principle and in recent years we have seen example after example of the consequences.
The consequences began with an observable cultural decay, an increase in unwed parenthood, a decline in the birth rate, millions of abortions, and a popular culture that has deified a reprobate mind. Such a mind, without restraint from religious principle promotes an “If it feels good, do it” wisdom, consequences notwithstanding. “You only live once” is now an excuse to make a foolish short term decision.
The consequences can be observed by most anyone who goes to an inner city shopping mall after school, all the way up to (or down to) our President who wound up his campaign with praise from a pop culture icon who raps about pimping out "ho's and bitches," drug use, and gratuitous, irresponsible sex acts, as if all these are all good. The American people have twice elected a President whose own preacher of twenty years, Jeremiah Wright, takes pride in his hatred for traditional American “middleclassness” and preaches the values of communism.
This 40 second video gives a stark example of how far things can go in just a single generation: [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ABEm6Zzxa1E]
How deliberate is that eradication of the American memory?
An Indiana University at South Bend publication described it well. The Intercollegiate Studies Institute with the University of Connecticut tested 14,094 students at 50 universities with a 60 question civics exam with half of the students being freshman and the other half being seniors. The results were not encouraging. Not a single senior, based on an average score, passed the exam.
Here are some of the results taken directly from the study:
- Seniors lack basic knowledge of America’s history. More than half, 53.4 percent, could not identify the correct century when the first American colony was established at Jamestown. And 55.4 percent could not recognize Yorktown as the battle that brought the American Revolution to an end (28 percent even thought the Civil War battle at Gettysburg was the correct answer).
- College seniors are also ignorant of America’s founding documents. Fewer than half, 47.9 percent, recognized that the line “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” is from the Declaration of Independence. And an overwhelming majority, 72.8 percent, could not correctly identify the source of the idea of “a wall of separation” between church and state.
- More than half of college seniors did not know that the Bill of Rights explicitly prohibits the establishment of an official [state] religion for the United States.
- Nearly half of all college seniors, 49.4 percent, did not know that The Federalist Papers—foundational texts of America’s constitutional order—were written in support of the ratification of the U.S. Constitution. Seniors actually scored lower than freshmen on this question by 5.7 percentage points, illustrating negative learning while at college
- More than 75 percent of college seniors did not know that the purpose of the Monroe Doctrine was to prevent foreign expansion in the Western Hemisphere.
- Even with their country at war in Iraq, fewer than half of seniors, 45.2 percent, could identify the Baath party as the main source of Saddam Hussein’s political support.
The most interesting results came from the list of universities where the freshman consistently out scored the seniors, meaning that the longer the students stayed at that university more ignorant of civics they became. Which colleges did the worst? Johns Hopkins, University of California at Berkeley, Cornell, Brown, Duke, Yale, Georgetown, M. I. T., University of Chicago, and the University of Michigan, all displayed negative learning.
As the Indiana University writer observes, what better way is there to destroy the ideas that America was founded upon than to make certain students forget them?
We are witnessing the truism of Abe Lincoln's warning that "The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next." None of the Founders who authored the First Amendment would approve of how the First Amendment has been turned on its head to enforce a Godless public education.
"A Bible and a newspaper in every house, a good school in every district - all studied and appreciated as they merit - are the principle support of virtue, morality, and civil liberty."
- Benjamin Franklin
"By removing the Bible from schools we would be wasting so much time and money in punishing criminals and so little pains to prevent crime. Take the Bible out of our schools and there would be an explosion in crime."
- Benjamin Rush
Those who are engaging in this systematic assault on our children and the American memory have a model to follow. Pre-war Germany took exactly the same actions that progressive secular leftists are using against public education and the Church today.
Hitler guaranteed freedom for the churches, so long as they never commented on what the government was doing. His regime banned school prayer, banned public nativity displays and Christmas Carols at schools. The liberals of today have already gotten some public schools to eliminate Christmas programs and replace it with a Winter Solstice celebration, just as Hitler moved Christmas to the day of the Winter Solstice. See more details in the video below:
How tyrants take God out of the public sector:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2NBjHtpu5M]
Ronald Reagan said that we need to re-institutionalize morality and the American Spirit. An informed patriotism is what we need:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rjLDxr3tnw]
We need to work at every level of government to turn back the tide and/or do what several states such as Indiana are already doing: enacting voucher programs to replace failing public schools whose agenda is foreign to the American Cause.
"There is no nation on earth powerful enough to accomplish our overthrow. Our destruction, should it come at all, will be from another quarter. From the inattention of the people to the concerns of their government, from their carelessness and negligence. I must confess that I do apprehend some danger. I fear that they may place too implicit a confidence in their public servants and fail properly to scrutinize their conduct; that in this way they may be made the dupes of designing men and become the instruments of their own undoing."
- Daniel Webster