WHAT DID YOU SAY ABOUT GEORGE WASHINGTON?

Impressionable school children and young adults sit in class and learn that George Washington was a deist. A deist is about as far away from Christianity as you can get because the definition of one holding to deism is one who believes that "God created the world but has since remained indifferent to it." By "since remained indifferent to it," the Bible, the Savior, any blessing, and all miracles are ipso facto omitted. Over and out. 

One must wonder if there's a nefarious motive behind saying that George Washington was a deist: it leads to the conclusion that our Founder Fathers had no Christian orientation. But let us pause a moment and go to the source, Washington himself. That means researching what Washington himself said, not what somebody said that he said. (That makes sense.)

So, here's just one of the hundreds of times Washington referred to a God who intervenes in human history, a violation of the cardinal doctrine of deism: 

"Whereas it is the duty of all nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey His will, to be grateful for His benefits, and humbly to implore His protection and favor…. For the great degree of tranquility, union, and plenty which we have since enjoyed; for the peaceable and rational manner in which we have been enabled to establish constitutions of government for our safety and happiness, and particularly the national one now lately instituted; for the civil and religious liberty with which we are blessed…”

"His protection" doesn't sound like a Creator who's walked away. "His favor" doesn't sound like a God who's no longer involved. "To be grateful for His benefits" has no reference to a God who doesn't care, but blesses. 

How about another look? Washington doesn't write like a deist: 

“And also that we may then unite in most humbly offering our prayers and supplications to the great Lord and Ruler of Nations, and beseech Him to pardon our national and other transgressions … to render our national government a blessing to all the People, by constantly being a government of wise, just and constitutional laws, discreetly and faithfully executed and obeyed … and to bless them with good government, peace, and concord, to promote the knowledge and practice of the true religion and virtue, and the increase of science among them and Us, and generally to grant unto all Mankind such a degree of temporal prosperity as He alone knows to be best.”

What did you say about George Washington? That he was a deist? 

No.

EVERYTHING MUST GO!

Psalm 11:3 is an oft-quoted verse as one of despair: "If the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do?" Then, upon quoting, it's left hanging with no context, as if you're supposed to answer, "Nothing."

Looking at the current milieu, we may not realize that what's going on is by deliberate, pre-planned, and in-your-face-design. David Horowitz was a one-time 1960's radical now turned one of the good guys at age 80. Speaking of his former days at UC Berkeley, he lets the cat out of the bag: the goal of the radical revolutionary can be stated in one sentence: "Everything must go!" The radical's definition of "everything" is simple: "everything." For the revolutionists to bring in their envisioned utopia, the old must go, i. e. everything must go. "Everything must go" explains what we're seeing today.

For example, we've seen that the Founding Fathers must go, statues in their honor must go, schools and streets which bear their names must find new ones. Athletic teams must adopt new mascots and names. Gender must go. Biology must go. Men's and women's, boys' and girls' restrooms and locker room facilities must go. 

Male and female sporting competitions must go. The pronouns, he and she, must go (Ze and Zir are the new ones). Shakespeare must go. (At the University of Pennsylvania in December 2016, English students, with the approval of the head of the English department, replaced a hallway portrait of William Shakespeare with a photograph of poet/activist Audre Lorde (1934-1992). (Hardly a household name.) A sample of her "poetry" is:

"I am trapped on a desert of raw gunshot wounds
and a dead child dragging his shattered black
face off the edge of my sleep
blood from his punctured cheeks and shoulders
is the only liquid for miles . . ." (It's longer, but you get the idea)

To continue: the Pledge of Allegiance must go. The Boy Scouts must be destroyed. History courses in Western Civilization must be eliminated for graduation. (No wonder, because Western Civilization was founded on Christianity.) In short, everything must be called into question, even marriage, Christmas trees, and carols, the Salvation Army, polite and civil language replaced crude vulgarities and at this time of the year, school plays about and the story of the Pilgrims must go--everything must go.

These are foundational beliefs, so "If the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do?" is the question that's asked in the psalm then we abandon Psalm 11 as if the author were holding a sign that says, "The foundation's gone. There's nothing you can do." 

But the reader needs to read the rest of the story where David answers the question:

"The Lord is in His holy temple; the Lord’s throne is in heaven;
His eyes behold, His eyelids test the sons of men. The Lord tests the righteous and the wicked,
And the one who loves violence His soul hates. Upon the wicked He will rain snares;
Fire and brimstone and burning wind will be the portion of their cup. For the Lord is righteous, He loves righteousness; The upright will behold His face."

David says that the answer is to have his viewpoint, the divine viewpoint which is reality: "The Lord is in His holy temple; the Lord's throne is in heaven." David's focus is on God whose "eyes behold, His eyelids test the sons of men. The Lord tests the righteous and the wicked." --God was aware of what was going on in Israel. He was testing both the believer and the unbeliever, leading to his punishing the wicked and rewarding the believer.

David is saying that the believer should remember that God is in control and He'll take care of those who are living for Him, no matter what the culture is doing. When the foundations are destroyed, it's beyond us, but not beyond Him. What can the righteous do? Pray, for one thing, and when God shakes things up, we put and keep our focus on building up the church, not building up one political party or another.That would be putting our hope in man, which is always and forever forbidden for the believer.

JUDY GARLAND'S CON GAME

There's a movie out and about called, "Judy." It's a biopic of Judy Garland who earned her fame going to see a wizard, meeting a lion, a tinman, and a scarecrow and still having time to squeeze in a song called, "Somewhere Over the Rainbow."

Judy had a hard life, some of it because of her choices but some not because of her self-inflicted decisions. To say she had an overbearing control freak of a mother would be an understatement. MGM put stringent restrictions of her, controlling her diet to the point that she wasn't permitted to enjoy a single slice of her own birthday cake. They were fanatical about controlling her weight.

She pill-popped her way through her abnormal childhood and five marriages to David Rose, Mark Herron, Mickey Deans, Sidney Luff, and Vincente Minnelli. Her schedule was so frenetic that she took pills to stay awake, pills to go to sleep, and pills to take the edge off her hunger.

The PG-13 movie depicted all those things and one thing more. There's a scene in the movie in which Judy Garland, now an adult, is in London performing at one of its theaters. One night after her performance, she can't sleep so she begins to walk around London in the dead of night all alone.

Wait a minute! Judy Garland out and about alone pounding the now-deserted pavement and darkened London? That sounds dangerous.

Yes, it's in the movie. It just so happens that at that early morning hour, she comes across two men who tell her that they're her biggest fans. They chit-chat a while and then it's suggested that they find a place to have breakfast (at 2 or 3 AM), so they traipse over to a place but it's closed. At this point, the ever-resourceful Judy says, "Why don't we go to your place and I'll fix breakfast?"

The two men are taken aback at the fact that one so famous as Judy Garland, their idol, would even suggest such a thing, but they see she's serious so they betake themselves to their apartment. While Judy is in the kitchen displaying her culinary talents, one of the fellows says that they've been to every one of her London performances except one. Judy's curiosity now comes to the forefront.

Now comes the revelation: the one time they missed seeing her was when the other fellow was arrested on "obscenity charges." Now the movie audience figures out just who these two are. Now the scene has been set for Judy Garland to make a speech about how narrow-minded and awful people are, how they don't understand people who are different and how afraid they are of anyone who's like those two.

Wait a minute one more time. Judy Garland is out walking around unattended, by herself at 3 in the morning? This looks suspicious, so suspicious that it needs checking out. If one were to run a check on it, he would discover that such a meeting never happened. She was never out on the streets alone; she never met two such men. The entire scene was a setup, a con perpetrated on the audience so that Judy would have a context and a soapbox on which to make her speech. It was all contrived.

But that's not all. In the last scene of the movie, Judy is on stage for the last time in London and the request comes from the audience, "Sing 'Over the Rainbow.'" Judy is struck by the request and begins to sing, but she has an emotional moment and drifts off into silence mid-melody, not being able to finish her signature song.

After an awkward silence, all of a sudden, there are the two men again in the audience and lo and behold, one of them rises out of his set and begins to sing "Over the Rainbow." There he was, the hero to the rescue. As he sings, the audience, one by one, begins to stand, one by one and two by two and sing along as well. Then Judy, touched beyond measure, joins in and the whole place sings in unison.

Wait a minute. That too was contrived. It never happened.

The point is that scenes were contrived, inserted into the movie so that a message, a piece of propaganda could be delivered to the unsuspecting audience. It was a contrived shaming of those watching the movie.

The credits roll. The people in the theater go home having been conned and they don't know it.

PROBLEMS WITH ANNE FRANK

“In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death.” That was the way Anne Frank ended her diary.

Anne Frank became famous for the diary she kept as she and her family suffered terribly at the hands of the Nazis during WWII. She eventually died in a Nazi concentration camp. There was only one reason for her suffering. Her crime in the eyes of the Nazis was that she was Jewish. 

Those last words she wrote in her diary put on the Seven League Boots and made her famous all over the world after her death and the discovery and publication of her literary efforts. She's been the subject of biographies, plays, and movies which have told her tragic story. And with each telling, that sentence has been told and retold.

But therein lies the problem: the last sentence in her diary is a lie, a lie that has been believed for centuries, just as Anne Frank believed it and that lie has influenced the policies of government, the policies of higher education, the policies of parenting, and the teachings of the social sciences.

Not only is it a lie, but embedded in Anne Frank's words, we see that it's a naive lie in the fact that she began the sentence with, "In spite of everything . . ." That is, in spite of the empirical evidence, in spite of the Nazis, in spite of the evil-soaked record of history inscribed in every textbook, "I believe that people are really good at heart."

Among the many texts in the Bible showing her sentence to be fallacious, one will suffice: "And you were dead in your trespasses and sins, in which you formerly walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience.  Among them we too all formerly lived in the lusts of our flesh, indulging the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were BY NATURE children of wrath, even as the rest." (Eph. 2:1-3)

Cameron Buettel records the results of this ancient lie: "Welfare programs flounder because of beneficiaries who prefer to extort the system rather than behave ethically. Psychologists continue to exclude the possibility of a sinful nature from their study of the human experience. Behavioral experts relentlessly try to solve bad behavior with better education. And society at large is now burdened with a younger generation that identifies as victims rather than perpetrators, refusing to be held accountable for its actions."

Buettel continues to show how the lie has infiltrated churches, citing the following from a sermon:

You’re not born evil. It’s amazing how many teachings and theologies start with that thought. Anytime you start with that you will create a controlling, manipulative environment.Every government, every structure . . . every system fundamentally and theologically must start with the concept and the idea that people are good and they mean to do good. Even if they are not saved, we have to start from that premise. We have to adjust our theology. We have to adjust our fundamental stance when we look at people. . . . We have to adjust our perspective of people. We have to realize that people are good and they mean to do good.

There's another problem with Anne Frank and it roars to the surface when we ask the question, "To whom are we listening and heeding when we believe and implement the lie in her diary? The answer: We're listening to a 15-year-old child. This reveals another lie believed by our society today.

It's another popular lie that children possess wisdom, wisdom beyond adults, a wisdom beyond their parents. The implication of this lie is, "Listen to the children." We see this in the propaganda put out by movies and television and in the press showcasing and the quoting children as authorities on current controversial subjects all the way from climate control to the Second Amendment.

Our touchstone is, once again, as it should be, the Bible: "Foolishness is bound up in the heart of a child . . ."

“The important concept here is that the adolescent brain is still developing and not yet fully mature,” says Andrew Garner, M.D., FAAP, member of the American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Psychosocial Aspects of Child and Family Health.

“Scans of normal kids have revealed that different parts of the brain mature at different rates,” he says. “In fact, some parts of the brain — such as the prefrontal cortex (PFC) that sits right behind the eyes — do not appear fully mature until 24 years old! Other parts of the brain, like the walnut-shaped amygdala (AMG) that sits deep in the brain, appear to be fully mature much earlier. Many neuroscientists think that this mismatch in brain maturity may explain a lot of adolescent behavior.”

As an example of the medical fact that the adolescent brain is still developing, I cite the following from a high school student's diary: "They all tried to tell me what to be and how to act. Who do they think they are? I've been alive for 16 years! I think I know how the world works. I think I can make my own choices."

Both Proverbs and the above medical findings would have ramifications in more ways than one. Proverbs 22:15 would be an argument against lowering the voting age to 16; an argument against allowing children to enter the office of and scream at a U. S. Senator; an argument against having children hold up signs and march for and against various positions; an argument against giving a platform to and granting interviews with high school students on gun control.

Anne Frank died in a concentration camp the month before Hitler committed suicide and the war in Europe was over. Hers was truly a tragic story. However, her conclusion about human nature is in error.






 

SEEING SOMETHING GOOD IN SECULAR UNIVERSITIES

Seeing something good in our American secular universities? Surely, I jest. Yet, we remember I Thessalonians 5:18: "In everything give thanks; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus."

Before we draw all this together, let's look at some of the content taught at various colleges, various incidents at those colleges, and the statements of some of the professors therein:

1. American University designed sessions to teach faculty “how to assess writing without judging its quality.” (Wait. How do you grade writing without judging the quality of its grammar and spelling?)

2. "Support for traditional marriage is the same as supporting the KKK." --from a professor

3. The University of Oklahoma's Women and Gender Studies Department is sponsoring an 'Abortion is Love' event. (The insanity of this is evident.)

4. Furman University students risk an investigation by the administration if they host Halloween parties that “encourage people to wear costumes or act in ways that reinforce stereotypes or are otherwise demeaning,” under the private school’s"Acts of Intolerance" policy.

5. The Big Sky Conference honored a transgender woman as its"Female Athlete of the Week" in cross country. (The "female" athlete was a male who considered himself a female.)

6. At Evergreen State College a furious mob of students berated and shouted at the college president, at one point even angrily instructing him on the correct position in which his hands should be held while speaking.

7. A student at the University of Michigan approached a group of Turning Point USA students and began stealing the entirety of the organization’s supplies — even the cookies and hot chocolate — before dismantling the group’s recruiting table.


8. Some of the titles in the most recent issues of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion—which proclaims itself as “the top academic journal in the field of religious studies" are:

“Dona Benta’s Rosary: Managing Ambiguity in a Brazilian Women’s Prayer Group”
“Death and Demonization of a Bodhisattva: Guanyin’s Reformulation within Chinese Religion”(Do the authors of such articles actually believe that anyone cares and that anyone will spend a second reading them? Who cares?)

9. Students at the University of Pennsylvania recently swapped out a portrait of William Shakespeare for a photo of an African American lesbian poet in an effort to diversify the school's English department. Shakespeare's picture had hung over the main staircase in Penn's Fisher-Bennett Hall for years when students took it down. In place of the legendary playwright, students tacked up a photo of Audre Lorde. English department head Jed Etsy said the Shakespeare portrait will not be rehung.

10. Arizona State University Associate Dean and Professor Asao Inoue tried to make the case that using proper grammar is racist during a recent speech at Ball State University.

11. Purdue University faculty have continued to fight against plans to bring Chick-fil-A to campus.

12. Do not address your class as "Boys and Girls."

13. On the New York subway system, the speaker on the public address system does  begin with, "Ladies and Gentlemen."

14. There are 53 genders. (And you thought there were a mere 2.)

Well, that's enough of the examples of university follies, yet parents are paying thousands and students are incurring huge debts for all this. How in the world can we be thankful for this howling-at-the-moon-madness?

We can when we realize that, of all things, our university system is giving us and any other rational person an example of the truthfulness of Scripture and another piece of evidence that God does indeed exist. How so?

All these once prestigious institutions are giving testimony by their pronouncements that the Bible is true. In Proverbs 1:8, we read "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge." Since there is no fear of God ("fear of the Lord" is a positive response to God and His Word) on the secular campus and in the classes, what would we expect? No God, no wisdom. The above examples are only the tip of the no-wisdom iceberg on our campuses. 

We find the summation of the matter in Psalm 2: 4: "He who sits in the heavens laughs,
The Lord scoffs at them," and in Psalm 76:10: "For the wrath of man shall praise You." Little do they know that by their very wise-in-their-own-eyes-pronouncements-of-foolishness, they're verifying His Word!