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!

SATAN'S PUNCTUATION

Mary Lou Follet is excited because today is the first day of her 8th-grade year at O. L Slaton Middle School. The school, trashing a 70+ tradition had changed their name from the Redskins to the Dell Peppers, but that didn't dampen Mary Lou's school spirit one bit. She's going to see all her friends again, catching up on who did what over the summer, and will be taking a new slate of subjects, like American history. She's an unusual kid because she likes history and has done some reading in it for the last two years. She particularly thrills to the adventures of the great explorers--men like Magellan, Cortez, Ponce de Leon, and of course, he who sailed the ocean blue in 1492, Christopher Columbus.

Little does Mary Lou know, but her history teacher this year is Mr. John Bookman fresh out of the University of Wisconsin with a major in history having graduated magna cum laude.  Mr. Bookman is excited about his first year of teaching and is looking forward to the school year. He's decided that the course will begin with the landing of Columbus in the New World.

The students are in their seats as Mr. Bookman calls the roll. After taking care of his administrative duties, he gets into his first-ever lecture. Mary Lou is about to learn a great deal from her newly-minted instructor.

John Bookman looks over the bright and shiny faces in his classroom and begins: "I want to tell you the untold story of Christopher Columbus—his story is a shocking tale of severed hands, assaulted women, and gentle, enslaved people worked to death to slake the white Europeans’ lust for gold."

Bookman was just getting warmed up. He continued: "Arawak men and women, naked, tawny, and full of wonder, emerged from their villages onto the island’s beaches and swam out to get a closer look at the strange big boat. When Columbus and his sailors came ashore, carrying swords, speaking oddly, the Arawaks ran to greet them, brought them food, water, gifts. He later wrote of this in his log: ‘They . . . brought us parrots and balls of cotton, and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks’ bells. They willingly traded everything they owned. . . . ’

And then came the knock-out blow of his lecture. Bookman's eyes narrowed as told the students, "Columbus wrote in his diary these words, 'The Arawaks have no iron. Their spears are made out of cane. . . . They would make fine servants. . . . With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.'”

Mary Lou Follet is shocked. She'd never heard such before. But what she and the other students don't know is they've been conned. Mr. Bookman, following the required reading he'd been assigned at the University of Wisconsin, didn't know what Columbus recorded in his ship's log on October 12, 1492: “I warned my men to take nothing from the people without giving something in exchange” The book he was assigned to read, "A People's History of the United States" by Howard Zinn, had omitted that October 12th recording.

Not only that, but Mr. Bookman had been tricked by Zinn's ellipsis, those three little dots between "fine servants" and "With fifty men." The ellipsis is hiding something. That punctuation is hiding the fact that "With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want" has nothing to do with the first part and is not even in the same paragraph as "They would make fine servants."

In fact, the "With fifty men" statement is from an entry Columbus made two days later where he was remarking on a theory he had, that people from the mainland came to the islands to capture these Indians as slaves because they were so docile and obliging.

John Bookman, following the party line also either didn't know or failed to mention another entry in the ship's log in which Columbus wrote: “I want the natives to develop a friendly attitude toward us because I know that they are a people who can be made free and converted to our Holy Faith more by love than by force.” He had not come, as is now portrayed to work the tribe to death to fill his coffers and return to Europe.

But that one contrived and deliberately designed sentence in the book has caused a nationwide movement and a nationwide attitude which "has captured our education system and popular culture. The book has been translated into over a dozen languages, including French, Spanish, Italians, Germans, Chinese, and even the Arab world. The defacement of statues of Columbus with red paint has already become an annual ritual in many places." (Mary Grabar) By 2018, it was estimated that the book had sold more than 2.6 million copies. In April 2019, the book was considered a sacred object” when newly elected Oklahoma City council member JoBeth Hamon chose to place her hand on it for her oath of office.

That one sentence forged in deceit has caused these states to change the name of Columbus Day to Indigenous People's Day:

• Maine
• New Mexico
• Vermont
• Minnesota
• Alaska
• North Carolina
• South Dakota
• Alaska
• Oregon
  
• Wisconsin
• Washington D.C.
• Oklahoma
• Alabama 

ANOTHER ELLIPSIS

Satan has embedded an ellipsis in the minds of men. His ellipsis hides the word "alone," as in "faith alone." His ellipsis occurs in book after book, sermon after sermon in which people are told that a faith that is alone cannot save, that it must be accompanied by turning from sin, feeling sorry for sin, making restitution for sin, confessing one's sins, publicly confessing Christ, and additional ordinances or sacraments.

Whether you're reading "A People's History of the United States" or listening to a sermon or reading a theological work, beware the ellipsis!

HE DARED TO SAY WHAT?

Recently, a high-ranking cabinet official of the government gave a speech at Notre Dame University. If I may paraphrase, he said:

1. Promiscuous sexual behavior is not a good thing.
2. Drug addiction is not advisable.
3. The breakdown of the family is not healthy for society.
4. Single motherhood is not the best environment in which to raise children.
5. Education should involve a search for the truth.
6. The truth exists.
7. Moral relativism brings do-your-own-thing-chaos.

He spoke on those seven topics much more eloquently than they appear in my paraphrase above, but I'm sure you get the idea.

THE "SHOULD BE" IN THIS SITUATION

Those seven truths should be accepted by one and all as bedrock, foundational, and simple statements. We should expect people to tell the speaker afterward, "That's all so simple. Your talk was like listening to a book review of Dick and Jane Go to the Farm; don't waste our time going over them because everybody knows that." But, whereas people would have said that just a few years ago, they don't think that way now. Things aren't as they once were.

HE DARED TO SAY WHAT?

That speech and that speaker have come under attack, an attack centering on outraged cries of "He wants to establish a theocracy!" And "Whatever happened to the separation of church and state!" The problem is that "theocracy" is a word they don't define and it hangs in the air as a threat of gloom and doom to come.

Does anybody ever say, "Hold on, Sparky. What's a theocracy?" No. They don't. So let's do that. What's a theocracy? A theocracy is a form of government in which priests rule the roost. Or to say it with more balanced precision: "A theocracy is a form of government in which God or a deity is recognized as the supreme civil ruler, God's or a deity's laws being interpreted by the ecclesiastical authorities are the laws of society."

In a theocracy, a person would be punished for not attending church or for blasphemy. In a theocracy, a person might be fined or executed for working on the Sabbath. So, one must ask, "Is that what the speaker at Notre Dame was advocating?" Of course not. Any common-sense reading or listening to his speech tells you that.

On the other hand, was Mr. Speaker advocating the establishment of a government church and thereby destroying the separation of church and state? Was he advocating mandating that the Southern Baptist church as the only church that would be legal in America? Of course not. But since people don't understand what a theocracy is, those who hurled the word like a dagger against the speaker get away with it and the speaker is labeled as evil. (One critic wrote that he deserved to go to hell for the speech.)

NOW TO SOMETHING MORE IMPORTANT

But it would seem more important to look at their outrage at its foundation: it's a revolt against and a loss of common sense. We're seeing this on many different fronts. For example, a large contingent of parents turns out for a school board meeting to debate the issue of who can use which bathroom. These are adults arguing the topic. Where's common sense in all of this?

Then there are those people who demand the right to choose which pronoun in the English language refers to them and a teacher can be fired for not using whatever pronoun each person chooses. Where's common sense? Does not birth reveal the proper pronoun? But, no, there's further nonsense. Did you know that as of last year, the third Wednesday in October is International Pronouns Day?

Then there's the furor over how many genders are there. For uncountable thousands of years, everyone has known there are two. According to one source,  there are a total of 112 as of this year, 2019. (Genesis 1:27 ends the debate. There are a mere two.) But these are seeming educated adults sho are seriously discussing the pronoun and gender issues.

Then if you were to ask for a listing in alphabetical order of all these 112 genders here's the first one: "Abimegender: a gender that is profound, deep, and infinite; meant to resemble when one mirror is reflecting into another mirror creating an infinite paradox." (I have no idea what that means.)

The point of all this is Proverbs 1:7: "The fear of the Lord (that is, a positive response to God and His Word) is the beginning of wisdom." A society bereft of the fear of the Lord will spend its time fighting over the correct number of genders, who can use which bathroom, and a host of other topics which no man can number. The destabilization of our society continues at record speed.