My Beauty Best Teacher

In Exodus 20, the Ten Commandments are listed- how well do you know them? To be honest, I had a vague understanding of them, but had never really read them and thought about them before. One that really got me thinking was the First Commandment:

And God spake all these words, saying, I am the Lord thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. Thou shalt have no other gods before me.

In my view, this commandment is fairly easy to understand- believe in God, believe in his power, and worship him and no other gods. Not only that, one should also refuse to 'worship' other things- money, sex, success, beauty, status, etc. Also, this commandment further prohibits one from holding false beliefs about God- in other words, don't believe in a false or incorrect God.

As a conservative teacher, I am surprised at how far our schools and our society has strayed from this simple commandment. Most public schools teach students to worship reason and logic, and they teach students to not worship God. Schools are increasingly becoming anti-God, and are finding new ways to prevent students and staff from worshipping him in order to follow some perverted interpretation of the 1st Amendment.

Schools and society increasingly promotes worship of a new God- Mother Earth. The increasingly worship of this God, increasingly at odds with the God of the Bible and Christians, is a shocking breach of the 1st Commandment. Ask yourself- would you rather work on the Sabbath or envy your neighbors goods, or recycle and buy a hybrid? Which commandments do you follow more closely- which God do you believe in more- the God of the Bible or Mother Earth? What God to you believe in more, which God's rules do you stick the most closely too, which God to you sacrifice the most to, which God do you look to for the future, and which God's learning's do you learn about- Mother Earth or the God of the Bible?

Schools and the larger society are increasingly breaking this commandment, and that bothers me, because if you don't believe in God, and if you don't worship him and follow his rules, what is next? Worshipping false gods (politicians, athletes, celebrities)? Murder (abortion)? Adultery (skyrocketing divorce rates)? Theft (raising tax rates)? False witness (perjury, lying, half-truths)? Coveting neighbors property (redistribution of property)? The failure to follow the first commandment is a sign that our society is not going to follow the other commandments.

A moral society is a just one, and we are losing our morality- we are attacking our morality, and it all begins with worshipping of other gods.

Several months ago, inspired by my reading of Exodus 20, I wrote a post about the importance of the First Commandment- Thou Shalt Not Have Any Gods Before Me. As I wrote earlier, this is a pretty easy command by God to understand- believe in God, believe in his power, and worship him and no other gods. This means that you should also refuse to 'worship' other things- money, reason, sex, success, environment, beauty, logic, status, etc.

In my post I went on to say:

As a conservative teacher, I am surprised at how far our schools and our society has strayed from this simple commandment. Most public schools teach students to worship reason and logic, and they teach students to not worship God. Schools are increasingly becoming anti-God, and are finding new ways to prevent students and staff from worshipping him in order to follow some perverted interpretation of the 1st Amendment.

The point of this statement was to point out that schools are not observing the first amendment or even a separation of church and state. Instead, schools are actively sponsoring the worship of other gods and are using their power and influence over students to actively attack the Christian church. It usually isn't obvious, but the fact that they have classes on diversity, international relations (or even Islamic studies), the portrayal of religion and religious leaders in history books, the absence of any mention of religion in science classes, or the fervent avoidance to any religious texts in English classes- in these ways, schools have tried their hardest to evict God and anything that sounds like God from their walls.

Look at the textbooks that your children take home, ask your child what was talked about by the teacher in their lectures, and by a fly on the wall in staff lunch rooms or between hours and you will hear a lot of public school teachers openly mock and disrespect religion, especially Christian religion.

In my post I directed people to learn more about religion and God by clicking on some links that I found were helpful- they took you to about.com's site on religion. This brought my blog to the attention of the atheism and agnostic blogger for this site, and on his site he decided to attack my views.

This blogger feels that caring about students morality and values and trying to put in place a society closer to God's views "could be one of the problems in America's public schools." In his view, it is a problem to even speak of religion, and the mere thought that someone in public schools might personally care about religion terrifies him. How could he be an atheist and deny God and have people read his blog if people learn about God in schools? Oh, the terror!

Here is the real root of his concern- "I doubt that this Conservative Teacher can find a single example of a society which has enforced Christian dogma and which was just"- in other words, he has so lost his faith and is bitter and angry at the world that he strikes out at it, hoping that if he can tear down God somehow he will be less alone. He thinks that the Christian church is particular has made the world worse off, and suggests that attempting to follow Gods laws makes society bad. I'd find him sad if he wasn't running a blog that thousands of people a day read and take advice from.

In his anger at the Christian church and his hysteria over protecting the liberal interpretation of the first amendment, he misses the point entirely. Read the comment section and you'll see what I mean. According to readers of this blog, God is an "imaginary god," "this world already lacks any gods," "What god?", or mock God by calling him the "Flying Spaghetti Monster." One reader even a says "I hate Enki the incestuous Sumerian semen god and want him dead. Don’t know why, maybe I just want to worship myself, or I don’t want to be accountable to anything bigger than myself. Or I hate love and hope."

No where do I see in the post on Austin's Atheism Blog or in the comments is my original point disputed- that once you disconnect people from God, they are disconnected from reality and usually in their desperation resort to worshiping other false idols, whether it is the state or other men.

Unlike liberals, whose main motivation seems to be to control other people, my main motivation is to understand other people, and thereby understand the world better. Several times in my blog I have wrote about my attempts to understand how liberals think, and my attempts are starting to converge.

In The Religion of the Democrats I wrote:

The modern Democrat party feels that people are trapped in an unfair and unjust material world. In churches they blame a lot of people for this, and their anger and bitterness is felt quite clearly. They frequently point fingers at God himself, who unjustly and unfairly did this to certain groups and races... They frequently reject the traditional Christian teachings of God, and try to go over his head to find some greater power than him. To Democrats, there is some higher power yet than even God- The People, The World, The Globe- they call it by many names, but the idea is the same, that there is some remote and powerful being out there who is higher than God... Democrats today believe that man is good and that the world is evil- that man was a good and decent person but was ambushed and put in a nation or world where bad things occur. It isn’t man’s fault, it isn’t any groups fault- no one is at fault, since man is good. The fault lies with the world, which must be changed from its fallen state..."

In Book Review: The Man Who Was Thursday I wrote:

...their ideas about economic suicide for no reason, their dislike of labeling things right and wrong, and their views on life and mark them as the modern Democratic Party. And at the center of the inner circle there is a man who speaks to applauding crowds and says pleasing phrases, but he is under no illusions, and his actions have terrible consequences for our great nation...

In Stonehenge and the Descent into Barbarianism I noted that:

...As government becomes increasingly powerful in Europe and America and we move father away from our Founder's conservative views, more and more often we are seeing evidence of Western societies slide back to barbarianism, and this celebration by hippies, leftists, liberals, and pagans at Stonehenge is yet another example. Pagan religion is becoming increasingly popular and accepted in our society. I see it most in the numbers of people who openly and proudly proclaim that they are not Christian, and also are the most fervent and devout believers in man-made-caused-one-way-global-warming-solved-by-government-power. They now worship the Green God. Other people, in an effort to be fair and politically correct to everyone, have decided to worship every god, embracing a polytheistic view of the world, whereby they pray to whatever god they think will help them the most. Animal rights activists worship animals and many people worship men (like Obama)- paganism is on the rise, not decline, in our society...

In The First Commandment I really noticed liberals religion:

...In my view, this commandment is fairly easy to understand- believe in God, believe in his power, and worship him and no other gods. Not only that, one should also refuse to 'worship' other things- money, sex, success, beauty, status, etc. Also, this commandment further prohibits one from holding false beliefs about God- in other words, don't believe in a false or incorrect God... society increasingly promotes worship of a new God- Mother Earth. The increasingly worship of this God, increasingly at odds with the God of the Bible and Christians, is a shocking breach of the 1st Commandment... A moral society is a just one, and we are losing our morality- we are attacking our morality, and it all begins with worshipping of other gods...

Today my brother emailed me another piece of the puzzle. Albert Mohler, in this article, starts putting the pieces to the puzzle together after reading a piece by Howard P. Kainz, which reminds him of something that he had read earlier by J. Gresham Machen.

The radical idea (for 1920) is that evangelical Christianity and its liberal rival are, in reality, two very different religions. Oh, I realize that you might not believe that liberalism is a religion, but does it have dogmas? A group of writings that you have to read? People who 'know' the ideas better than others and are accepted speakers on any liberal subject? Observances or holidays that we have to celebrate? Parades or rallies? Do liberals get all frothy and upset when someone utters a heresy like "affirmative action is racist" or "global warming isn't real"? What does 'future man' look like to a liberal- going to heaven, or a heaven on Earth? Liberalism is a religion.

I want to caution you that I agree with the author- "not all liberals are committed to this religious vision of liberalism... conservatives may find common cause and common ground with these non-religiously committed liberals."

In order to make this world a better place, you should be aware that there are people out there that BELIEVE on faith alone that mankind must overcome 'religious superstition' by means of Reason, that empirical science can and will answer all the questions about the world, and that the human race, by invalidating and disregarding Christian traditions, can and will achieve perfectibility.

"We had reversed the recession, avoided a depression, gotten the economy moving again," Obama told a crowd in Decorah, Iowa. "But over the last six months we've had a run of bad luck."

If bad luck is the reason that our nation has struggled lately, I wondered to myself just what exactly our President and Commander-in-Chief was doing to combat this recent run of bad luck.

Never in my knowledge has any other President had to battle 'bad luck' before- a google search of past Presidents' speeches did not turn up any results of past Presidents, whether they were Republican like George W Bush or Ronald Reagan or Democrats like Bill Clinton or Jimmy Carter, ever blaming 'bad luck' for the problems that the United States faced. Perhaps it was because these past Presidents were religious people, who did not believe in paganism and 'luck' so much as the divine will of God and his plan.

To combat a run of 'bad luck', past Presidents like George W Bush turned to prayer and Bill Clinton took to reading Scripture, but it appears from President Obama's speeches and comments that he has decided not to talk to God or read God's word to turn around the run of bad luck, but rather bemoan the run of 'bad luck' and sing 'woe to me'.

Although in our nation we do have a separation of church and state, that does not mean that there is a separation in our nation between those who believe in a higher power and those who serve in our political institutions. For most of our nation's history, our leaders on both side of the political spectrum have been religious and have prayed and read the word of God and saw in the actions of the world God.

President Bush often said that "these are trying times" when our nation faced tough circumstances like terrorist attacks, hurricanes, the total collapse of our banking system, a recession in 2001, or the difficult times of fighting two major wars against dedicated and evil groups. He did not say that our nation suffered through 'bad luck'- he recognized that God's plan and the free will of men sometimes tried our faith and offered a trial to our nation and its people, whether to fight harder for what is good and right or to not.

Bill Clinton, for all of his faults and failures, was well versed in the Bible and believed that he was doing his best to advance the values that he saw in it- love, hope, forgiveness, etc- and that when he faced trials, that those trials were presented to him by God or by those who freely choose to deny God, and that our nation would overcome those trials by sticking to our values and believing in God.

And yet, President Obama, who resigned from Trinity United Church of Christ after he judged that his affiliation with Jeremiah Wright would reflect badly on him politically, does not quote Scripture or talk about his time in prayer. So how exactly should Obama cope with this run of bad luck- an unaffiliated Christian who does not go to Church or regularly read the Bible or study theology of any sort of any religion?

At some point questions need to be asked about President Obama and his views on God and religion, and I don't just mean the sort of 'is he a Muslim' kind of questions that will lead us nowhere. He does not appear to be a Muslim, and his connection to Christianity is either very very private and unmentioned or thin at best, and since he isn't Buddhist or Jewish, one has to begin to wonder just what exactly does Obama see as the divine plan for our nation. I would suggest that Obama is atheist, but his reference to supernatural 'luck' does not fit with that theory either.

What are President Obama's religious beliefs and what role does 'luck' play in his view of the universe?

UPDATE: Get out of my head Charles Krauthammer! For the record, I posted my post before he came out with his editorial today, but it is amazing that both of us arrived at the same thought days after the event and then posted about it. In his article called Bad luck? Bad faith? he goes a slightly different direction, but struggles like me with Obama's comment about 'luck'.

Via memeorandum.

Those who are interested in learning more about Obama's religion should try The Faith of Barack Obama.

Via Big Hollywood, I read this random thought from Victoria Jackson in her post Sunbathing Naked (Day One):

….I was reading in 1 Samuel 8 how Israel wanted a king and God did not want them to have a human king. God was the King of Israel. He gave them The Ten Commandments and other super smart laws, like not eating pork (it was not sanitary) and getting circumcised (prevention of disease), and ”an eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth” (crime prevention). God wanted people to obey Him because He is the smartest leader and loves us the most. But, Israel wanted a king really, really bad. A human King. God relented.

King Saul was elected. And it was bad for everyone.

This reminds me of America. When God was the King of America we were blessed. Our founding fathers built our country on the Judeo-Christian foundation of The Ten Commandments and the presence of no human King. The colonists were escaping the human king of England, seeking religious freedom and they set up our Government purposefully to prevent the corruption of power; thus, the legislative, executive and judicial branches of Government – all balancing out one another. No one man in charge. No human king. King God was engraved onto our money, put in our pledge, and carved into our buildings in Washington, D.C.  But, as time went on, just like Israel, we gradually started to take His blessings for granted, and abandon His laws. We kicked God out of the courts, the public school system, our families, and our personal lives. So, now we had no King. And we wanted a king really, really bad. A human king. God relented.

King Obama was elected. And it was bad for everyone...

As many people do, every Sunday we read the Bible together as a family at bedtime, and right now I'm also making my way through the Book of Samuel. To me, the strongest passages in Samuel was Chapter 12, when Samuel recounts for the people of Israel all that God has done for them- he lists all the amazing things that the Lord did for his people. That is powerful, and evidence of the real power of the Lord. Having a King rule over you and attacking your enemies and saying nice stuff like 'change' and 'hope' is nothing, and I'm always surprised when people want to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Things were good when you follow the Lord, and abide by his laws, which I believe include the laws of natural law and the laws of the free market. God gave us life, liberty, and the ability to pursue and keep property, and the closer we stick to those beliefs, the more we will prosper. We should have been happy enough with the way America was going, but instead, like the people of Israel, we weren't happy enough with that and demanded a King to rule over us to decree hope and change, and the result is bad for us.

America is an exceptional nation- a nation that was founded and built on traditions and ideas in a way that no nation had previously tried and no other nation has since duplicated. The ideas are put forth in our Declaration of Independence- all men are created equal, no man is better than you at deciding how you run your life, government is created for very limited purposes, and that these mainly are to protect your freedom of choice, to protect your life, and to protect your property which was the product of your hard work and labor. As I have written about many times, these ideas are under daily attack by those unexceptional nations who would drag us back into their petty jealousies, and by those who support these nations out of belief that America has something to apologize for or that the monarchs and empires of the past are to be admired and emulated.

Traditionally, our nation has been a nation of immigrants who come here expecting nothing other than to be rewarded for their hard work and not be judged based on their race or class, and traditionally our nation has been a nation built on rule of law, not rule of strong men ruling by decree. These traditions are also under attack by those who immigrated here expecting others to work hard for their benefit, and rule of law is slipping badly in our nation.

One other great tradition that America was firmly built on is Christianity. This Christian spirit animated our nation and our nation's leaders from the beginning to today, and is firmly a part of our character. While other Christian nations around the world have had slipping church attendance and little vigorous debate on the nature of God and God's Word, in our nation many still go to church and healthy and moral debates continue to be engaged on the nature of God.

This traditional Christian character of our nation is an important part of our tradition, and has been enshrined in our Pledge of Allegiance, which we all know and say from birth as:

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

But this tradition is under attack as well, by well meaning individuals who believe that out nation will be improved or strengthened in some manner if God is driven underground and killed. They object to saying the pledge, usually by hiding behind nameless others who might possibly be offended by saying that the United States of America was founded and remains as one nation under God. They seek to remove the words 'under God', believing that it is possible to pick and choose what parts of America they like and support. Today they remove the phrase 'under God', but it has always been my fear that once that phrase is permitted to be removed, others will soon follow, and our traditions will be torn asunder and our foundations as a nation will shatter and we will fail.

Sadly, this is what is now happening. The election of Barack Obama was a bad gamble that our nation took, a leap of faith on someone who did not earn it, and the empowering of the liberal wing of his party, a Democratic Party that has moved far away from most people, further took our nation down a path of failed ideas and rejection of traditions. On Sunday, while many people sat down on a great Father's Day to watch the U.S. Open Golf Championship, they saw how far our nation has gone down this path when one of the major networks altered our nation's Pledge.

NBC on Sunday decided to cut the words "under God" from the reading of the Pledge of Allegiance that accompanied the beginning of its coverage of the U.S. Open Golf Championship. Seconds after that, there was another reading of the Pledge, and this time, in addition to cutting out the words 'under God', NBC went further and cut out the words 'one nation' as well, dishonoring all of the thousands of dead who fought to keep our nation one nation during the US Civil War. Watch the video yourself.

NBC later issued an apology, but I wonder, what is next for the liberals who run NBC, who support Barack Obama, and support the liberal radical left of the modern day Democratic Party? Will they next drop out the words 'with liberty', since they don't believe that I truly have the liberty to run my own life however I want and need to be ruled over by elites in Washington? Will they drop out 'to the republic', or maybe alter it 'to the democracy', thereby changing our nation from a nation of laws into one where strong men can do what they do and the rest of us must suffer under their tyranny? What is next for our nation, if the traditions of our nations can be so casually rejected by a major network?

For your classroom, think about getting one of these posters- I Pledge Allegiance to the Flag of the USA - Classroom Motivational Poster or I Pledge Allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America - Classroom Motivational Poster.

There have been a couple situations in my school over the last month about having pictures of various politicians in school. What prompted this was the sudden appearance of several large Obama pictures in teachers classrooms, days after the election. Students and parents were concerned about having their children gaze on images of our great leader every day, to which those teachers replied that there were pictures of Bush in other teachers classrooms.

The pictures of Obama are meant to be gazed at in worship. The picture of Bush usually serves as a focal point for 2 minutes of hate. In this spirit, I direct you to Bruce Walker's piece over at the American Thinker. It is really good. Here is it in a somewhat edited form:

It has been sixty years since George Orwell wrote his chilling dystopian classic, 1984.

(It is possible for) Americans like you and I, (to) become so decoupled from reality and morality that they could be led to surrender everything, even their lives, intoxicated only with the venom of modern Leftism, (and become) Orwell's Children.

We are drifting into the sort of horrific future he described. Too many of us for comfort or solace have become just like the denizens of Jonestown: Orwell's children -- a new generation of creature enraged into constant militancy against eternal enemies, oblivious to the notion of a Blessed Creator, melded into the consciousness of the party hive, divorced from history, hypnotized by images, inoculated against reason, stripped of family, and existing only to serve the cause.

Orwell did not write his book in a vacuum. 1984 describes the Soviet Union (the book describes Stalinist Russia so well so that subjects of that evil empire wondered when Orwell had lived there, though he had just described what he saw from the outside.) 1984 also describes Nazism and every other odious totalitarianism, which its secret police and propaganda machine and atomized subjects. But Orwell was very much also writing about the democratic western nations. His book was a warning of what could happen here. Oceania, the only totalitarian superstate actually descried in 1984, was largely America and the British Empire.

There were specific elements necessary for nations with a heritage of freedom to slide into the most absolute and abject slavery. These elements existed in Nazi Germany, they existed in Soviet Russia, and they exist in our free democracies today. What are the characteristics of the Orwellian state?

Start with God. He must go. The great Russian novelists knew this: "Without God, everything is permitted." In Oceania, God simply does not exist. The Nazis bragged that they would raise a generation "...without ever having heard of the Sermon on the Mount or the Golden Rule, to say nothing of the Ten Commandments." The Soviet persecuted anyone who followed the God of Jews and Christians. God is hounded in our world today. A generation of Orwell's Children are growing up without thinking about God at all or thinking that God is a silly idea cherished by sillier old fogies.

Truth must go too. Nazis embraced the "Big Lie." Soviets denied that honesty, per se, mattered. In Orwell's Oceania, the Inner Party members learn to even lie to themselves and to hold utterly contradictory beliefs at the same time. Truth and honesty have little meaning to Orwell's Children in our world. All truth is relative, all honesty a sham.

Language must be brought to heel. The Nazis did this by inventing meaningless words like "Aryan science." Marxism foisted upon us words like "capitalism," which means nothing at all but which has so infected our minds that we reflexively use this silly nonsense word instead of freedom. Politically correct language is rampant. We come to view words like "discriminate" as inherently evil, and other words like "viable fetal mass" have replaced the reality of murdered babies.

Image and symbols replace words. Hitler, whose disciples seldom recalled what Hitler said, always recalled the raw imagery of their leader. Stalin's portrait was as inescapable in the Soviet Union as the portrait of Big Brother in Oceania. We live in a word of symbols and images. Conservatives succeed in books and talk radio, media that deal in words. Orwell's Children live in the realm of symbols and images.

The books of the Nazis and Soviets were unreadable tomes like Mein Kampf, The Myth of the Twentieth Century (the two Nazi "masterpieces") or vast empty volumes of Marxist-Leninism. Is it an accident that the giant who most resisted this evil, Solzhenitsyn, was a devout Christian who mastered the written word better than any stooge of Hitler or the Politburo ever could?

Immutable oppressors are the final nasty element in dystopia. Hitler blamed Jews for everything. Stalin blamed kulaks and his enemies in the party for everything. Subjects of Orwell's Oceania saw Emmanuel Goldstein as the eternal, immutable enemy of the party. Today there is a drearily predictable list of oppressors. Christians, men, white people, the "rich" (whatever that is supposed to mean), America, and Israel are oppressors and nothing can ever change that.

Orwell even told us, by name, the professionals who would lead us into the nightmare of 1984: "sociologists," "teachers," "bureaucrats," "journalists," "professional politicians," "scientists," "trade union organizers," "publicity experts," and "technicians." (The term "community organizer" was unknown to him.) Those who enslave were those who taught students, who created the news, who sat in the halls of government power, and who defined official "truth" (at least truth de jour.)

Orwell's Children live among us now, not in tiny numbers in weird Marxist cults like Jim Jones' People Temple, but as leaders of Congress, as the establishment of academia, as the producers of news and entertainment, as the administrators of public schools, as the "experts" in a thousand myriad and odd fields of putative "expertise." They infatuate our bored children with the only reality and the only diversion that many can find. They wait for the rest of us to grow older and to die.

Will these children inherit the earth? History, not theology, has shown a single defense against the spreading contagion of Orwell's Children. Solzhenitsyn found God in the godless Gulag. Michael Power in early 1939 wrote: "In the Christianity of the German people, the National Socialist has found the one enemy it could not vanquish" - and Christians in Germany, alone, chose to voluntarily seek death before selling their souls to Nazism.

The Jewish refusniks proved indigestible to the brutal Soviet police state. When all else failed the Jewish people under the Nazis, devout Jews like my wife's mother clung to the Blessed Creator and survived the Holocaust. God can touch us all. God can protect us all from evil (not from harm - we all suffer and we all die - but from the much greater danger of the sort of evil Orwell described.)

Education, science, technological gadgetry, good medical care - all of this can not stop us from sliding into a massive Jonestown, a realized Oceania, a place marked by Dante's grim caution "Abandon hope, all you who enter here." We are all anchored in belief, but it is what we believe that matters. We can believe in the lies of Big Brother, which change each day with the needs of the party or we can believe in the truth of a living God. We can become the children of Orwell or the special creatures of God. Everything -- our nation, our world, our families, our communities -- flows from that choice.

I'm so glad I read 1984 recently- I actually hadn't read it until a couple years ago- in high school, the advanced students didn't read Animal Farm and 1984, and instead read highly intelligent liberal drivel. But my brother and I often talk about these books nowdays, as America sadly descends into the fascism and socialism that was described in them.

UPDATE: One of my brother's disagree's with me- he says it won't be 1984 that we see, but rather a Brave New World- happy, fluffy, smiley-faced fascism. This actually fits with an earlier post of mine called "Happy-Nicing Ourselves into Dictatorship."- Maybe there is something here- doped up kids, random sex, mindless entertainment, no morality or religion. Just gnostic overlords ruling over us stupid masses- a heartless, ghastly prison, with walls painted up with bright murals of MLK and Mother Earth singing kumbya. Kind of like the school I teach at right now!

A sovereign is the supreme lawmaking authority within its jurisdiction. When the Pilgrims left England and came to America, in their hearts they didn't recognize as their sovereign lord the King of England, realizing that anyone who could make it wrong to practice your religion could not truly be the real authority over your actions. The Pilgrims didn't recognize themselves as sovereign lords over themselves, able to determine what was right and wrong for themselves, knowing that this sort of selfishness and vanity would lead away from morality and create an absence of law. When the Pilgrims came to America, they didn't recognize 'no one' as sovereign, realizing that someone had to be responsible for their actions and had to provide law over them or else their community would dissolve into anarchy.

When the Pilgrims arrived in America, they knew in their hearts who their sovereign lord was- they knew who was the real lawmaking authority who watched over them and governed their behavior. Even on the shores of a faraway world, far from the British military or the power of the crown, far beyond the reach of any monarch, in a hostile land filled with potentially hostile people, the Pilgrims sat down and gave thanks to their sovereign lord and savior, to the authority which governed their society, to the source of law and rules and power, and to the one person who could possibly guarantee their safety and salvation. The Pilgrims gave thanks to God and his son, Jesus Christ, recognizing him as their sovereign.

Nolan Finley, writing in the Detroit News today, wrote in Editing God out of history distorts truth:

Ask any grade school kid who the Pilgrims were giving thanks to on the first Thanksgiving and I'll lay you three-to-one odds that the answer you get is, "the Indians." Public education is so obsessed with separation and so uncomfortable with discussions of religion that it has sanitized the unbreakable link between faith and America's founding. Now children are taught that the Pilgrims set the first Thanksgiving dinner for the Native Americans who helped keep them alive during their first harsh year in the New World.

This is more than just a small distortion in the name of political correctness. And it's not one of those Merry Christmas versus Happy Holidays issues. Whether you're a believer or non-believer, you should be concerned that God is being written out of this nation's history because doing so will limit our understanding of who we are as a people.

Faith was the driving force in the lives of the Pilgrims. Certainly the Indians helped them through the deprivations of that first year. But the settlers believed it was their prayers that accounted for their survival. And despite the starvation and sickness, they saw this new land as a great gift from God, a place where they were free to practice their religion.

The freedom to worship sparked a hunger for other liberties and created a culture that chafed at submission to arbitrary authority.

The words they used matter. When you edit out "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights" from the Declaration of Independence, as President Barack Obama has been doing lately, you lose the understanding that the early Americans were able to take the extraordinary risk of breaking way from their king and taking responsibility for their own governance because they believed God was the only sovereign they were answerable to.

It was a remarkable proposition at a time when the entire rest of the world was under the rule of monarchs.

The belief in America's divine destiny and its providential partnership fueled the nation's sea-to-sea expansion and sparked a missionary zeal for spreading freedom. It gave rise to the notion of America's large and unique place in the world and the theory of American exceptionalism that is also now considered quaint in many quarters.

The irony here is that schools have no problem exposing our flaws in the name of getting history right. It almost relishes defrocking our heroes — Jefferson owned slaves, and so did Washington; Jackson practiced genocide; the pioneers ravaged the land. They do so even to the point of challenging the nation's legitimacy.

But when it comes to discussing the very complex and integral ways religion shaped our history, educators lose their nerve. So they invent more convenient scenarios, such as Pilgrims cooking up the idea of a huge Thanksgiving dinner to honor their Indian benefactors, instead of the God whom they ardently believed led them to this New World and controlled every aspect of their fate.

There's both good and bad in the nation's religious history. Americans have done some noble things in the name of serving God, and they've made some tragic mistakes doing the same. It's not proselytizing to explore that relationship between God and country. It's just telling the truth.

Truth is largely being scrubbed from public schools today, especially in the social studies, in ways big and small, and the fact that almost every single one of my students thinks that Thanksgiving was held to give thanks to the Native-Americans and not God is just one more piece of evidence that our nation is losing its history and its soul, and soon when people ask you who your sovereign is, your answer of "The President of the United States" will not be the same as the Pilgrim's reply of "God and Jesus."

For months, my two brothers and I have been discussing the connections in our modern political system between church and state- that is, between religion and politics. We reject the false theory that religion and politics should be separated, because it is not possible. A person’s views on God, the nature of God, and the teachings of God do affect their political views- nay, those are the basis of a person’s political views. A person’s religion will form the foundation on which that person builds their political theories, and thus it is very important to consider what religious beliefs important political figures has.

This is not to say that one should vote based on religion- I’m not advocating identity politics or discrimination in any way. And this is not to say that the State should establish a particular religion as the only recognized religion- this is not the role of government and lessens liberty. But it is important to know what major political figures believe about the world so that you can better understand how they will use policy and power to shape the world.

One way of looking at the world is advocated by our current President, Democrat Barack Obama, and he has many others who share his worldview, such as Democrat leaders Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. Through their statements and policy proposals, they have revealed how they view the nature of the universe.

Generally speaking, the modern Democrat party feels that people are trapped in an unfair and unjust material world. In churches they blame a lot of people for this, and their anger and bitterness is felt quite clearly. They frequently point fingers at God himself, who unjustly and unfairly did this to certain groups and races.

This does not mean that Democrats reject God, although there are a lot of agnostic and atheists in this party today. Rather, they frequently reject the traditional Christian teachings of God, and try to go over his head to find some greater power than him. To Democrats, there is some higher power yet than even God- The People, The World, The Globe- they call it by many names, but the idea is the same, that there is some remote and powerful being out there who is higher than God.

Democrats today believe that man is good and that the world is evil- that man was a good and decent person but was ambushed and put in a nation or world where bad things occur. It isn’t man’s fault, it isn’t any groups fault- no one is at fault, since man is good. The fault lies with the world, which must be changed from its fallen state.

The chief way for a person to change this fallen world and once again hope of being divine is by believing in these facts and by more fully understanding how great humans are. Obama’s speeches are filled with platitudes and phrases about how he knows that people are good, about how he feels that people are great, and that if only they would follow his ideas, then we could overcome this fallen world and be great ourselves.

The key to Obama’s speeches are that knowledge and understanding and empathy are the central factor in this process of restoration. And I’m not talking about knowledge as in an understanding of policy, book learning in economics, experience in certain industries, etc- I’m talking about esoteric experiences of direct participation with the divine.

It is more important for Obama to appoint Czars of various industries who feel what he feels, who have empathy like he has empathy, and who know what he knows, rather than appoint czars from within particular industries. It is more important that they are acquainted with Obama than they have real knowledge of subject matters. It is more important that they be inward 'knowing' people or people on journeys of self-exploration than be people who have common sense and are average people.

The idea is that the disorder and badness of the world can be overcome by dreaming and believing, and above all, by trusting the leadership of Obama and his guidance of this journey, because he is.

A lot of time it feels as if Democrats today are alienated from the world- Obama holds himself as aloof, above the world, and it is not uncommon for Democrats to insist that they be called by fancy titles that make them higher than the rest of us. They don’t feel connected with us, especially those of us in the heartland of the nation, those of us who are laughed at for clinging to our guns, gods, and goods.

This is not all speculative stuff- there is a policy impact of this. Obama and the Democrats, acting on these beliefs, seek to implement and or create a policy to actualize their speculations- to create a sort of heaven on earth. Now is the time, the one point in human history, these Democrats claim, when the kingdom of God can be replaced with the kingdom of man.

For example, some Democrats believe that we can establish the perfect healthcare system once selected bureaucrats, who have special knowledge, take control and overturn the natural forces of capitalism. Or that the perfect education system can be established if only it is run by chosen government official, who will overcome the natural forces of man and make us better people.

Democrats are now marked by a desire to dominate others, as seen by the Cap and Trade bill, because it is they who has The Vision. They Know, and they laugh at others who pretend to know things, because they Know that they don’t. As a result, there is very little regard for the welfare of those who are harmed by the resulting politics, which ranges from coercive to calamitous.

Hopefully, this little essay helps you to understand the beliefs behind Obama, Pelosi, and the Democrat Party today, and in the future you will not wonder why they do the things that they do. Their political policies are indeed affected by their religious views, and in understanding their religious views better, you will better understand their political views.

The sign of the Occupy Wall Street protester shouts 'False Gods of Wall Street', but in other signs and in interviews and conversations, these protesters loudly shout that their real gods are people who run governments. They believe in government policy- see sign after sign encouraging more spending, more government programs, more government control of the economy and people, and sign after honoring and supporting 'the People'. The 'P' in 'People' is always capitalized, because they are not talking about supporting the people who go to work every day, pay their taxes, pay on their debts, and try to make a better world for their children- no, these Occupy protesters support the People, who believe that Men are Gods and that if Men were given power to control other Men, the world would be a better place.

Growing up, all my friends would have described my family as a Christian family. I assumed all my friends were Christians as well. We all believed in God. We occasionally attended church. We were good people. Even though we believed in God, we didn't know his word, didn't understand the gospel, and didn't pursue his will. We believed in God, but we lived as if he didn't exist. After pastoring for eighteen years, I've noticed a large percentage of people in my church living similar lives. Some seem to be Christian in name only without a lot of visible spiritual fruit. Others boldly claim Christ is Lord while living lives diametrically opposed to the teachings in scripture. The more I looked, the more I found Christian Atheists everywhere. While it is often easy to spot the hypocrisy in others, it is generally more difficult to see in the mirror. One day in an honest moment, I painfully admitted that although I unquestionably believed in God, I was leading the church as if he didn't exist. I wrongly depended more on my own abilities than on his Spirit. Sadly, I dangerously cared more what people thought about me than what God thought about me. And although I preached about putting your whole faith in God, I still lived as if everything was up to me. The book Christian Atheism reflects my personal journey toward a more authentic God-honoring life.

 

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Praying God’s Word: How do we practice II Corinthians 10:3-5, "tearing down strongholds by captivating our minds with the knowledge of God"? Beth Moore shows you how in Praying God's Word. A topical prayer guide addressing fourteen common strongholds and what Scripture reveals about each of them, Praying God's Word presents Scriptures in prayer form to be incorporated into your daily prayer life. Jesus, the One and Only: In Jesus, the One and Only, Beth Moore introduces you to an intimate God in an up-close and personal portrait of the life of Jesus the Messiah. This is far more than just a work on the life of Christ. Jesus, the One and Only is a romance, and you are invited to become part of it. As He has done in the past, God will use Beth's words to woo you into falling in love with Jesus of Nazareth. The Beloved Disciple: John the apostle must have thought he had seen everything. Having been with Jesus all the years of his ministry, John witnessed more miracles than he could count, saw more displays of power than he could comprehend, and experienced more love than he could fathom. And one unforgettable morning young John outran Peter to his Savior's empty tomb. Just as Christ took John on a lifelong journey into the depths of His love, He will do the same for you.

About the Author

Beth Moore is a writer and teacher of best-selling books and Bible studies whose public speaking engagements carry her all over the United States. A dedicated wife and mother of two, Moore lives in Houston, Texas, where she leads the Living Proof Ministries and teaches an adult Sunday School class.

Product Details

• Audio CD
• Publisher: Brilliance Audio on CD
• Language: English

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"And God spake all these words, saying, I am the Lord thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. Thou shalt have no other gods before me"- Exodus 20

Several months ago I wrote a post called The First Commandment in which I observed this about our society:

I am surprised at how far our society has strayed from this simple commandment. Most public schools teach students to worship reason and logic, and they teach students to not worship God. Schools are increasingly becoming anti-God, and are finding new ways to prevent students and staff from worshipping him in order to follow some perverted interpretation of the 1st Amendment.

Schools and the larger society are increasingly breaking this commandment, and that bothers me, because if you don't believe in God, and if you don't worship him and follow his rules, what is next? Worshipping false gods? The failure to follow the first commandment is a sign that our society is not going to follow the other commandments.

The failure of our society to follow the first amendment is now being seen. Breitbart has video of the Gamaliel National Clergy Caucus holding a New Orleans style funeral procession as they deliver a casket symbolizing the death of old ways of providing health care and pray for a new day for health care in America. The Gamaliel Foundation is the community organizing group that helped sponsor Barack Obama's initial work in Chicago. While praying and signing, these people appear to be singing "Hear our cry, Obama" and "Deliver us Obama".

The video can be seen here.

Combine this with the recent stories about school children singing hymns and songs praising Obama, and what we have here is clear evidence of a society that is no longer worshiping God but is beginning to worship false idols like people (Obama) or nature (environmentalism). I don't want to hop up on my preacher box, but if our society abandons God, don't you think we'd start to see some signs of that in our society, like rising unemployment, falling prosperity, and our national power being challenged abroad?

Yemisi Ogbe writes in Farafina:

At the risk of losing my faith in the Nigerian church, I began to ask what the real relevance of Christianity is in Nigeria, especially the unglamorous Christianity of carrying crosses, following paths of repentance, seeking a God of love, and endlessly turning the other cheek. Would Nigerian men of God and congregations cease deceiving themselves, and would over 30 million Nigerians who profess Christianity make a difference to a precarious economy? Would the biblically proscribed need for integrity in our relationship with God and other human beings gain its rightful place in the church? Is there a danger in giving more and more power to men who believe it is their God given right to determine the course of other people's lives? What would happen if it becomes difficult to continue to control people with the threat of a God who avenges insubordination to his representatives? Would men of God then find ‘more effective’ means of keeping people under control, keeping themselves relevant?

Originally I was going to put together a post about how the Occupy Wall Street movement has been endorsed by the American Nazi Party. It was news-worthy- the ANP said in a statement that

The fact that its these “lefties” as you call them, who are picking up the ball and running with it – only shows how much more in tune THEY are with the fed up masses of White Workers, than the fossilized, reactionary “right-wing”. WHO holds the WEALTH and POWER in this country – the JUDEO-CAPITALISTS. WHO is therefore the #1 ENEMY who makes all this filth happen – the JUDEO-CAPITALISTS. WHO therefore do WN need to FIGHT? My heart is right there with these people, perhaps someday the “movement” will SHOW the same COURAGE and DEDICATION that these people OUT THERE FIGHTING are SHOWING!

Yeah, so there is that out there, the fact that the fascists in the Nazi party clearly recognize that this movement fits into their goals and agenda. But really this isn't so much what I want to post about today, because when I was doing research for this post, I came across something more stunning, something that I had written about before after Obama's election as President and something that I think is relevant today.

In December 2008, I linked over to a piece at the American Thinker from Bruce Walker called Orwell's Children, and I think we should all take a minute to re-read it today, because it describes this Occupy Wall Street movement very well. Picture the people at these protests and rallies as you read the following (edited for brevity)...

It has been sixty years since George Orwell wrote his chilling dystopian classic, 1984....

...We are drifting into the sort of horrific future he described. Too many of us for comfort or solace have become just like the denizens of Jonestown: Orwell's children -- a new generation of creature enraged into constant militancy against eternal enemies, oblivious to the notion of a Blessed Creator, melded into the consciousness of the party hive, divorced from history, hypnotized by images, inoculated against reason, stripped of family, and existing only to serve the cause...

...There were specific elements necessary for nations with a heritage of freedom to slide into the most absolute and abject slavery. These elements existed in Nazi Germany, they existed in Soviet Russia, and they exist in our free democracies today. What are the characteristics of the Orwellian state?

Start with God. He must go.... A generation of Orwell's Children are growing up without thinking about God at all or thinking that God is a silly idea cherished by sillier old fogies.

Truth must go too. Nazis embraced the "Big Lie." Soviets denied that honesty, per se, mattered. In Orwell's Oceania, the Inner Party members learn to even lie to themselves and to hold utterly contradictory beliefs at the same time. Truth and honesty have little meaning to Orwell's Children in our world. All truth is relative, all honesty a sham.
Language must be brought to heel... Politically correct language is rampant.

Image and symbols replace words... We live in a word of symbols and images. Conservatives succeed in books and talk radio, media that deal in words- but Orwell's Children live in the realm of symbols and images...

..Immutable oppressors are the final nasty element in dystopia. Hitler blamed Jews for everything. Stalin blamed kulaks and his enemies in the party for everything. Subjects of Orwell's Oceania saw Emmanuel Goldstein as the eternal, immutable enemy of the party. Today there is a drearily predictable list of oppressors. Christians, men, white people, the "rich" (whatever that is supposed to mean), America, and Israel are oppressors and nothing can ever change that.

Orwell even told us, by name, the professionals who would lead us into the nightmare of 1984: "sociologists," "teachers," "bureaucrats," "journalists," "professional politicians," "scientists," "trade union organizers," "publicity experts," and "technicians." (The term "community organizer" was unknown to him.) Those who enslave were those who taught students, who created the news, who sat in the halls of government power, and who defined official "truth" (at least truth de jour.)

Orwell's Children live among us now, not in tiny numbers in weird Marxist cults like Jim Jones' People Temple, but as leaders of Congress, as the establishment of academia, as the producers of news and entertainment, as the administrators of public schools, as the "experts" in a thousand myriad and odd fields of putative "expertise." They infatuate our bored children with the only reality and the only diversion that many can find. They wait for the rest of us to grow older and to die....

Education, science, technological gadgetry, good medical care - all of this can not stop us from sliding into a massive Jonestown, a realized Oceania, a place marked by Dante's grim caution "Abandon hope, all you who enter here." We are all anchored in belief, but it is what we believe that matters. We can believe in the lies of Big Brother, which change each day with the needs of the party or we can believe in the truth of a living God. We can become the children of Orwell or the special creatures of God. Everything -- our nation, our world, our families, our communities -- flows from that choice.

Go back and look at the Occupy Wall Street movement with this lens- listen to the interviews from these people, look at the signs they hold up, and have conversations with them. They are inarticulate slogan-shouting, God-hating, lying children who endlessly talk about 'oppressors' that need to be overthrown by empowering an all powerful government to take property from those who they do not like, attack and kill those who they hate (like Jews), and control all of our choices through regulations and taxes. The people who go to these Occupy Wall Street rallies and support them and talk favorably of them are Orwell's Children, and are the enemies of the protection of life, liberty, and property, and deserve nothing but the full and complete opposition of all true patriots.

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Today I watched a strange movie called Screamers, and after wikipeding it, discovered it was based on a short story by Philp K Dick. So I looked in my bookshelf and began to read one of his books. While reading it, I came across the following passage (slightly modified):

... Their view; it is cosmic. Not of a man here, a child there, but an abstraction: race, land. Not of honorable men but of honor itself, the abstract is real, the action is invisible to them. And I know why. They want to be the agents, not the victims, of history. They identify with God's power and believe they are godlike. That is their basic madness. It is not hubris, not pride; it is the inflation of the ego to its ultimate- confusion between him who worships and that which is worshiped. Man has not eaten God; God has eaten man...

When reading this, I imagined that I was listening to a speech from Barak Obama to a raptured crowd of leftist Democrats. They chant of change, and hope, and unity- but reject changing to new policies and new ideas in order to return to the failed ones of the past, they do not hope but talk of how we have lost and failed and bankrupted, and they do not want to unify but instead crush all who oppose them. They do not value change, hope, and unity- they value the abstract idea of these things. They do not want to be real people in history, they think they personally can change history- Obama himself has said that voting for him will change the history of the world. And not by actually changing anything- again, the abstract idea of being an agent of history is more important than doing anything, just like being a community organizer is more important than actually organizing a community. And we all know Obama's position on God- he thinks people cling to it religion because they're bitter, while he goes to the Wright church of hate. Listening to Obama and seeing his supporters is to watch the world go mad. They do not worship God- they demand to be worshipped.

Oh, the passage in the book though was not referring to Obama, or Democrats, or liberals, or anything like that. The passage from the book was describing the Nazi's and their ideology. Interesting.

Yesterday I attended a conference at a university in another state for the purposes of looking over a test that this university gives all future teacher candidates, and it was indeed an upsetting experience for me once again because of my conservative beliefs. The conference had about a dozen teachers and professors at it, all drawn from the social studies profession, and we spent the day looking over all of the items on a test that is given each year to graduating teacher candidates, making sure that the test items were valid questions to ask future teachers. The teachers on the committee ranged from communists to fascists to socialists to liberals, with one or two moderates thrown in for balance, and me. The day was a constant battle for me, but there was one question in particular that I believe was very revealing.

Our committee looked over a question that (roughly) said "Which of the following is the correct reason why there is global climate change?" The supposed correct answer was "the build-up of carbon dioxide gasses caused by man-caused deforestation."

Of course I questioned the validity of the item, and in doing so, I set off an amazing firestorm of criticism and personal attacks that shocked me in its savagery and offensiveness by simply questioning of whether a test question should be asked to all students who want to be teachers in the future should establish as a fact that there is in fact global climate change occurring and that the reason for it occurring is because of the build up of carbon dioxide gasses and that the reason why there is more CO2 is because of deforestation and that this deforestation is caused by man.

You see, by questioning this test item, I questioned the entire Faith of the liberals and leftists on the committee, and questioning people's Faith really pisses people off. It is a matter of Faith that is not to be questioned and that evidence is not needed that global warming was happening, that it is caused by humanity, that it is a bad thing, that even if other nations do nothing we can still do something, that it isn’t too late to act, that we can afford to do something, and that the something is more government control over our society. I questioned whether it should be a fact that all students learn the Faith of the left.

The committee reacted with shock that I was allowed to be on the committee and was allowed to be a teacher. I was called stupid, dumb, uneducated, and an unbeliever. They wanted to know how many years I had been teaching, how many students I may have possibly talked to about my unbelief, and above all, how I had ever been allowed to become a teacher with such ideas as questioning the Faith of the left.

In spite of the vicious and personal nature of the attacks me, I maintained my cool and simply kept repeating that some question aspects of the question and that it would be unfair and invalid to have that sort of question on a test that all students must take. I maintained that my personal views were irrelevant and that I was simply doing my job. But this wasn't good enough- the mere whiff that there was a heretic in the room had got the committee's blood boiling, and instead of discussing whether the item was valid or not, they jumped to the attack of me, demanding to know my personal views on every aspect of global climate change. I kept my cool until one of the more moderate committee members made a comment that sent me over the edge by questioning my Faith.

"Teach brings up a good point," he said, "There are people out there who may doubt what we all know are accepted facts, and we should be careful with our language. When we ask questions about other discredited ideas and theories, like creationism, we are careful to not purposefully offend those who believe in those things, so we should really try to rework this question."

The committee though disagreed- one after another they said "This test is to test whether graduating students have the knowledge to be teachers, and I don't want anyone becoming a teacher who has illogical and wrong views, whether it is believing in a flat earth or creationism or or magic or doubting that man-made global warming is happening now due to deforestation."

Now I was boiling. This committee thought that I was illogical and wrong because I believed in science and God!  They compared creationism (a variation of which that focuses on the evolution of early man that I have become increasingly fascinated with) and the science of global warming with flat earth and magic and saw nothing wrong with that comparison! My Faith and beliefs were now under attack.

Sadly though, I recognized that the committee was correct- I was a Christian man in a sea of heretics, and my options were at that point to continue my objections to the test question and continue to be attacked by the group, or to just shut up and continue to chip away at the edges of the the liberal agenda of the test. Since this was only a volunteer effort on my part, I stopped talking, eventually their personal attacks and questioning of my education and beliefs were stopped since they no longer were hurting me, and the committee moved on to other questions of various degrees of invalidity.

This is not the first time that I have run into this sort of reaction, and it will not be the last. In Stonehenge and the Descent into Barbarianism I wrote:

Pagan religion is becoming increasingly popular and accepted in our society. I see it most in the numbers of people who openly and proudly proclaim that they are not Christian, and also are the most fervent and devout believers in man-made-caused-one-way-global-warming-solved-by-government-power. They now worship the Green God. Other people, in an effort to be fair and politically correct to everyone, have decided to worship every god, embracing a polytheistic view of the world, whereby they pray to whatever god they think will help them the most. Animal rights activists worship animals and many people worship men (like Obama)- paganism is on the rise, not decline, in our society.

In My Personal Experience Fighting the Worship of Earth Hour I wrote:

...It all started last week with an innocent email that was sent out by an administrator, telling our entire staff all about Earth Hour and encouraging people to "support the fight against global warming by turning off your lights for one hour tomorrow night- together , we can create change in our world and bring peace to all."...

...In a fit of frustration, I replied to this email- pecking out a reply between hours- and sent it to the whole staff. I felt that if it was okay to get emails about Earth Hour, it was okay to respond to these emails- and I did. I sent the following message "As you can see from the attached graphs, there is no correlation between keeping your lights on and the Earth warming. But, because you asked, I'll turn off some lights to lower my energy bill."...

....But question the religion of global warming, question the beliefs of liberals, and be prepared for a firestorm- now I know. My inbox was instantly filled with emails blasting me, stunning me with their viciousness and vileness.

Other teachers and administrators sent me emails that said that my arguments were "sad defeatist" arguments, that I was giving up on the world and was unwilling to fight to make the world a better place. I was called "unintelligent," "uneducated," "immature," "backward," and "crazy." Like most liberals do, rather than debate my ideas and thoughts and data, they went straight for name-calling.

Even worse, many began to question my teaching ability. For the record, my students have the highest scores in the district on our common assessments and high-stakes tests, and I have frequently been recognized by students, other teachers, and administrators for being an outstanding teacher. But question the global warming religion once, and I get emails saying such things as "I am concerned that you could be convincing our students of the same fallacies" and "I seriously question what you are teaching our students."...

...Logic, reasoning, and calm calculations, supported by data and clear thinking, had run up against religion. Global Warming (or climate change) is a religion, not a policy position. It's too bad that this religion is allowed to flourish in schools, that education can have study classes on the tenets of global warming, that we erect alters to worship global warming (a 'green garden' was built at our school last year), and that there are places to sacrifice to the green gods all over schools (the recycling symbol is omnipresent, as our recycling boxes and bins). It's too bad that schools are against religions such as Christianity and Judaism, as public schools continue their war on "he who can not be named in schools" (God).

Perhaps what was most upsetting to me about this incident was the reaction I got from my wife when I told her all this stuff. Excited about fighting the good battle, energized from my attempts to reason, I told my wife what I had done. Her face got pale, and she became fearful and scared- she was frightened that in this world, this new country of change, that I would be fired for believing the wrong things, for having the wrong views on global warming. My wife was scared that schools have become so much like a 3rd world dictatorship that saying the wrong view could mean the loss of my job. And the scary thing, she is right.

By taking this stand, by sending out one little email questioning global warming, by defending myself from insults and questions as to my ability, I have put myself personally in danger of being fired. I may now be let go from my job for questioning global warming. That is scary. Things are changing in this world, hope is dimming, and life is not fair anymore- and my small attempt to fight back at this, to push the darkness back by lighting the light of logic and reasoning on Earth Hour, may very well be the end of me as a teacher.

As you can see, the Green God has a lot of followers in the education world, and expressing faith in him and his beliefs and rituals is more accepted in our society and in our schools that expressing faith in God and the Bible and the rituals of Christianity. My experience serving on this committee once more reinforced this belief and provided even more evidence to me of that Liberalism is now a Religion.

My brother passed me this article "Look Who's Irrational Now," that talks about a comprehensive new study released by Baylor University yesterday that shows that traditional Christian religion greatly decreases belief in superstitious and pseudoscience. Belief in God decreased the belief in everything from the efficacy of palm readers to the usefulness of astrology. The study also shows that the irreligious and the members of more liberal Protestant denominations, far from being resistant to superstition, tend to be much more likely to believe in the paranormal and in pseudoscience than evangelical Christians.

In my own personal experience, I also find this true. The students in my class that are the most grounded, the most likely to use rational thought and chuckle at irrational claims, are those who are also the most traditionally Christian. And those students in my class who are openly anti-religious tend to believe in magic- they have charms and rings, they are superstitious about rituals, and I even had one anti-religious student put a curse on me. From the article:

Anti-religionists such as Mr. Maher bring to mind the assertion of G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown character that all atheists, secularists, humanists and rationalists are susceptible to superstition: "It's the first effect of not believing in God that you lose your common sense, and can't see things as they are."

Maybe this is why Americans are becoming gullible fools? Maybe the fall of Christianity is the reason that they're more likely to buy into charlatans who promise to sell them the world? Maybe this is why they actually get excited and faint over the One when he gives a speech, and they mock those who 'cling to their guns and religion' while clinging to One who promises to walk on water and control the weather? Maybe the fall of traditional Christianity is the reason why people believe that Bush personally knocked down the towers on 9/11, or personally destroyed the levies in New Orleans- or any of the other host of irrational concerns that are now commonly accepted. Who knows? Guess I'll just have to ask for guidance and faith from my 2,000-year-old space god.

Times have to be getting rough on those who worship the Green God; science and reasoning are killing their religion in a way that it never could do with Christianity. For years people have been preaching that humans are the cause of global warming, that global warming is bad, and that the only way to reverse this climate change is to repent and tithe. Symbols of the evil of humans abound to these true believers- SUV's, air conditioning, electric power, comfort, happiness, etc- and these modern-day followers of Mandaeanism inevitably preach that humanity is responsible and needs to turn towards communism in order to stop the rise of the seas and the heating of the earth.

But it turns out this entire religion is built on a false premise- humans are largely not responsible for the changing of the climate and thus bear no obligation to give up any sort of symbols of progress to fix a problem that isn't theirs to fix. That doesn't mean that humans can pollute as much they want- there is still the tragedy of the commons, which can be solved by stronger rule of law and more property rights, which is the exact opposite of what environmentalists preach. But it does mean that government policies discouraging certain things and encouraging other things are built on a faulty foundation of unreality that will do more harm to society than good if continued.

Humans are not responsible for any sort of change in climate, and thus we should dash the dreams of Democrats and liberals and environmentalists and wake them out of their paradise world of railroads, bike paths, windmills, and other relics of the 1800's. CAFE standards, denying permits to mining and drilling companies, using the laws of the national government to stop developments everywhere, and cap-and-trade schemes are unreal, in the sense that they do not reflect the reality of the world. The only thing that these policies do in reality are empower elites in society to take and keep control of the means of production in order to put in place a more unjust world where life, liberty, and personal property is attacked- they do not do anything to the temperature of the globe or the environment or the climate.

The reason that these policies do not work is because humans are not responsible for any sort of changes in climate- the sun is. Shout it from the rooftops and yell it with passion at any environmentalist or liberal or Democrat whose party has been captured by these believers in the false Green God-

THE SUN IS RESPONSIBLE FOR TEMPERATURE OF THE EARTH!

This is a central fact about global warming that I learned several years ago that blew my mind and illuminated a truth that was previously hidden- that it is changes in the sun that cause the temperature of the Earth the change.

Oh, it is not fully understood yet how changes in the sun affect the temperature of the Earth, but it has been quite clear for some time that changes in sunspot activity correspond to changes in the temperature of the Earth. In times of active sunspot activity, the Earth gets warmer, such as in the 1980' and 1990's when there was considerable sunspot activity observed, or during the Medieval Warm Period (800-1300). And in times of passive sunspot activity, the Earth doesn't get warmer, such as the 2000's when sunspot activity slowed and so did the increase in global temperatures (if any of the data can be believed, seeing as so much of it has been purposefully falsified by worshipers of the Green God) or during the Little Ice Age (1400-1900), which only ended when sunspot activity began to increase again and was not related in any way to the start of the second Industrial Revolution.

But it was not clear how or why sunspot activity affected temperatures on Earth, so those who believe in the Green God rejected this science in favor of believing that they held the power to control the whole globe in their own hands and that they are the source of evil in the world and that they can transcend this evil by denying themselves pleasures and modern comforts and making the world in general better by telling other people that they are evil and working to deny them pleasures and comforts as well.

BUT THE SUN IS RESPONSIBLE FOR TEMPERATURE OF THE EARTH!

Henrik Svensmark, a Danish physicist, has for many years studied the effects of cosmic rays on cloud formation. His research and data forced him to present a new hypothesis: that solar activity is an indirect cause of global warming, and that the how and why sunspot activity was responsible for temperature changes on earth was a link through the interaction of the solar wind and cosmic rays and cloud cover.

The basic theory is that clouds are formed when cosmic rays hit the atmosphere. The more clouds in the atmosphere, the more sunlight that is reflected off our globe, and our globe cools. When the sun is very active, it's magnetism draws cosmic rays to it rather than earth, resulting in less cosmic rays hitting the atmosphere, less clouds, less cooling effect of these clouds, and temperatures go up. When sun is inactive, it has fewer sunspots, fewer magnetic activity, more cosmic rays hit the earth, resulting in more clouds, resulting in more cooling, and the temperature of the Earth goes down.

And when our solar system, Earth included in it, go through one of the denser star areas of the Milky Way, it doesn't matter what our own sun is doing, because the surrounding stars make lots of cosmic rays and overcome the sun's activity, resulting in many cosmic rays hitting our planet, leading to increased cloud cover, leading to a cooling effect, and temperatures go down.

It is a nice theory, and advances us just a little bit closer to understanding climate change. We now know that major perturbations in climate relate to the position and orientation of the Earth in its orbit around the Sun. For example, as Serbian mathematician Milutin Milankovic pointed out in 1941, as have many others since, initiation of the major ice ages on Earth correlate with a 23,000-year precession cycle, a 41,000-year obliquity cycle, and a 100,000-year eccentricity cycle in the position of the Earth relative to the Sun. Cyclic variations measured in oxygen isotope ratios that correlate with the growth of ice sheets and biogeochemical responses closely reflect the 23,000-year precession cycle. Also, a half-precession cycle appears to be related to the dynamics of the East African Equatorial monsoon. In addition, the 41,000-year obliquity cycle shows strongly in North American marine depositional records (source: The Science and Environmental Policy Project weekly newsletter).

And now we also suspect that suns, both our own and other suns who we may near by, also affect our climate by bombarding us with cosmic rays that escape from suns when they have periods of lower magnetic activity and less sunspot activity and more cosmic rays and more clouds and lower temperatures, or periods of higher magnetic activity and more sunspot activity and less cosmic rays and less clouds and higher temperatures.

To advance our knowledge a little bit more on this, we have to figure out what function high energy particles might have on cloud formation- in other words, what effect does cosmic rays have on cloud formation- do more of them create more clouds? This is exactly the sort of science that can be tested and verified. And that's what CERN recently did.

Via Ace of Spades I read that the CLOUD (“Cosmics Leaving Outdoor Droplets”) experiment, which examines the role that energetic particles from deep space play in cloud formation, has been successful in producing some sort of results, although those results are currently being actively suppressed by CERN Director General Rolf-Dieter Heuer because the results of these experiments "would go immediately into the highly political arena of the climate change debate," one imagines that if they prove that cosmic rays indeed do cause increased or decreased cloud cover, it would be yet another nail in the already buried coffin to the theory that global warming is caused by man. These findings are called "bombshell" by the Linking Canada Free Press.

For those of you who are interested in fully understanding how cosmic rays may affect cloud formation which many affect the temperature of our planet, there is a documentary film on Svensmark's theory, The Cloud Mystery, that came out in 2008 and is on youtube. It is broken up into 6 parts- check out part 1 by following this link.

Henrik Svensmark is also the author of The Chilling Stars: A Cosmic View of Climate Change.