The View From 1776

1960s Freedom as Life-Enslavement

Since the beginning of the liberal jihad with the student anarchist movement in the 1960s, liberty has been redefined.

1. Fatherlessness-absence of an involved and loving father is at the root of many of our social ills. Boys who grow up without a father have no model for how a responsible man or husband might behave and the girls have no model for what kind of man might make a good husband-or father if the woman does have children. Many women who would make good mothers now do not seem to want to have children, while those who face difficult problems raising children seem to be having most of them.
   70% of black and 30% of white babies are born without a father living in the house with the mother.
   I know something about being a father-our four children wrote a piece at my seventh birthday entitled, “Seventy Things We Have Learned From Daddy.”

   Posted by Donald W. Bales  on  12/17  at  08:59 AM

2. The missing element in every human ‘solution’ is
   an accurate definition of the creature. 
   The way we define ‘human’ determines our view of self,
   others, relationships, institutions, life, and future.

   Many
   problems in human experience are the result of false
   and inaccurate definitions of humankind premised
   in man-made religions and humanistic philosophies.

   Human knowledge is a fraction of the whole universe.
   The balance is a vast void of human ignorance. Human
   reason cannot fully function in such a void; thus, the
   intellect can rise no higher than the criteria by which it
   perceives and measures values.

   Humanism makes man his own standard of measure.
   However, as with all measuring systems, a standard
   must be greater than the value measured. Based on
   preponderant ignorance and an egocentric carnal
   nature, humanism demotes reason to the simpleton
   task of excuse-making in behalf of the rule of appe-
   tites, desires, feelings, emotions, and glands.

   Because man, hobbled in an ego-centric predicament,
   cannot invent criteria greater than himself, the humanist
   lacks a predictive capability. Without instinct or trans-
   cendent criteria, humanism cannot evaluate options with
   foresight and vision for progression and survival. Lack-
   ing foresight, man is blind to potential consequence and
   is unwittingly committed to mediocrity, collectivism,
   averages, and regression - and worse. Humanism is an
   unworthy worship.

   The void of human ignorance can easily be filled with
   a functional faith while not-so-patiently awaiting the
   foot-dragging growth of human knowledge and behav-
   ior. Faith, initiated by the Creator and revealed and
   validated in His Word, the Bible, brings a transcend-
   ent standard to man the choice-maker. Other philo-
   sophies and religions are man-made, humanism, and
   thereby lack what only the Bible has:

   1.Transcendent Criteria and
   2.Fulfilled Prophetic Validation.

   The vision of faith in God and His Word is survival
   equipment for today and the future. Only the Creator,
   who made us in His own image, is qualified to define
   us accurately.

   Human is earth’s Choicemaker. Psalm 25:12 He is by
   nature and nature’s God a creature of Choice - and of
   Criteria. Psalm 119:30,173 His unique and definitive
   characteristic is, and of Right ought to be, the natural
   foundation of his environments, institutions, and re-
   spectful relations to his fellow-man. Thus, he is orien-
   ted to a Freedom whose roots are in the Order of the
   universe.

   That human institution which is structured on the
   principle, “...all men are endowed by their Creator with
   ...Liberty...,” is a system with its roots in the natural
   Order of the universe. The opponents of such a system are
   necessarily engaged in a losing contest with nature and
   nature’s God. Biblical principles are still today the
   foundation under Western Civilization and the American
   way of life. To the advent of a new season we commend the
   present generation and the “multitudes in the valley of
   decision.”

   Let us proclaim it. Behold!
   The Season of Generation-Choicemaker Joel 3:14 KJV

   “Man cannot make or invent or contrive principles. He
   can only discover them and he ought to look through the
   discovery to the Author.” —Thomas Paine 1797

   “Got Criteria?” See Psalm 119:1-176
   
   - from The HUMAN PARADIGM
   
   MERRY CHRISTMAS December 25, 2006 AD

   Posted by Choicemaker  on  12/17  at  09:15 AM

3. I’m open to being convinced on this argument, but haven’t seen any compelling evidence.

   Mr. Bales says the “absence of an involved and loving father is at the root of many of our social ills.” However, I don’t see any data backing that claim.

   So, can someone show me the numbers?  For example, what are our social ills, and how is fatherlessness at the root?  Things that could help convince me:

   - A correlation with domestic violence
   - A correlation with drug/alcohol abuse
   - A correlation with crime

   (For reference, I think poverty and lack of education are at the root of many of our social ills.  So studies that control for that are more compelling.)

   Of course, Mr. Brewton goes even further by saying “the historically unprecedented explosion of sexual promiscuity spread HIV and destroyed the prospects for millions of children reared in single-parent homes, in addition to rearing several generations of irresponsible, hedonistic, and self-centered young men.”

   For one thing, I highly doubt that the 60’s was a “historically unprecedented explosion of sexual promiscuity.” Am I to believe that it was only the hippies that discovered sex?  And further, the purported link between 60’s values and HIV is completely baseless.  But the most subjective and outrageous claim is that there have been “several generations of irresponsible, hedonistic, and self-centered young men” (which seems to be the canard of the “greatest generation” again).  This final claim is so hyperbolic that is probably beyond any kind of provability.

   Posted by squantum  on  12/20  at  04:45 PM

4. It is not true that 70% of black and 30% of white babies are born out of wedlock? This surely was not the case in the past.
   Why are the single mothers not educated? Didn’t many of them drop out of school because they were pregnant? Were none of them raised in fatherless families? Isn’t poverty related to single motherhood? Why are they in poverty?

   Posted by Donald W. Bales  on  12/20  at  05:13 PM

5. True...the social revolution of the 60’s blew all structure out of the water, perhaps in some cases throwing the baby out with it.  However, it needed to happen.  After WWII, America experienced unprecedented prosperity and technological advancement.  We had come out the other side from 20 long years of depression and war.  We finally were given the breathing space that would transform us from creatures of dire-immediacy and compulsory action to creatures of free-will, repose, and ultimately introspection.  We witnessed the Holocaust, we put a man on the moon, and with the atomic bomb, the very fabric of reality itself seemed to be splitting.  Many embraced these changes as a sign of a new society, a new World, and a new America.  However, when faced with such rapid change, a very large portion of America reverted, as any society will, to a reactionary tightening of what it perceived as essential to its national self-identity.  Viewing change as a step toward extinction, it wanted to clutch onto all those eroding aspects that were “essentially American.” The face of America was shifting, but as it stared in the mirror it fondly looked back and saw all those wrinkle lines of determination, hard work, and family values that put it there in the first place.  It saw Jesus, baseball, and apple pie…“Duty to God, Country, and Family”.  It overlooked that with our softening lifestyles, the word Duty didn’t carry the same weight—the supremacy that it had in previous generations.  This was a pre-WWII sentiment, a “Greatest Generation” notion, driven on the heels of the Great Depression—something they desperately tried to instill within the baby-boomers.  However, our society was getting rich, slowly aging and loosing the tart green hardness of its rough beginnings. It was ripening and becoming pliable, maturing into what seemed to be a golden age…and our children were turning soft.

   After WWII, our modesty was stripped of us.  Life itself didn’t have quite the same pious sanctimony.  Our sons were coming back victorious from battle.  We were a new daring people, brimming with a raw virility that could not be tamed.  Bebop Jazz and Rock and Roll were born…our chaste and innocent acquaintance with sexuality was about to come to a screeching halt.  In the face of increasing freedom and economic advancement, minorities were now mingling with the whites, setting us up for a major show down over the issue of race.  As Dwight Eisenhower warned us against in his parting speech as president, the “military-industrial complex” (a phrase he himself coined) birthed a permanent standing Army with no one left to fight.  In the still churning wake of our victory in Europe, this set us up for a major show down with our own hubris as we dove headlong into two un-winnable wars in Korea and Vietnam. Now as society looked in the mirror, these lines of introspection turned to worry.

   The leaves were changing, the branches of our society were bending low with weight, ripening, burgeoning towards a new season...summer was coming to a close, and as the colors turned, the balance tipped toward fall.  Feeling the change in the weather, American society tried with all its might to hold on to all those “healthy” summer-time images that fueled its sense of national pride, to forcefully reassure itself of all that was “good and right.” It tried with all its might to shut out the cold, to cover its ears and shout, to drown out its own upheaval by distracting itself with the menace of Communism and all that was “out there”.  To admit certain things to ourselves would have been too jarring to our fragile self-perceptions, to all our justifications of “the way things are.” It would lead to us questioning other more permanent things like the supremacy of Scripture, and Government, and so on...and so we averted our eyes to the lynching, we covered our ears to the Gulf of Tonkin, we said nothing to the repression of women and minorities.  We tightened our grip on everything that we thought was “America,” even things that never defined us quite so importantly.  Squeezing out all that was foreign and “other,” we rounded up Asians and put them in our own concentration camps.  We assassinated those leaders that were advocating these uncomfortable changes. We hunkered down and caged ourselves in, until the melting pot began to boil like a pressure cooker.  We went to Church and prayed for salvation while this beast, this “Leviathan” that Hobbes foresaw, lurched ever closer to the brink of destruction.

   Posted by  on  12/22  at  06:42 AM

6. Mr. Brewton is indeed right when he says:

   “Since the beginning of the liberal jihad with the student anarchist movement in the 1960s, liberty has been redefined.”

   Brewton’s right that many of the reforms of the 60’s threw the baby out with the bath water.  However, one must not forget that the bath water was still in fact changed.  The question now becomes, how do we recover the baby without letting it soil the water again? Indeed, we have been plunged into a sea of relativity, in which we can barely see straight.  Indeed, we are so entrenched in political correctness that it is impossible to call something for what it is.  Indeed, the Family is dying, and our children are suffering.  But the question is, how do we restore the family and faith without force-feeding society on the stale bread of hollow institutions or state religion?  To respond to modernity and all its complexity by simply entrenching ourselves in a blanket of reactionary traditionalism is a far cry from a realistic and mature solution.  Advocating for a return to our pre-WWII, good-old-Christian-social-structure is merely falling into the same mode of thinking that Islamic Jihadists do when they defend their virtually medieval social structures.  And to the question I know is popping up in some of the more pious readers like Choicemaker, how dare I compare good Christians who just want to save the world to Islamic extremists that blow innocent people and themselves up?  I would have to say, look at the end result of the past five years.  If we are so sanctimonious, if we really care so deeply about upholding the sanctity of all innocent life, which is the core justification for this “Global War on Terror,” if we really believe so firmly in Christ’s radically nonviolent philosophy which at its core maintained that we should turn the other cheek and love our enemies as ourselves, why have we sanctioned our commander in chief to wage a war that has taken the lives of over half a million people?  How could we turn our cheeks in an offering not of compassionate understanding but of hubris and repudiation of international law?  This sort of myopic and prideful “us vs. them” mentality is not a good recipe for good Christianity or for good Islam, and those members of any society or any religion that fall victim to this thinking are at the heart of all conflict today.  The Western World’s edict to the East is that Muslims must learn moderation and acceptance of others…however, we are so fanatical in spreading this that we ourselves have become violent extremists ourselves, willing to “take out” hundreds of thousands of innocent people if necessary to spread this message of peace and tolerance?  Freedom in the sites of a firing squad?  It’s baffling really.
   How all of this translates into a functioning global political body I’m not quite sure, but I do know that the true revolution is of the heart and mind.  One day we will experience a global catastrophe large enough for all of us to realize that there is one God, one spirit, one mind, one planet, and one people.  We are all brothers and sisters.  Every single one of us.  And that relation is not determined by our religion or nationality, it is determined by our membership on Planet Earth.  My prayer is that there is something left of this place when that day comes, because I happened to have discovered that heaven is not some place we go when we die.  The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand!

   We don’t have time for theological arguments….Wake Up and Love!!!

   Posted by  on  12/22  at  06:45 AM

7. Your criticisms, as well as your suggested solutions, are of the Jimmy Carter-type, emulate-the-lamb-of-God humanism, that Believers are not called to reproduce.

   Your ignoring and repudiation of the Scriptural Word of God’s clear prophecy of end times fastens your ‘solutions’ upon human deeds and human virtues which totally lack and mislead the ignorant into false avenues of submission and destruction. Such feel-good priorities are self-oriented and the very antithesis of Biblical values, priorities, and direction.

   And, as you would know if you honored Scripture, no one earns Heaven. It is a Gift that must be chosen to accept. Sanctimony is a purely religiously humanistic substitute for virtue.

   According to the Word, “when He returns...we shall all be changed for we shall see Him as He is… the Lion of Judah...and He will rule with a rod of iron...” Reality.

   semper fidelis

   Posted by Choicemaker  on  12/22  at  10:46 AM

8. FATHERLESSNESS KEY TO SOCIAL ILLS
   Oakland Tribune Op Ed
   July 22, 2003
   By
   Vernon Foster
   Again this does not speak directly to the question and it may be that the figures are not accurate and that other factors may play a part. But it is an interesting article. Is the Oakland Tribune a conservative paper? Most everything thing and nearly everyone in San Francisco and Marin county are not.

   Posted by Donald W. Bales  on  12/22  at  01:56 PM

9. "Your ignoring and repudiation of the Scriptural Word of God’s clear prophecy of end times fastens your ‘solutions’ upon human deeds and human virtues which totally lack and mislead the ignorant into false avenues of submission and destruction.”

   It never ceases to amaze me how wide ranging and varried our interpretations of the bible can be...with scriptural evidence I could make the case for a completely violent, noncompassionate, and intollerant way of relating to people, or a completely peacefull, loving, and accepting one.

   Either way, I guess it’s just determined by what our own subconscious motives are in life, by the pain we’ve been dealt, the scars we hold onto, and how we choose to deal with that.

   It would appear to me that your paradigm of Christianity suggests that you would advocate that the rapture is coming in which God’s 144,000 chosen people are taken up, and the rest of us are left to just sort it out?  That the final show down of Good and Evil are coming to a head, so we might as well just hurl ourselves head long into Armagedon?

   Revalations is a criptical, metaphorical, dream that people want to take litterally...which, if so you are completely entitled to do that.  My question then, is what about the Biblical prophesy of 1,000 years of peace?

   I guess that doesn’t resonte enough to your fixation with millitarism.

   Posted by  on  12/24  at  12:28 AM

10. Your choice between God’s Criteria for choice, and any variety of humanism, is obviously faith and trust in humanism and its universe of ignorance. Self justification requires a much higher price and lower return than the prophetic and result oriented Word of God. Psalm 25:12 kjv

    Yes, life is an I.Q. Test. It IS all about making choices. Joel 3:14 kjv

    (There will be far more than “144,000” taken up in the rapture. However, the 144,000 refers to the Hebrews who will restore Israel. It does not include gentile Christians.)

    You seem to be enjoying and exercising the Freedom military quality has purchased and maintained for you.

    Patty-cake? No thanks.

    semper fidelis

    Posted by Choicemaker  on  12/24  at  09:08 AM