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FromGodtoSelf.Hed

U151206.jpgnbeknownst to most Americans, on June 17, 2013, America's top politician, Barack Obama, was visiting elementary school children at Enniskillen Primary School in Northern Ireland. When Obama wants to get his anti-Christian views on the record, he speaks them in foreign countries. On June 17, using the tiny tots who didn't understand a word he was saying as a prop for his anti-Christian rhetoric, Obama said: "If towns remain divided—if Catholics have their schools and buildings and Protestants have theirs, if we can’t see ourselves in one another, and fear or resentment are allowed to harden—that too encourages division and discourages cooperation.” Like most of Obama's anti-white, anti-Christian rhetoric, his comments to the students and teachers in Belfast hit a sour note when Obama intimated that Northern Ireland should end Catholic education after quoting the Vatican’s Archbishop Gerhard Müller, who said that Catholic education was "...a critical component of the Church."

Dr. Matthew Bunson, a senior writer for Our Sunday Visitor noted that Obama should have chosen his words more carefully since Catholic education did much to bring about the 15-year-old peace between Protestant Ireland and Catholic Northern Ireland. "While I understand the backdrop of his remarks in terms of the painful history of the religious strife in northern Ireland," Bunson added, "it's unfortunate that his remarks could be construed by some as an attack on religious education." Probably because they were.

Brietbart.com observed that Obama's words were a serious gaffe because Obama didn't take the time to consider the religious sensitivities of his audience—or that his words would reveal his own anti-Christian biases. Brietbart.com drove home its point by saying: "To travel to a city troubled by conflict, and then insult the members of at least one of the two communities, is not only a gaffe, but a serious diplomatic error."

How would a social progressive Islamic community organizer with no diplomatic or political experience know when he's making a serious diplomatic gaffe? He wouldn't. In a campaign speech on June 28, 2006 as he was running for the US Senate, candidate Barack Obama said: "While we once were, we are no longer a Christian nation—at least, not just. We are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, a Buddhist nation, a Hindu nation, and a nation of non-believers." churchathomebookThe National Catholic Observer noted that if the "if" in "...if Catholics have their schools and buildings and Protestants have theirs..." then strife will likely continue between Ireland and Northern Ireland—as long as the two forms of scholastic education exist. Obama has been trying to walk himself out of that gaffe for ten years, first by saying he never said it, and finally by admitting he did something which was conditioned on the two word phrase, "not just."

The tragedy with minority politics is that the world's minorities are really the majority. Only 17% of the global population is White. Eighty-three percent of the world's population is something other than White. The 2010 Census revealed that in California, the most populous State in the country, only 49.8% of the population is White. In 1970, 80% of California's population was White. (Earlier this year,it was reported that there are approximately 2.4 million illegal aliens in California, or 6.3% of the State's total population. Pew Research reported that the 2010 census revealed there are 2.6 million legal Muslims in the United States. By 2030, there will be approximately 6.2 million non-assimilated legal Muslims, with almost as many illegals who are currently availing themselves of Obama's refugee program; or illegal Muslim extremists posing as Mexicans crossing our porous Southern border. Today, roughly 70% of the US population is Caucasian. The Guardian of London estimates that between 2055-2060, Whites will be the minority population here, with Blacks, Hispanics and Muslims making up the majority. And that's important—why?

Because in 1787 the Founding Fathers proclaimed the United States to be a Christian nation. In 1892 in the case of the Church of the Holy Trinity v the United States 143 US 457, the high court declared the United States to be a Christian nation. Several of America's presidents (excluding Barack Obama), but including Gorge Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson, Woodrow Wilson, Calvin Coolidge, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower, called America a Christian nation. As did Supreme Court Justices George Sutherland (in 1931) and William O. Douglas (in 1952). In 1989, according to Alan M. Dershowitz, when Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor was delivering a speech in which she said that America was "...founded on a Christian heritage," she was booed by her audience.

America began making its slow drift to agnosticism on April 6, 1946 through the premeditated acts of President Harry S. Truman who violated the Constitution by introducing a UN public school curriculum created by UNESCO. The curriculum, "Towards World Understanding" was designed to prepare America's next generations for "world citizenship." Sir Julian HuxleyThe following year UNESCO's Director General, Sir Julian Huxley, issued a scholastic directive entitled "Classrooms With Children Under 12-years of Age" which blamed the parents of school children for harming their offspring by instilling in them a sense of Christian faith and patriotic pride. Huxley said that "...[b]efore the child enters school his mind has already been profoundly marked, and often injuriously, by earlier influences...first gained...in the home."

Later in the text—which was used in hundreds of classrooms throughout the nation—Huxley observed that "...it is frequently the family that infects the child with extreme nationalism. The school should therefore use the means described earlier to combat family attitudes." Among those things that "infect" the family, Huxley reiterated again, were religion and patriotism.

From 1946 until 1965 an anti-Christian battle was covertly waged almost entirely within the citadels of public education. The American Civil Liberties Union volunteered to carry the separation of church and state banner in the battle to rid God from the classrooms of Christian America.

In 1946, after the State of New Jersey enacted legislation that allowed parochial school children—whose parents, like the parents of public school children, were taxpayers—to ride to their Catholic schools on public school buses, a Ewing Township taxpayer, Arch R. Everson sued—based on two prior Supreme Court decisions, Reynolds v. United States (98 us 145) [1878] and Pierce v. Society Sisters [1925]—on the grounds that the school board was supporting a religion. The case was argued before US Supreme Court on Nov. 20, 1946. The decision in Everson v Board of Education came down on Dec. 2, 1947. Everson won. The American people lost.

In Everson, the high court did two things. First the activist social progressive New Deal court violated the Constitution by legislating from the bench—a right reserved exclusively for he Congress under the separation of powers. By coupling the 1st and 14th Amendments, the high court applied applied the prohibitions that the Founding Fathers intended for the central government to impact the States. Vashti_McCollumSecond, it more clearly defined what Reynolds v United States [98 USC 145] unconstitutionally viewed as a wall of separation between church and state, creating what has since become known as "the establishment clause.

The final coup d état in the eviction of God from the schools of America came in McCollum v Board of Education (333 US 203, 207-209). In 1945 Vashti McCollum, an atheist and two-time president of the American Humanist Society, argued that an Illinois law that allowed public school students to be excused from classes one afternoon per week to attend Bible classes (in whatever church those students attended with their parents) was unconstitutional. McCollum sued not only to ban the voluntary classes held in local churches (not on school property), but to forbid any form of Christian indoctrination that would suggest, to any child, that there is a God. McCollum v Board of Education was the Supreme Court decision in 1947 which evicted God from America's public schools—a decision the 1st Amendment to the Constitution forbade the high court from making. But the high court had an agenda. Before world government could be achieved, the titans of political might in the United States, working with the princes of industry and the barons of banking to create a New World Order, had to erase patriotism from the hearts of the next generations of Americans. Before that could happen, the headmasters of humanism, remembering the isolationism of the American people at the end of World War I, also had to erase God from their minds. That war progressed from the 1960s and into the 1999s. By the turn of the 21st century, America had lost its moral bond with God.

The void created by the eviction of God continued to expand with the assistance of an education system which no longer "taught," but indoctrinated. God was easily replaced with "self" because humanity has always been lovers of its own self-centeredness. In other words, "I" has always been more important than "Thy."

When the world went to war in 1941, 90% of the American people (over the age of accountability) claimed to be Christians. By 1990, the number of professing Christians dropped to 86%. Tragically, while 85% of Americans born before 1945 still refer to themselves as Christians, only 57% of those born after 1980 do. The decline in church attendance and Christian relevance is greatest among the young. Today, less than 74% of the American people claim they are Christians, but Christian church attendance is much lower—only about half of those who claim to be Christians attend church services weekly. And sadly, that number is shrinking.

If we want to see America's Christian future we need look no farther than Europe where Protestant Christianity was born, and where the English versions of the Holy Bible were translated from the original Hebrew, Greek and some Aramaic phrases (since Aramaic was the common language spoken in the Holy Land at the time of Christ's Earthly ministry).

The first translation of the Latin Vulgate into English was done by John Wycliffe (who began his translation of the Latin Vulgate in 1382. Wycliffe's Bible, the first English version of the Bible to reach the laity, was completed in 1388. Had Wycliffe not been protected by the 4th son of King Edward III (John the Gaunt), Wycliffe would have been executed for heresy as soon as he began his translation. When Edward III died in 1383, the Vatican launched the trial of Wycliffe although Richard II , who also protected Wycliffe, became regent of England and shared the throne with John the Gaunt.

In 1535 William Tyndale translated the Greek New Testament into English. He also felt the wrath of the Vatican. He was charged with heresy and sentenced to Vilvorde Prison where he was tortured for over a year to make him confess. When Tyndale refused, he was tried before a Catholic Church tribunal, and found guilty of heresy. On the morning of Oct. 6, 1536, Tyndale was taken to the public square in Augsburg, Belgium where he was strangled to death and his dead body was then burned at the stake.

Europeans throughout the continent fought hard for the right to own a Bible, and to possess some semblance of religious freedom. Fox's Book of Martyrs is replete of the exploits of Protestant reformers who fought and died to possess the Word of God. Yet, today, the gothic cathedrals of European Christianity are nothing more than empty backdrops for the iPhone and Android cameras of the tourists who visit the Old World cities on credit card vacations, snapping photos of their vacation memories.

Jim Woolsey, the author of Passport to the Impossible, noted that when he was visiting Brussels, Belgium he "...walked through an open air shopping mall where thousands of people were going into a variety of shops, theaters, restaurants and bookstores. [He] walked a couple of blocks when [he] heard the loud gong of a church bell. Right there, tucked away in the heart of this huge metropolitan city, was an old church, it's bell calling people to worship." He stood there, he said "...and watched to see how many people would enter through the ominous gothic doors. After the longest wait, guess how many people went inside to worship? None. Yet hundreds flooded into movie theaters and places of entertainment. What a graphic picture of a modern church. The whole extent of its evangelism was a gonging bell falling on the spiritually deaf ears of a pleasure-seeking generation."

According to Pew Research Center, in the United States, from 2007 to 2014, the percentage of Christians dropped from 78.4% to 70.6%. Even with those dropping numbers, the United States is still the most Christian nation on Earth. Those who describe themselves as atheists has risen from 16.1% to 22.8%. As Americans surrender their Christian moorings, the population is experiencing a major uptick (39%) in both racial and religious intermarriages. Which may very well be why over half of all marriages end in divorce. Historically, as Christian faith dies, the human mind gives rise to humanistic individualism, materialism and narcissism.

As new generations of agnostic materialistc self-centered "me" egotists are born, the Bible-born mourn the de-Christianization of America as the unregenerated youngbloods, the "gimme generation," change the cultural landscape not only of America, but the entire industrialized world as they chase the gratuities of life without any investment of sweat equity, believing them to be an "entitlement" as they rush to the very gates of Hell.

Speeding up the decay of the family is divorce, with an growing number of the children raised in fractured homes in the 1970s—the Woodstock Generation—shunning marriage themselves and opting, instead, for temporary sex partners instead of divorce. Millions of babies were born in out-of-wedlock relationships. Beginning in 1973, with the Supreme Court decision: Rowe v Wade and Doe v Bolton, millions of women opted for a quick abortion rather than investing 18 years or more in child-rearing—with all of the associated costs of raising a child simply because of a mistake in timing.

The first major Christian revival in the United States since 1910 occurred in the 1980s, leading to the American Bar Association's assault on Christianity through a brochure sent to every ABA lawyer which advertised a seminar for "...[a]ttorneys who want to be on the leading edge of an explosive new area of law"—suing churches, Christian leaders and Christian activists. The seminar was entitled: "Expanding Use of Tort Law Against Religions." The ABA, funded by the princes of industry, triggered the attacks on Christianity. The first assault on the Christian Church was launched shortly after the end of World War II with the birth of the United Nations and the reemergence of the globalist movement that lay dormant for two decades because the effort to create world government failed when our 28th president, Woodrow Wilson, was unable to convince Congress to join the League of Nations and surrender America's sovereignty to a world government headquartered in Europe.

With a seven decade re-education program centered on erasing Christianity from the hearts and minds of each new generation, the liberal Warren Court used its power to increase minority civil rights and liberties, and initiated the secular revolution to purge Christianity not only from the public schools of America, but from society as a whole. The 1963 Supreme Court decision, Murray v Curlett & Abington School District v. Schempp 374 US 203 not only outlawed Bible reading in public schools but Christian prayer as well. In the Madalyn Murray part of the Supreme Court case, the head of the American Atheists argued against a statute adopted by the Baltimore, Maryland school board which mandated that all Baltimore schools begin their school day with the Lord's Prayer. It was joined to Schempp only because both cases dealt with atheists and prayer in schools—and the Supreme Court thought it would be a waste of valuable judicial time to hear them separately.

In 1963, God was successfully evicted from the hearts and minds of our youth—who, of course, became the next generation of less-Christian adults. And, within two or three more decades, they became the next generations of educators, politicians, business leaders and, sadly, clergymen who were educated in leftwing theological universities whose God was not a a male deity known as Jehovah or Yahweh, but a woman named Gaia. It would be these university-educated theologicians with Ph.Ds who would increasingly question and dispute the deity of Jesus Christ. Remember this: The 12 Apostles were simple fishermen who followed a carpenter.

In 1950 approximately half of the Christian body in the United States identified themselves as Episcopalian, Lutheran, Methodist and Presbyterian. By 2010, the social mainstream church which sugar coats its gospel, more closely resembled the lukewarm Church of Laodicea than the fire and brimstone fundamental Christian churches that seat a hundred, not five thousand. The worst of the feel good, social gospel orators is, in my opinion, Joel Osteen who feeds pablum to a congregation of 43,000 at Lakewood Church in Houston, TX through pithy sermons and feel good, self-help books designed to build self-esteem in congregations of under-fed parishners who have receive the feel-good message of orators like Osteen, but not the unvarnished Word of God. (Let me throw this in as a bonus: the pastor of any true, God-believing congregation should never be paid more than the average income of his congregation.) As of 2012, the website Rich But Broke reported that Osteen's annual income was $3,770,000.00, and he has a net worth $60,278,500.00. He lives with his family in a $10,500,000.00 mansion. When he was interviewed by Oprah Winfrey, the billionaire media entreprenuer was visibly intimidated by the opulence in which Osteen lived.) Makes you wonder if the "eye of the needle" and not the Golden Gate is the entrance to heaven for preachers, doesn't it?

Today the Episcopalian, Lutheran, Methodist and Presbyterian denominations represent only 14% of the professing Church. Many are lukewarm, preaching a social gospel and not the gospel of repentance and sanctification.

Historically, as Christianity dies, the civilization which fostered it dies as well. The void created by the eviction of God from the everyday life of His creation impacted the youngest generations most. Worst yet, as the middle-aged to elderly Christian population dies, narcissist materialism and egotistical greed replaces it through the growing "gimme generation" which doesn't seem to understand that, contrary of the political campaign promises to those who expect a free living, an entire nation has to earn enough income to provide for their families and still have enough left over to foot the tax bill to feed the deadbeats who always want something for nothing. Which is why the deadbeat dits always vote the most crooked career politicians who promise the freeloaders the most—from everyone else's pockets...

The dissolution of God in the Christian world is being expedited by a million or more abortions per year, the legalization of same sex marriage, and a socialized medical system which will ultimately mandate euthanasia for the elderly since it is the elderly in America that best remember not only their Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ but also a free America where liberty is an inherent gift from God. It has to be because God granted man free will. When a man wakes in the morning, God has given him the right to toil however best it suits him to provide for his family. He may go where he wants—from following the rising sun in the east to the setting sun in the west. With free will, man makes his own choices. When man has free will, he has a sense of pride and accomplishment. As Christianity dies, the culture it fostered is easily destroyed.

Children have free will, too. Prior to the unconstitutional erasing of Christian values by an increasingly pro-Islamic, atheist government, adolescent free will dealt largely with issues of obedience and disobedience. Unfortunately, the generational decline in Christianity created a void in the minds and hearts of America's adolescents, most of whom have too little parental guidance and too much undisciplined free time. By the 80s and 90s, the youth of America evolved into the "gimme" generation. As they become mid-teens, they came to expect that it was their parents obligation to give them everything their friends possessed, including an either a right to drive the family vehicle whenever they wanted, or a car of their own. And, of course, pay for the insurance, too. By 2009, the next generation of children would be demanding iPhones, Android phones, gaming computer and whatever other electronic gizmos topped the 30-minute best seller list or the latest cyber fads and whatnots—the worst of which was social media. Bebo, Buzznet, Facebook, Flickr, Gaia Online (the New Age environmental replacement for God), Habbo, Ibibo, Instagram, MySpace, Pinterest, Snapchat, Tinder, Tumblr, Twitter and scores of other sites around the world, many of them restricted or closed to new members.

Someone told me that social media is to a narcissist what crack cocaine and heroin are to a drug addict. Not everyone who uses Facebook is a self-adoring egotist. Many of them are introverts with low self-esteem. Facebook allows the introvert to hide in cyberspace and pretend they are something they're not. Of course, almost everyone on Facebook, for one reason or another, are doing the same thing. Some are looking for friends with benefits, some are just looking for friends. Whether they are extroverts or introverts, social media junkies use their Facebook pages for the same reason—to portray themselves differently than they really are—or portraying themselves as someone others would like when they don't like themselves. Welcome to the Selfie Generation.

It was a slow evolution. It began with the "baby boomers" whose grandchildren evolved into the "Millennials." The Millennial's' offspring became "Generation X." You wouldn't be wrong to call the Selfie Generation "Generation Z" because it didn't evolve from the human genome unless it was from the DNA of Steve Jobs—Apple's cyber DNA.The Selfie Generation, which can honestly be called the Millennials on steroids wouldn't exist today without the Smart Phone (OS or iOS touch phones). The tech battle still wages today whether the Smart Phone technology was perfected by Android or Apple. Apple admits that the first rudimentary OS phone was developed by Android. But, the first Android devise, the HTC Dream (G-1) came out a year after the release of the iPhone (iOS), so I feel safe in crediting Jobs with the birth of the Selfie Generation.

Small screen TV entertainment has kept up the devolution of American morality. In the 1950s we had family sitcoms like Father Knows Best. In the 1960s we began to see single parent sitcoms like Bachelor Father. The 70s brought All in the Family and the first bigot on TV—Archie Bunker. The 80s brought the seniors—The Golden Girls and a sex-starved 60-somethings. The 1990s brought Roseanne and disobedient children. The 21st century introduced the traditional American family to Modern Family and homosexual couples, and finally we got Charlie Sheen and blatant sex talk on Two and a Half Men. They proved popular with the increasingly secular TV-viewing audience and the viewers seeking a brief reprieve from their own life realities.

The electronic media provided an escape from reality through the fictional world of sitcoms, soap operas and series. Suddenly from nowhere, we got reality TV which turned our attention back to ourselves by broadcasting what the networks palmed off on their audience what the networks purported to be mundane lives of genuine everyday people, upgrading trash TV to cultural blockbusters for idiots.

Couch potatoes turned to social media outlets like YouTube which gave every subscriber their own channel, enabling anyone with the price of membership to star of their own video. Digital exhibitionism. The Guardian noted on May 13, 2014 that "... narcissism levels have been rising for decades. Such increases pre-date social media but they have exacerbated since its emergence. There has been a steep decline in altruism since the advent of Facebook and Twitter. We are now more connected than ever, but also less interested in other people, except when it comes to finding out what they think about us. Think about that for a moment. You just posted something on your Facebook, Instagram or Twitter page. What do you do next? You wait to see who's going to respond to your pithy thoughts, and what will they say about them?

The big problem with the rise of digital ego-boosters like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and scores of start-up social media sites is that every 19 to 25 year old woman in the country wants to be seen as Kim Kardashian when their bodies are screaming Melissa McCarthy. When you don't like who you are, it's hard to convince others they do.

First, each of us needs to realize that, in the long and short of it all, it doesn't really matter what anyone else thinks of your superficial appearance because that's just the packaging that contains the person God created. Some may come off the human assembly line gift-wrapped in glittery paper with a fancy bow, and some of us arrive packaged like a brown paper bag.

God created each of us as peculiarly individual people. But, He created us equal. Some may be born into wealth, some into poverty. Some will grow tall, others short. Some will be thin, others fat. The aesthetics mean nothing because the real person is found inside, beneath the package. The real person cannot be seen by looking in a mirror, or by viewing their latest cell-phone "selfie" on your new 30-minute waste of time YouTube video as you wait for Hollywood to discover you. It's found within your personality, your intellect and your human compassion for others.

If the Internet and the Smart Phone existed prior to the expulsion of God from the American and European nations anytime between 1920—the birth of the League of Nations, and 1945— the camouflaging of the corrupt European model by blessing it with an American name, I would venture that the Internet of 1920-1945 would not be a cyber-garbage can full of porn, and social media websites hosted by self-indulgent , self-absorbed, egocentric dysmorphic losers with a compulsive need to take and post "selfies" on social media. The medical community now considers the "selfie craze" a form of mental illness called Dysmorphic Disorder. It is treated, Dr. David Veal, a British pyschiatrist, with "...cognitive behavioral therapy to help a patient to recognize the reasons for his or her compulsive behavior, and then to learn how to moderate it."

In my non-professional, non-scientific view, when you destroy the spiritual aspect of life (i.e., God) from the human psyche, the dysmorphic dits have a void within them that can only be filled with an exploding human ego.

Let me add this. Most social media users are not introverts. And they aren't narcissistic, either. Granted, they are self-absorbed and self-indulgent. But, sadly, even if they claim they aren't, they're all looking for approval from their peers. Too bad they aren't seeking it from God.

 

 

 

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Just Say No
Copyright © 2009 Jon Christian Ryter.
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