‘God blessed Texas’
First He lit the sunshine, then He made the water deep
Then He gave us moonlight for all the world to see
Well, everybody knows that the Lord works in mysterious ways
He took a rest, then on the very next day
God blessed Texas with His own hand
Songwriters: Porter Carleton Howell / Brady Seals
Now I can’t really brag too much on a personal level about Texas because
I’ve only visited the state twice.
But those two times were great trips.
And yep, Texas is as big as it is wide.
They say they do things bigger in Texas, and I suspect that might be so.
So thinking about Texas, I’ve started another book.
It was a recommendation offered by Dawn Marie over on https://hugsnblessings.com
And no, this book is not about Texas, but stay with me for a bit.
The book is by Peter Kreeft—
a professor of philosophy at Boston College and The King’s College.
He is a convert to Catholicism and a prolific writer.
This particular book is titled How To Destroy Western Civilization And Other Ideas From The Cultural Abyss.
The book opens with the following sentences…
The single most necessary thing we can possibly do to save our civilization—
the single most necessary thing citizens can ever do to save their civilization,
at all times and all places and in all cultures, whether they are good or evil,
religious or irreligious, ancient or modern–is to have children.
If you don’t have children, your civilization will cease to exist.
Before you can be good or evil, religious or irreligious, you must exist.
And this is when what I’ve been reading collides into thoughts about Texas.
I have been a huge proponent of Georgia’s House bill 481,
aka the Georgia Heartbeat bill.
A bill that was put into place to protect the rights
of the unborn.
The gist of the bill is that when a heartbeat is detected, life is detected.
And if life is detected, then abortion would be considered murder.
Several states have put forth their own versions of a heartbeat bill.
Life begins with the heartbeat and therefore abortion is no longer an option.
And so with each bill introduced by various states,
protests and lawsuits have ensued.
Sadly but not surprisingly, Georgia’s bill has been deemed unconstitutional.
Many cases have been going from court to court, with many eventually
falling on the desks of the highest court in the Nation,
The Supreme Court.
This week Texas’s version of the heartbeat bill was allowed to pass
via the Supreme Court.
And the oh so Catholic President Joe Biden…as in Catholics are deeply
opposed to abortion because abortion equates to murder, is now loudly
protesting the Supreme Court’s ruling on this Texas Law.
Here also is security for the welfare and renown of a commonwealth;
for no state is perfectly established and preserved otherwise than on the
foundation and by the bond of faith and of firm concord,
when the highest and truest common good, namely, God, is loved by all,
and men love each other in Him without dissimulation,
because they love one another for His sake from whom they cannot disguise
the real character of their love
St Augustine
(poor example of spontaneous note taking / Julie Cook / 2018)
Well….
it happened that before I could elaborate on last week’s video offering
by the Scottish pastor David Robertson..that being a video posting from his
Wee Flea Blog and the SOLAS conference talk given in 2010—
during the course of the weekend here came another posting.
It seems our Wee Flea friend is faster at offering tasty morsels than I am at
digesting them and then in turn sharing the nourishment of the morsel with you…..
This time the posting is from a 2013 SOLAS conference which focuses on education
and the poor.
Very powerful, sobering and collar grabbing kind of stuff.
And well, you didn’t think a retired educator, a Christian retired educator,
one who taught for 31 years in the secular public educational system of the
United States could actually pass over such a tempting morsel without stopping
to take it all in did you??
Despite this latest SOLAS (remember Gaelic for Light) offering running for
nearly an hour…I couldn’t let it pass without giving it my undivided attention.
During last week’s video offering, I wrote down two quotes of David’s…
“When you remove Christianity from a country, [its] education declines”
“Secularism doesn’t educate you—it dumbs you down.”
I was struck by both of those statements.
And as I am also a faithful reader of Citizen Tom’s blog (https://citizentom.com)
as Tom often points out the dire and dismal state of the educational system in the
United States, I knew these two statements were indeed onto something….
And before I could properly digest and share my copious note taking from the previous
posting, here came this latest posting over the weekend.
My weekend was such that I had to put off watching this particular video until
this Monday morning when I could carve out an hour’s time…
in order to properly sort things out.
Yet on top of just watching the video, came the sorting of the notes and then the
turning around and offering to you a proper post regarding David’s talk…
So now picture me holding my hands to my head in a bit of a tizzy while visions of the
National Football Championship dance dizzily around my head…
There are homemade cookies and homemade pizza preparations to get underway all
for this evening’s big game festivities…..GO DAWGS…while my head was still
swirling with what I’d gleaned from David’s talk.
(well, I wrote this before the big game obviously—now, we won’t talk about it)
But back to the SOLAS clip….
Do yourself another favor—carve out the time to watch this.
Especially if you are a teacher, have children or grandchildren who attend schools
or are simply worried about our youth and their future…..
You should note however when watching the video that there is one huge difference
between the educational system in Scotland verses the educational system
in the United States.
The educational system in Scotland is considered a state Christian System by law
verses our very separate and secular school system in the US.
But the message remains the same—as there is a growing gap between rich and poor
in educational opportunities in both of our nations.
David noted an example….
The more affluent families can easily afford after school and out of school tutors.
Whereas a finer tutor, say in London, might fetch 400 pounds an hour—
such a tutor in Dundee, Scotland might command only 15 pounds an hour—
but no matter, as both kids, be it from London or Dundee, those who can afford a
tutor already have a step up the ladder from those disadvantaged kids from lower
income families who can’t afford any sort of tutor….
If you’ve never heard of Thomas Guthrie, it’s worth clicking on the following link for
a bit of background on a man whose life has played a rich part of the
educational system in Scotland other than that of John Knox himself who boldly
stated that “wherever there is a church, there shall be a school.”
Guthrie (1803-1873), a man who studied to become a doctor but became, upon graduating college, a minister instead held as his mission statement…
regarding those he ministered to in Scotland, that education was essential to saving
the less fortunate from a life of ignorance, squalor, disease, idleness and poverty.
He saw that education and learning were the keys to opening doors and turning away
from the vicious cycles of hunger, alcoholism, crime and poverty that was rife
within the families of the poor and disadvantaged…
Guthrie therefore petitioned Parliament to make compulsory education mandatory
in order to help save the children and future children from an assumed destiny
of misery.
Yet Guthrie maintained that such an education had to have Christianity as its root.
How else would morality anchor itself within society.
As we bewildered watch the secular movement today creating its “social engineering”
of the masses.
The physical threshold of each school Guthrie founded was to be fashioned with the
carving of an open Bible with the motto written, “Search the Scriptures”
Yet David notes that there will always be secular resistance as the secular world
pushes ever closer to ultimately having a society without God.
However David holds firm to the notion that without Christianity,
we will destroy Education….
***and in turn destroy our civilization…
(*** my 2 cents)
And David presents this polestar thought with laser precision in this talk.
David admonishes us all…those of us who confess the Faith of Jesus Christ…
that as Christians it is our moral obligation that we should be making education
and our schools a top priority…be it here in the States or there in Scotland.
Yet I don’t see that happening here anytime soon.
He reminds each of us not to simply leave it to the schools to educate our kids
as to what is a Christian worldview—but it is up to us…us being the ones who need
to chiefly see to that responsibility.
And I dare say, that most of us have grown rather complacent here in the States.
The upper tier pay exorbitant yearly fees to upper crust schools for a
private education, that even though some of the private institutions claim a church denomination’s backing…as I dare ask is that a worldly looking denomination???
Leaving everyone else to the charge of the state and federally funded school
systems—schools, many of which, are woefully lacking and are stymied in
their ability to lay a moralistic foundation…due greatly in part to the fact that
we have erased our Christian heritage from the very system our founding fathers state
as being an important component to the fledgling new nation’s growth and development.
Keep hold of instruction; do not let go; guard her, for she is your life.
Proverbs 4:13
“From fanaticism to barbarism is only one step.”
Denis Diderot
“Maybe there is a beast… maybe it’s only us.”
William Golding, Lord of the Flies
(I used this image back in June, but it fit so well today)
I suppose the reading of certain books during our time spent in high school
lit classes is all a part of the adolescent right of passage.
Most folks my age read such books as Animal Farm, Catcher in the Rye,
A Farewell to Arms, The Old Man and the Sea, For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Crucible,
1984 (yes published in 1949 and I read it long before 1984),
The Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men…the list goes on and on.
Some books I enjoyed.
Some books I loathed.
Some books left me unsettled.
Lord of the Flies was just one such book.
No happy ending there.
It was a tale that left me terribly unsettled.
Any sort of story showcasing those who are oh so civilized one minute while
quickly falling into barbarism the next,
when all the trappings of modern life suddenly disappear,
leaves me less than happily settled—
Perhaps because it is a blatant reminder of how thin is the veil that separates
modern man from his animalistic alter ego …
and yet that was indeed the author’s intent…
A stalk reminder…..
I was in high school just past those heady days of Woodstock and Flower power.
The early 70’s were to be a time of reemerging.
We were coming up for air from an unpopular war, grave national unrest,
sit-ins, love-ins as a president was preparing to leave office in disgrace…
people wanted to reset and move forward.
Our naiveté was long gone.
Sounds as if I could be talking about today….
We read the works of writers who addressed such feelings..some being current, some
simply ahead of their time.
And it appears as if I am not alone in my recollection of my required reading
of such a tale…
The newly consecrated bishop of the Christian Episcopal Church of Canada and the US,
The Rt. Reverend Dr Gavin Ashenden, also recalls reading Lord of the Flies.
I found his post Wednesday to be most timely as he touched on an issue I’ve been
referencing in just these past many days…
That being the Nazis and their obsessive need to plunder, loot, and burn millions of books… in an all out attempt to control the thought processes of those they
wished to manipulate and rule while at the same time obliterating an entire
swarth of humanity.
“I can understand why the Nazis burned books.
One book can subvert a whole culture.
Perhaps one of the most subversive books I’ve known was “Lord of the Flies”
by William Golding.
I must have read it when I was 14 or 15.
It tells the story of a group of schoolboys whose plane crashes onto a remote island.
They survive the crash, but descend into violence and chaos and finally murder.
They lose all the trappings of civilisation, inside and out, in a very short time.
This was and is a shocking book.
It called the bluff of moral progress and ethical evolution.
Our civility is just skin deep Golding was saying.
From the moment I finished the book,
I knew that Golding was right and that progressive politics was based on a
misjudgment of human nature.
Our ethical progress was just skin deep, and could be lost in an instant.
I keep on being haunted by images of Nazi book burning and the smashing up of
Jewish shop fronts from Germany in the 1930’s.
Something like a collective madness came on the people of Germany.
It really seemed to erupt almost out of nowhere.
How could such a civilised people, the children of Goethe and Beethoven,
so swiftly become the breeding ground of Nazism, with its book burnings, thuggery
and ultimately the horrifying and very Golding-like final solution?”
The good Bishop goes on to explore the similarites he sees between the current acts of violence taking place on both sides of our collective pond in regards to the
progressive liberal groups and their lack of tolerance, or perhaps allowance would be a better word, with the more conservative and Christian groups over the current battle
lines.
Bishop Ashenden notes in particular a rather nasty incident taking place in Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park when several protesting groups converged.
It seems that a 60 year old feminist sort of protester was punched in the face by a transgendered male dressed as a female type individual,
who after punching said 60 year old woman in the face and knocking her to the ground,
then ran ran off.
Ashenden makes a rather stalk comparison between a now and then sort of moment: “Mindless thugs beating their opponents in public were not the preserve only of the Brown Shirts in Berlin, of state apparatchiks in Moscow, but it’s odd to find gender activists demonstrating in favour of love, peace, tolerance and inclusion, beating up elderly feminists at Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park.”
Ashenden goes on… “A great deal is made by the left that the threat of violence comes from the
‘far Right.’ In fact the press and media don’t bother with the ‘Right’ any more.
Anything less than socialist is called ‘Far-Right, – or Nazi.
There is no near-right, or middle right, or further right; just Far-Right.’
The irony of our current thuggery groups behaving so terribly badly while they shout
for rights, proclaim justice, preach love, and of all things, demand tolerance….
all the while commencing to malign and beat to a pulp those who oppose their current
trend of senseless thoughts……
They might do well to reread a book or two from their day’s in lit class.
Barbarism is but a step away from the the civilized…..
“You are of your father the devil, and you want to do the desires of your father.
He was a murderer from the beginning,
and does not stand in the truth because there is no truth in him.
Whenever he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own nature,
for he is a liar and the father of lies.
John 8:44
(the quince are about a month early / Julie Cook / 2017)
“In a clock, stop but one wheel and you stop every wheel,
because they are dependent upon one other.
So when God has ordered a thing for the present to be thus and thus,
how do you know how many things depend upon this thing?
God may have some work to do twenty years hence that depends on this passage of providence
that falls out this day or this week.”
Jeremiah Burroughs
Look back over the past, with its changing empires that rose and fell, and you can foresee the future, too.
Marcus Aurelius
(sand castle being dismantled by the tide / Henderson State Park / Julie Cook / 2014)
Time has always proven the master of any and all Empires. As soon as a people grow complacent, change will come. . .Empires, be they realms, kingdoms, countries, states–or be they personal fame and fortune, will all eventually fade from sight. As they are built on the shifting sands of humanity. If you believe otherwise, you are merely deceiving yourself—only one Kingdom will withstand the test of time—
To him who loves us and freed us from our sins by his blood, 6 and made us to be a kingdom, priests serving his God and Father, to him be glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen.
Look! He is coming with the clouds;
every eye will see him,
even those who pierced him;
and on his account all the tribes of the earth will wail.
So it is to be. Amen.
“I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.
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