What’s REALLY At Stake In The ‘Religious Liberty vs. ObamaCare’ Fiasco

When I go to the grocery store, there is frequently someone outside asking me for spare change.  When I go to a fast food restaurant, there is more than occasionally someone outside asking me for spare change (although, it’s happened quite a few times that I’ve had people INSIDE these places asking me for spare change, too).  When I get gas, there is often someone outside asking me for spare change.

Here is my response to them:

“Let me ask you a question: why should I give you anything?”

That’s a head scratcher for most of the people I deal with, I mean, beyond the pure “entitlement” mindset of, “Because you OWE me for being so wonderful.”

“Because I’m a human being,” I often hear.

“What does that mean to me?”  I demand.  “According to the theory of evolution, human beings are nothing more than a random-chance accident and you are nothing more than a slightly smarter version of a monkey.  According to Darwinism, the stronger ought to survive and the weaker ought to have the decency to perish and get the hell out of the stronger’s way.  When the lion or the wolf kills the weakest members of a herd, environmentalists point out that they’re actually doing the herd a service by winnowing out the genetically inferior members who would otherwise undermine the herd.  Frankly, according to Darwinsim, I ought to be taking what little you DO have instead of weakening my own prospects to help an inferior.

So again, why should I give you anything?”

Well, as it so happens, there is only ONE correct answer.  And here it is:

“Because I’m a human being created in the image of God, and because God loves human beings as demonstrated in His sending His Son to seek and to save me even when I’m lost.  And because Jesus cares for the poor, you should care for the poor and help me.”

And with that lesson – along with my pointing out that I am NOT giving a damn thing to you because I’m a good person, but ONLY because I’m following the example of my Savior and Lord, Jesus – I buy them food (I don’t give money to self-destructive people who will only use it to further destroy themselves with drugs and alcohol and cigarettes).

So here’s the question: is there any connection between “morality” and “religion,” or is “morality” whatever the hell Obama or the government says it is?

In my own personal case, and very definitely in the case of orthodox/genuine Christian theology, morality has EVERYTHING to do with religion.

Let me get in the face of atheists here who would interrupt me and say that they’re atheists and they’re “moral.”  Bullcrap.  And here’s why: if you are an atheist and a situation arises and a lie or doing something wrong would benefit you and you don’t think you would get caught, why wouldn’t you do what would benefit you?  And your answer as an atheist MUST be entirely subjective and completely arbitrary.  Lying, for example, is “unchristian.”  But how would lying by “unatheist?”  What IS “atheist morality” such that if you do X you are a bad atheist???  And of course there is nothing, because atheism and morality have nothing whatsoever to do with one another.  Whereas as a Christian, as a religious person, as someone who believes in God, I would tell the truth or do the moral thing in a given situation even to my own immediate harm because I BELIEVE THAT GOD REWARDS GOOD AND PUNISHES EVIL AT JUDGMENT DAY.  WHICH ATHEISTS DON’T BELIEVE.

Morality and religion are intimately connected.

Any other view on that is morally depraved.

The founding fathers had a word for the latter (non-Christian) view that Obama is taking: treason.

George Washington said, ““Of all the habits and dispositions which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports.  In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism who should labor to subvert these great pillars.  And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion…reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”

So yeah, the view that morality comes from anywhere OTHER than religion is TREASON.  Barack Obama and the Democrat Party are traitors to America according to the father of our country and our greatest American hero.

John Adams pointed out that the Constitution was written ONLY for people who believed in God and received their morality from Him: “We have no government armed with the power capable of contending with human passions, unbridled by morality and true religion. Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

Samuel Adams put it this way: “Religion and good morals are the only solid foundations of public liberty and happiness.”

Patrick Henry had this to say: “The great pillars of all government and of social life [are] virtue, morality, and religion. This is the armor…and this alone, that renders us invincible.”

You need to understand that when it comes to ObamaCare, “morality” is quite simply whatever the hell Obama says it is.  “Morality” is a game of “Simon Says,” and Obama has appointed himself as “Simon.”

Barack Obama promised to “fundamentally transform America.”  And he’s largely done it.

If morality can be completely and fundamentally severed from religion, then what IS morality?  It is nothing more than whatever Obama or whoever is in charge of the government says it is.  And nothing more.  That ought to terrify you, if you aren’t a complete moral idiot.

Here’s another question: Can the government grant Hobby Lobby a waiver when it comes to forcing them to provide the four forms of “birth control” (read “abortifacients”) given that Hobby Lobby provides coverage for the sixteen forms of birth control that DON’T actually kill fertilized eggs (babies)???

Given that Congress passed and President Clinton signed into law the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.  The purpose of the LAW was to prevent any laws that substantially burdened a person’s free exercise of religion., doesn’t it seem like Obama and Democrats ought to do anything possible to prevent forcing people to perform abortions or fund abortions against their religiously-informed consciences?

Consider all the other damn waivers Obama has issued in hopes of keeping his Democrats in power in the Senate.  There is clearly another way around this because Obama has found another way at least 25 times when it came to protecting his Democrats from the consequences of their evil socialist health care takeover law.

As an example:

Could the administration extend the deadline to buy ObamaCare beyond March 31st?  Absolutely NOT, they assured us:

Coincidentally, Schrader filed his bill the same day Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius testified on Capitol Hill that, “there is no delay beyond March 31st.” Of course, that wasn’t the first, or last, time she made that claim. And, as our colleagues over at Wonkblog explain, the administration is adamant that it’s not so much an extension as an accommodation.

Heritage provides a montage of such assurances as well as some well-deserved mockery:

No, it cannot happen. It will not happen. The Obama administration absolutely, positively will NOT extend the deadline to sign up for Obamacare.

This isn’t even a laugh line anymore. It’s just an eye roller. And how silly these guys look now:

“We have no plans to extend the open enrollment period. In fact, we don’t actually have the statutory authority to extend the open enrollment period in 2014.” — Health and Human Services (HHS) official Julie Bataille, March 11

“Once that 2014 open enrollment period has been set, they are set permanently.” – HHS official Michael Hash, March 11

“March 31st is the deadline for enrollment. You’ve heard us make that clear.” – Press Secretary Jay Carney, March 21

“There is no delay beyond March 31.” – HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, March 12

There was no delay…until there was. The Washington Post reported last night that March 31 is not, in fact, the final word. To get more time, you tell the government that you haven’t been able to sign up yet:

Under the new rules, people will be able to qualify for an extension by checking a blue box on HealthCare.gov to indicate that they tried to enroll before the deadline. This method will rely on an honor system; the government will not try to determine whether the person is telling the truth.

My favorite there is Obama mouthpiece Jay Carney, who says, “March 31st is the deadline for enrollment.  You’ve heard us make that clear.”

Until he made it clear that Obama had tooted his ObamaHorn and imperiously re-issued “morality” to say that what would be wrong was now right and what is right is no longer wrong.

Kind of like what he did with homosexual marriage.  Yes, Obama said that marriage was the union between one man and one woman.  But he hadn’t said, “Obama Sez.”  And so when he said the exact opposite, well, THAT was “morality.”

So it turns out the answer mimicked Obama’s campaign slogan: “Absolutely NOT” turned into “Yes, we can!”

And they could have protected Hobby Lobby from violating their consciences, too.  They simply chose not to do so.  Kind of like homosexuals had the right to marry whatever adult of the opposite sex who would have them and they chose not to exercise their right.  Which is another way of saying that marriage between one man and one woman doesn’t violate anybody’s “rights.”  It merely rightly defines what marriage IS.

So ObamaCare didn’t HAVE to substantially burden Christians who wanted to exercise their basic rights to form a corporation.  Obama merely wanted to violate Christians’ rights because that’s the kind of demonic man he is.

There is no question whatsoever that Barack Obama is violating the Constitution and violating the law.  He is imposing a substantial burden on religious freedom when there are very clearly ways to have avoided this fascist mess.

My point in the above is to simply demonstrate that Obama didn’t have to force Hobby Lobby to violate its conscience, either as individuals or as a corporation.  There was another way, because as Obama has now proven over and over and over again, there has been another way around EVERY ASPECT of this idiotic failed law.  And so there was a way around this too.

Here’s another thing: nobody knows what the Supreme Court is going to do on this one.  It’s basically like, “Let’s spin the wheel of chance to find out what the Constitution means today!”

Laws no longer mean what they say in this country.  Which is another way of saying they no longer mean ANYTHING.

America is no longer a nation of laws.  Obama abrogates the law as he sees fit and simply issues unconstitutional waivers and unconstitutional extensions.  It is a nation under a Fuehrer, rather than under God as we mouth in our Pledge of Allegiance.

And that’s important because that’s what Hitler did: he had his minions pledge allegiance directly to HIM.  That’s what we all might as well be doing now, under Obama and his God damn America.

This is a morally sick nation that is at this point experiencing the curse of the wrath of God according to Romans chapter one, thanks to our antichrist president.

Democrats are liars without shame, without honor, without virtue, without integrity of any kind whatsoever.  They are falsely claiming that Hobby Lobby is somehow denying women birth control when in fact they provide SIXTEEN different forms of birth control on the health insurance that they offer.  This isn’t about health care OR birth control; it is about abortion and Obama wanting to demonically force Christians to violate their faith and their conscience and fund the murder of ANOTHER 55 million innocent human beings.

What does the Bible say about abortion and where babies come from?

“For You formed my inward parts; You wove me in my mother’s womb.  I will give thanks to You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made; Wonderful are Your works, And my soul knows it very well.  My frame was not hidden from You, When I was made in secret, And skillfully wrought in the depths of the earth; Your eyes have seen my unformed substance; And in Your book were all written The days that were ordained for me, When as yet there was not one of them.” — Psalm 139:13-16

I stand for human LIFE.  Which is another way of saying that I stand AGAINST this demon-possessed president and his demon-possessed Democrat Party and their genocide that is already more than nine times as murderous as Hitler’s.

And I stand for America as “One nation under God” as opposed to “One nation WITHOUT God” as godless Democrats are now demanding.

This also isn’t even about corporations.  Obama and his wicked, godless Democrat left have been persecuting small business owners (i.e., “individual Christian believers”) for refusing to participate in homosexual “marriage”.  They are being forced to either photograph queer “weddings” or participate in aforementioned “weddings” by making the wedding cakes against their consciences.

So, again, Democrats are demon-possessed LIARS for saying this is about a corporation not being a “person” and therefore not able to have religion.  Because it is a FACT that Democrats don’t want ANY PERSON to be able to practice his or her religion unless it is a “religion” of demons.

In fact, this isn’t even about “health care” at ALL.  What did liberal “Justice” Sonia Sotomayor and “Justice” Elena Kagan say?  These Injustices told Hobby Lobby that they could just drop ALL their employees from their generous health care plans and just pay the damn fine:

“Those employers could choose not to give health insurance and pay not that high a penalty – not that high a tax,” Sotomayor said.

Clement said Hobby Lobby would pay more than $500 million per year in penalties, but Kagan disagreed.

“No, I don’t think that that’s the same thing, Mr. Clement,” Kagan said. “There’s one penalty that is if the employer continues to provide health insurance without this part of the coverage, but Hobby Lobby would choose not to provide health insurance at all.

So how can this be about “health care” when these liberal judges are literally telling Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood Specialties NOT to provide health care, but to just dump their poor bastard employees into the sewer of ObamaCare???

The crazy thing is, as Christians, Hobby Lobby would ALSO have to violate their consciences to refuse to provide their employees health care.

Liberals are evil, pure and simple.  This isn’t about “health care.”  This is about liberals trying “to control the people.”

This is about Obama and his government having a messiah complex, pure and simple.

We’re about to lose what little is left of America.  It’s all up to the throw of the dice in the Supreme Court where a bunch of unelected judges get to sit and dictate what “religion” is and what “morality” is.

This is what “God damn America” looks like.

Notre Dame Faculty Responds To Obama: ‘This Is a Grave Violation of Religious Freedom and Cannot Stand’

Let us simply call this what it is: it is a new front in a culture war for purely political reasons that Obama started on religion, religious freedom and the right to individual conscience.  It is the imposition of excessive and burdensome regulation from a government that has already repeatedly demonstrated that it is way out of control:

Notre Dame Faculty to Obama: ‘This Is a Grave Violation of Religious Freedom and Cannot Stand’
By Terence P. Jeffrey
February 12, 2012

(CNSNews.com) – Twenty-five Notre Dame faculty members–led by the university’s top ethics expert, and including some of the school’s most eminent scholars–have signed a statement declaring that President Barack Obama’s latest version of his administration’s mandate that all health insurance plans in the United States must cover sterilizations and all FDA-approved contraceptives, including those that cause abortions, is “a grave violation of religious freedom and cannot stand.”

The statement—put out on the letterhead of the University of Notre Dame Law School–is also signed by leading scholars from other major American colleges and universities, including Princeton, Harvard, Stanford, Georgetown, Brigham Young, Yeshiva and Wheaton College.

Prof. Carter Snead, a professor of law at Notre Dame, was one of the lead organizers of the statement, which was published on his official law school letterhead. Notre Dame’s top ethics expert, Snead serves as director of the university’s Center for Ethics and Culture, a position to which he was appointed by Father John Jenkins, the president of Notre Dame.

In 2009, Father Jenkins awarded President Barack Obama an honorary Notre Dame law degree.

Some of the other distinguished Notre Dame faculty who signed the statement condemning Obama’s mandate are Prof. Patrick Griffin, chairman of Notre Dame’s History Department; Prof. Richard Garnett, an associate dean; John Cavadini, director of Notre Dame’s Institute for Church Life; Christian Smith, director of Notre Dame’s Center for the Study of Religion and Society; Prof. Paolo Carozza, director of Notre Dame’s Center for Civil and Human Rights; Prof. Philip Bess, Notre Dame’s Director of Graduate Studies; and Father Wilson Miscamble, a professor of history.

Other leading organizers of the letter included Prof. Robert George of Princeton and Prof. Mary Ann Glendon of Harvard Law School.

When Obama received his honorary degree at Notre Dame’s May 17, 2009, commencement, he vowed to respect the conscience rights of those who believe abortion is wrong.

“Let’s honor the conscience of those who disagree with abortion, and draft a sensible conscience clause, and make sure that all of our health care policies are grounded not only in sound science, but also in clear ethics, as well as respect for the equality of women,” said Obama. “Those are things we can do.”

Many Catholic bishops and lay leaders had criticized Notre Dame’s decision to grant Obama an honorary degree–pointing to his long-standing position in favor of legalized abortion on demand, which included going so far as to oppose a law in the Illinois state senate that would have simply said that a baby born alive in that state was entitled to the same rights under the U.S. Constitution as any other born “person.”

In their statement released late Friday, the 25 Notre Dame faculty members and the many other prominent scholars from other institutions who joined them said that Obama’s sterilization-contraception-abortifacient mandate–even with Obama’s proposed adjustments on Friday–remains an “assault on religious liberty and rights of conscience.”

“The administration will now require that all insurance plans cover (‘cost free’) these same products and services,” said the scholars. “Once a religiously-affiliated (or believing individual) employer purchases insurance (as it must, by law), the insurance company will then contact the insured employees to advise them that the terms of the policy include coverage for these objectionable things.

“This so-called ‘accommodation’ changes nothing of moral substance and fails to remove the assault on religious liberty and the rights of conscience which gave rise to the controversy,” they said. “It is certainly no compromise. The reason for the original bipartisan uproar was the administration’s insistence that religious employers, be they institutions or individuals, provide insurance that covered services they regard as gravely immoral and unjust. Under the new rule, the government still coerces religious institutions and individuals to purchase insurance policies that include the very same services.”

The statement also said that Obama’s latest iteration of the regulation is “an insult to the intelligence of Catholics, Protestants, Eastern Orthodox Christians, Jews and Muslims” and “cannot stand.”

“The simple fact is that the Obama administration is compelling religious people and institutions who are employers to purchase a health insurance contract that provides abortion-inducing drugs, contraception, and sterilization,” the scholars said. “This is a grave violation of religious freedom and cannot stand. It is an insult to the intelligence of Catholics, Protestants, Eastern Orthodox Christians, Jews, Muslims, and other people of faith and conscience to imagine that they will accept an assault on their religious liberty if only it is covered up by a cheap accounting trick.”

When you’ve got Harvard, Princeton and Standford agreeing with Catholic Notre Dame, it is rather glaringly obvious that Obama is just WRONG.

Let me provide a couple of illustrations as to “what an insult to the intelligence” of all concerned this truly is:

1) the Catholic League – very obviously a Catholic organization – is one such organization that will be required to purchase insurance coverage to provide “free” birth control, abortifacients and sterilizations.  Obama says the Catholic League won’t have to pay anything for this; rather the insurance company that represents them will.  But what insurance company is that?  It turns out that the health insurer of the Catholic League is Christian Brothers.  But guess what?  That is ALSO a Catholic organization.  So Catholics are STILL being forced to violate their consciences as Obama tramples all over their religious freedom.  But it won’t just be Christian Brothers who pays for this “:care”; Christian Brothers and the Catholic League share costs such that each pay a percentage of the burden.  So the Catholic League will STILL be compelled to pay for treatment it morally objects to on religious grounds that the Catholic Church has held for one thousand five hundred years.

Many religious – and particularly many CATHOLIC – organizations are self-insured.  So Obama is still demanding that the Catholic Church must pay for “care” it has never had to pay for before.  It’s just a bait-and-switch tactic for fools who love nothing more than having “their intelligence insulted” to make it appear that the Church isn’t under attack when in fact it clearly IS under attack.

2) Take the garden variety situation in which a Catholic organization is not self-insured or insured through another Catholic organization.  In this case, Obama is STILL a liar.  He claims:

“Religious organizations won’t have to pay for these services and no religious institution will have to provide these services directly.”

But they still have to pay for them INDIRECTLY.  And how is that anything other than a completely meaningless and arbitrary distinction???

Unless Obama is volunteering to take over the premiums of all the religious organization that he is imposing his new policy on, THEY ARE GOING TO HAVE TO PAY FOR THIS REQUIREMENT.

Unlimited and unrestricted access to Birth control, abortifacients and sterilizations isn’t free just because Obama declares it by fiat.  Somebody still has to pay for it.  And it is beyond “magical thinking” to believe that the insurance companies won’t increase their premiums to reflect this new level of “care.”

This “accommodation” simply reveals that Obama is a truly dishonest weasel.

One last thing.  If you look at the way the mainstream media propaganda continually depicts this story, it is all about “preventative health care for women.”  This whole boondoggle is being imposed and packaged under the guise of “preventative health care.”  Well, it’s one thing to require an insurer to provide “preventative care” for issues such as the deadly disease of diabetes.  But when you use the same language to describe a human baby as you do a deadly disease, you have crossed the line into being genuinely morally sick.  That is NOT mainstream thinking; that is the thinking of the far radical feminist left that is being deceitfully repackaged into something that masquerades as mainstream thinking.

The other thing that is just beyond nauseating is that the left and their mainstream media allies continually depict this issue as a “birth control” issue as if this is the first time in the entire history of the republic that woman have ever had “access to birth control.”  That is obviously a red herring; rather, this is the first time ever that Catholics have been put in a position in which they had to sacrifice their religious beliefs and violate their consciences to provide something that has obviously been “widely available” for decades if not centuries in America.  It is a false facade, pure and simple.

I am not a Catholic.  I do not believe that providing birth control is evil (although I most certainly DO oppose abortion-inducing drugs as evil).  But the Catholic Church has consistently maintained their belief regarding birth control for 1,500 years.  It is simply stunning that a theology which has endured for a millennium and a half cannot survive the wickedness of one Barack Obama term of office.

The Manhattan Declaration As The New Barmen Declaration

Christians are hearing about the Manhattan Declaration with great excitement.  It is a tremendous document with tremendous support from some tremendous Christian figures.

The actual declaration (linked to above) is some 4,000 plus words long, and is available to read at the link above.  But here is the nutshell version:

Christians, when they have lived up to the highest ideals of their faith, have defended the weak and vulnerable and worked tirelessly to protect and strengthen vital institutions of civil society, beginning with the family.

We are Orthodox, Catholic, and evangelical Christians who have united at this hour to reaffirm fundamental truths about justice and the common good, and to call upon our fellow citizens, believers and non-believers alike, to join us in defending them. These truths are:

1. the sanctity of human life
2. the dignity of marriage as the conjugal union of husband and wife
3. the rights of conscience and religious liberty.

Inasmuch as these truths are foundational to human dignity and the well-being of society, they are inviolable and non-negotiable. Because they are increasingly under assault from powerful forces in our culture, we are compelled today to speak out forcefully in their defense, and to commit ourselves to honoring them fully no matter what pressures are brought upon us and our institutions to abandon or compromise them. We make this commitment not as partisans of any political group but as followers of Jesus Christ, the crucified and risen Lord, who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life.

I hope you stand with me – and with (at last count as of November 24, 2009) 106,738 other believers – and sign this declaration.

It reminds me of another time, and another declaration: the Barmen Declaration of 1934, which was a point-by-point denunciation of the fascist and racist ideological doctrines of Nazism and a positive expression of true Christian faith against a government and a culture that had become evil.

Adolf Hitler attempted to redefine – or “Nazify” – the Church and transform it into a component of his ideological agenda.  At one point in its history Germany had been the seat of the Protestant Reformation, and while Germany had since become the most secular humanist nation in Europe, there was still a vestige of Christianity remaining.  And Hitler wanted to harness that still-influential vestige toward his own ends.  The government thus passed resolutions to limit the influence or dictate the agenda of the church.  One demanded the purging of all pastors who rejected “the spirit of National Socialism.”  Another resolution categorically rejected the very foundations of Judeo-Christian transcendent morality even as it tried to conflate “being a German” with “being a Christian”:

“We expect that our nation’s church as a German People’s Church should free itself from all things not German in its services and confession, especially from the Old Testament with its Jewish system of quid pro quo morality.”

The German Confessing Movement was a reaction against the German government’s attempt to impose its agenda upon the Christian Church in Germany.  As Gene Edward Veith put it in his book Modern Fascism: Liquidating the Judeo-Christian Worldview:

The Barmen Declaration thus sets itself against not only the German Christian aberration but against the whole tradition of modernist syncretism that made it possible.

[Article 1 affirmed Christ as the transcendent authority and source of values (as opposed to the German race, the Nazi revolution, or the person of Adolf Hitler)].  Article 2 asserts the sovereignty of Christ over all of life.  Article 3 asserts Christ’s lordship over the church and rejects “the false doctrine, as though the Church were permitted to abandon the form of its message and order to its own pleasure or to changes in prevailing ideological and political conventions.”  That is to say, the world does not set the agenda for the church.  Article 4 teaches that church offices are for mutual service and ministry, not for the exercise of raw power.  Article 5 acknowledges the divine appointment of the state, but rejects the pretensions of the state to “become the single and totalitarian order of human life, thus fulfilling the Church’s vocation as well.”  Article 6 affirms the church’s commission to proclaim the free grace of God to everyone by means of the Word and the sacraments.  “We reject the false doctrine, as though the Church in human arrogance could place the Word and work of the Lord in the service of any arbitrarily chosen desires, purposes, and plans [pp. 60-61].

One article, entitled “Hitler’s Theologians: The Genesis of Genocide,” takes time to describe how various key German liberal theologians systematically tore apart the Bible and orthodox Christianity – and in so doing systematically undermined the ethics and morality of the German people in preparation for the hell to come.  The author begins with Friedrich Schleiermacher, called “the founder of Liberal Protestantism,” and profiles the “contributions” of Friedrich Nietzsche, Julius Wellhausen, and Adolf von Harnack.

Georg Lukacs has observed that tracing the path to Hitler involved the name of nearly every major German philosopher since Hegel: Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Dilthy, Simmel, Scheler, Heidegger, Jaspers, and Weber [page 5, The Destruction of Reason].  And Max Weinreich produced an exhaustive study detailing the complicity of German intellectuals with the Nazi regime entitled Hitler’s Professors: The Part of Scholarship in Germany’s Crimes Against the Jewish People.  Ideas have consequences, and it was the ideas of these liberal theologians, philosophers and scholars who provided the intellectual justification and conceptual framework for the Holocaust.  Thus Nazism did not merely emerge from a liberal theological system, but from a distinguished secular humanist intellectual tradition as well — a distinguished intellectual tradition that had repudiated all the moral and spiritual values inherent to the orthodox Christianity of the Confessing Church.

Josef Hromadka wrote that:

“The liberal theology in Germany and in her orbit utterly failed.  It was willing to compromise on the essential points of divine law and of “the law of nature”; to dispose of the Old Testament and to accept the law of the Nordic race instead; and to replace the “Jewish” law of the Old Testament by the autonomous law of each race and nation, respectively.  It had made all the necessary preparation for the “Germanization of Christianity” and for a racial Church.”

Veith subsequently says, “in deciding whether or not to sign the Barmen Declaration … the dividing line was clear.”  And he states, “The German Christian theologians predictably denounced the confessional movement as being ‘narrow’ and ‘fundamentalist.'”  He rightly described the opponents of the Barmen Declaration as being “modernists,” “existentialists,” and “dialectical” in their thinking.  The theologians who rejected Barmen were men like Emanuel Hirsch, who taught that the resurrection of Christ was only a spiritual vision, and that the idea of a physical resurrection distorted Christianity by focusing attention to the hereafter rather than to the culture and community of the present.

In short, it was Christians who thought like the evangelicals and fundamentalists of today who signed the Barmen Declaration and openly opposed Nazism, and it was “Christians” who thought like the mainline liberals of today who stood for the German Christian Nazification of Christianity and for the resulting Nazification of German ethics and morality.

Confessing Church pastors and priests who resisted this Nazification of the church paid dearly.  Thousands of clergymen were hauled away to the concentration camps.  According to the Niemoller archives, 2,579 clergymen were sent to Dachau alone – and 1,034 of them died in the camp.  And that only refers to the priests and pastors – not the untold thousands of devout Christians such as the Ten Booms who perished in the death camps for their opposition to Nazism.

An article entitled “Asking ‘Why Nazism?’” reviewing a book by Dr. Karla Poewe has this:

“One of the dangers of liberal Christianity, where all sorts of interpretations are permitted, is that it can easily slip into becoming a new religion,” Poewe says. “This is what happened. In a bid to rid Germany of what it saw as Jewish Christianity, several home-grown practices sprang up, including some that incorporated Icelandic and pre-Christian sagas, as well as ideas from German Idealism.”

Although initially these new religions were separate and disorganized entities, they eventually came under the umbrella of what was known as the German Faith Movement. Hitler saw in it a mechanism for transmitting and reinforcing the National Socialist worldview. “He shaped its followers into a disciplined political force but dismissed its leaders later when they were no longer needed,” Poewe says.

We’re clearly not to the point where Jews, or Christians, or anyone else are being gathered by the thousands and placed in death camps.  But we’re beginning to see a trend that is frightening, as government, with the assistance of liberal “Christian” churches and organizations, are trying to impose their will upon the church and its agenda.

We’ve had a “hate crimes” law imposed upon us that makes homosexuality a protected behavior.  And one evangelical expresses the Confessing Church position in a nutshell:

Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, said in a written statement the bill “is part of a radical social agenda that could ultimately silence Christians and use the force of government to marginalize anyone whose faith is at odds with homosexuality.”

In another recent case, a Christian mother who has homeschooled her child is being forced to put her ten-year old child in public school, not to improve her academic education, but to limit her exposure to Christianity and forcibly expose her to a government-approved “public” point of view:

According to the court order, the guardian concluded that Amanda’s “interests, and particularly her intellectual and emotional development, would be best served by exposure to a public school setting in which she would be challenged to solve problems presented by a group learning situation and…Amanda would be best served by exposure to different points of view at a time in her life when she must begin to critically evaluate multiple systems of belief and behavior.”

This is a shocking case, in which the government is usurping both parental and religious freedoms.  And there are many similar usurpations today, in which our government is actively opposing Christian values.

Nearly fifty million babies have been killed in this country by a government-sanctioned “pro-choice” system.  Gene Edward Veith addresses the “pro-choice” movement and its philosophical underpinnings:

Existential ethics brackets the objective issues on abortion entirely.  At issue is not some transcendent moral law, nor medical evidence, nor a logical analysis.  The content of that choice makes no difference.  If the mother chooses to have the baby, her action is moral.  If she chooses not to have the baby, her action is still moral.  If she bears a child against her will or aborts a child against her will — then and only then is the action evil.  Those who believe that abortion should be legal do not consider themselves “pro-abortion.”  They are “pro-choice.”  The term is not only a rhetorical euphemism but a precise definition of existential ethics.

Existentialism is also reflected in those who are “pro-choice” but personally oppose abortion.  They do not believe in abortion for themselves, but refuse to impose their beliefs on others.  In this view, a belief has no validity outside the private, personal realm of each individual.  Moral and religious beliefs are no more than personal constructions, important in giving meaning to an individual’s life, but not universally valid.  Or, to use another commonly accepted axiom, “what’s true for you may not be true for me.”

Such a view of truth flies in the face of all classical metaphysics, which sees truth as objective, universal, and applicable to all” (page 96, Modern Fascism: Liquidating the Judeo-Christian Worldview).

We can return to the historical analysis of Nazism presented by Karla Poewe, and what happened when such “anything goes” belief systems were allowed to rule.  [I have written an article describing how existentialism became a primary component of Nazism, and link to it HERE].

Before we leave the issue of abortion as a vile violation of Christian ethics and morality, let us consider one more voice:

“But I feel that the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a war against the child – a direct killing of the innocent child – murder by the mother herself. And if we accept that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another?” — Mother Teresa

Christians should fight for life.  And allowing a human being to live should not be a “choice,” but a duty.

In 2003 one David Allen Black wrote an article bearing the question, “Do We Need A New Barmen Declaration?”  No Christian with a knowledge of history can answer any other way than, “YES!”

The Barmen Declaration was written in 1934, but in many ways it was already too late: The Nazis were already in power.  Hitler was in his second year of power; and the ideas of the liberal theologians, the existentialist philosophers, and the amoral intellectuals were already firmly in place.

It is my fervent hope that we finally have that “New Barmen Declaration” to answer the evils of our own day.  If we already should have written one, then every day that passes is one more day wasted; if we are acting pro-actively, then let us thank God that we acting before it is too late.

From the UK Telegraph:

At last, Christians draw a line in the sand against their PC secularist persecutors

By Gerald Warner UK Last updated: November 24th, 2009

At long last, Christian leaders have faced up to their persecutors in the secularist, socialist, One-World, PC, UN-promoted axis of evil and said: No more. In the popular metaphor, they have drawn a line in the sand. For harassed, demoralised faithful in the pews it will come as the long-awaited call to resistance and an earnest that their leaders are no longer willing to lie down supinely to be run over by the anti-Christian juggernaut. This statement of principle and intent is called The Manhattan Declaration, published last Friday in Washington DC.

It is difficult to believe that so firm an assertion of Christian intransigence in the face of persecution will not have some beneficial effects even here. For this Declaration is no minor affirmation by a few committed activists: on the contrary, it is signed by the most important leaders of three mainstream Christian traditions – the Catholic Church, the Orthodox Church and Evangelical Protestants. For an ecumenical document it is heroically devoid of fudge, euphemism and compromise.

The Manhattan Declaration states that “the lives of the unborn, the disabled, and the elderly are severely threatened; that the institution of marriage, already buffeted by promiscuity, infidelity and divorce, is in jeopardy of being redefined to accommodate fashionable ideologies; that freedom of religion and the rights of conscience are gravely jeopardized by those who would use the instruments of coercion to compel persons of faith to compromise their deepest convictions”.

For Barack Obama, the PC lobby, the “hate crime” fascists and, by implication, their opposite numbers in Britain, the signatories have an uncompromising message: “We pledge to each other, and to our fellow believers, that no power on earth, be it cultural or political, will intimidate us into silence or acquiescence.” That is plain speaking, in the face of anti-Christian aggression by governments. The signatories spelled it out even more unequivocally: “We will fully and ungrudgingly render to Caesar what is Caesar’s, but we will under no circumstances render to Caesar what is God’s.”

In a world where a Swedish pastor has been jailed for preaching that sodomy is sinful, similar prosecutions have taken place in Canada, the European Court of Human Rights (sic) has tried to ban crucifixes in Italian classrooms, Brazil has passed totalitarian legislation imposing heavy prison sentences for criticism of homosexual lifestyles, Amnesty International is championing abortion, David Cameron has voted for the enforced closure of Catholic adoption agencies, and Gordon Brown’s government has just been defeated in its fourth attempt to abolish the Waddington Clause guaranteeing free speech – this robust defiance is more than timely.

The signatories are unambiguously expressing their willingness to go to prison rather than deny any part of their religious beliefs. Those signatories are heavyweight. On the Catholic side they include Justin Cardinal Rigali, Archbishop of Philadelphia; Adam Cardinal Maida, Archbishop Emeritus of Detroit; the Archbishops of Denver, New York, Washington DC, Newark, Saint Paul and Minneapolis, Kansas City, and Louisville; and other Bishops. The Orthodox include the Primate of the Orthodox Church in America and the Archpriest of St Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary. There are also the Anglican Primates of America and Nigeria, as well as a host of senior Evangelical Protestants.

In terms of influence on votes and public opinion, this is a formidable coalition. It has served notice on the US government that further anti-Christian legislation will provoke cultural trench warfare and even civil disobedience. As regards the sudden stiffening of resistance among the usually spineless Catholic leadership, it is impossible not to detect the influence of Benedict XVI.

We need more declarations like this, on a global scale, and the requisite confrontational follow-up. This is Clint Eastwood, make-my-day Christianity – and not before time. From now on, any governments that are planning further persecution of Christians had better make sure they have a large pride of lions available for mastication duties. The worm has turned.

As a young Christian, I was inspired by the music, lyrics, and album cover of Keith Green’s album, No Compromise.  The cover says it all:

The Manhattan Declaration – like the Barmen Declaration – calls for Christians who are willing to stand up and be singled out even in the face of persecution or punishment.

I hope you are willing to be one of those Christians.

Is This Economic Recovery? ‘1,000 Banks To Fail In Next Two Years’

Studies galore have demonstrated the bias of the media.  They have documented that more than 80% of supposedly objective journalists are Democrats.  And they have documented that their personal bias shaped their professional bias, with the media overwhelmingly favoring their “first love,” Barack Obama in the presidential campaign.

Their bias runs to even the smallest and most seemingly trivial matters, on the apparent theory that there is nothing to small to use to attack and undermine a Republican: journalists who stumbled all over themselves to praise Obama’s strenuous exercise rituals and his “chiseled pectorals” found Bush’s exercise “obsessive” and “creepy.” The media wouldn’t even allow President Bush to golf without attacking him for abandoning his duties, whereas they don’t attack Obama – even though he’s playing gold far more often than Bush did – and even golfing with a CEO of a firm in the midst of a tax corruption investigation.

So it really shouldn’t surprise anyone that the media would show its bias in big matters such as the economy.

University of Maryland senior research scientist John Lott Jr. says news coverage of the economy is slanted. Lott writes, “Over 78 percent more negative news stories discussed a recession when the economy — under a Republican president was soaring than occurred under a Democrat when the economy was shrinking.”

Lott — who researched 12,500 newspaper and wire service articles from 1985 through 2004 — also found that Democratic presidents got positive headlines 15 percent more of the time than Republican presidents for the same economic news.

Of his findings Lott writes, “The media’s focus on the negative side of everything surely helps explain people’s pessimism… Indeed, research has indicated that media bias is real.”

The media helped Obama fearmonger the economy when he wanted them to fearmonger the economy to push through his stimulus; but now they’re are trying to talk up the economy when Obama wants them to talk up the economy.  They are dutifully reporting that the recession seems to be over.

But it isn’t.  And it won’t be.

1,000 Banks to Fail In Next Two Years: Bank CEO
Published: Thursday, 27 Aug 2009
By: Natalie Erlich

The US banking system will lose some 1,000 institutions over the next two years, said John Kanas, whose private equity firm bought BankUnited of Florida in May.

“We’ve already lost 81 this year,” Kanas told CNBC. “The numbers are climbing every day. Many of these institutions nobody’s ever heard of. They’re smaller companies.” (See the accompanying video for the complete interview.)

Failed banks tend to be smaller and private, which exacerbates the problem for small business borrowers, said Kanas, who became CEO of BankUnited when his firm bought the bank and is the former chairman and CEO of North Fork bank.

“Government money has propped up the very large institutions as a result of the stimulus package,” he said. “There’s really very little lifeline available for the small institutions that are suffering.”

This comes at a time when the FDIC has established new rules on bank sales. Private equity, for instance, would have to hold double the capital of their competitors in order to buy such an institution, said Kanas.

“This will have somewhat of a chilling effect on our participation,” he said. “As a result of having to keep higher capital levels, we’ll see lower prices coming from that sector.”

Of the 81 failed banks this year, two have been successfully acquired by private equity, he said. Kanas’ private equity firm bought UnitedBank, the failed Florida-based bank, from the FDIC in May. Regulators also allowed the sale of IndyMac Bank of California earlier this year.

“We are seeing more people step up and lobby bids in this situation,” he said. “We’re seeing more players mostly as a result of being attracted to the sector. I’m not so sure that will continue now that the rules have been ratchet it up.”

Meanwhile, much of the commercial realty problem resides in the regional and small community banks, said Kanas, because larger banks haven’t fueled that sector in the past.

“The market is expecting about the way we were expecting,” he said. “Unfortunately, we’re not seeing any evidence of a recovery in the real estate market in the southern Florida market,” he said.

It’s rather interesting that there’s a strong argument that Obama’s regulations are actually hurting our recovery, but Obama doesn’t have to worry about that message getting out to the public.  His secret, clearly,  is completely safe with the mainstream media.

The FDIC – the government entity which is supposed to step in if a bank goes bankrupt – is itself on the verge of going bankrupt:

March 4 (Bloomberg) — Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Chairman Sheila Bair said the fund it uses to protect customer deposits at U.S. banks could dry up amid a surge in bank failures, as she responded to an industry outcry against new fees approved by the agency.

And think about it: one thousand banks failing over the next two years is to the notion of “economic recovery” what a giant asteroid hurtling toward us from space is to the statement “things are looking up for us.”  But again, the mainstream media is so focused on talking up the economy that they don’t have much time for such distractions.

What’s going to happen to unemployment?  The media made such a big deal about a temporary 1/10th of one percent drop in the unemployment rate.  But the longer term trend isn’t good.  It isn’t good at ALL:

Banks Stronger But Outlook Clouded by Job Loss: Whitney

Unemployment is likely to rise to 13 percent or higher and will weigh on the economy for several years, countering government efforts to stabilize the banking industry, analyst Meredith Whitney told CNBC.

While Whitney raised her short-term outlook for banks, causing stocks to open in positive territory after pointing lower earlier, she said the long-term outlook for the economy remains murky.

Consumers will not be able to spend as they continue to lose jobs and credit conditions stay tight, she said in a live interview. The result will provide a vivid display of how critical housing and lending are to economic growth. Unemployment is currently at 9.5 percent but is expected to keep rising.

“We underestimate how much the whole economy is dependent on the mortgage industry, and that has to change,” Whitney said. “This is what happens when you delay the inevitable. We’re buying time here, but we’re not restructuring the economy.”

We’re looking a situation in which nearly half of American homes will be “underwater” – with the mortgages being higher than then homes are worth – by 2011.

And Obama’s policies are not helping to actually deal with the core problem facing the mortgage industry.

The dire assessment comes amid a slight stabilization in the U.S. housing market after three years of price drops, according to the National Association of Realtors.

The report states that the drop in home prices is fueling a vicious cycle of foreclosures as it eliminates homeowner equity and gives borrowers an incentive to walk away from their mortgage.

But, the foreclosed homes are not coming onto the market because people are finding out they can stay living in them and not pay their mortgage, according to Kudrle.

“The Obama administration is putting so much pressure on the banks and lenders to slow down the foreclosure process to try and keep people in their homes,” Kudrle said. “We have people who have not made a payment for 12 to 18 months and the bank still hasn’t come in to foreclose.”

That’s not a policy that is going to correct our financial woes; it’s just a delaying tactic that will ultimately make a bad problem far, far worse by postponing and in fact stockpiling the coming misery.

Government Supported Enterprises (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac – created by a Democrat-congrolled Congress and long run by connected Democrats – have been at the epicenter of the mortgage meltdown fiasco.

Peter Wallison predicted a future Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac failure in 1999 in a New York Times article, saying of Fannie Mae’s enormous financial exposure and risky policies:

”From the perspective of many people, including me, this is another thrift industry growing up around us,” said Peter Wallison a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. ”If they fail, the government will have to step up and bail them out the way it stepped up and bailed out the thrift industry.” . . .

Franklin Raines, Jamie Gorelick, Jim Johnson, Daniel Mudd.  That’s just part of your list of Democrats who ran Fannie Mae into the ground and profited wildly in doing so.  The Wall Street Journal cites the first three names for disgrace in the Fannie Mae Enron-scheme they produced.  The fourth figure, Fannie CEO Daniel Mudd, showed just how far to the left Fannie Mae was politically when he said to THE most radically liberal wing of the Democrat Party – the Congressional Black Caucus – the following:

So many of you have been good friends to Fannie Mae and our mission. You’ve been friends through thick and thin. We have indeed come upon a difficult time for Fannie Mae…  In many ways I want to tell you today you are also the conscience of Fannie Mae.

President Bush tried SEVENTEEN TIMES to create tighter regulation of the government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Bush’s efforts led to two major Republican efforts to push through regulations that would have limited the mess that Fannie and Freddie could create, but their every move was fiercely resisted by Democrats.  The first time, Barney Frank – leading the Democratic effort to shield Fannie and Freddie from necessary regulatory reform in 2003, said:

”These two entities — Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — are not facing any kind of financial crisis,” said Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee. ”The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.”

Again, in 2005, Republicans tried and failed to establish necessary regulatory reforms of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac at a time when reforms could have averted the 2008 disaster.  Again Democrats unanimously rose up to block any such effort.  John McCain warned:

If Congress does not act, American taxpayers will continue to be exposed to the enormous risk that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pose to the housing market, the overall financial system, and the economy as a whole.

But Democrats refused to heed the warnings.  And when the economy DID collapse BECAUSE of their refusal to deal with the GSEs that they had politically-benefited from, the very people who created the disaster in the first place poised themselves to benefit from it by demagoguing Republicans whose greatest sin was not being strong enough in their efforts to stand up and stop Democrats from advancing a ruinous agenda.

Think about it: seventeen calls for regulatory reform of the housing mortgage industry, all resisted by Democrats.  Two major efforts at regulatory reform, both blocked by fierce and united Democrat opposition.  And then Democrats demonized Republicans for refusing to enact regulations.  That’s called ‘chutzpah.’  And when the mainline media reported it as if it were somehow true, it was called ‘propaganda.’

In only a couple short years in the Senate, Barack Obama racked up the 2nd highest total in campaign contributions from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (2nd only to fellow Democrat and Senate Finance Chairman Chris Dodd).  Barack Obama was second in receipts of campaign contributions from corrupt Wall Street leveraging companies such as Lehman Brothers behind only Hillary Clinton.  Lehman Brothers profited and profited by playing the insane Wall Street insiders game until it went belly up from its own bloated practices.  And somehow that parasitic leech of a company was under the impression that financing one Barack Hussein Obama’s political career would be good for it’s greedy special interests.

And now we’re in such good hands to fix the mess that Democrats almost exclusively created.

And hey, don’t worry.  If anything bad happens, you can count on the mainstream media to honestly and objectively keep you informed — NOT.

Grand Theft Auto IV: the Consequences of Gamer Culture (1)

The computer game Grand Theft Auto IV was released today to the standard irrational hype surrounding these game introductions, with buyers lining up around the store for their chance to be the first ones to own the game.  Drive-by-shootings, acts of prostitution, and car thefts make up just some of the activities players participate in during the game.  I have not played the game, but I understand that players receive the sexual services of prostitutes, and then beat them up to get their money back.  Advancing means continually committing criminal acts while trying to stay alive.

One of the issues that constantly arises with the release of one of these violent games is the outcry against the reality that many of these games end up in the hands of children and young adolescents.  So let’s start with that.

What happens physically and emotionally when children and adolescents spend a great deal of time exposed to these activities?

Children are concrete thinkers, and generally aren’t yet capable of understanding the consequences of their actions. In real life, children have shot other children without realizing that the act results in actual death. Games such as Grand Theft Auto IV reinforce this mode of concrete thinking by means of a series of behaviors that have no consequences. It’s the prescription for creating a moral monster.

There is also a very real, and very damaging impact on adolescents. Psychologists use the term “vicarious traumatization” to describe the measurable physical reactions a person can have after simply viewing a traumatic event on television or on a video game. What researches have documented is that habitual exposure to vicarious violent events can cause a person to experience the identical physical effects – such as heightened blood pressure, racing heart beat, etc. – as if that person were actually experiencing the event in real life.

Craig A. Anderson, the author of the book, Violent Video Game Effects on Children and Adolescents, detailed in a peer-reviewed article written for the American Psychological Association the effects of violent games on children. He noted that repeated exposure to media violence generates and legitimizes more aggressive behavior even as it “decreases the normal negative emotional reactions to conflict, aggression, and violence.”

The younger one is, the more intense the effect. When children play these games for hour after hour, it seriously distorts their worldviews.

I think that any responsible adult will acknowledge these facts, and act accordingly by limiting children’s exposure to such games. The problem is there are way too many irresponsible adults who either don’t know or simply don’t care about the psychological damage that is being inflicted by children under their care or supervision.

I do not propose a solution for this growing problem. Banning the games is decried as an act of censorship, and regulating or restricting the games is decried in almost the same tones as a form of censorship. Frankly, by the time a culture is determined to bring this kind of junk into their lives, it is probably too late to do anything about it. And at this point in the life of American culture, we are determined to have all kinds of crap in our society and in our homes.

My real objective in writing about games such as Grand Theft Auto IV is to address the effects of these games on adults, because there IS an effect on adults.

The typical response of the above reasoning with an adult “gamer” is, “I’ve played these games for years, and I’ve never killed anybody.”

Most of the time, that’s true, of course. Adults experience many of the same symptoms that children and adolescents experience playing games over time; however, their superior impulse control, sense of identity, and grasp on reality enables them to resist effects that can tear younger minds apart.

while I would argue that playing violent video games is the psychological equivalent to using drugs or alcohol (i.e. it messes up the mind, but most adults can handle the effects unless they really go overboard), I want to focus on a whole other impact of these video games.

I want to address a pattern of thinking that very often comes to characterize the minds of adults who spend a significant period of time “gaming.” It is also increasingly consuming postmodern culture. It boils down to three key characteristics: Cynicism, Skepticism, and a Dislike for reality.

Cynicism is the intelligent but lazy mind’s shortcut to genuine philosophy. When the world seems to make no sense, the simplest thing to do is to say the world makes no sense, and to give up on searching for sense, purpose, or meaning in the world. For an increasing number of people, this cynicism seems superior to the “simple” belief that the world does make sense, when one cannot explain why it does. Frankly, it is easier to stand on the sidelines and ridicule what is going on around you than it is to get in the trenches and work toward a better reality. Cynicism sneers at such hope.

Skepticism is – in modern secular society – a replacement for faith. But skepticism cannot serve for long as a replacement for faith, because if you teach people to believe in a thing, you have to adopt a specific position. And in a secular and pluralistic society, we can’t adopt a position (as that would disfavor other competing positions!). So we present a smorgasborg of worldview positions. This is not a Socratic education, but rather Socrates gone insane. Skepticism is a useful epistemological tool but it cannot be foundational. Why? Because if turned on itself it collapses by its own standards: what if we become skeptical about skepticism? Do we then have to become skeptical about being skeptical about skepticism? Frankly, the world would have been a much better place had Descartes realized this and abandoned his project.

Ultimately skepticism and cynicism are self-consuming. They can’t produce even a vacuous culture; they can simply mock and parody it. So ultimately, culture runs out of ideas, and from that point on, it simply relies on marketing to sell. Take the fact that we are talking about Grand Theft Auto IV as a case in point.

A Dislike of reality, or a rejection of reality for virtual reality. In video games you are a hero, the savior of the world, desired by women and loved or feared by everyone. People are relying on virtual reality to give them a feeling of joy. We are frankly seeing too many young people who are too intelligent to fall for the trap of incoherence, and yet our incredibly incoherent education system has made them immune to normal apologetics against their worldview. Having grown up with no genuine or coherent worldview, there is simply no worldview to attack or correct.

But they also unconsciously recognize the real effects of the fall and sin in the real world. In the real world, people get hurt, people suffer, people have meaningless dead-end lives. And then they die. They recognize instinctively at the very core there is something that should be in the world but is not. And yet the cynicism and skepticism of our age (the one thing that they have picked up) have left them completely unable to embrace the notion that change can matter. And so they replace physical reality with virtual reality. It very quickly becomes a form of addiction.

(Part 2 will address the spiritual components of this worldview, and offer a Christian perspective and response).