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POPSThomas Paine and American Values "Aspirations of Thomas Paine and his fellow liberal-progressives toward economic equality as the necessary condition for earthly social perfection gave us the bloody French Revolution. More than 70,000 French citizens – from children to the elderly – were murdered on the guillotine, by hanging, and by firing squads, in the name of "Liberty, Equality, Brotherhood." Those same liberal-progressive ideals espoused by Thomas Paine gave us the 20th century, the most savagely sanguinary and oppressive period in human history, all in the name of perfecting humanity." These realities combined with the motivations from Rousseau laid the foundations for nationalism and socialism that came to fruition in the early 20th century Europe.
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POPSCompassion -or- Philosophy of windows into the soul "Besides, the effectual truth of enlightened self-interest and the invocation of rights in service of that interest was hateful competition among men, not genuine co-operation. Ultimately commerce and all other such forms of competition serve the passion of amour-propre or vanity, which craves superiority over our fellows or inequality for its own sake. Rousseau thus presents the emergent liberal commercial society in which Montesquieu, Hume, and Smith invested such hopes as a lurid nightmare of strife, exploitation, and cruelty." "Commerce makes men more alike while also multiplying inequalities among them. Montesquieu seized on the first of these facts to welcome commerce as a new dawn: whereas difference bred narrowness and hostility, sameness brought greater understanding. Rousseau, by contrast, stressed the second of these elements, presenting commerce as driving men apart even as it supposedly brought them together."
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POPSThe Long March "much of the wacky, upside-down, right-is-wrong, black-is-white stuff we see in the news these days is directly or indirectly inspired by Gramsci: the attacks on Christianity, the family, individual freedom, morality and moral judgements; multiculturalism; the cult of victimhood, "tolerance," political correctness, the replacement of the roles of family, religion, individual responsibility and choice with government rules, laws, and regs; the expansion of the State and the Welfare State and the Nanny State; anti-tradition, anti-capitalism, anti-success, anti-nationalism, anti-Americanism and anti-Westernism, etc - all the stuff that makes me echo Bob Grant with "It's sick out there, and getting sicker." I am sure Antonio never anticipated that a Green movement would emerge to become an ally of the slow, incrementalist and thus less-alarming Gramscian revolution."
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POPSNazi Christian Propaganda Christianity was used by the Nazis as propoganda in a similar way that it is used by Marxists in Black Lib Theology and the same way Militant Islamists take liberties with Islam. From article: "The German Protestants, in doing this, have been the first body in Germany to stand up against the dictates of Hitler, and have shown courage and determination. They have also shown that the Nazi interpretation of religion is not accepted by the mass of pious people in Germany, and that the idea of a military, patriotic Christ has not yet conquered over the gentler, nobler idea which inspires better Christians than the Nazis, and which is summed up in the teaching, “Love thy neighbour as thyself.” There was a similar relationship between the Chruch and Mussolini, who despised Theists and the organized Church. Fascism was characteristically anti-Christian in practice - public and personal. "
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POPSFaith as a necessary virtue "Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods. For moods will change, whatever view your reason takes. I know that by experience. Now that I am a Christian I do have moods in which Christianity looks very improbably; but when I was an atheist I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable. This rebellion of your moods against your real self is going to come anyway. That is why Faith is such a necessary virtue: unless you teach your moods "where they get off," you can never be either a sound Christian or even a sound atheist, but just a creature dithering to and fro, with its beliefs really dependent on the weather and the state of its digestion. Consequently one must train the habit of Faith." From Mere Christianity, p. 138-139.
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POPSThe superficiality of liberal-progressivism "Humans in that philosophy are merely bundles of nerves and muscle that respond positively to sensual pleasure and negatively to pain. Intellectuals, therefore, in theory, can structure political societies that will create universal happiness and harmony, effecting paradise on earth. It was this promise that gave us the Soviet Union and National Socialist Germany." Both Freud and Ortega were atheists and regarded spiritual religion as ignorance to be banished by what in the United States John Dewey called progressive education. What Freud and Ortega would not see was that the socialistic materialism spawned by the French Revolution was the true source of civilization’s discontents and the banality and crassness of mass man. "By initiating the destruction of Christianity in Europe, the French Revolutionary version of the Age of Enlightenment effectively decapitated civilization, leaving one-dimensional humans with bodies but little wisdom. "
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POPSThe reason behind todays's political division. "The new battleground, reasoned Gramsci, must become the culture, starting with the traditional family and completely engulfing churches, schools, media, entertainment, civic organizations, literature, science, and history. All of these things must be radically transformed and the social and cultural order gradually turned upside-down with the new proletariat placed in power at the top." Learn your history people. It is not about politics. It is about cultural and institutional destruction.
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POPSJohn Piper on the Anniversary of 'Atlas Shrugged'
"Ayn Rand had no place for mercy, whereas Christianity has mercy at its heart. And the reason for the difference is that God was simply missing in Ayn Rand’s universe. Since there was no God from whom she had received everything undeserved, and since there was no God who promised to reward every act that showed his supreme worth, she could only conceive of sacrifice as the immoral suicide of one’s own values." "What Ayn Rand meant by altruism is indeed ugly and can be seen best in the words of Lillian Rearden to her husband in Atlas Shrugged. Here is the essence of the evil of altruism, as Rand saw it:" ______________________________________________________________ "Since Ayn Rand had no place for a sovereign, all-sufficient God who cannot be traded with, she did not reckon with any righteous form of mercy. It is indeed evil to love a person “for their vices.” But mercy in the Christian sense is not “because of” vices, but “in spite of” vices."
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POPSWhy Atheists are So Smart Thus when Christopher Hitchens and other atheists routinely dismiss religious claims on the grounds that "what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence," they are making what philosophers like to call a category mistake. We learn from Kant that within the domain of experience, human reason is sovereign, but it is in no way unreasonable to believe things on faith that simply cannot be adjudicated by reason. When atheists summarily dismiss the immortality of the soul or the afterlife on the grounds that they have never found any empirical proofs for either, they are asking for experiential evidence in a domain which is entirely beyond the reach of experience. In this domain, Kant argues, the absence of evidence cannot be used as the evidence for absence. Notice that Kant's argument is entirely secular: It does not employ any religious vocabulary, nor does it rely on any kind of faith.
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POPSAlexis de Tocqueville - Impressions of God in America I do not know whether all Americans have a sincere faith in their religion -- for who can search the human heart? But I am certain that they hold it to be indispensable to the maintenance of republican institutions. This opinion is not peculiar to a class of citizens or a party, but it belongs to the whole nation and to every rank of society. In the United States, the sovereign authority is religious...there is no country in the world where the Christian religion retains a greater influence over the souls of men than in America, and there can be no greater proof of its utility and of its conformity to human nature than that its influence is powerfully felt over the most enlightened and free nation of the earth.
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POPSThe Founding Fathers view on America and God Patrick Henry - “It cannot be emphasized too clearly and too often that this nation was founded, not by religionists, but by Christians; not on religion, but on the gospel of Jesus Christ. For this very reason, peoples of other faiths have been afforded asylum, prosperity, and freedom of worship here.” “ Providence has given to our people the choice of their rulers, and it is the duty, as well as the privilege and interest of our Christian nation to select and prefer Christians for their rulers.” Source: October 12, 1816. The Correspondence and Public Papers of John Jay Thomas Jefferson - "I am a real Christian, that is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus." “God who gave us life gave us liberty." - Thomas Jefferson “ It is impossible to rightly govern the world without God and Bible.” - George Washington "Christianity is part of the common law" - James Wilson
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POPSEvery Gift was Handed Back - By Beth Fisher I gave Him my life completely, to show His light in a world of night, He gave me a wonderful testimony, a way to share His light. I offered Him my eyes to see all that they could take in - He showed to me a world of fear, unhappiness and sin. For every gift I gave to Him, He handed back to me Instructions for their uses - endless possibility To reach a world that needs to find the Saviour that I found, So on and on, I serve, for to Him in love I'm bound.
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POPSJustification As guilt was imputed to man through our fall, justification is also imputed to the elect of God by faith alone.
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POPSAt the heart of Reformed Theology - RC Sproul "We need a style and a variety of Christianity that is not a religion, but is a life and a worldview, where at the heart and foundational structure of it is a sound and deep biblical concept of the character of God."
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