A Christian’s Heart 3-26-2012

America The Fool

[Updated 4 2 12]

The 4 2 2102 submission will be delayed until later today or at the latest, Tuesday 4 3 2012.

[Updated 3 26 12]

The ink had not yet dried on this statement in the last paragraph of the blog below: (By his actions and by statements made to the press, but not in so many words, our current president would clearly love to have this absolute power.) when this article appeared in Times 24/7:  Obama authorizes himself to declare martial law in the event of a war with Iran. This would give Obama absolute power to control the country. Since Obama has already stated that he can take offensive military action without the consent of congress, and since he could easily do this in Iran, he would have created a scenario where “war” has broken out. Then Obama can exercise this self-realized power and suspend the November elections. (I have declared in other venues that Obama will seek a way to suspend the November elections, because he knows he’s in trouble.) We will have arrived at the destination on our road to Tyranny.

Building a Tyranny on the Backs of the Poor (Part II)

“The LORD saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time. … even from childhood … [even from] birth …” (Gen 6:5, 8:21a, Ps 51:5a)

In this blog I will refer to this wonderful article: Does Advocating Limited Government Mean Abandoning the Poor? By Ryan Messmore, D. Phil on the root causes of poverty and how America’s (Godless) political solutions to this problem cannot solve it.

Americans think of poverty as being extreme material deprivation. And it is, in a sense, although, that is not how our government defines poverty, as I posited my March 12 blog. Material deprivation in itself is not a cause of poverty; it is, rather, a symptom of deeper problems, all of which arise from spiritual poverty, the kind that is growing in and destroying America.

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In this blog, I am specifically excluding material deprivation caused by physical or mental disability, though our godless government cannot adequately address these issues either: 40% – 45% of the homeless population is mentally ill, having been thrown out of institutions that could have helped them during the civil rights movement in the mid 1960’s, their homeless fate sealed by a 1974 Supreme Court decision, Donaldson v. O’Conner ruling that:

“A finding of ‘mental illness’ alone cannot justify a State’s locking a person up against his will and keeping him indefinitely in simple custodial confinement… In short, a state cannot constitutionally confine without more a nondangerous [sic] individual who is capable of surviving safely in freedom by himself or with the help of willing and responsible family members or friends.”

Here is the Kafkaesque irony:  Far from respecting civil liberties, legal obstacles to treatment limit or destroy the liberty of the person. 

This result is consistent with the insanity of a country that is spiritually dying, if it is not completely dead already: throw helpless mentally ill people out onto the streets in the name of their civil rights!

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To summarize from Dr. Messmore’s article:

“Poverty in America is often the result of a relational problem, such as fatherlessness [sic] or community breakdown, which government programs cannot adequately address … Such relational breakdowns are addressed most effectively through various civil society institutions. … People have many needs that extend beyond simple material possessions—needs that cannot be met by any single institution. Families, churches, businesses, and other forms of association play crucial roles in sustaining liberty and meeting people’s needs.”

Not only can godless government solutions not correct the problem, they actually make the problem worse. According to Dr. Messmore:

“Since the beginning of the War on Poverty in 1965, the federal government has spent $16 trillion on welfare. Sadly, this massive spending has failed either to break the cycle of government dependence or to help low-income families to climb the ladder of social mobility. Instead, welfare dependence has grown dramatically. From 1960 until shortly before the welfare reforms of 1996, the total number of welfare recipients more than tripled. The overall poverty rate has not changed much over the past four decades, and today, one in seven Americans lives at or below the official federal poverty line.

“Moreover, since the War on Poverty was launched, the rate of births out of wedlock has increased from 7 percent to 41 percent nationally, exceeding 70 percent among the black population. This has devastated the well-being of these single mothers and their children and has sharply limited their prospects of escaping poverty.”

For example: a child born to a never married mother is seven times more likely to live in poverty than a child born to an intact family. 62% of all poor children live in single parent (never married) families. Nearly 80% of all children suffering long-term poverty come from broken or never married families. Never married mothers are twice as likely as married mothers to be victims of social violence. A child living with a single mother is fourteen times more likely to suffer from serious child abuse than one living in an intact family. (Google: The Positive Effects of Marriage: A Book of Charts to get the previous statistics).

What’s the obvious solution to these vexing and socially destructive problems? Keep unmarried women from getting pregnant (by moral suasion, such as belief in the rightness of God’s solutions, rather than through whatever evil coercive means the hearts of men will come up with); and keep families together (again by the same moral suasion). It was these types of social pathologies that the moral values and commandments of God were designed to prevent. It is God’s solution to these problems that our society has specifically rejected. Therefore effective solutions to these problems are impossible in the current Godless climate.

This is the underlying message in all of my blogs: since America has turned away from God, there is no longer any way to restrain the evil inclinations of all human hearts. Thus any political solutions to problems of poverty and its accompanying social pathologies will exclude a God-centered approach and will therefore be doomed to make the problem worse. At some point, the abominable sense of entitlement fostered by our political class will become so great, and the politicians’ inability to fix the problems they themselves have created so evident, social strife will increase to the point that it will threaten to tear this country apart. Enter an absolute ruler who will take over to calm the strife. (By his actions and by statements made to the press, but not in so many words, our current president would clearly love to have this absolute power.) We will have become a full blown socialist nanny state, one that can only exist at the point of a gun, as the Russian, Chinese, Cambodian, and other peoples of the world have sadly found out. (See this wonderful book by Jean-Francois Revel, which proves this point: Last Exit to Utopia: the Survival of Socialism in a Post-Soviet Era, (translated by Diarmid V.C. Cammell, New York, Encounter Books, 2000)) Our economy and our freedoms will be a ruin, and we will have graduated to full third-world banana-republic status.

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