The Last Christmas?

Toogood Reports contributor Paul Weyrich recently wrote that survey's show less than half of college administrators (41%) and only a third of the students (32%) think that people should promulgate their religious beliefs by whatever legal means available, and that only 23% of students "strongly support" people's right to express their religious beliefs on campus. That means that over three-quarters of U.S. college students either do not support the Constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech and freedom of religion, or are lukewarm about those freedoms, at best.

Our best-educated Americans, then, are of the dismaying opinion that religion is fine, as long as it is practiced in private and not discussed in open society…yet that homosexuality is perfectly acceptable for public discussion and practice and should not be kept in such a closet! Such is the state of our colleges this Christmas; what does that portend for the next generation of administrators and students, or for our future society?

If it were really just "tolerance" at play on American college campuses, would not intellectual honesty require the open study and discussion of perhaps the most powerful of all influences on man's behavior? To be fair, exotic Eastern beliefs, foreign religions and mysticism, including New Age "spiritualism" (and since 9/11, strangely enough, the religion of Islam) are common in most curricula. It is Christianity that is unwelcome. Given the enormous influence of the universities themselves, and the a-religious (if not outright anti-Christian) sentiment they instill in the millions who attend them, it is hardly surprising that God is increasingly unwelcome in off-campus society, too.

That's ironic, considering that most of our colleges and universities (over 180 of the first 200) were established for the expressed purpose of educating young Americans in the Christian faith and instilling in them Christian virtues and principles. How in the world did we go from widespread belief in and acceptance of the Christian faith to the anti-Christian, anti-God nation we now are?

The answer to that question comes from a brief but profound essay on man and morals by Thomas F. Woodlock, columnist and editor of the Wall Street Journal in the early 1900s. The essay, written in 1939, precisely addresses today's anti-God mentality as much as it did pre-war amorality. Included is this quote from John Dewey, the "father of modern American education," whose theories still form the backbone of colleges of education in America: "There is no separate body of moral rules; no separate subject-matter of moral knowledge and hence no such thing as an isolated ethical science. If the business of morals is not to speculate upon an ultimate standard of right, it is to utilize physiology, anthropology and psychology to discover all that can be discovered of man, his organic powers and potentialities." (John Dewey, Creative Intelligence, 1917)

Dewey rejected all absolutes, including God; the corollary to that denial was his strong belief in accepting multiple values as equally valid (multi-culturalism, before it was called that). He saw truth as what works best in a given situation, and believed that truth and other previously immutable concepts were merely instruments to be used to meet man's needs, as man determined them. This is the man considered by many the single most influential American philosopher, and from the evidence of his "progressive" philosophy that permeates American education, it is difficult to dispute their assertions. Any wonder that so many people today do not believe in absolute right and wrong?

Marx and Engels wrote that if you could remove a people from their roots, they could be easily swayed to your point of view. Dewey's pragmatism and "progressive education" have been major instruments in removing God as one of America's nourishing roots. What better way to separate Americans from their Founding moral, political and economic roots than by the corruption of public education, which reaches every child? How many teachers have been indoctrinated into his atheism by education departments? How many American schoolchildren have been duped into believing his relativist theories? From recent court rulings, the continually declining behavior of Americans, and surveys that reveal our ignorance of the role of Christianity in our founding and our liberties, that separation appears to have been hugely successful.

David Limbaugh has documented much of that "success" in American classrooms in Persecution, a book that will shock, frighten and anger you. What goes on in American schools today, and in our name, is beyond incompetence and union protectionism; it's an outrage. It's blatantly, unapologetically and deliberately anti-God and anti-Christian.

Listen to radio and TV advertisements for the word "Christmas" and you'll find it strangely absent. Instead, the ads and promos incessantly chatter about "holidays," while avoiding mention of any reason for the holiday. Listening to ESPN radio the other day, I heard "holidays" repeatedly, and not one mention of Christmas.

A friend emailed today, sharing a memo from his workplace about the upcoming "holiday party." That's what Christmas is now called in many of our public schools, of course, since uttering the word "Christmas" might scar some tender young psyche (the reference to Christ, you see). In some places it's "the sparkle season," proving there's no limit to the contortions to which the anti-God crowd will resort to help stamp out God from our consciousness.

Of course, since language should accurately reflect the thoughts of a people, discarding "Christmas" as the name of the upcoming holiday is actually the honest thing to do, for the celebration of the birth of Christ has not been a major factor at Christmastime in America for several decades now. Frenzied wallowing in material excess and consumer spending, celebrating days off from school and work, parties at work and home where the main attraction is food (often sharing billing with football or booze), impossible traffic jams leading to malls and even worse human traffic jams inside…these make up the modern spirit of Christmas.

No Christ, whose birth Christmas is supposed to celebrate. No holiness (how many even know that "holiday" was originally "holy day"?), no reflection on the archetype of gifts, that of Christ to the world, for whose sin He died that we might again be reconciled to God. No humility or grace (for what else should be the response to such a gift?), and certainly no gratitude, for anything. In fact, ours is the opposite response, a clear and willful rejection of God and His gift. It's only right, then, that Christ (and thus "Christmas") be discarded from our language and celebrations, for we have already discarded Him from our lives, in practical fact.

Man doesn't want to need to be "saved" by Christ, for that doesn't fit the humanist philosophy that says man can create heaven or hell all by himself, with no help or interference from a "judgmental" God. (You have to admit, it's right about the hell part.) So we must make God a myth, and ridicule His Truth and the weak-minded and foolish who believe it. Man believes only in man, that man is all we need. Of course, it sounds better as John Lennon's "Love is all we need," for we're inexplicably reluctant to openly (consciously?) admit our worship of and infatuation with feeble man (which is strange, given our determined arrogance to be rid of God once and for all). Could it be that, deep within, we know that our vaunted humanism is a lie?

Also in the Woodlock essay is this quote, from Anne O'Hare McCormick: "Above all…the international crisis is a moral crisis, and the foundations of the world will be shaky until the moral props are restored." That is even truer today of the world, and especially of the U.S., than it was when written in 1939.

In response, Woodlock wrote: "Today the modern philosophy of Naturalism denies both conscience and God. One thing we can safely predict of any social order that is erected upon a theory of human amoralism . It must, if it is to be 'order,' take the ant heap or the hive as its model. It cannot stop short of that...[and] there can be no 'liberty' for anyone in an amoral social order, any more than there is liberty for an ant or a bee." To be rid of God, then, we'll give up even the liberty we now use to rail against Him!

Woodlock's final words are chilling: "To those who believe that man is a moral creature, Mrs. McCormick's conclusion is convincing. We shall see the world's crisis beginning to resolve when we see the law of right and wrong entering into the dispute — not before. To those who do not so believe, the crisis should be no crisis at all, but rather a step toward the order which their philosophy foresees and demands ."

So, while you celebrate the "winter holiday," others are also celebrating, but for quite a different reason. They celebrate the demise of morality in America, and their success in separating the American people from the God Who inspired the founding of this nation, upon Whose principles we built such prosperity and power, and Whose rejection clears the way for their socialist fantasies. Those are the same fantasies, always presented with such beautifully rhetoric and noble images, that were responsible for such horror and human suffering in the last century, including over 150 million deaths. Yet we will do it all again, if not worse, all because man insists on denying his God and worshipping himself.

less than half of college administrators (41%) and only a third of the students (32%) think that people should promulgate their religious beliefs by whatever legal means available

That means that over three-quarters of U.S. college students either do not support the Constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech and freedom of religion, or are lukewarm about those freedoms, at best.

Statement B does not follow from Statement A.

I can be a strong supporter of someone's right to be as obnoxious as they wish in promulgating their religious beliefs, and believe at the same time that it is not something they "should" do.

What better way to separate Americans from their Founding moral, political and economic roots than by the corruption of public education, which reaches every child?

MERRY CHRISTMAS

"We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other."- John Adams, Oct. 11, 1798
'nuff said.

Thinking that "people should promulgate their religious beliefs by whatever legal means available" is actually a pretty strong opinion isn't it? That's a lot of promulgation.

Catholic Ping - let me know if you want on/off this list

"Winterfest" seems to be the term slouching toward...

And how many know the "12 Days of Christmas" end in January...?

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