Posted on 01/01/2011 5:57:04 PM PST by rhema
What should we laud or lament in the year just ended? Where should we turn our attention in 2011? One troubling trend, I suggest, dwarfs all others in importance. It's the shrinking influence and declining prestige of religion in our nation today.
Increasingly, Americans see religion as a private matter with little to contribute to public debate -- even on issues with moral dimensions, such as marriage and family, abortion and euthanasia. In the crusade to banish faith from public life, judges order county courthouses to be stripped of plaques listing the Ten Commandments, and activists attack Christian hospitals that decline to perform abortions.
Our growing distaste for religion springs, in part, from our modern hatred of constraints on our behavior, and from our equating freedom with living exactly as we please. Judeo-Christianity presents an obstacle here. It holds that there are universal moral truths -- accessible to reason -- that should shape our conduct, and that create obligations to others that require sacrifices we might prefer not to make.
In recent decades, the rise of psychology -- which is replacing religion as a vehicle for understanding what it means to be human -- has greatly facilitated our cherished project of throwing off moral constraints. Almost 50 years ago, psychologist Philip Rieff spelled out the implications in his seminal book, "The Triumph of the Therapeutic."
Rieff wrote that our society's model for the organization of personality -- our paragon, or character ideal -- has undergone a radical shift. The Christian model of man, he explained, dominant for 1,500 years, has been increasingly replaced by "psychological man" as our society's primary character type. The "soul" has been replaced by the "self."
Why does this matter? Traditional Christianity, Rieff observed, made great moral demands on believers.
(Excerpt) Read more at startribune.com ...
The bible said this would happen. Does it surprise anyone? The apostasy.
We were warned about what would lead to the failure of our great experiment.
Not sure I agree that religious belief is all that much in decline. Our lamestream media might want us to think so and have thus created such an impression but ...
Not so sure.
Who gave the warning, might I ask? I don’t recall the event.
"Today, we Americans take our democracy for granted. But our founders warned that our system of self-government is an experiment, and is not guaranteed to succeed. If we allow the "ordered liberty" they envisioned to degenerate to license -- as our embrace of the psychological model of man makes likely -- our experiment may fail."
“God who gave us life gave us liberty. And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are a gift from God? That they are not to be violated but with His wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, and that His justice cannot sleep forever.”……Thomas Jefferson (excerpts are inscribed on the walls of the Jefferson Memorial in the nations capital)
Our founders ! Wasn’t them the guys who wrote the Constitution that the guy on MSNBC said didn’t count any more cause it was wrote so long ago?
>>Not sure I agree that religious belief is all that much in decline.<<
I don’t know how old you are but let me assure you that gays, abortion, and the Godless society we have today would not have occurred back in the ‘50s.
And they are called “the founders” rather than the “founding fathers” because of women’s lib. The term “founding fathers” is considered offensive to radical feminists. To appease the feminists, the MSM replaced the term “founding fathers” with “founders” or “framers” of the constitution, so we don’t have to be confronted with the fact that they were all men.
“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
- John Adams
When we cease to be a moral and religious people, our government will fail. Simple enough equation....
It never occurred to me that you were referring to the article itself. Why would you do that? It's very confusing when you lose the context of your posting.
“Why do the heathen rage and the people imagine a vain thing.
The kings of the earth set themselves and the rulers take counsel together against the Lord and against his Anointed saying,
Let us break their bands asunder and cast away their cords from us.
He that sits in the heavens shall laugh: the Lord shall have them in derision.
Then shall he speak unto them in his wrath and vex them in his sore displeasure”
I say good riddance.
Indeed, it’s not as if the values that created the happiest, most prosperous and all-around most successful societies in human history could have any value today. /s
LOL - won’t happen again!
Liberals claim the demise of religion gives people more freedom but if there are no personal restraints on behavior, then what’s left to keep in you line? Government! The simple rules of life every one once followed have now been replaced by a thicket of regulations that govern every aspect of our conduct. Its debatable whether that has made us more freer than our parents were.
I say good riddance.
So also said the men of Sodom and Gomorrah.
And countless other 'civilizations'.
Those that turn from God, reap the fruits of their arrogance as God removes HIS restraining hand and gives them up to their own lusts and depravities.
There is only one recipe for a Nation to prosper. It is as it has always been:
2 Chronicles 7:14 If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.
I agree with you.
I don’t belong to any established church but strongly feel I am a Christian.
Many of my acquaintances attend church but don’t seem to act as Christians. Going to church is something they ‘do’ on Sunday, and repeating passages from the Holy Bible substitutes for incorporating Judeo-Christian morals into their everyday lives.
I agree with you about "founding fathers" vs. "founders," but "Framers" actually does point to a meaningful distinction.
The "Founders" were the men who prosecuted the Continental Congresses and the Revolutionary War. They would include Thomas Jefferson, for example.
But Jefferson was not a Framer. The Federalists, with keen foresight, sent him to Paris as ambassador to the French court, to get him out of town so he couldn't impede the great Federalist project of overhauling the Republic that Jefferson had done so much to help found.
The Framers were the men in the room when the Constitution was written (they "framed" the Republic); or more broadly, participated in the Philadelphia Convention, or the ratification conventions in the several States (Patrick Henry refused to attend in Philadelphia, and George Mason bolted the convention before it concluded; but both came to the Virginia ratification convention; likewise, John Hancock did not attend in Philadelphia -- he was an Antifederalist like Mason and Patrick Henry -- but eventually joined his ratification delegation), or more broadly still, participated in the public debate over the Constitution (this included a woman or two, btw, writing pseudonymously to the papers), which last category at a broad, tenuous stretch, could be deemed to include Jefferson, since he corresponded with some of the convention participants like, most signficantly, James Madison.
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