" It Will Take a Moral Movement "

americanthinker.com ^ | November 27, 2012 | Christopher Chantrill

[virgil283]

" After the election, conservatives are still full of foreboding -- and also a pessimistic hope...... McLoughlin argues that the great reforms in North American history have always been preceded by a religious Awakening. Liberal economist Robert William Fogel was so impressed that he wrote The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism to warn liberals of the coming threat to their power...... What was going on just before the American Revolution? It was the massive Great Awakening led by the Wesley brothers and Jonathan Edwards. ......" ---This concept goes deeper than this article suggests. I would recommend this book to those interested..---

[virgil283]

http://www.amazon.com/2000-Years-Charismatic-Christianity-pentecostal/dp/0884198723/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1355066894&sr=8-1&keywords=2000+years+of+charismatic+christianity

[CityCenter]

The church needs to stop being a social club and start standing for something.

[TEXOKIE]

Thanks for the article and the ray of hope it brings.

[upchuck]

Agreed. I have friends that attend a megachurch. They are constantly telling me about all the social happenings at their church. Dinners, parties, outings, etc.

They appear distressed when I say, “That all sounds nice but when do you worship God? When do you do his work?”

[virgil283]

“In Fogel’s view, the Fourth Great Awakening now underway has resulted in attacks on material corruption, the rise of pro-life and pro-family movements, campaigns for values-oriented school curricula, an expansion of tax revolt, and an attack on entitlements. Fogel observes: All of the Great Awakenings are “not merely, nor primarily, religious phenomena. They are primarily political phenomena in which the evangelical churches represent the leading edge of an ideological and political response to accumulated technological, economic, and social changes that undermined the received culture.” -—’The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism’ by Robert William Fogel -—( wait isn’t that the Tea Party)

[HangnJudge]

“Morality is not the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy,
but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.”
Imannuel Kant

[HangnJudge]

The Roots of Violence:

Wealth without work,
Pleasure without conscience,
Knowledge without character,
Commerce without morality,
Science without humanity,
Worship without sacrifice,
Politics without principles

Mahatma Gandhi

[mjp]

Don't look now, liberals, but this is probably the beginning of the end of the Liberal Hour. We will know this for sure if and when a great new moral movement arises in America.

Moral values are the same as religious values.They are the only protection against the basic cause of the corruption now rampant in America, which is secularism. The cause must be secularism because, as Dostoevsky famously said: "if there is no God then anything is permitted."

[loveliberty2]

Add this to the Ghandi words:

In the course of his research for "Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile" (Harper Collins), Joseph Pearch traveled to Moscow to interview the writer. The excerpt below is from that interview:

Solzhenitsyn: "In different places over the years I have had to prove that socialism, which to many western thinkers is a sort of kingdom of justice, was in fact full of coercion, of bureaucratic greed and corruption and avarice, and consistent within itself that socialism cannot be implemented without the aid of coercion. Communist propaganda would sometimes include statements such as "we include almost all the commandments of the Gospel in our ideology". The difference is that the Gospel asks all this to be achieved through love, through self-limitation, but socialism only uses coercion. This is one point.

"Untouched by the breath of God, unrestricted by human conscience, both capitalism and socialism are repulsive."

America's Founders possessed a unique understanding of human nature, of history's long record of the human struggle for individual liberty and against oppressive coercive power exercised by some human beings, whether alone or in combinations, who considered themselves of superior understanding and ability.

Their belief in a "Creator," in "Divine Providence," in "the laws of nature and of nature's god," and in a "Supreme judge of the world," (Declaration of Independence), allowed them to frame a Constitution for self-government which reflected the unique idea that because life, liberty and rights are Creator-endowed, they are "inalienable."

That "unique idea" allowed the light of liberty to beam from America for over 200 years.

Today, small minds, limited by their college-age fascination with counterfeit ideas of likewise small thinkers like Mao, Marx and Lenin, with arrogant and self-important ambitions, may, for a time, fool American citizens into yielding up their liberty on promises of benevolence and redistribution, but when the history of America is written, they will be seen as "destroyers" of liberty for those who followed them.

[MachIV]

I live in a community with one of America’s top 10 mega churches. It’s the same story here. Mostly just put smaller churches out of business. Sortof the Sams Wholesale Club of evangelical Christianity.