Posted on 11/20/2013 1:59:14 PM PST by pastorbillrandles
And at the end of the days I Nebuchadnezzar lifted up mine eyes unto heaven, and mine understanding returned unto me, and I blessed the most High, and I praised and honoured him that liveth for ever, whose dominion is an everlasting dominion, and his kingdom is from generation to generation: And all the inhabitants of the earth are reputed as nothing: and he doeth according to his will in the army of heaven, and among the inhabitants of the earth: and none can stay his hand, or say unto him, What doest thou?(Daniel 4:34-35)
I believe that the God of the Bible rules in the affairs of men and of nations. History, is indeed “His Story” . Therefore I believe also that there are Kairos *moments for nations as well as people.There is no doubt in my mind that there are special times ordained of God, for good or evil, watershed moments set for people and nations as well as individuals.
The horrifying events of November 22-24, 1963 haunt most of us Americans because we instinctively sense that they represented such a Kairos moment. America has never been the same since these events and their fallout as this American Thinker article illustrates,
“Three Minutes Which Transformed America”
What a contrast between the America before the Kennedy Assassination, (and the shocking slaying of the accused assassin on the live news report on television), and the America afterwards. Our nation almost immediately headed down the tracks like a runaway mine cart, veering sharply left, descending into the abyss of Viet Nam, the cultural and sexual revolution, race riots, and other violent assassinations.
We even subsequently witnessed the demon possession of the formerly moderately liberal Democratic party by far left revolutionaries, sexual deviant pressure groups, identity politics, and Marxist disciples of Saul Alinsky, leading us 50 years later to the most radical, American hating, racially polarizing president in American history!
It is instructive to see news reports of the time leading up to the assassination of the President. An excellent documentary showing this is Three Shots That changed America . Starting with the morning of November 22, and using only films and news reports from the time, we follow the events of the fateful two days.
We see in the film glimpses of the old America in the respectfully dressed, well scrubbed crowds lining the Texas streets to get a glimpse of the President. One gets a sense of confident optimism in the clear air that November morning.
Sure there were warning tremors of trouble to come, such as an assassination attempt at a retired General, known for his right-wing leanings. Also the American UN Ambassador Adlai Stevenson was harangued in Dallas by an unruly crowd.
In what would be his last speech, at the Fort Worth Chamber of commerce, JFK reasserted America’s global committment to be a defender and beacon of freedom and liberty throughout the world. It was with good humor and respect that the President and first lady were received, and the breakfast ended with the MC asking everyone to bow their heads in the Spirit of prayer, and offered a heartfelt, Biblical prayer for the President and the nation.
The documentary is heartbreaking, as we follow the President to the fatal motorcade, the scene shifting from happy crowds, to sheer terror and panic, as the shots ring out and the motorcade rushes to the Parkland hospital. Americans are deeply marked by the tragic, iconic imagery which ensued. The badly frightened first lady, cradling her husbands wounded head, the Priests rushing to the hospital to administer last rites,the swearing-in of the new President Johnson, his wife Ladybird on one side, and Jackie in a bloodstained dress on the other, as a witness.
I believe that it was a political calculation immediately afterwards that helped set the nation on such a self-destructive course, that we have never recovered from it.
How was the deceased President to be regarded? For what cause was he martyred?
The real truth of history is that JFK was a cold warrior, and a staunch anti-communist. He may have been a Democrat and a liberal, but in the older classic sense. That Kennedy died at the hands of a communist, was a fact many on the left at that time found to be hard to bear.
The narrative being cultivated by the left, leading up to the assassination was that right-wing, conservative groups such as the John Birch society, were dangerous, violent seditionists, but not well-meaning leftists. But Kennedy was killed by a man of the far left, an avowed Marxist!
The grieving Jackie Kennedy was quoted as lamenting,
“He didn’t even have the satisfaction of being killed for civil rights. It’s — it had to be some silly little Communist.”
George Will explained that the Kennedy media machine then kicked into revision mode, in order to elevate the assassination by erasing the “silly little communist” , and penciling in traditional America as the culprit
She thought it robbed his death of any meaning. But a meaning would be quickly manufactured to serve a new politics. First, however, an inconvenient fact — Oswald — had to be expunged from the story. So, just 24 months after the assassination, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., the Kennedys’ kept historian, published a 1,000-page history of the 1,000-day presidency without mentioning the assassin.
The transformation of a murder by a marginal man into a killing by a sick culture began instantly — before Kennedy was buried. The afternoon of the assassination, Chief Justice Earl Warren ascribed Kennedy’s “martyrdom” to “the hatred and bitterness that has been injected into the life of our nation by bigots.” The next day, James Reston, the New York Times luminary, wrote in a front-page story that JFK was a victim of a “streak of violence in the American character,” especially of “the violence of the extremists on the right.”
Never mind that adjacent to Reston’s article was a Times report on Oswald’s communist convictions and associations.
Three days after the assassination, a Times editorial, “Spiral of Hate,” identified JFK’s killer as a “spirit”: The Times deplored “the shame all America must bear for the spirit of madness and hate that struck down” Kennedy. The editorialists were, presumably, immune to this spirit. The new liberalism-as-paternalism would be about correcting other people’s defects.(George Will, Expunging Oswald,October 9, 2013)
Thus it began, the relentless false witness against the American people, the right wing and American values. Perpetrated by the press, the power elites, the educators and of course Hollywood, these lies have seriously damaged America, by turning the nation over to the supposedly morally superior left, putting traditional American values on the defensive, accusing Patriots of what the left itself is, hateful, violent and misogynistic. Lies are powerful. Look at how they treat the perfectly peaceful Tea Party and compare it to the coddling they have given to the violent, lawless Occupy movement.
My only comfort in all of this is that God is in control of history, and will have the last word concerning nations.
Our nation has gone mad, it has gone crazy, and seems to have lost its mind. Perhaps God will have mercy on us once again, and restore to us our minds, if we would just “look up to heaven again” in humility as Nebuchadnezzar once did, we too can be forgiven, restored and reclothed with the dignity God once afforded us in former times.
* Kairos is one of two greek words for time, the other being Chronos. Chronos, from which we get our word Chronology, Chronicle, and Chronometer (clock,) refers to linear time, measurable by clock, and calendar. Kairos means a set time, or a season of destiny or of special meaning.
also on that date... CS Lewis died, Aldous Huxley died, Doctor Who launched!
I remember that spirit of hate schtick well. The Left has been hitting that note for all of my life. I was well familiar with it by the time I graduated High School in ‘76.
I believe that God speaks to us in current events and in the workings of history , that is if we have ears to hear. The challenge is to try to interpret just what it is that God is saying in the twists and turns of daily events.
Because of the assassination of President Kennedy, November 22, 1963 is a day in history that has gone down as one of those “I know exactly where I was and what I was doing and thinking ” days, like 9-11 is to this generation. Television transmitted the nightmare instantly to hundreds of millions , and cast a surreal shadow over America and the world.
But the events of the day overshadowed the deaths of both CS Lewis and Aldous Huxley. All three died within hours of each other. What is it that God’s Wisdom is crying out about in this strange confluence of events?
These three, Kennedy, Huxley and Lewis were the embodiment of different ideals of the times they lived in. Their influence helped shape their own and following generations.
Kennedy was a symbol of the post World War 2 America, he was a cold warrior, and an ardent anti-communist. His inauguration was the passing of he torch to the new generation and he represented American confidence. His rhetoric was brimming with hope, the future, and sacrifice for the better good. He was young, handsome, and appeared (by carefully crafted imagery) virile and healthy.
CS Lewis, was a British man of letters, an Oxford Don, and a veteran of the horrors of World War One . He had been an atheist until sometime after the war, when he was “Dragged kicking and screaming into faith”, as “the most reluctant convert ever”.
But he would by his regular BBC broadcasts through World War 2, lucidly and confidently give a besieged and battered people a reason for the christian hope he had within him.
His lectures on air would eventually be published as books, such as Mere Christianity, The Great Divorce, The Abolition of Man, and Surprised by Joy.These are considered classics of apologetics.
Lewis’s children’s novels have also become classics, such as his Chronicles of Narnia series enjoyed by millions. The Christian subtext of Narnia and his Space Trilogy as well as the non fictions books Lewis wrote have convinced millions of the claims of the christian faith.
On that same November day ,Aldous Huxley died. Huxley also represents an aspect of his times. He was the grandson of the Zoologist,Thomas Huxley, friend and contemporary of Charles Darwin, known as “Darwin’s bulldog”, for his famous debates over clergymen who objected to Darwin’s theories.
Aldous Huxley was a man of letters also, his most famous book being Brave New World, a novel about the future of society, in which the masses are controlled by a technocratic elite, using pleasurable Pavlovian conditioning to manipulate them.
Huxley was also an acquaintance of British occultist Aleister Crowley who introduced him to the psychedelic drug peyote as far back as the 1930′s.
As a philosopher, Huxley became a vocal advocate for various new forms of consciousness, including Vedanta Hinduism, and the use of psychedelic drugs.
In 1954 He published an influential study of consciousness altering drugs, which he called THE DOORS OF PERCEPTION,.(Jim Morrison named his rock band,THE DOORS having been influenced by Huxley’s ideas).Huxley was one of the leading philosophical proponents of the use of LSD in the fifties and sixties.
Each of these three were summoned to judgment on the same day in 1963. the christian apologist , the president of the world’s most powerful nation, and the atheistic advocate of hinduism and drug use.
Could it be that the Lord called them home on the same day to speak to a generation (baby Boomers) as a contrast ? Could it be that each of them who impacted their generation and the one that followed so profoundly, were called to judgment, that we might consider our own paths?
Huxley represents the dismal end of what seemed so promising in the days of his grandfather Thomas. All society need do is dismiss the church and the Bible , and to follow Darwin, into a bright shiny future of (godless) enlightenment.
What would become of the BRAVE NEW (godless) WORLD , crafted by the west after listening to Darwin and Huxley’s grandfather ? Would the west find some new meaning now that science had finally supplanted the christian God?
Perhaps Huxley’s end was the answer to the question, for Huxley’s last request as he lay dying on November 22, 1963, was for two more doses of LSD!
Very little about Kennedy’s carefully crafted image proved to be true. Contrary to the image, Kennedy wasn’t healthy at all , in fact he took daily cocktails of drugs just to function without pain.
The “Camelot” Image of the wholesome young family man, in love with his beautiful wife, was only made possible because a fawning press covered over his penchant for adultery.
When it became politically untenable he cut ties with Frank Sinatra so as not to be (rightly) perceived as being too comfy with people connected to Mafioso.
The generation that came into adulthood would come to be disillusioned by ‘the crafted Image’ in general, after Kennedy’s death. Pessimism would replace the unbounded confidence in Government, and in America as a force for good.
Unfortunately Kennedy’s hidden sexual morality would come to be openly embraced by a whole generation of young cynics, shortly after his death. But since most people aren’t ‘Kennedy’s’ the consequences of such actions cannot easily be swept under the rug.
Out of the “sexual revolution” that would soon sweep away ‘traditional’ American Judeo Christian virtues, would come the bitter harvests of illegitimacy, poverty, the breakdown of the family and society, that we see today.
How many of these disaffected young people, having long lost their faith through the “Scientific Atheism” of Thomas Huxley, or had tried to fill the vacuum in their lives by Aldous Huxley’s promotion of Drug use, or Eastern Mysticism, have picked up a copy of Mere Christianity at some point in their life, and found a reason again to believe in God, and in Jesus Christ His Son?
I wonder how many who had embraced the godless hedonism embodied by Kennedy, and instead of play acting as he did, just dropped all pretense and “Did their thing”, until it ruined them morally,spiritually and even physically?
But I know for a fact that time and again this has happened , that people like this have been given, perhaps a copy of THE ABOLITION OF MAN, or MERE CHRISTIANITY By CS Lewis and they found the understanding they needed to find their way back to God and sanity . I think God let these three die on the same day for us to consider these things. What kind of legacy would you want to leave?
interesting commentary!
One might say that the turning point was the outcome of the stolen 1960 election.
good point!
It really happen when we took God out of the schools and public arena. If you remember . We took prayer out of the public schools and we had court cases that preceding the Cuban crisis. That spring of 1962 we had a judgement limiting prayers. I found it no strange coincide to us almost blowing up the world . When Kennedy broadcast it everyone around the world prayed like “no tomorrow.” That is what saved us not just his administration thinking. Then a funny thing happen the following spring in court more limitation on God in the public square then that falI his assissnation. When you include less prayers . Less intercessory prayers I believed caused the horrors of the 1960’s. Well when you tell God to take a hike. We are lead to our own devices without God. Remember the asinine God is dead movement started around then too. Major upheavals in that decade .
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