There is a way that seems right to a man, but in the end it leads to death.
(Proverbs 14:12, NIV)
We know that the law is spiritual; but I am unspiritual, sold as a slave to sin. I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it. So I find this law at work: When I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God's law; but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God—through Jesus Christ our Lord!
(Romans 7:14-25, NIV)
We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all.
(Isaiah 53:6, NIV)
The Basic Recommended Reading List by Author:
God, The Holy Bible
Asimov, Isaac, Nine Tomorrows
Bennett, Arthur, The Valley of Vision
Brimelow, Peter, Alien Nation
Buchanan, Patrick J., Everything published by St. Martin's Press
Burnham, James, Suicide of the West: An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism
Chesterton, Gilbert Keith, His entire anthology, excepting "Manalive" but including the "Father Brown" series
Conrad, Joseph, Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim
Fleming, Thomas, Socialism (Political Systems of the World)
Kirk, Russell, The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot and The Roots of American Order
Orwell, George, Politics and the English Language
Postman, Neil, Amusing Ourselves to Death and Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology
Schaeffer, Francis A., How Should We Then Live? and Escape from Reason
Choice Quotes:
"As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see 'the River Tiber foaming with much blood'. That tragic and intractable phenomenon which we watch with horror on the other side of the Atlantic but which there is interwoven with the history and existence of the States itself, is coming upon us here by our own volition and our own neglect. Indeed, it has all but come. In numerical terms, it will be of American proportions long before the end of the century. Only resolute and urgent action will avert it even now."
-The Right Honourable John Enoch Powell MBE, 1968 (nearly forty years prior to the attack on London and the "rioting youth" in France)
"A man did not stand up and say 'I believe in Jupiter and Juno and Neptune,etc., as he stands up and says 'I believe in God the Father Almighty' and the rest of the Apostles Creed...Polytheism fades away at its fringes into fairy-tales or barbaric memories; it is not a thing like monotheism as held by serious monotheists. Again it does not satisfy the need to cry out on some uplifted name or some noble memory in moments that are themselves noble and uplifted; such as the birth of a child or the saving of a city."
-G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man
"A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murder is less to fear.”
-Marcus Tullius Cicero, in a speech to the Roman Senate, 42 B.C.
"With nothing higher than human opinion upon which to base judgments and with ethics equaling no ethics, the justification for seeing crime and cruelty as disturbing is destroyed. The very word crime and even the word cruelty lose meaning. There is no final reason on which to forbid anything -- 'If nothing is forbidden, then anything is possible.'
-Francis A. Schaeffer and C. Everett Koop, Whatever Happened to the Human Race?
"Hand wringing over the demise of our culture accomplishes little more than getting chapped hands. Anyone who walks according to God's Word already knows we live in a world with problems. Is it any surprise?"
--Rev. Robert Fleischmann, National Director of Christian Life Resources