Monday, November 2, 2020

Politics is Only Part of the Problem

 The alienation and division are symptomatic of a deeper spiritual decline in America.  As John Adams observed when addressing the Massachusetts Militia:

We have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion. Avarice, Ambition,  Revenge or Galantry, 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 to the government of any other.

Much of the panic the Left is both experiencing and promoting around COVID-19 is like that around AIDS.  People terrified of death will do anything to avoid confronting their own mortality.   Deaths comes for us all; we need to face that with either hope: "For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord," or an acceptance that the party does not go on forever. (This should not be a hard decision; if in doubt consider Pascal's Wager.)  The unrelenting rage about AIDS came from the belief that they would be young, sexually active, and beautiful forever.  AIDS ravaged its victims' looks, made many impotent (although not before infecting hundreds to thousands of others), and ended the lives of many men barely adults.  

There are strong parallels; the Left is terrified of death, because they either do not know the grace and eternal life that Jesus promises, or they reject it because it is contrary to their pride, or desire to avoid confronting:

18 The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness, 19 since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. 20 For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.

21 For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. 22 Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools 23 and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles.

24 Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. 25 They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.

26 Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. 27 In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error.

28 Furthermore, just as they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, so God gave them over to a depraved mind, so that they do what ought not to be done. 29 They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, 30 slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; 31 they have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy. 32 Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them.

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