Disregard God and violence results

By Patrice Lewis

Friday morning’s headlines were enough to make people reel in horror: five cops ambushed and killed, nine wounded in Dallas at a Black Lives Matter protest. As of this writing, the story is still developing, but it promises to be ugly no matter what additional information comes to light.

Recently, I reread James Michener’s “Hawaii,” which covers, among much else, the impact of missionaries in the Aloha state. During a scene in which whalers and sailors were rioting after the town cracked down on its grog shops and available “service” girls, the Hawaiian ruler Malama asks the prissy little missionary Abner how these so-called “civilized” men could behave in such an uncivilized way.

“We are all animals, Malama,” Abner replies. “Only the laws of God keep us within the confines of decency.” He then admits to being ashamed of the way his countrymen were behaving – since, of course, they weren’t obeying the laws of God.

Some time ago, Dennis Prager wrote a powerful column on how to solve all the problems in the world. Yes, all. Every single one. It’s called the Ten Commandments. Not the 10 suggestions, not the 10 recommendations, the Ten Commandments. Consider the following pertinent excerpts, italics mine:

Properly understood and applied, the Ten Commandments are really all humanity needs to make a beautiful world. While modern men and women, in their hubris, believe that they can and must come up with new ideas to make a good world, the truth is there is almost nothing new to say.

If people and countries lived by the Ten Commandments, all the great moral problems would disappear. Or, to put it another way, all the great evils involve the violation of one or more of the Ten Commandments.

I am the Lord your God … There are moral atheists and there are immoral believers, but there is no chance for a good world based on atheism. Ultimately, a godless and religion-free society depends on people’s hearts to determine right from wrong, and that is a very weak foundation.

Do not have other gods … Plenty of people have died in history in the name of God. But many more have been killed, tortured and deprived of liberty in the name of humanity and progress or some other post-Judeo-Christian value … a free society can survive only if its citizens believe themselves to be morally accountable to God.

Do not take God’s name in vain … People have misinterpreted this commandment. … [W]e are forbidden from doing evil in God’s name. Only when thus understood does the rest of the commandment make sense – that God will not “cleanse,” or forgive, the person who does this.

In our increasingly secularized and violent society, people are forgetting the power of accountability and its role in keeping us moral, safe and calm.

In 1811, the first chief justice of the Supreme Court, John Jay, recounted to a friend: “I was at a large party, of which … several … spoke freely and contemptuously of religion. … An atheist very abruptly remarked that there was no God, and he hoped the time would come when there would be no religion in the world. I very concisely remarked that if there was no God there could be no moral obligations, and I did not see how society could subsist without them.”

Historian Bill Federer, summarizing the importance of literacy and the Law among the early Hebrews, wrote:

The Law was empowered when people were taught that:

  • There is a God who knows every thought and sees every action;
  • God wants you to be fair; and
  • God will hold you accountable in the next life.

When the priests neglected teaching the Law, everyone did what was right in their own eyes and the country fell into moral chaos. … The pattern was clear – for a country to maintain order without a king, there needed to be a citizenry educated in moral restraints. This was understood during America’s colonial era, where education and morals were a high priority.

America no longer teaches morals, personal responsibility, or above all accountability to a Higher Power. Instead we’re taught to worship our feeeeelings, cultivate victimhood, obsess over “microaggressions,” and pretend God isn’t necessary to prevent us from reverting to violent, primitive behavior.

Progressives have advanced the agenda that humans are mere animals and morality is a useless, prudish contrivance of our Judeo-Christian past from a bunch of fuddy-duddies who simply want to spoil everyone else’s fun.

But no one was having fun in Dallas last night.

As God is taken out or denied in our society, we’re no longer trying to fight our sinful nature. Instead we welcome it. Has America become freer and more independent as a result? We may fight religion. We may fight God. But we cannot fight the fact that America is becoming more obsessively government-controlled. And as we’re already seeing, governmental fiat is a very poor replacement for godly self-control.

Please watch this short video by a professor from the Harvard Business School in Boston named Clayton Christensen where he mentions a conversation he had with a Marxist economist from China. When asked what he had learned in America, the Marxist replied, “I had no idea how critical religion is to the functioning of democracy. … The reason why democracy works is not because the government was designed to oversee what everybody does; but rather, democracy works because most people, most of the time, voluntarily choose to obey the law. In your past, most Americans attended a church or synagogue every week, and they were taught there by people who they respected. … Because if you take away religion, you can’t hire enough police.

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Increasingly, we will be waking up to more and more horrific headlines unless America can recapture what once made it great: namely, allegiance to our king, God.

Media wishing to interview Patrice Lewis, please contact [email protected].

Patrice Lewis

Patrice Lewis is a WND editor and weekly columnist, and the author of "The Simplicity Primer: 365 Ideas for Making Life more Livable." Visit her blog at www.rural-revolution.com. Read more of Patrice Lewis's articles here.


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