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REFERENCE EDITION
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American Christian Voice Volume 12 No. 6 Contents Don’t Miss These! ABOUT US 4.Yak Bak 16.Would you like to join the ministry of the American Christian Voice? 27.Puzzle Page!! 36.Where you can buy a copy of the American Christian Voice... 36.Subscription Info FEATURES 8.Everyone Benefits When You Make Charitable Gifts 10.Well Versed: Biblical Answers to Today’s Tough Issues 11.Ask the Rabbi: Was Thanksgiving patterned after a
Jewish Holiday? 17.How to Expose Liberal Hypocrisy 22.Seeing the “Guys” 23.It’s Not a Game 25.Gold Star Family Inn 30.The Shortcomings of Government Charity 33.Who we are in Christ 37.Give Up the Ghost 38.Dr. Hill’s Health Tip 39.Dear Mr. President Trump... “A Nation Divided Against Itself Will Not Stand!” 46.Quotes About Entitlement 47.Government Cheese
About the Cover: The soul of the progressive liberals at its worst believes there is no God, so we have to make our own benevolence. At best, they do not understand how they cripple the masses with their “charity”. The heart of the compassionate conservatives understands that God has chosen His church to be His hands and feet in order to encourage and lift up the oppressed with knowledge and opportunity.
Dependency, Not Poverty Conservative Compassion vs. Liberal Pity Liberal vs. Conservative Beliefs
HE is the AllConsuming Fire!
It is a Worldwide Divide
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We have never ran an article more than 2 or three pages long.However, the topics regarding the two different worldviews cannot be discussed in short missives. Therefore, treat this issue as a reference guide when teaching students, friends and family members about the real issues surrounding the souls of Progressive Liberals and the hearts of Compassionate Conservatives. This issue cannot be skimmed over. Even though I am the editor and a self-described word smith, I had to look up a lot of unfamiliar words. Take the time to do the same. Read these articles more than once to really let it sink in. Now that this election is finally over we need to stand up as Christians and preach the Gospel first and doctrines afterwards. Love and not pity will make America strong as we all work together to model the best government we can in a fallen world led by fallen people. -ed
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So, George Bush, Sr., George W. Bush and wives revealed their true natures after all by not voting for the Republican nominee because they got their feelings hurt. Boo Hoo. By not voting, and George Sr. even going so far as to suggest he might vote for Hillary Clinton, we find them only concerned with self interest instead of concern for our country. We were not too surprised since Laura Bush announced she was pro choice after they left the White House and could not be lynched for it. Carl & Debbie Sischer, Omaha, NE _____________________________________ As a Canadian, I hate to comment on American politics but I have a suggestion on how Donald Trump can expose the true hearts of progressive liberals: Grant the 11,000,000 illegal immigrants amnesty and full citizenship with one caveat; they must sign a pledge to be life long republicans. If not, they have to all go home. What would the democrats all cry out for? SEND THEM BACK! (LOL) But seriously, if Mr. Trump did the same with the caveat that they could not vote in general elections... thus not adding 11 million voters to either party, the Dems would most likely lose interest in the plight of the illegals. Kara Alpines, Toronto, Canada ______________________________________ Liberals and conservatives are not a cultural difference but rather a battle of spiritual principalities. Good and evil. Light and darkness. All of the protesters signs that say, “Love Trumps Hate” could be held by either party. The problem is (as scripture points out) …(2 Cor.11:13) For
.Feed Back From Our Readers such men are false apostles, deceitful workers, masquerading as apostles of Christ. (14) And no wonder, for Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light. (15) It is not surprising, then, if his servants masquerade as servants of righteousness. Their end will correspond to their actions.… I am amazed at how many “Christian” Democrats support the platform of abortion for convenience; justify it as an act of compassion for the poor woman who has been inconvenienced by a baby. Or the Christians like former vice-president contender, Senator Kaine, that claim to be personally pro-life but politically pro death. The Bible says, “a double minded man is unstable in all his ways”. Maya Mings, Oakland, CA __________________________________________ I am a Christian and I am pro-choice. Having a woman suffer an unwanted pregnancy is hateful, not compassionate. The hypocritical Christians on the right boast that all life is sacred and then, are the first ones willing to gleefully electrocute a person to death as capital punishment. So, who really are the haters here? Karen Paris, Denton, TX Karen, most of us Christian hypocrites would be willing to give up the 50 or so capital death sentences each year if you are willing to give up the 1.21 million abortions each year. Do we have a deal? ed ________________________________________ I have been a subscriber for years to your magazine and have been impressed on the increase in the quality and content of your
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The American Christian Voice Magazine is published with the primary purpose being to educate the body of Christ through informative articles (Intelligent), to edify the body of Christ through inspirational articles of Christian faith and courage (Inspirational), and to promote the message that disciples of Christ are not under the penalty of sin or condemnation of it (Fun!). It is because of what Christ has done... not what we do. Our obedience to Love Him and Them, to the law, and our good works: now is out of our gratitude for that precious gift of grace and salvation; not as a motivation to be in right standing with God. Now that Christ has cloaked us with His Righteousness, God the Father looks at us as Sons/Daughters, not the stranger stealing His wallet. We are in training now. We are dedicated to be Kingdom builders as we realize that our unity can only represent God in our diversity as we love the lost through Christ. Our focus is on, and to, the invisible church which Jesus said, “The gates of hell would not prevail against.” We report the good as well as the bad within our church family as a testament for the necessity of a Savior. Our observations are made from a fairly moderate to conservative viewpoint.
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discontent is a matter of comparison
Dependency, Not Poverty There is no material poverty in the U.S. ere are a few facts about people whom the Census Bureau labels as poor. Dr. Robert Rector and Rachel Sheffield, in their study “Understanding Poverty in the United States: Surprising Facts About America’s Poor”, report that 80 percent of poor households have air conditioning; nearly threequarters have a car or truck, and 31 percent have two or more. Twothirds have cable or satellite TV. Half have one or more computers. Forty two percent own their homes. Poor Americans have more living space than the typical nonpoor person in Sweden, France or the U.K. What we have in our nation are dependency and poverty of the spirit, with people making unwise choices and leading pathological lives aided and abetted by the welfare state.
long-term poverty is not rocket science. First, graduate from high school. Second, get married before you have children, and stay married. Third, work at any kind of job, even one that starts out paying the minimum wage. And finally, avoid engaging in criminal behavior. It turns out that a married couple, each earning the minimum wage, would earn an annual combined income of $30,000. The Census Bureau poverty line for a family of two is $15,500, and for a family of four, it’s $23,000. By the way, no adult who starts out earning the minimum wage does so for very long.
The Census Bureau pegs the poverty rate among blacks at 35 percent and among whites at 13 percent. The illegitimacy rate among blacks is 72 percent, and among whites it’s 30 percent. A statistic that one doesn’t hear much about is that the poverty rate among black married families has been in the single digits for more than two decades, currently at 8 percent. For married white families, it’s 5 percent. Now the politically incorrect questions: Whose fault is it to have children without the benefit of marriage and risk a life of dependency? Do people have free will, or are they governed by instincts?
Since President Lyndon Johnson declared war on poverty, the nation has spent about $18 trillion at the federal, state and local levels of government on programs justified by the “need” to deal with some aspect of poverty. In a column of mine in 1995, I pointed out that at that time, the nation had spent $5.4 trillion on the War on Poverty, and with that princely sum, “you could purchase every U.S. factory, all manufacturing equipment, and every office building. With what’s left over, one could buy every airline, trucking company and our commercial maritime fleet. If you’re still in the shopping mood, you could also buy every television, radio and power company, plus every retail and wholesale store in the entire nation”. Today’s total of $18 trillion spent on poverty means you could purchase everything produced in our country each year and then some.
BY WALTER E. WILLIAMS
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There may be some pinhead sociologists who blame the weak black family structure on racial discrimination. But why was the black illegitimacy rate only 14 percent in 1940, and why, as Dr. Thomas Sowell reports, do we find that census data “going back a hundred years, when blacks were just one generation out of slavery … showed that a slightly higher percentage of black adults had married than white adults. This fact remained true in every census from 1890 to 1940″? Is anyone willing to advance the argument that the reason the illegitimacy rate among blacks was lower and marriage rates higher in earlier periods was there was less racial discrimination and greater opportunity?
No one can blame a person if he starts out in life poor, because how one starts out is not his fault. If he stays poor, he is to blame because it is his fault. Avoiding
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There’s very little guts in the political arena to address the basic causes of poverty. To do so risks being labeled as racist, sexist, uncaring and insensitive. That means today’s dependency is likely to become permanent.
And another thing... Public Schools Makes Students Dumb Do you wonder why Sen. Bernie Sanders and his ideas are so popular among
American college students? The answer is that they, like so many other young people who think they know it all, are really uninformed and ignorant. You say, “Williams, how dare you say that?! We’ve mortgaged our home to send our children to college.” Let’s start with the 2006 geographic literacy survey of youngsters between 18 and 24 years of age by National Geographic and Roper Public Affairs. Less than half could identify New York and Ohio on a U.S. map. Sixty percent could not find Iraq or Saudi Arabia on a map of the Middle East, and three-quarters could not find Iran or Israel. In fact, 44 percent could not locate even one of those four countries. Youngsters who had taken a geography class didn’t fare much better. By the way, when I attended elementary school, during the 1940s, we were given blank U.S. maps, and our assignment was to write in the states. Today such an assignment might be deemed oppressive, if not racist. According to a Philadelphia magazine article, the percentage of college grads who can read and interpret a food label has fallen from 40 to 30. They are six times likelier to know who won “American Idol” than they are to know the name of the speaker of the House. A high-school teacher in California handed out an assignment that required students to use a ruler. Not a single student knew how. An article on News Forum for Lawyers titled “Study Finds College Students Remarkably Incompetent” cites a study done by the American Institutes for Research that revealed that over 75 percent of two-year college students and 50 percent of four-year college students were incapable of completing everyday tasks. About 20 percent of four-year college students demonstrated only basic mathematical ability, while a steeper 30 percent of two-year college students could not progress past elementary arithmetic.
NBC News reported that Fortune 500 companies spend about $3 billion annually on training employees in “basic English.” Reported by Just Facts, in 2009, the Pentagon estimated that 65 percent of 17to 24-year-olds in the U.S. were unqualified for military service because of weak educational skills, poor physical fitness, illegal drug usage, medical conditions or criminal records. In January 2014, the commander of the U.S. Army Recruiting Command estimated this figure at 77.5 percent, and in June 2014, the Department of Defense estimated this figure at 71 percent. A few weeks ago, my column discussed the dishonesty of college officials. Here’s more evidence: Among high-school students who graduated in 2014 and took the ACT college readiness exam, here’s how various racial/ethnic groups fared when it came to meeting the ACT’s college readiness benchmarks in at least three of the four subjects: Asians, 57 percent; whites, 49 percent; Hispanics, 23 percent; and blacks, 11 percent. However, the college rates of enrollment of these groups were: Asians, 80 percent; whites, 69 percent; Hispanics, 60 percent; and blacks, 57 percent. What I am labeling as dishonest, fraudulent or deceitful comes from the fact that many
more students are admitted to college than are in fact college-ready. Admitting such students may satisfy the wants and financial interests of the higher education establishment, but whether it serves the interests of students, families, taxpayers and the nation is another question. To accommodate less college-ready students, colleges must water down their curricula, lower standards and abandon traditional tools and topics. Emory University English professor Mark Bauerlein writes in his book “The Dumbest Generation”: Tradition “serves a crucial moral and intellectual function. … People who read Thucydides and Caesar on war, and Seneca and Ovid on love, are less inclined to
construe passing fads as durable outlooks, to fall into the maelstrom of celebrity culture, to presume that the circumstances of their own life are worth a Web page.” Walter E. Williams is the John M. Olin distinguished professor of economics at George Mason University, and a nationally syndicated columnist. To find out more about Walter E. Williams and read features by other Creators Syndicate columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page. Copyright © 2016
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learn how to sow in order to reap Code that governs such groups), your gift can offer you a tax deduction. So, for example, if you are in the 25% tax bracket, and you give $1,000 to a qualified charity, you can subtract the $1,000 from your adjusted gross income, which will result in tax savings of $250. Upon making your gift, make sure you get a receipt that lists the name of the organization and the date and amount of your contribution. (Your maximum deduction will be limited to a percentage of your adjusted gross income.) You can do more than simply write a check, however. If you have stocks that have grown significantly in value, you may want to donate them to a charitable group. You will be allowed a charitable deduction for the full fair market value of the gift on the date of the transfer, even if your original cost was only a fraction of today’s value. Furthermore, you will avoid the capital gains taxes you’d have to pay if you sold the stock, provided you’ve held the stock for at least a year. If you do contribute appreciated stocks, you will want to be cognizant of the effect of your donation on your
Everyone Benefits When You Make Charitable Gifts ow that we are in the heart of the holiday season, you may be thinking about ways you can put your money where your heart is. Specifically, you might be pondering which groups you should support with charitable gifts. And as long as you choose groups that meet the right criteria, your generosity can also be rewarding to you, in the form of tax benefits. To begin with, you’ll want to make sure you are giving to a reputable charity. That means you’ll need to ask some questions. How does a group measure its effectiveness? Is it devoting as much of its contributions as possible to the actual work of the organization, or is it spending too much money on administrative costs? Generally, a worthwhile charity should spend at least 75% of its income on programs. You may be able to find this type of information on a charitable group’s annual report and its website. You can also go to the website of one of the agencies that evaluates charitable groups. On these sites, you can get a lot of information dealing with a charity’s effectiveness, income, spending and other topics. After you’ve identified a charity, or charities, you can decide how much you want to give and how you want to give it. If the charity has 501(c)(3) status (named after the section of the Internal Revenue
FROM EDWARD JONES FINANCIAL ADVISOR
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portfolio. If you were to give a sizable amount of growth-oriented stocks, would it affect your overall growth potential? Conversely, if you are primarily giving away relatively conservative, income-producing stocks, would it end up moving your portfolio in a riskier direction? When donating stocks, if at all possible try to do so in a way that does not harm your portfolio’s balance. In any case, whether you give cash or appreciated assets, you’ll need to make your gift by Dec. 31 if you’re going to deduct it on your 2016 taxes. So be as generous as you can afford, think about the effect of your gift on your own financial situation – and be prepared to act soon. This article was written by Edward Jones for your local Edward Jones Financial Advisor.
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the 1st amendment allows the church to speak about political candidates
Well Versed: Biblical Answers to Today’s Tough Issues by James L. Garlow
WELL VERSED CHAPTER ONE EXCERPT
Chapter One: Why Are We Quiet? I have always said and always will say that the studious perusal of the Sacred Volume [the Bible] will make us better citizens... Thomas Jefferson eople want to be taught more about the social and political issues of our day. In August 2015, respected pollster George Barna released the results of a survey that revealed this remarkable insight. But the survey also revealed an odd behavioral pattern. People who label themselves as conservatives do not speak up. Why? The answer might surprise you. It is not because they are afraid. They are not fearful of being called derogatory names, such as intolerant or hateful. According to the survey, they are quiet for one reason: they do not know what to say! They do not know how to state a biblical basis for their convictions. This book was born while reading the results of that survey. The results revealed that theologically and politically conservative people hold deep convictions. They simply are not sure how to convey those beliefs. One year prior, a Pew Research poll revealed more quite surprising, and unanticipated, information: people want their churches and pastors to speak up on the social and political issues of the day. You might not think that revelation particularly newsworthy, but it is. Only a few short years earlier, the overwhelming consensus was that they did not want pastors to speak out. But four years brought about a dramatic shift. The two responses switched places, with more people now saying they wanted pastors to speak out. What caused this change? And what had caused pastors to be silent in the first place? The Change Point Everything changed on July 2, 1954. Lyndon Baines Johnson returned from Texas after the election season of 1954 angry at two prominent businessmanFrank Gannett (media) and H.L. Hunt (oil)who had opposed him in his reelection bid for the Senate through their not-for-profit organizations. They had thought he was too soft on communism. When a bill overhauling the tax code was going through the Senate, Johnson added a few words to the proposal. What became known as the Johnson Amendment passed with no discussion and only a voice vote. The amendment effectively silenced and
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muzzled all pastors. Here's why: nearly all churches are classified as not-for-profit 501(c)() charitable organizations by the IRS. Johnson's amendment inadvertently made it illegal for a pastor, because of his affiliation with a not-for-profit organization, to endorse or oppose a candidate in a sermon. Johnson's legislative aide would later admit that they did not have churches and pastors in mind, only these two businessmen and their organizations. You might think the unintended outcome to be a good thing. But consider the following facts. First, there are twenty-nine categories, was suddenly silenced- the one that included America's churches! Second, what it means to oppose or endorse a candidate is unclear. For example, if a pastor says, "Vote to oppose abortion," and one candidate is pro-life and the other one is pro-abortion, did the pastor endorse a candidate? The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) cannot give a clear answer to the questions. Third, the First Amendment guarantees no governmental intrusion into the pulpit at all. None. The IRS has no authority to be the pulpit police, dictating what any pastor can say from any pulpit. And they know it. At the urging of the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a group of more than three thousand Christian and allied attorneys, several thousand pastors have intentionally violated the amendment since 2008 by endorsing or opposing a candidate from their pulpits. They then recorded their sermons and mailed them to the IRS. But the IRS has not taken a single church to court. Why not? The presumed answer is that the IRS does not want the Johnson Amendment to be scrutinized in the light of the U.S. Constitution, as it would most certainly be thrown out. However, for over sixty years, and muzzle pastors. I am not advocating that a pastor should or should not endorse or oppose a candidate. I am saying that it should be up to the pastor and that local church. The bottom line is that the First Amendment keeps the state from dictating what the church believes and practices. Finally, a cultural myth has developed where people wrongly believe pastors agreed not to speak out on political issues in exchange for churches having tax-exempt status. Such is not the case. Our nation
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granted the tax-exempt status to churches from the beginning because the Supreme Court agreed that whatever the government could tax, it could tax, it could kill. And if it could kill the church, there could be no true separation of church and state. Many pastors have bought into the lie
and gone silent. Pastors either don't know what to say regarding many social and political issues or won't say it. Many parishioners have become silent as well, and don't want their pastors to speak out. A silent pulpit means a silent pew. A silent pew produces an uninformed electorate. An uninformed electorate will not know what the One who created civil government has to say about how it should be run. To overcome this grand and lethal silence, this book was born. The Bible and Political and Social Issues Does the Bible speak to the political and social issues of our day? To begin to answer that question, can we agree that our nation is in trouble? There seems to be a strong consensus that our nation has problems- deep problems. No one thinks the massive debt is good. Our national security has people on edge. Waste, fraud, abuse, and corruption are widespread. Civil discourse in governmental bodies is almost gone. There is a strong sense among many that something has gone wrong. For these reasons alone, continue to read the pages that follow, as they contain some good new regarding real answers that can make a difference. The Bible speaks to every important issue of life. After all, it was God who came up with the idea of government. He established it and has clear principles about every major issue facing our nation or any nation. The Bible even uses the strong metaphor to say of Jesus: "The government will be on his shoulders"
believing in the present-day understanding of separation of church and state! After a 145-year hiatus, services were begun again on July 30, 2014, and are held every Wednesday night in the Capitol Building for members of Congress and their staff. These meetings are called the Jefferson Gathering in honor of the nation's third president. One more thing: How often do we hear someone say, You can't legislate morality? The fact is, all laws legislate morality. We have laws against murder because we believe that it is not right for people to murder, Laws against perjury (lying under oath), stealing, violating contracts- along with a host of other laws- are all attempts to legislate morality. Of course we legislate morality; that is the reason for laws. The Way Government was Intended Here is the good news: government- if properly ordered- can work. It can do what it is supposed to do. For just a moment, imagine with me that we could do away with the horrific messes we have in our national, state, and municipal governments right now. Suppose we could reconstruct government. What would it look like? What would make government function the way it is supposed to, bringing peace and tranquility to our communities? That is exactly what we will uncover- or rather rediscover- in the pages that follow. As a result, I hope you will become well versed on more than thirty different
political and social issues. When the Bible Speaks, Implies, or Stays Silent I readily acknowledge that the many issues we will cover are not equally weighted in Scripture. The Bible's response to the political and social issues of our day will fall into four categories: • Cases where the Bible speaks directly and clearly to some issues. (An example would be the definition of marriage in Genesis and stated again by Jesus in Matthew.) • Cases where the Bible speaks to overarching principles for today's issues. (An example might be the principles applied to minimum-wage laws.) • Cases where there are biblical inferences regarding present-day social and political issues. (An example would be the biblical approach to appropriate taxation.) • Those topics the Bible does not address via direct reference, overarching principle, or inference. (I choose not to discuss those topics.) I write the following pages with a healthy sense of humility, recognizing that the truth of God's Word is more expansive than this author could possible understand. With that in mind, let's move forward. This excerpt of Chapter 1 is from the book titled Well Versed written by James L. Garlow is available at Amazon.com.
CONTINUED
(Isaiah 9:6). Separation of Church and State Some of you are likely thinking, But wait! Don't we have separation of church and state? Where is that in the Constitution? It is not. Where is that in our national birth certificate, the Declaration of Independence? It is not. Then where does the phrase come from? It comes from a letter written by Thomas Jefferson to the Danbury Baptists in Connecticut on January 1, 1802, in which he used the phrase "wall of separation" to assure them that the federal government would not intrude into church life (that is, forcing a certain denominational state church on the people). But nowhere did he or any other Founder try to distance the federal government from the basic tenets of Christianity. On the contrary, the Bible was the book the Founders quoted most. Many people like to point out that Jefferson was not a Christian, but a Deist. Yet he got on his horse Sunday after Sunday and rode down Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House to the Capitol Building for weekly interdenominational Christian worship services- complete with preaching by a pastor from the Bible. In fact, there were weekly worship services in the U.S. Capitol Building from approximately 1800 to 1869. The Founders affirmed this practice. Weekly Christian worship services in the U.S. Capitol? So much for their
Ask the Rabbi - Was Thanksgiving patterned after a Jewish Holiday? merican pilgrims, who originated the Thanksgiving holiday, borrowed the A idea from Sukkot. The pilgrims were deeply
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FROM RABBI JEREMY STORCH
religious people. When they were trying to find a way to express their thanks for their survival and for the harvest, they looked to the Bible for an appropriate way of celebrating and found Sukkot. This is not the standard story taught in public schools today - but the Sukkot explanation of Thanksgiving fits better. The original Thanksgiving was a harvest festival (as is Sukkot), that was observed in the fall (as Sukkot is), and that Pilgrims would not have celebrated a holiday that was not in the Bible. Research shows that the first Thanksgiving was "a harvest festival that included feasts, sporting events, and other activities," concepts very much in keeping with the Jewish religious observance of Sukkot. In Jewish tradition, the Festival of Sukkot is a joyous occasion to give thanks and praise
to the Source of Creation for the bounty we enjoy. In fact, we are told that during Sukkot, "you shall have nothing but joy." [Lev. 16:15] Jews erect a sukkah, a harvest booth, in which they eat their meals, and sometimes sleep, during the festival. It is a reminder of the booths in which their ancestors are said to have dwelled during their forty-year Sinai sojourn. While we cannot be certain about what motivated those Pilgrim settlers to initiate a feast of thanksgiving, it is likely that they consciously drew on a model well-known to them from the Bible they cherished. Seeing themselves as new Israelites in a new "promised land," the Pilgrims surely found inspiration in Deuteronomy 16 in which God commands the ancient Israelites to observe the Feast of Booths--in Hebrew, Sukkot, "to rejoice before Adonai your God" at the time of the fall harvest [16:13].
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no self respecting person wants your pity least of all, mankind as a whole. It cannot reach out farther than what is suffered by Compassionate conservatism works because it addresses one person and still remain what it is supposed to be, co-suffering. Its strength people as individuals rather than as faceless units in a throng. hinges on the strength of passion itself, which, in contrast to reason, can TA remarkable feature of former They embraced the modest socialism of the comprehend only the particular, but has no President George H. Bush’s welfare state partly because they hoped to pronouncements was his unashamed use of stave off more draconian forms of socialist notion of the general and no capacity for the “L” word. Mr. Bush called his political organization, but also because they generalization. The sin of the Grand philosophy “compassionate conservatism,” genuinely sympathized with the plight of Inquisitor was that he, like Maximilien but he was not afraid to say the older, the less fortunate, whose condition they Robespierre, was “attracted toward les hommes faibles,” not stronger word that gives that philosophy its hoped to improve only because such meaning. through social The secret of attraction was legislation. In freedom indistinguishable nationalizing The word is love. almsgiving, the lies in educating people, from lust for power, but also because he liberals were Mr. Bush used the word when, during the whereas the secret of had depersonalized motivated, too, by presidential campaign, he was confronted the sufferers, lumped belief, so tyranny is in keeping by a man who spoke loosely and negligently the them together into an of illegitimate children and the welfare characteristic of them ignorant. aggregate—the the last century, system. When the man uttered the word people toujours that compassion “bastards,” Mr. Bush became angry. “First of malheureux, the suffering masses, et cetera. exercised under the supervision of all, sir,” he said, “we must remember that it To Dostoevski, the sign of Jesus’s divinity government experts is more likely to be is our duty to love all the children.” The president was similarly unflinching in his effective than the charitable impulses of clearly was his ability to have compassion inaugural address, in which he spoke of private individuals. Charity would no with all men in their singularity, that is, “failures of love.” In that address Mr. Bush longer be a gift but a right. The liberals without lumping them together into some spoke, too, of “uncounted, unhonored acts hoped, through this change of terms, to such entity as one suffering mankind. The of decency,” an allusion to William make taking alms less humiliating to the greatness of the story, apart from its Wordsworth’s lines describing that best taker. They failed to see that the taking of theological implications, lies in that we are charity is always humiliating—except, made to feel how false the idealistic, highportion of a good man’s life; perhaps, when the gifts are accompanied by flown phrases of the most exquisite pity the moment they are confronted His little, nameless, unremembered an affection so palpable as to diminish the sound with compassion. shaming quality of the transaction.
Conservative Compassion Vs. Liberal Pity
BY MICHAEL KNOX BERAN
T
acts of kindness and of love.
Many conservatives are skeptical of the notion of mixing love and politics. Memories of the sloppy radicalism of the 1960s, with its “Summer of Love,” can sour almost anyone on love’s “significance as a principle of order in the human soul, in society and in the universe,” as T. S. Eliot put it. But the taint goes deeper than the sixties. Long before the hippies exhorted a now-defunct counterculture to “make love, not war,” the parties of the Left sought to make love a first principle of politics. The socialists invoked the idea of love in their struggle against market liberalism: they believed that the modern system of loveless labor could be replaced by a model of community grounded not in competition but in mutual care. In their idea of the “communal” or “social” man, the socialists disclosed the deeper image of their hearts, the idea of the loving man, the man who is not alienated either from himself or the things and people around him. In the twentieth century, many liberals adopted this vision of love’s place in society.
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The error the socialists and the welfarestate liberals made was to suppose that love’s efficacy can be gradually extended beyond the bounds of the family and the tribe, where it spontaneously creates desirable patterns of order, into larger communities, where it does not. Wherever we see love required to perform a large, public role, we find that it almost always degenerates into pity. Hannah Arendt, the German Jewish émigré and New York intellectual, illuminated the distinction between love and pity when she drew attention in On Revolution to a theme in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. Arendt described how the novelist, in the story of the Grand Inquisitor, contrasted the loving compassion of Jesus with the eloquent but disastrous pity of the Inquisitor: For compassion, to be stricken with the suffering of someone else as though it were contagious, and pity, to be sorry without being touched in the flesh, are not only not the same, they may not even be related. Compassion, by its very nature, cannot be touched off by the sufferings of a whole class or a people, or,
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Pity, Arendt argued, is a concern for the misery of another unprompted by intimacy with, or love for, the sufferer. Compassion, by contrast, is a love directed “towards specific suffering” and concentrates on “particular persons.” It can be exercised only by individuals or small groups, not by agencies or bureaus. Pity, Arendt wrote, “may be the perversion of compassion.” Because the pitier “is not stricken in the flesh,” because he keeps his “sentimental distance,” he has often shown “a greater capacity for cruelty” than the confessedly cruel. The type of compassion that modern liberals claim as their own peculiar virtue is really a form of pity, milder perhaps than that which lies at the heart of the socialist orthodoxies, but dangerous in its own right. David Hume called pity “counterfeited” love. It is the false compassion that results when men exercise their kindness by committee. It is the look in the eyes of the welfare clerk or the public housing official. To be pitied by another man is to stand humiliated before him; however well-
Love awakens; pity oppresses. Driven by a belief in the redemptive power of love, President Bush had tried to mobilize America’s little platoons of compassion on behalf of the wayward, the needy, the outcast. Even so, pity still prevails in government. Proposed changes in the law, to involve the institutions of civil society in the distribution of public assistance, languish in limbo. Religious institutions, for example, do a better job than purely secular assistance programs in helping people fix those inner defects of character that account for so much failure and distress, but our modern poor laws hinder the compassionate work of these organizations. In Les Miserables, Victor Hugo described the power of faith-based charity not simply to feed and clothe but to heal and transform. Hugo made his character Monseigneur Myriel, bishop of Digne, a model of religious charity, and he expertly portrayed the effect of the priest’s
compassion on the wretched convict Jean Valjean. “You need have told me nothing,” [the bishop assured Valjean.] “Why should I ask your name? In any case I knew it before you told me.” The man [Valjean] looked up with startled eyes. “You know my name?”“Of course,” said the bishop. “Your name is brother.” “Monsieur le cureacute;,” the man cried, “I was famished when I came here. Now I scarcely know what I feel. Everything has changed.” Les Miserables is a novel, and it may be that Hugo’s account of the compassion of the bishop of Digne is overly sentimental. But don’t tell that to Father Peter Raphael and Sister Simone Ponnet of Abraham House. This organization, in the Mott Haven section of the Bronx, is home at any given time to ten or so previously incarcerated convicts, who, in exchange for early release, have agreed to live by the rules of the house— its regimen of work, education, and drug testing—prior to regaining their full liberty. Only nonviolent offenders in prison for the first time are eligible. When I mentioned Hugo’s bishop of Digne to Father Raphael, who was for many years a prison chaplain on Rikers Island, I found he knew the story by heart. Hugo’s picture of compassion, he insisted in French-accented English (Father Raphael was born in the Languedoc), “is not fiction.” He has seen the transformations occur. In New York State, some 70 percent of released offenders return to crime; of more than 100 Abraham House graduates, only one has so far gone back to prison for a fresh offense. Why is faith effective in the provision of welfare assistance? First, because it enables the provider to see in the recipient something more than degraded human flesh. The next time you read a newspaper account of some particularly wretched man, who has committed a crime or fallen into a miserable way of life, try to connect this picture of the man with the child he must once have been, full of promise. If this takes an effort of imagination, how much greater the force of will necessary to
associate the miserable man with the idea of a loving God who purposefully gave him life and who yet desires his regeneration. Faith gives some people the ability to do that. “God,” Father Raphael says, “came to call sinners.” Whatever one’s idea of the truth of particular religious creeds, society benefits when people engaged in social work are able to see promise in the people they are charged with helping. Faith in God, Father Raphael says, is crucial to the work of the non-denominational Abraham House—as well as to its success. He calls the place a “little parish, a parish of offenders.”
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intentioned programs grounded in pity may be, they always end by laying low their intended beneficiaries. Pity does not lead to a flourishing in the pitied, though it may provoke their resentment, even their rage; the act of pitying is always a kind of strength condescending to weakness.
His faith, Father Raphael says, not only
Father Peter Raphael & Sister Simone Ponnet helps him to see the “grace God can work” in fallen men; it also helps him overcome the fear a man naturally feels when he works under the ever present threat of violence. Here, too, Hugo understood the problem. After the bishop of Digne has offered Valjean a bed for the night, Hugo relates how the convict “swung round upon his elderly host, folded his arms, glared at him,” and exclaimed, “This is wonderful! You’re putting me to sleep in a bed next to your own.” He broke off to laugh, and there was a monstrous quality to his laughter. “Have you thought what you’re doing? How do you know I have never murdered anyone?” The bishop replied quietly: “That is God’s affair.” Father Raphael tells me that when you visit a prisoner on Rikers Island, “You don’t go by yourself over there.” He believes that God goes with him. The effect of a compassionate gaze is to make the beneficiary conscious of
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liberals meant well but didn’t improve life something in himself he did not know he possessed. Hugo’s bishop of Digne sees past Valjean’s grime and perceives what Hugo called his “soul.” Through the bishop’s charity, Valjean is himself brought to “see his own soul, hideous in its ugliness.” Yet as “he wept a new day dawned in his spirit.” Melodrama? If so, we need more of it: according to one study, one in every 32 adults in the United States is under some form of supervision by the criminal justice system; over 2.2 million people are behind bars. Nearly 10% of our population! Compassionate assistance cannot, of course, be a substitute for the punishment of criminal acts or atonement for wrongdoing. And we must remember, when we speak of compassion’s healing virtues, the ineradicable element of evil in human nature. No doubt most people do too little to resist the evil in themselves; but for the much smaller group who embrace the malignant power they discover in their hearts, even acts of kindness and of love may fail to redeem. But although in many cases compassion can heal, institutions that have the power to do more than pity people who, unrepaired, will go on to wreck other lives continue to be shut out of public almsgiving. Abraham House receives no government money. In order to qualify for funds, it would have to compromise the principles that make it effective. “We tried many, many times,” Father Raphael says. “We went to Albany. We saw the people from the state and from the city, telling us, ‘Oh, you have to compromise with us, to change a little bit your philosophy, because we can help you.’ But our philosophy is that we cannot erase the spiritual way we deal with human beings.” To understand how different from the compassionate ideal is the reality that bureaucratic pity has constructed, consider the example of the public school system. Compassion is at least as key in education as in almsgiving. A teacher’s faculty of sympathetic insight into his students’ minds and imaginations is precisely what shows him each one’s special potential. We do not, when young, know who we are; it is in the course of being educated that we come to understand what we must be. The teacher whose vision is sharpened by compassion helps to awaken those processes of self-culture that enable his student to develop his own peculiar gifts and aptitudes.
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In his inaugural address, President Bush observed that “no insignificant person was ever born”: the specially valuable function of a good teacher is to perceive, in each student, his unique significance. This work of doing justice to people, impossible in a crowd, is not easy even in a classroom. Though experience helps, compassion is the real origin of that insight that lets a teacher see through the superficial masks that young people so often wear, and to understand their deeper problems and possibilities. The German philosopher Johann Georg Hamann argued that only “love—for a person or an object—can reveal the true nature of anything,” an observation especially true of that most complicated and mysterious of objects, the human soul.
awakened in little Harry, his “favourite scholar,” a love of learning and of “poring over books.” Yet Harry’s reciprocated affection for his teacher perplexes Marton. “How did he ever become so fond of me?” the schoolmaster asks, modestly oblivious to the miracle he has performed in an English village. “That I should love him is no wonder, but that he should love me—” The reader understands what Marton himself does not: it is what Dickens calls Marton’s “compassion” that has made Harry love him and desire to please and emulate him—one of learning’s most powerful spurs. Harry ends by calling his teacher his “dear kind friend.” “I hope I always was,” Marton replies. “I meant to be, God knows.” Marton’s compassion, Dickens shows, has enabled him to perceive, in the young people with whom he works, the “panting spirit” inside their “fragile form.” “I love these little people,” Dickens has the narrator of The Old Curiosity Shop declare, “and it is not a slight thing when they, who are so fresh from God, love us.”
“My experience,” the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge said, “tells me that little is taught or communicated by contest or dispute, but everything by sympathy and love.” Educators whose teaching is an extension of their powers of sympathy—think of Charles “Chips” Chipping in James Hilton’s Goodbye, Mr. Chips—develop the most remarkable qualities of perception. The reason is obvious: William Shakespeare has one of his characters reflect on the folly of taking love out of learning, for love “adds a precious seeing to the eye.” In the same spirit, Charles Dickens dramatized the compassion of the true teacher in the character of Marton, the benevolent schoolmaster in The Old Curiosity Shop. Like Hugo’s bishop of Digne, Marton is the soul of charity; and he has
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It is because education seeks to nurture that “panting spirit” that compassion is so crucial to its enterprise. Education involves more than equipping a child with mechanical skills, filling him with useful information, and teaching him how to reason. Good teachers also try to awaken a child to the world’s possibilities—and his own. They nourish his moral imagination, his human sympathy, his understanding of himself as a citizen in a community. The philosopher John Stuart Mill, whose father had famously educated him on strictly utilitarian principles, knew from bitter experience how defective an education only in skills, unilluminated by compassion, can be. James Mill’s machinelike efficiency as a teacher made his son into a prodigy of scholarship—he began Greek at three—but it left him unfinished as a human being. As a young man, Mill published brilliant essays upholding the progressive political ideals his father had inculcated in him; but he had not learned how to cultivate the “material out of which all worth of character, and all capacity for
The result was predictable: after completing his home schooling, Mill suffered a nervous breakdown—a “habitual depression,” a “grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear,” he called it, quoting Coleridge. The “whole foundation on which my life was constructed,” he wrote, “fell down.” He recounted how, after much travail, he came “to adopt a theory of life, very unlike that on which I had before acted.” The scholar educated on severely utilitarian principles now ranked “among the prime necessities of human well-being” what he called the “internal culture of the individual.” My own first memory of the kind of education I am trying to describe, an education inspired by love and compassion, is inseparable from my early consciousness of a world beyond the mechanical and utilitarian. My second-grade teacher encouraged me to memorize Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. Of course I was incapable of understanding much of it at the age of seven, but I soon discovered that adults were stirred by the words. At Gettysburg, Lincoln went beyond Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence to give the most profound account we have of the ends of American life. The Declaration, for all its power as a civic touchstone, is of the eighteenth century in its depiction of men as machinelike assemblages of “inalienable rights.” The weakness of the classical liberalism that the Declaration expresses lies in what Lionel Trilling called its “denial of the emotions and the imagination,” its “mechanical” conception of “the nature of the mind.” Lincoln insists that the mind is more than a package of reason and passion: it possesses depths that the Enlightened philosophers never fathomed. In urging me to learn the Gettysburg Address by heart, my teacher introduced me to the most cogent refutation we have of the idea that the American is merely a Yankee—rational Economic Man, a shrewd getter and spender, a Mill-like calculating machine. On this battlefield, Lincoln says, Americans offered up their lives out of love for ideals that transcended their material aspirations. These ideals sanctify their
deaths: they “consecrate” and “hallow” the land where they fell. Though my secondgrade self could understand none of this, I was conscious at the time, in some inarticulate way (however improbable it may seem), of the growth within me of an ideal self—the person whom the secondgrader, trying to memorize the Gettysburg Address, wanted to become, and believed that he could become. And, though I wouldn’t understand this until much later, it was the beginning of my civic education, as well. Even in the best of all possible worlds, not every teacher will live up to this compassionate ideal, sparking each student’s intellectual, moral, and imaginative development. Not every school will be a community bound together by fellow-feeling. But compared with many private schools, whether secular or religious, today’s public education system—like so many creations of the liberal, bureaucratic state—smothers the embers of compassion under an encompassing blanket of pity. Today’s progressive-ed pedagogy, with its focus on pupils’ self-esteem, shrinks from giving students the constant challenge they need to move on to a new level of mastery and insight. The dumbing-down of the curriculum, the unwillingness to make kids learn a body of knowledge and develop basic skills through drill, the easy tests and lack of consequences for leaving homework undone—all conspire to keep kids’ horizons low, instead of expanding them. In inner-city public schools, especially, teachers tend to view their students with undiluted welfare-state pity, seeing them as unable to meet high, or even ordinary, standards. The result is the normalizing of social promotion and the multicultural assertion that the student’s own world is sufficient for him, that his education need not constantly challenge him with worldviews and ways of life higher and better than the limited world into which he was born—since how could he ever become the person fit to enter such a higher realm?
A teacher prompted by compassion rather than pity would say to a struggling kid: “You are not living up to your potential. You are frivolously wasting the gifts God gave you. You’ve got talent. Show it.” Compassion awakens a spirit of emulation; pity does not, for pity is afraid to judge,
even where judgment is essential to growth. Nowhere is the secret contempt that underlies all forms of pity more evident than in this failure of teachers to hold their students to their own private standards or to try to excite in them a yearning to excel and transcend. In their hearts, these teachers lack the very foundation of compassion: the ability to see their pupils as fellow creatures exactly like themselves. Denying that these young people can possibly live up to a higher idea of themselves, the teachers acquiesce in what President Bush had called the “soft bigotry of low expectations.”
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happiness, are made.” He was, he said, like a “stock or a stone,” able to turn out quantities of prose for the Westminster Review but unacquainted with what he later called the “culture of the feelings.”
Yet it is difficult for teachers to do better under their demoralizing working conditions. Caught between the it’s-not-myjob work rules of the teachers’ unions and the picayune regulations of the central bureaucracy, they find themselves imprisoned in a mechanical system organized like an industrial factory. Anyone who has been put to cookie-cutter work on such a model knows how difficult it is to feel, in such conditions, that he possesses a soul and a destiny; only by a tremendous effort of will can such a person retain, in this situation, anything more than a faint idea that the human raw material he is charged with processing also has its unique human potential. A teacher’s contract requires him to teach for x hours a day; at the end of the xth hour his students become someone else’s problem. The merit of teachers who do manage to see behind their students’ apathetic masks goes unrewarded: teachers’ unions oppose merit pay and defend a perverse set of incentives that encourage not compassion but timeserving. That mindset results in a community far different from one where compassion can work its nurturing transformations, and, were there any lingering possibility of creating such a community, the rights revolution that has swept over the public schools in the last several decades has vaporized it. The rights that students have been discovered to possess include everything from the right to due process before being suspended from school for misconduct to the right to wear a baseball cap during the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance (or not even stand but may be excused to use the restroom opposite of your gender if you just feel like it ed) the right to play on the boys’ baseball team, even if one
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a liberal worldview destroyed discipline in classrooms
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is not a boy. Earlier this year, a federal district judge decided who had the “right” to be the valedictorian in a New Jersey high school.
To view schoolchildren as rightsbearing citizens before they have reached the moral and civic maturity the schools are supposed to foster is to lose sight of education’s purpose. Where students can sue their teachers, there can be no spirit of order and community, no flourishing of fellowfeeling. A teacher cannot be expected to act confidently to make the classroom an orderly place, a little platoon of learning, when he knows that even a minor infraction on his part of the numerous rules that now govern every facet of school life may render him personally liable. Nor will a teacher who is straining every spiritual muscle to maintain authority in the face of his unruly students be able to see through the cocky pose to the struggling, uncertain soul. Even though the liberals’ reign of pity has filled America with shabby housing projects and grim schoolhouses destitute of beauty and love, the Left has won a reputation for compassion, while conservatives are thought to be coldheartedly indifferent to human suffering. How did this come to pass? Partly because, with the decline of classical liberalism, conservatives became the principal defenders of liberty of trade. In their effort to rescue market principles, they forgot the role that love plays in ordering those parts of society that the mores of the marketplace do not govern. But there is another reason. Unnerved by the success of the progressives, many conservatives reasoned that, since they could not possibly beat their opponents, they must join them. In a spirit of pessimism and opportunism, these conservatives abandoned their own principles. A mistake: they gave up the
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chance to formulate an alternative theory of compassion without gaining in exchange a reputation for charity. If the liberals built up a regime of pity both to halt the spread of more sweeping forms of socialism and to assuage their own guilty consciences (in agony over the fact that some of them are rich), the pessimistic conservatives did so to outfox the liberals. One sees this dark cleverness at work in the careers of conservatives as different as Otto von Bismarck and Richard Nixon. Bismarck, strictly speaking, was not a conservative: he was an idiosyncratic reactionary who, in the words of his English biographer, A. J. P. Taylor, followed by turns Karl Marx and Klemons von Metternich. In the 1880s, a decade after he had unified the German nation, Bismarck implemented a far-reaching program of social welfare insurance, grounded in the then-
revolutionary idea of old-age pensions. The reforms he oversaw were, he believed, inevitable; better, he thought, that he, rather than the liberals or the radicals, should carry them out, for he at least could be relied upon to mitigate the damage. These reforms were admirable in theory, and, had they been implemented in a different spirit, they might have proved beneficial in practice. But the Iron Chancellor enacted his program in a manner calculated to diminish personal liberty and increase the authority of the state. Bismarck, Taylor wrote, did not “promote social reform out of love for the German workers.” His object was to make workers “more subservient” to the state. Bismarck “provocatively rejoiced,” Taylor wrote, “in echoing Frederick the Great’s wish to be le roi des gueux, king of the poor.”
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But the merriment was deceptive, for the old Junker was at heart a pessimist. With his nervous anxieties, his gastric ulcers and temper tantrums, his nights with his cigars and his “Black Velvet” (a combination of stout and champagne he concocted himself), Bismarck was not at home in the modern world he felt powerless to stave off completely, nor was he in the least sympathetic to its aspiration to lift up the masses through social legislation. “I have spent the whole night hating,” he announced one day, when he was the most powerful man in Germany and perhaps in Europe, and might be supposed to have been on good terms with his planet. In trying to outmaneuver his enemies, Bismarck laid the foundation for the socialist state envisioned by the nineteenth-century German economist Johann Karl Rodbertus, one of the earliest
theoreticians to reconcile nationalism and socialism in a Romantic ideal of the superstate. Rodbertus thought it possible to re-create, in a nation-state organized along socialist lines, the communal purpose that had propelled the city-states of antiquity to greatness. In his theories lay the inspiration of a number of socialisms—National Socialism, Leninism, the Stalinist idea of “socialism in one country.” Bismarck was under no illusions about men reaching greatness; but in combining nationalism and socialism, he prepared the way for a successor who did nurse such dreams: Adolf Hitler. A century after Bismarck’s reforms, Richard Nixon made a similar series of calculations. As part of his Family Assistance Plan, Nixon contemplated the ultimate form of public pity, a government-supplied minimum income unconnected to individual exertion
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and therefore sure to subvert the industriousness that strengthens character. Impelled by a bitterness—a resentment, Henry Kissinger called it—even fiercer than Bismarck’s, Nixon similarly sought to disarm the opponents he hated by using their ideas against them. (“Can you imagine what this man might have been,” Kissinger once asked, “had he ever been loved?”) Although Congress never enacted his proposed guaranteed-income legislation, Nixon succeeded in opening the government’s sluice gates and flooding federal cash into social programs. Such spending, 28 percent of the budget at the end of Lyndon Johnson’s term, consumed some 40 percent of it by the time Nixon left office. Under Nixon, the dreams of the Great Society became a reality. Nixon had been influenced not by Rodbertus and the Romantics, but by Friedrich Nietzsche. Borrowing a copy of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil from his assistant, Monica Crowley, in 1992, Nixon told her: “I must have lent [my copy] out to someone. I can’t believe I’m missing my Nietzsche! I always try to look at his stuff during a presidential campaign to remind me of why I went through the damn fire.” Nietzsche’s theory of decadence found fertile soil in Nixon’s mind. In off-the-cuff remarks in Kansas City in July 1971, Nixon—recalling how, on visits to Athens and Rome, he had sat musing upon the broken columns—speculated on the decline of the American civilization. The “great civilizations of the past,” Nixon said, “as they have become wealthy, as they have lost their will to live, to improve,” have “become subject to the decadence which eventually destroys a civilization.” The United States, he said, was “now reaching that period.” The policies Nixon proposed for “decadent” America were contrived in an atmosphere of impending doom and have about them, as so many things in his life do, a quality of ruin. Believing that Western civilization had passed its peak and begun to decline, both Nixon and Bismarck formulated their apparently compassionate programs out of a combination of cynicism and disillusionment. Ostensibly conservative, they never thought to address the problem of compassion in a conservative way; full of hate, they could never have grasped the transformative potential of love. Possessed by morbid drives that defy easy psychological analysis, they pursued a
revolutionary domestic policy, not because they had any faith in its merits but in order to be revenged on their enemies and consolidate their power. Conservatives have come a long way since then. Unlike their counterparts 30 years ago, they’ve learned where compassion fails to thrive. They know that governments are not structures of love—any more than markets are. More important, they understand, as Edmund Burke and Alexis de Tocqueville did, the power of civil society. Conservatives today are showing that the state can mobilize civil power in new ways, in order to multiply the little platoons of compassion and to tap society’s deep reservoirs of love. From governmentfunded school voucher programs that give kids the chance to experience real teaching, to faith-based welfare reforms that actually promote welfare, these policies are designed to replace the pity that rots lives with the compassion that can transform them. That’s what makes compassionate conservatism a revolutionary idea.
www.CityJournal.org
How to Expose Liberal Hypocrisy Compassion or politics? Conservatives: What exactly do you want for the 11 million illegal immigrants in the United States? Liberals: We want them to have total amnesty and 100% citizenship! It is the compassionate thing to do. Conservatives: Okay, we will grant them amnesty and 100% citizenship with one condition. Liberals: Name it!
(303) 9633000 ccuadmissions@ccu.edu www.ccu.edu
Conservatives: We will grant the 11 million illegal aliens 100% amnesty and full citizenship but they must agree to and pledge to be life long Republicans or return to thier original country. Liberals: SEND THEM BACK! John G. Sacoulas VOL.12 #6 | WWW.AMERICAN CHRISTIAN VOICE.COM
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Seeing the “Guys”
e go to the bank, and never look the teller in the eye. Just a guy. We push our shopping cart past the family, and never even see the young father's face. We couldn't recognize him again if they paid us. Just a guy. The Uber driver. The man behind the burger counter. The homeless man out front, or the bus passenger. Just a guy. We look past the neighborhood man who walks his dog regularly down our street, watching the black and white Springer Spaniel tug on the red leash instead. Him? Just another guy.
W BY BRAD STRAIGHT
I was your waitress... twice. Do you remember what I look like?
The word we often use for unnamed, faceless people is "a guy". It comes from the name of Guy Fawkes, who was part of a failed attempt to blow up the English Parliament in 1605. In England, people used to burn his effigy in the faceless shape of a man, which they called "a Guy." In most circles now, "a guy" simply means a man in general. Or "guys"--a wrap up meaning for all the anonymous people of either sex gathered. In mask form, it has come to stand for any anonymous person. Sadly, our individualistic world is full of guys. People no one really looks at, or really listens to, or really cares to get to know. We don't really see the guys. We're on our way, too busy. Our minds are somewhere else. We're checking our texts. We don't take the time to see beyond the figures, to the faces of the real people with real stories who have a deep value to God. And as we walk past them a bit of our own humanity is burned in effigy, too. Take a sniff. You can smell the smoke of our smoldering community, and our blackened, disconnected, selfish future. It takes so little to change. Today, Lord, may I open my eyes and see people as you do. May I really "see" the guys. Amen.
www.BradStraight.com
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Serving You Monday-Friday: 7:00 am - 6:00 pm Saturday: 9:00 am - 5:00 pm 910 Hwy 62-65 N Harrison, AR 870-741-1973
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Would you like to join the ministry of the American Christian Voice? The American Christian Voice Ministry Team is looking for retired persons who would like to join us in promoting this magazine in your area. We would send you approximately 75 copies of each issue that we publish. You can then distribute them to hospital waiting rooms, nursing homes, Christian Bookstores and any place magazines are displayed. You have the option to cover the cost that we charge ($25.00 or approximately 33 cents per copy) and just paper your travels with them or you are permitted to sell each copy to book and gift stores. An example: Sell each copy for $1.50 and the retailer would sell it for $3.95. You would receive $112.50 less your $25.00 and have $87.50 for gas and lunch expenses. (However magazines are normally sold on consignment.) As your ministry grows, you can order as many issues as you would like at $25.00 per box of 75. If you have been blessed by the ACV just think how rewarding it will be to bless others that would never have come across it otherwise! Just drop us a note with your first $25.00 check or call us with a credit card at: (417) 336-3636. Obviously you would not need to pay for a personal subscription anymore. It’s a win, win... when you help us grow, we help you grow!
america gets a new chance
It’s Not a Game
BY KATHLEEN O’NEIL
T
It seems that much comes down to being offended. We used to laugh at ourselves and tell jokes about our nationalities and our personalities. Now the only ones that are okay to offend are blondes.
This brings me to the divide in this nation. Hilary Clinton and The game began and in Donald Trump the first few plays, Hillary were like one of the key Clinton & divorcing players was hurt. parents Donald Trump It happens. He was carried off were like divorcing fighting over the the field and we parents fighting custody of found out later kids that he would be over the custody of the and the kids out for the season. the kids and the were us. The But then a few stakes were plays later, another kids were us high and the key player was hurt campaigns went and he was out of the on too long abd were game. I began to get uneasy. much too divisive. We had In the beginning of the second become weary of the dirty tricks quarter, there was a flag on the and the anger on both sides. play and the call was “horse collar” and when we saw the Those of us who seek to impose replay, our quarterback’s head our own opinions, ideas and snapped back and forth and I felt desires on others are lost in the certain that his neck was broken. abyss of self. After the football At this point, I knew they were game was over and we left the out to hurt our team to gain stadium, it went into the record books and will be forgotten. Was advantage. it worth the pain that was left This was a game but it had behind. become a war. Winning was now the key thing instead of playing There is only one truth that can the game. The stakes had heal what divides us in the many become higher than the final ways we have lost our way. It is the love of God. Many of us don’t score. know how much we are loved by The question is what have we as our Father God. The Scriptures a nation come to when even in say, “God is love.” His great love something as benign as a football is only found in Jesus Christ. He game becomes so contentious. sent Him to earth to see to it, that Our families are shattering and all of our insanity is forgiven and the parents fight over everything our hearts healed. including the children. Some of the people are angry with the If you are tired of the chaos and police and have taken to wish to stop the madness, ask assassinating these men and God to reveal Himself and His women who are trying to protect great love for you. You will find us. We are instructed not to say the utter relief that you seek Merry Christmas because we from this crazy divide. might offend someone. There are
Special thanks to Kay and Joy for making the American Christian Voice available coast to coast!
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he crisp autumn air surrounded us in our great seats at our favorite football team’s stadium. The seats were filled and there were thousands of cheering fans. We anticipated a great college football game. The team entered and the air cracked with excitement. We cheered.
many more things that separate and divide us.
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T
he term Gold Star Family is a end of World War II. The Gold Star modern reference that comes Lapel Button was established in from the Service Flag. These August 1947. flags/banners were first flown by Today, the nation recognizes the families during World War I. The flag sacrifice that all Gold Star Family included a blue star for every members make when a father, mother, immediate family member serving in brother, sister, son, daughter, or other the armed loved one forces of No one has given more for the nation dies in the United service to than the families of the fallen. States, the nation. during any Gold Star period of war or hostilities in which Mother’s and Family’s Day is the last the armed forces of the United States Sunday of September and Gold Star were engaged. If that loved one died, Spouses Day is April 5. The strength of the blue star was replaced by a gold our nation is our Army. The strength star. This allowed members of the of our Army is our Soldiers. The community to know the price that the strength of our Soldiers is our family had paid in the cause of families. The Army freedom. recognizes that no one has given The United States began observing more for Gold Star Mother's Day on the last the nation Sunday of September, in 1936. The than the Gold Star Wives was formed before the families of the fallen. Who hasn’t thought, “What can I do to honor these special families? How can we reach out to family members that have lost a loved one who has fallen in the service our country?” The number one request from the dying on the battlefields has always been, “Please take care of my family”. Our goal is to honor the Gold Star Families by providing one week in our Gold Star Family Inn located in beautiful Branson, Missouri. These rooms will be
nicely appointed suites that have all the amenities as well as free Gold Star Club tickets to the hottest shows in town to honor a fallen hero's family.
“A Buck in the Box in the Back” 100% of the proceeds donated to the Gold Star Club will be used to directly secure the facility to bless a family of the fallen. We all can play a small part of this by “putting a buck in the box in the back” the first Sabbath/Sunday of every month. All we are asking for is $1.00 per month. So, even at a dollar per person we can collectively make a difference! So… can we add your church to the list and have you join the Gold Star Club by signing up for the donation box and presenting it to your fellowship? Together we can make a difference to the families that made the greatest sacrifice of all! Your church’s name will be painted on one concrete block of the Gold Star Family Inn to encourage many other fellowships to join in. Order your box today! And as always, it will be the children of God showing the world the love and Grace of God provided by His Son, our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ! You will be able to follow our progress and your involvement at:
www.GoldStarFamilyInn.com
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puzzle page
Online readers, we’ve included a link to printable PDF puzzle page!
ACROSS 1 Yin's partner 5 Farm credit administration (abbr.) 8 Standard golf scores 12 Malaria 13 Seasonal greeting beginning 15 American state 16 Ponder, with "over" 17 Sporty car brand 18 Locomote 19 Marketable 21 Chopped off 23 Debris at the base of a cliff 25 Deer relative 26 Tibia 28 See 8 Down 30 Soil 33 Seasonal greeting part 2 35 Pacific Time 37 Desire 39 Conger 40 Rested 42 Baby dog 44 Constellation 45 Loch __ monster 47 Dads 49 Seasonal greeting end 51 Dozes 53 Game official
55 Chest muscles 56 Gone to lunch 58 Walks in shallow water 60 Seasonal entree 63 Warlike 67 Continent 68 Braid 71 Bored 72 Pennsylvania (abbr.) 73 National bird 74 Precious stones 75 Margin 76 Young male 77 Orient DOWN 1 Seasonal Vegetables 2 Water (Spanish) 3 Void 4 Jell-O 5 Face upwards 6 Computer part 7 Rainy mo. 8 With 28 across, seasonal dessert 9 On top 10 Praise 11 Molt 13 Foyer 14 Harvard's rival 20 River edges 22 Elderly 24 Drink slowly 26 Shininess
27 Shampoo brand 29 Sixth sense 31 Souvenir 32 Adolescents 33 X 34 Deplete 36 Yank 38 Pooch 41 Sticky black substance 43 Woodwind player 46 SE WA city 48 Fasten 50 Visible trace 52 Take to court 54 Seasonal visitors 57 Use a keyboard 59 Day of year 60 Video 61 Secondhand 62 Telephone noise 64 Notion 65 Charity 66 For fear that 69 Scientist's office 70 Gone by
Dear Lord, Help me not despise the things I do not know or understand. ~William Penn
Answers to Sudoku Puzzle on Page 28
Answers to CrossWord Puzzle on Page 45
God Loves you just the way you are, not the way you should be. Because no one is as they should be. - Brennan Manning
Friberg’s Gone Green Recycling & Waste Management Regular Hours Mon Fri 8:00 am 4:30 pm Sat 8:00 am 1:00 pm Sun Closed 2957 State Road 35
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grace filled fellowships • Spiritfilled Davidic style Praise & Worship • Annoited Bible-based teaching • Fellowship after each service • Nursery & Children’s Shabbat School
PEACE LUTHERAN CHURCH (ELCA) WORSHIP SERVICES: Praise & Worship Sun. @ 8:30 a.m. Education Hour - 9:15 a.m. Liturgy &Traditional Service - 10:30 a.m.
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Join us for weekly services: Erev Shabbat (Friday) 7:30 pm Shabbat (Saturday) 11 am (417) 3347373 www.TheTabernacleinBranson.com
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see service times at: jimbakkershow.com/morningside/ churchservices/
The only power sin has is the power you give it when you refuse to take hold of the sincrushing strength of the Holy Spirit.
Gateway Austin, TX Northwest Austin: McNeil Campus South Austin: South Campus Internet Campus: internetcampus@gatewaychurch.com www.GatewayChurch.com Gateway Branson, MO Located in the Vista Plaza Shopping Center on the backside 2005 West Highway 76 • Suite 106 Branson, MO • (417) 335-9915
His life is your life, His death is your death, His righteousness is your righteousness
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Waking the World to their Loving Creator Okay, so we are not a typical church but we are a training ground to make disciples for Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit! Come visit OUR FAMILY Sunday morning at 9:45 am and you will see what we mean.
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FRUSTRATED WITH RELIGION?? This fellowship offers no judgments (not our job). Ready for a mind blowing perspective on how to really find Joy in this life, right now! Your horrible past experiences will be broken off leaving a new opportunity to experience God on a level you did not think possible! -MEMBER
The basis for loving our neighbors, and for unity in Christ, is not proximity, understanding or commonality. We are one in Christ not because we are one in the same, but because Christ is the same. It is an impoverished theology that mistakes unity in Christ for sameness in Christ. - Leslie Leylands
"Sharing Freedom in Christ" Pastor: Andy Hassen • 1521 E. 24th Street N. Springfield, MO 65803
(417) 8316721 Sabbath School: 9:45 am • Worship: 11:00 am Wednesday night: 6:30 pm
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A week without a Sabbath is perpetual bondage. 28
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VISIT ONCE AND YOU ARE HOOKED ! ! ! 42 years of Healing Hurts and Building Dreams. FAITH ASSEMBLY 2 miles South of Beautiful Harrison, MO (2 blocks West of Hwy. 7) 9:30 A,M. Sunday School: 10.30 A.M. Worship; 6 PM. Praise; Wed. 7 PM. Training for all ages. Pastor Arlis Thrasher. (870) 7412635
Sudoku Answers to Page 27
Springfield Church of God (7th Day)
BY
the church & family have been replaced with: funding that the spirit of American compassion was unleashed. In the best interests of the poor, the government should withdraw itself completely from all activities designed to help them and allow civil society its full range of motion.
BY JUDE BLANCHETTE
The Shortcomings of ... n their book, Myths of Rich and Poor, W. Michael Cox and Richard Alm observe, “Some part of human nature connects with the apocalyptic. Time and again, the pessimists among us have envisioned the world going straight to hell.” To be sure, “pessimists” apparently run most national newspapers. Headline after headline screams about the brutality, avarice, death, and inequality that infest our world. Be it violence in the Middle East, droughts in Africa, drug wars in South America, or
I
airplane crashes across the globe, there seems to be little to celebrate in our modern world. Because it lacked the typical journalistic flair for the dour, a story appearing on the website of the Examiner on December 18, 2006 was passed over by most casual readers. “Charitable giving in ’06 predicted to outpace ’05 record,” was the headline. It reported that “total donations in 2005 hit a high of $260 billion and 2006 should top that.” For those who noticed the article, it provided a perhaps brief pause in the bad news, but little more. To more-interested parties, however, it was a simple reminder of the longstanding crusade by America’s
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private charities and individual philanthropists to mitigate one of the world’s oldest social ills: chronic poverty. For large charities such as the Salvation Army and smaller local charities run by churches and other private organizations, the fight against poverty has been going on for the past 150 years. Tragically, standing in their way has been the federal government. Besides an effort to wage “war” on poverty beginning in the 1960s, the federal government has attempted to intercede and dole out aid since the beginning of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. These interventions have
proven costly and yielded disastrous results. By continually siphoning funds away from the private sector, lawmakers and bureaucrats further diminish the ability of civil society to deal with the problem of poverty. (As Charles Murray shows in Losing Ground, poverty was declining steadily through the 1950s and 1960s up until the Great Society programs kicked in during the early 1970s.) If the plight of the poor is to be truly addressed, Americans should study the lessons of the past. Earlier in the twentieth century, private charities offered a more effective cure for chronic indigence, and it was through mutually beneficial activities and voluntary
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Unfortunately, most social commentators see increased state action as the best (indeed, the only) way to fight poverty. With apologies to Ian McEwan, the welfare state has become “the repository of collective fantasy.” Private charities, they often argue, financed by volunteers and private donations, cannot meet the immense burden of welfare provision. Advocates of public assistance see “private enterprise” as an economic system that functions on Hobbesian self-interest (Thomas Hobbes 15881679. English philosopher and political theorist best known for his book Leviathan (1651), in which he argues that the only way to secure civil society is through universal submission to the absolute authority of a sovereign.) and that would leave the poor to suffer if profit could not be squeezed from their labor. Many proponents of laissez faire (a policy or attitude of letting things take their own course, without interfering) recognize these common protestations, but are unable to provide cogent rebuttal. On the surface it would seem that only government, with its vast infrastructure and immense financial resources, can improve the plight of the poor. Private charities, subject to the vagaries of voluntary donations, are a far less reliable source of income. Yet if this were the case, how is it that after more than 40 years since the Great Society and more than $8 trillion spent (in 2000 dollars-16 years ago) so little headway has been made by the government in alleviating poverty? This is not to say that poverty has not diminished in America. Indeed, the market economy has virtually eliminated extreme poverty in the United States. The average poor American lives a lifestyle that
Government Charity
Most Americans today were born after the New Deal and therefore have no memory of American social policy before the 1930s. Those then alive will recall that before the policies implemented by Roosevelt, there effectively were no social-welfare programs provided by the federal government. State and local government programs in place during that time, such as soup kitchens and state-run orphanages, were meager affairs in comparison to the welfare programs of today. The question must then be asked: If the government wasn’t helping the poor, who was? To put it simply, neighbors and religious communities helped the less fortunate, and members of different races, ethnicities, and occupations expressed solidarity to improve their financial independence. In effect, it was private voluntary cooperation that came to the aid of the poor. In the absence of government assistance, the social net cast by private charities, organizations, and businesses reached farther and remained much stronger than federal welfare programs. According to MerriamWebster’s Collegiate Dictionary, poverty is “a lack of money or material possessions,” and on the surface money would seem to be the obvious remedy. But if reducing poverty were simply a matter of transferring funds from rich to poor, then the “War on Poverty” should have been won years ago. In Losing Ground, Murray chronicles the failures of federal social policies from 1950–1980, concluding, “The first effect [of government policy] . . . was to make it profitable for the poor to behave in the short term in ways that were destructive in the long term. Their second effect was to mask these longterm losses—to subsidize irretrievable mistakes. We tried to remove the barriers to escape poverty, and inadvertently built a trap.” The “trap” was built through the largess of the federal government, which exacerbated the dependency of the poor on handouts, and supported decisions that furthered damaging behavior. Observing the English Poor Laws in 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in Memoirs on Pauperism: “Man, like all socially
organized beings, has a natural passion for idleness. There are, however, two incentives to work: the need to live and the desire to improve conditions of life.” In effect, the government destroys both of these incentives. By receiving food, shelter, and most other necessities, welfare recipients aren’t faced with the need to provide for themselves. Likewise, by supporting all lifestyle decisions, both good and bad, government insulates the poor from having to face the consequences of unfavorable choices. Tocqueville was prescient in his critique of government welfare, forecasting, “I have said that the inevitable result of public charity was to perpetuate idleness among the majority of the poor and to provide for their leisure at the expense of those who work.” By traditionally allocating the bulk of its resources as cash payments, the government increased dependency and neglected to address the causes of perpetual poverty. Welfare Reform The idea of entitlement has been rectified to some extent by the federal government’s 1996 welfare reform. Officially named the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA), it has succeeded in decreasing the federal welfare caseload. Individuals are no longer “entitled” to receive aid now that states must choose among its population who is to receive cash payments. According to a Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) news release in 2002, “Between PRWORA’s enactment in August 1996 and December 2001, the welfare caseload fell nearly 57 percent from 12.2 million recipients to fewer than 5.3 million. This is the largest welfare caseload decline in history and the lowest percentage of the population on welfare since 1965.” Yet in many ways PRWORA has failed. HHS can claim success since its enactment because of statistical chicanery. Fewer and fewer individuals are now eligible for cash assistance, and since only those receiving monthly payments are counted on the welfare roles, the program is deemed a success. Yet as Michael Tanner of the Cato Institute concludes, “[W]elfare reform has done little to make individuals self-
sufficient. Even after leaving welfare, most former recipients continue to rely on a wide variety of noncash government assistance programs.” At the same time that cash assistance has decreased, noncash handouts have increased markedly. According to the New York Times (2003), “[F]ederal and state welfare money spent on cash assistance declined 44 percent in 2002, from 77 percent in 1997. The proportion allocated to various types of noncash assistance shot up to 56 percent, from 23 percent in 1997.
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would be envied by most of the world’s citizens. But this is a product of the market economy not government handouts. It is only through wealth creation, not wealth distribution, that we see the wellspring of human progress.
And the Associated Press reported in February, • The welfare state is bigger than ever despite a decade of policies designed to wean poor people from public aid. • The number of families receiving cash benefits from welfare has plummeted since the government imposed time limits on the payments a decade ago. But other programs for the poor—including Medicaid, food stamps and disability benefits—are bursting with new enrollees. • The result, according to an Associated Press analysis, is that nearly one in six persons rely [sic] on some form of public assistance, a larger share than at any time since the government started measuring two decades ago. How, Not How Much The primary reason private charity is more effective and more humane in providing for the poor lies in how aid is given, not simply how much is given. If administered indiscriminately, any type of aid renders the recipient in a worse predicament than before, for now he is dependent on the handouts of others. As Isabel Paterson wrote in The God of the Machine: “[T]ake the case of a truly needy man, who is not incapacitated, and suppose that the philanthropist gives him food and clothes and shelter—when he has used them, he is just where he was before, except that he may have acquired the habit of dependence.” Economist and Freeman columnist Walter E. Williams comes to a similar conclusion in More Liberty Means Less Government, labeling indiscriminate aid “animal compassion.” Writes Williams: “Compassion towards animals includes
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CONTINUED
making sure the animal has adequate food and water, medical attention and when needed, suitable shelter, and a toy or two for entertainment. . . . Animal compassion bears none of the hardships and complexities of human compassion. You don’t have to instill lessons of independence. In fact, independence is a negative.” Like any other government monopoly (public schools, the post office), public charity is insulated from competition and financial loss, and thus inefficient spending is inevitable. Indeed, bureaucrats have an incentive to recruit recipients in order to justify bigger budgets. With the need to control costs diminished, aid can be handed out regardless of conditions or situations facing potential recipients. By way of comparison, private charities, churches, and mutual-aid societies are faced with economic realities and must attempt to decide who truly merits aid, as well as how to best bring about the recipient’s economic independence. An admittedly subjective process, this helps to eliminate freeloaders, thus allowing more resources to be directed to the deserving poor. As law professor Richard A. Epstein writes in Principles for a Free Society: “Since charitable budgets were—as they are today—limited, if not fixed, a primary concern was how to maximize the benefits over all the indigent: that is, how to prevent scarce resources from being drained off by those who were not really needy or who had, in fact, resources of their own; and then to channel those resources to those who were most in need.” Only private institutions, however, can turn down aid applicants using self-imposed criteria. Conversely, government programs often operate under the belief that humans have a “right” to aid. Marvin Olasky, author of The Tragedy of American Compassion, believes that this entitlement is the problem. He writes: “The War on Poverty of the 1960s was a disaster not so much because of its new programs but because of their emphasis on entitlement rather than need. Opportunities to give aid with discretion disappeared as welfare hearings became legal circuses and depersonalization triumphed. Freedom came to mean governmental support rather than the opportunity to work and move up the employment ladder.” Over 150 years ago, Tocqueville reached the same conclusion:
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I am deeply convinced that any permanent, regular administrative system whose aim will be to provide for the needs of the poor will breed more miseries than it can cure, will deprave the population that it wants to help and comfort, will in time reduce the rich to being no more than tenantfarmers of the poor, will dry up the sources of savings, . . . and the indigent, no longer being able to take from the impoverished rich the means for providing for his needs, will find it easier to plunder them of all their property at one stroke than to ask for their help. Values Stressed In stark contrast to the “cookie-cutter” approach of government, private charities such as that maintained by the Mormon church stress personal responsibility, spiritualism, and good character as the most effective combatants of indigence. In its 1936 “Church Welfare Plan,” the Mormon church formulated the guidelines that underpinned their policy on charity. The plan was “a system under which the curse of idleness would be done away with, the evils of a dole abolished, and the independence, industry, thrift and selfrespect be once more established amongst our people. The aim of the Church is to help the people to help themselves.” Likewise, Olasky points out, during the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, a multiplicity of Jewish and Christianrun charitable activities arose in America’s major cities as populations began to urbanize and poverty became more visible. Organizations such as the United Hebrew Charities, the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, and the Olivet Helping Hand Society stressed the importance of selfhelp, family ties, and living a prudent lifestyle if the individual wanted to regain selfreliance. They believed that aid given without nourishment of a man’s character would accomplish little except to demean him. As the founder of New York City’s Charity Organization Society, Josephine Shaw Lowell, wrote (quoted by Olasky), “Nothing should be done under the guise of charity, which tends to break down the character. It is the greatest wrong that can be done to him to undermine the character of a poor man.” Perhaps the most extraordinary example of self-help and social cooperation during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was the mutual-aid movement characterized by fraternal, or friendly,
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societies. As historian David Beito has shown, until the onset of the Great Depression and the resulting increase in government assistance, fraternal societies played a vital role in the welfare of the poor. It is estimated that by 1910, over one-third of the American adult male population were members of or had some affiliation with a fraternal society. The primary role of fraternal societies was to provide sickness and death benefits, which served as forms of health and life insurance. The function of the fraternal system is best characterized by a spokesman for one such fraternal society, who wrote (quoted by Beito): “[A] few dollars given here, a small sum there to help a stricken member back on his feet or to keep his protection in force during a crisis in his financial affairs; a sick neighbor’s wheat harvested, his grain hauled to market, his winter’s fuel cut or a home built to replace one destroyed by a midnight fire—thus has fraternity been at work among a million members in 14,000 camps.” Through a system of local lodges where charitable and social events were held, fraternal societies represented a plethora of races, religions, ethnicities, and occupations, according to Joseph P. Blanchette, my father, in The View from Shanty Pond. The Ladies of the Maccabees, for example, was a white, all-female society that provided health benefits, Beito writes. The Independent Order of Saint Luke was a black fraternal society that, in addition to providing for the sick and the survivors of its members, founded the Saint Luke Penny Savings Bank of Richmond, Va. Tired of the racist attitudes exhibited by some white merchants, the order went on to found the Saint Luke Emporium, which provided an opportunity for blacks to spend their paychecks in a black-owned store. In addition to the financial services provided by fraternal societies, the individual lodges made it possible for immigrants to socialize and participate in activities together. When a member was sick or near death, his “brothers” or “sisters” felt a social obligation to help the victim’s family by either providing medical care or paying for burial. Blanchette quotes the motto of the Irish Benevolent Society, “We visit our sick, and bury our dead.” When members needed to borrow money during rough times, they were obliged to regain financial stability as quickly as possible. Much of the fraternal society’s appeal was due to its being one of the few avenues through which immigrants and the
If this voluntary social safety net was so wide and so pervasive, why did government step in? Ludwig von Mises’s analysis of interventionism accurately describes the rise of the welfare state: programs that were originally instituted to fill the “gaps” in the private safety net eventually exacerbated the problem at hand. This in turn produced a call for more intervention to fix the new problem. The latest round of intervention created its own unintended consequences, thus creating yet another demand for a “solution.” And on and on. Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society propelled the welfare state to even greater heights (or depths, depending on how you view the issue). History shows that it is only through private voluntary solutions that we see true
Who we are in Christ well-known speaker started off his seminar holding up a $100.00 bill. In the room of 200, he asked, "Who would like this $100 bill?" Hands started going up. He said, "I am going to give this $100 to one of you but first, let me do this." He proceeded to crumple up the $100 dollar bill. He then asked, "Who still wants it...?" Still the
A
human compassion. Organizations and individuals, in the spirit of compassion, provided poverty relief that embraced generosity, but recognized the dire consequences of haphazardly given aid. Most social workers of a century ago understood that good character, selfreliance, and strong social ties were virtues that must be instilled in the poor if there were to be any gains made in alleviating poverty. Before the Depression private solutions played an important moral and material role for the poor. Whereas government relies on coercion, charities and fraternal societies embody the qualities that make volunteerism socially advantageous.
allow the private sector to once again achieve the levels of social welfare seen in the past. Jude Blanchette joined the Atlas Network in January 2009 as a member of the Institute Relations team, focusing on think tanks in Asia. Prior to joining Atlas, he was a China based special correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor, a research assistant at the Cato Institute, and the Henry Hazlitt Research Fellow at the Foundation for Economic Education. He studied economics at Loyola University and Mandarin Chinese at the Beijing Institute of Technology. He currently resides in Shanghai, China.
CONTINUED
poor could assure themselves some financial stability. Not surprisingly, the demise of the fraternal society as a primary provider of mutual aid corresponded to the rise of the New Deal era of federal welfare policies.
Conversely, the past 75 years have shown that government has not prudently handled, and cannot prudently handle, the plight of the poor. Rather than help those in need of assistance during times of trouble, the federal government has imprisoned them in a political power game, resulting in increased dependence. Only abolition of the government dole will dirt by the decisions we make and the circumstances that come our way. We may feel as though we are worthless. But no matter what has happened or what will happen, you will never lose your value. Dirty or clean, crumpled or finely creased, you are still priceless to those who DO LOVE you. The worth of our lives comes not in what we do or who we know, but by WHO WE ARE. You are special-Don't EVER forget it."
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hands were up in the air. "Well," he replied, "What if I do this?" And he dropped it on the ground and started to grind it into the floor with his shoe. He picked it up, now crumpled and dirty. "Now, who still wants it?" Still the hands went into the air. "My friends, we have all learned a very valuable lesson. No matter what I did to the money, you still wanted it because it did not decrease in value. It was still worth $100. Many times in our lives, we are dropped, crumpled, and ground into the
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BY TIM CHALLES
Give Up the Ghost here are all kinds of phrases and idioms we use day to day even though we have lost their origins. We know what they mean, we know when to use them, but we don’t know where we got them. In so many cases they come to us by way of the Bible, and especially the King James Bible. This is exactly the case with the common little phrase “Give up the ghost.”
T
The Expression We use the expression “give up the ghost” to describe death—the disconnection of the soul (the ghost) from the body. Yet today we would not use the phrase in a solemn occasion (“We are gathered here today to honor our friend who gave up the ghost on Saturday”). Rather, we tend to use it humorously to describe the “death” of something that is inanimate or relatively unimportant, as in “My iPhone finally gave up the ghost.” A small-town newspaper laments, “History is strewn with towns that gave up the ghost when companies moved on” while a home renovation column in the Sydney Morning Herald begins “The vanity unit in our bathroom gave up the ghost recently, and as we are saving for a major renovation in a few years…” In this way we use it as a form of personification, to make it seem as if something has greater significance than it does intrinsically.
The Origin The phrase was popularized by the King James Version of the Bible, though the King James drew from the Coverdale Bible. The
KJV uses it in a number of passages: Luke 23:46 and John 19:30 when describing the death of Jesus and Acts 12:23 when describing the death of Herod. “And immediately the angel of the Lord smote [Herod], because he gave not God the glory: and he was eaten of worms, and gave up the ghost.” Most current translation render “gave up the ghost” as “breathed his last” or simply “die.” A quick check of the Greek shows that the John passage is different from the others in that it explicitly references “pneuma” or “spirit.” Thus the ESV does well to translate it differently from the other two: “he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.” It is only here where “give up the ghost” is a literal rather than idiomatic expression.
The Application Though the idiom is no longer used in modern Bible translations, it lives on in the culture around us. In this way it gives us reason to consider its significance. It is drawn most naturally from John 19:30 and, thus, from the most momentous event in human history—the death of Jesus Christ. There is much we can and should learn from it. We see that Jesus “gave up his spirit” and this reminds us that Jesus was fully human even while he was fully God. There is and was unity of body and soul, of the material and the immaterial. And then we see that he “gave up his spirit.” This reminds us of his uniqueness, for there was something active rather than passive in this “giving up.” To the end, Jesus was willingly enduring his suffering and sacrifice. Yes, he was dragged to the court and the cross, yes
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he was nailed to the tree, but all the while he was willing, he was still in control. He was willing to suffer in this way even while he had the power and authority to make it stop. This is consistent with what he said in John 10:17-18: “For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life that I may take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down, and I have authority to take it up again. This charge I have received from my Father.” And finally, this little phrase is a call for us to remember that we, too, are more than bodies, more than what can be seen, touched, and killed. Though our bodies can and will be destroyed, in that moment we, too, will give up the ghost. The soul will live on until it is at last reunited to a body that is remade, restored, and perfected. This is the great promise of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Not surprisingly, many Christian songs express worship for these beautiful realities. “In Christ Alone” is a stirring example: No guilt in life, no fear in death This is the power of Christ in me From life’s first cry to final breath Jesus commands my destiny No power of hell, no scheme of man Can ever pluck me from His hand; Till He returns or calls me home, Here in the power of Christ I’ll stand.
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DR. HILL’S HEALTH TIP optimize the function of the body. That is the purpose of the Family Wellness Chiropractic Care we provide in our office, to remove postural distortions of the spinal column that are preventing your body from functioning at its maximal potential. Proper spinal alignment produces better body function. THE SPINAL COLUMN WAS DESIGNED TO SERVE THESE PRIMARY FUNCTIONS: Posture is the position in which you hold your body upright against gravity while standing, sitting or lying down. Posture is determined by the alignment of the spine. When your posture is distorted it causes stress to the spinal cord and the spinal nerves, interfering with the messages being sent from the brain to the body. Uncorrected postural distortions cause early degeneration of your spine, leading to common symptoms such as back pain, neck pain, headaches, sciatica, and fatigue. The spine protects the nervous system, the system that controls all functions of your body. Postural distortions represent injured, damaged or weakened areas of your spine shutting off the energy to the vital organs of your body. We were all created with a skull surrounding the brain and 24 vertebrae surrounding the spinal cord for protection of these vital organs. The nervous system is the only system in the body totally encased in solid bone. It is the most important system of the body, and the most delicate. THE NERVOUS SYSTEM CONTROLS ALL FUNCTIONS OF THE BODY The nervous system, composed of the brain,
THE POSTURE HEALTH CONNECTION There is an epidemic in our society that is causing sickness and disease. The research demonstrates that 90% of the population presents with postural distortions that will negatively affect their health. If postural degeneration of the spine doesn’t get corrected, it inevitably gets worse with time. We don’t want to see happen to you, what happens to most people. Once the postural distortions get worse, patients experience pain and symptoms, diminishing their overall quality of life. Because when it comes to your health you can’t afford to let it get worse, isn’t health the greatest asset that you have? WHAT IS HEALTH? The World Health Organization describes health as a state of complete physical, mental and social function, and not merely the absence of sickness and disease. Our health, therefore, is not just how we look or how we feel, it is how well the body is functioning. If health is 100% function of the body, our goals to improve health should thus be to
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the rest of your body. Right now your heart is beating, your lungs are breathing and you are digesting the food that you ate earlier. 70 trillion cells that you are made up of are responding in sync because your brain tells them to. The communication from the brain to the body must occur at 100% in order for the body to function at its optimal level. Interferences to this communication cause degenerative changes and the process of disease. Due to trauma or stress, individual vertebrae or whole sections of the spine shift out of place. When there are postural distortions of the spine, this causes irritation to the spinal nerves that exit from the spinal column, going to all parts of the body. When this occurs there is a reduced level of communication from the brain to the organs of the body to properly perform their function. Chronic stress to the spinal nerves can cause serious health consequences. THE CIRCUIT BREAKER EXAMPLE An easy metaphor is to consider a circuit breaker in your house. When the power is too high, or there is a problem in the electrical system of a house the circuit breaker flips the switch, which then stops the flow of electricity to the house. If this happens can you operate your TV? What happens to the refrigerator? They stop working without the power source. But where is the cause of the problem? If you replace the TV and the refrigerator, but do not correct the problem with the circuit breaker, the new TV and refrigerator will not function. However, if you correct the problem with the power source to these appliances, they will continue to function and perform their operations. Correcting the posture and spinal alignment is like correcting the circuit breaker. By restoring a proper flow of energy to the brain and the spinal cord the organs of your body (just like the TV and refrigerator) remain in a state of health and wellness. BETTER POSTURE, BETTER FUNCTION, BETTER HEALTH One of the most important factors in health is that your spine is aligned correctly. To ensure proper spinal alignment throughout the arc of life, postural correction is an essential component to the health regiment of you and your family. Wellness Chiropractic Care is a safe and effective way to restore the function Hill Family Chiropractic of your body and improve your overall health. By being proactive 800 State Hwy 248 Suite 2D with your posture, you are making Branson, MO 65616 417.339.3978 the choice to be a better, healthier branson.elevationhealth.com version of yourself. In the end, your health is the greatest asset that you the spinal cord, and the spinal nerves controls all possess as a human being. Take immediate action functions of your body. The Brain sends messages to maximize your health potential with the help of to every organ, cell, and tissue in your body to our team at the Hill Family Chiropractic initiate or suppress their intended function. The Elevation Health Center. messages from your brain flow through your spinal www.AmericanPostureInstitute.com/ cord like an electric signal out the nerve roots to PostureIsHealth/
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Dear Mr. President Trump... “A Nation Divided Against Itself Will Not Stand!”
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When the firemen arrived, they quickly grabbed their hoses and began to put out the flames. The fire had spread rapidly so the threat of it getting to our house was terrifying. We peered out the window while the firemen worked collaboratively to contain the fire. After the firemen successfully killed the fire, we went outside to thank them for protecting our house and our lives. I was impressed by their kindness and respect toward us. It was apparent to me that the firemen would do anything they could do to protect us. Like the firemen at my house, many rescue and emergency crews responded to a national tragedy from a surprise terrorist attack on the twin towers in New York City on September 11, 2001. After the twin towers had fallen, responders from all over the nation worked effortlessly to help the victims recover and clean up the debris. There were crews from various backgrounds, ethnicities, and cultures that bonded together in unity to help with the tragedy. Across the United States citizens sympathized with one another as they evaluated the invasion from the enemies. And the government worked jointly to develop plans to increase our protection to keep our nation safe. When the Founding Fathers started the political process in the United States, their purpose was to help make our nation better and to keep it unified. In their words, “The political process was all about identifying the common good. It was not about competition and disagreement; politics was
a process in which rational voters and officials calmly sorted out what best served the entire community. The end result was not one camp of winners and another of losers, but the entire electorate united behind a common vision.” They had visualized a nation that would be unified, not divided, as a result of the political process.
In about A.D. 70, the Church at large began with believers assembling together with a common purpose: to worship God and help one another. The New Testament book of Acts says, All the believers were one in heart and mind… (Acts 4:32, NIV).
may be one, just as you are in me and I am in you…so that they may be brought to complete unity. (John 17:20-22, NIV) Mr. Trump, as our new president entering the leadership of our nation, it is essential that we do as Jesus taught us: pray to God and unify! We are one nation under God! Please do all you can to preserve our founding father’s intentions to honor Him in the public sector by boldly acknowledging, In God we trust!
BY DR. MARLA WOODMANSEE
hen I looked out the kitchen window, high blazing flames were burning up our trees that lined our backyard. I yelled “There’s a fire! Oh, my, gosh, there’s a FIRE!” Urgently I called 9-1-1 requesting a firetruck. Then I yelled upstairs, “FIRE! CHILDREN, THERE’S A FIRE!” All four children, ages 12 and under, quickly ran toward me. Minutes later we heard loud blaring sirens from two firetrucks blasting up our driveway. The fire happened on Halloween night, but this was not a trick and the firemen were not dressed up to seek treats.
Dr. Marla is a radio host, motivational speaker, and a writer. She is available to speak at your next event!
After the Church began to spread their unity was threatened. Many had become competitive and individualistic with negative attitudes that spilled over into the church. Different leaders started hosting house churches causing tension and arguments among believers. Racial tension was high between Jews and Gentiles; unfair discrimination caused division between those who were free and those who were enslaved seeking freedom; and females sought their own rights in a male dominated society. Paul understood that division affects the church so he appealed to the believers to unite: I appeal to you, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree with one another so that there would be no divisions among them, but that they would be united with the same mind…. (1 Cor. 1:10, NIV) Unity is defined as “the state of being united or combined into one, as of the parts of a whole; concord, harmony, or agreement.” On the other hand, disunity is “disagreement and conflict within a group.” Disunity in the United States will weaken our country. Abraham Lincoln’s remarks on disunity remains true: “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” Jesus encouraged believers who trusted in Him to be unified. He prayed: I pray for those who believe in me…that all of them
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Liberal vs. Conservative Beliefs
BY THE EDITORS
Compiled by the Editors. Copyright 2005 (revised 2010) StudentNewsDaily.com.
We all want the same things in life. We want freedom; we want the chance for prosperity; we want as few people suffering as possible; we want healthy children; we want to have crimefree streets. The argument is how to achieve them…
Liberals believe in government action to achieve equal opportunity and equality for all. It is the duty of the government to alleviate social ills and to protect civil liberties and individual and human rights. Believe the role of the government should be to guarantee that no one is in need. Liberal policies generally emphasize the need for the government to solve problems.
Conservatives believe in personal responsibility, limited government, free markets, individual liberty, traditional American values and a strong national defense. Believe the role of government should be to provide people the freedom necessary to pursue their own goals. Conservative policies generally emphasize empowerment of the individual to solve problems. NOTE: The terms “left” and “right” define opposite ends of the political spectrum. In the United States, liberals are referred to as the left or left-wing and conservatives are referred to as the right or right-wing. On the U.S. political map, blue represents the Democratic Party (which generally upholds liberal principles) and red represents the Republican party (which generally upholds conservative principles). THE ISSUES: (In alphabetical order)
Abortion Liberal A woman has the right to decide what happens with her body. A fetus is not a human life, so it does not have separate individual rights. The government should provide taxpayer funded abortions for women who cannot afford them. The decision to have an abortion is a personal choice of a woman regarding her own body
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and the government must protect this right. Women have the right to affordable, safe and legal abortions, including partial birth abortion.
Conservative Human life begins at conception. Abortion is the murder of a human being. An unborn baby, as a living human being, has separate rights from those of the mother. Oppose taxpayer-funded abortion. Taxpayer dollars should not be used for the government to provide abortions. Support legislation to prohibit partial birth abortions, called the “Partial Birth Abortion* Ban”(*Partial Birth Abortion: the killing of an unborn baby of at least 20 weeks by pulling it out of the birth canal with forceps, but leaving the head inside. An incision is made in the back of the baby’s neck and the brain tissue is suctioned out. The head is then removed from the uterus.)
Affirmative Action Liberal Due to prevalent racism in the past, minorities were deprived of the same education and employment opportunities as whites. The government must work to make up for that. America is still a racist society, therefore a federal affirmative action law is necessary. Due to unequal opportunity, minorities still lag behind whites in all statistical measurements of success
Conservative Individuals should be admitted to schools and hired for jobs based on their ability. It is unfair to use race as a factor in the selection process. Reverse-discrimination is not a solution for racism. Some individuals in society are racist, but American society as a whole is not. Preferential treatment of certain races through affirmative action is wrong.
Death Penalty
Conservative The death penalty is a punishment that fits the crime of murder; it is neither ‘cruel’ nor ‘unusual.’ Executing a murderer is the appropriate punishment for taking an innocent life.
Economy Liberal A market system in which government regulates the economy is best. Government must protect citizens from the greed of big business. Unlike the private sector, the government is motivated by public interest. Government regulation in all areas of the economy is needed to level the playing field.
Conservative The free market system, competitive capitalism, and private enterprise create the greatest opportunity and the highest standard of living for all. Free markets produce more economic growth, more jobs and higher standards of living than those systems burdened by excessive government regulation.
Education Liberal Public schools are the best way to educate students. Vouchers take money away from public schools. Government should focus additional funds on existing public schools, raising teacher salaries and reducing class size.
Liberal The death penalty should be abolished. It is inhumane and is ‘cruel and unusual’ punishment. Imprisonment is the appropriate punishment for murder. Every execution risks killing an innocent person.
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Conservative School vouchers create competition and therefore encourage schools to improve performance. Vouchers will give all parents the right to choose good schools for their children, not just those who can afford
private schools.
Embryonic Stem Cell Research
research and production. Support increased exploration of alternative energy sources such as wind and solar power. Support government control of gas and electric industries.
Conservative
Support the use of embryonic stem cells for research. It is necessary (and ethical) for the government to fund embryonic stem cell research, which will assist scientists in finding treatments and cures for diseases. An embryo is not a human. The tiny blastocyst (embryos used in embryonic stem cell research) has no human features. Experimenting on embryos/embryonic stem cells is not murder. Embryonic stem cells have the potential to cure chronic and degenerative diseases which current medicine has been unable to effectively treat. Embryonic stem cells have been shown to be effective in treating heart damage in mice.
Oil, gas and coal are all good sources of energy and are abundant in the U.S. Oil drilling should be increased both on land and at sea. Increased domestic production creates lower prices and less dependence on other countries for oil. Support increased production of nuclear energy. Wind and solar sources will never provide plentiful, affordable sources of power. Support private ownership of gas and electric industries.
Conservative Support the use of adult and umbilical cord stem cells only for research. It is morally and ethically wrong for the government to fund embryonic stem cell research. Human life begins at conception. The extraction of stem cells from an embryo requires its destruction. In other words, it requires that a human life be killed. Adult stem cells have already been used to treat spinal cord injuries, Leukemia, and even Parkinson’s disease. Adult stem cells are derived from umbilical cords, placentas, amniotic fluid, various tissues and organ systems like skin and the liver, and even fat obtained from liposuction. Embryonic stem cells have not been successfully used to help cure disease.
Energy Liberal Oil is a depleting resource. Other sources of energy must be explored. The government must produce a national plan for all energy resources and subsidize (partially pay for) alternative energy
Euthanasia
Conservative Change in global temperature is natural over long periods of time. Science has not shown that humans can affect permanent change to the earth’s temperature. Proposed laws to reduce carbon emissions will do nothing to help the environment and will cause significant price increases for all. Many reputable scientists support this theory.
Physician-assisted suicide
Gun Control
Liberal
Liberal
Euthanasia should be legalized. A person has a right to die with dignity, by his own choice. A terminally ill person should have the right to choose to end pain and suffering. It is wrong for the government to take away the means for a terminally ill person to hasten his death. It is wrong to force a person to go through so much pain and suffering. Legalizing euthanasia would not lead to doctor-assisted suicides of noncritical patients. Permitting euthanasia would reduce health care costs, which would then make funds available for those who could truly benefit from medical care.
The Second Amendment does not give citizens the right to keep and bear arms, but only allows for the state to keep a militia (National Guard). Individuals do not need guns for protection; it is the role of local and federal government to protect the people through law enforcement agencies and the military. Additional gun control laws are necessary to stop gun violence and limit the ability of criminals to obtain guns. More guns mean more violence.
Conservative Neither euthanasia nor physician-assisted suicide should be legalized. It is immoral and unethical to deliberately end the life of a terminally ill person (euthanasia), or enable another person to end their own life (assisted suicide). The goal should be compassionate care and easing the suffering of terminally ill people. Legalizing euthanasia could lead to doctor-assisted suicides of non-critical patients. If euthanasia were legalized, insurance companies could pressure doctors to withhold life-saving treatment for dying patients. Many religions prohibit suicide and euthanasia. These practices devalue human life.
Global Warming Liberal Global warming is caused by an increased production of carbon dioxide through the
CONTINUED
Liberal
burning of fossil fuels (coal, oil and natural gas). The U.S. is a major contributor to global warming because it produces 25% of the world’s carbon dioxide. Proposed laws to reduce carbon emissions in the U.S. are urgently needed and should be enacted immediately to save the planet. Many reputable scientists support this theory.
Conservative The Second Amendment gives citizens the right to keep and bear arms. Individuals have the right to defend themselves. There are too many gun control laws – additional laws will not lower gun crime rates. What is needed is enforcement of current laws. Gun control laws do not prevent criminals from obtaining guns. More guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens mean less crime. Full text of the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
Healthcare Liberal Support free or low-cost government controlled health care. There are millions of Americans who can’t afford health care and are deprived of this basic right. Every American has a right to affordable health care. The government should provide equal health care benefits for all, regardless
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CONTINUED
of their ability to pay.
Immigration
Conservative
Liberal
Support competitive, free market health care system. All Americans have access to health care. The debate is about who should pay for it. Free and low-cost government-run programs (socialized medicine) result in higher costs and everyone receiving the same poor-quality health care. Health care should remain privatized. The problem of uninsured individuals should be addressed and solved within the free market healthcare system – the government should not control healthcare.
Support legal immigration. Support amnesty for those who enter the U.S. illegally (undocumented immigrants). Also believe that undocumented immigrants have a right to: — all educational and health benefits that citizens receive (financial aid, welfare, social security and medicaid), regardless of legal status. — the same rights as American citizens. It is unfair to arrest millions of undocumented immigrants.
Conservative
Homeland Security Liberal Airport security – Passenger profiling is wrong, period. Selection of passengers for extra security screening should be random. Using other criteria (such as ethnicity) is discriminatory and offensive to Arabs and Muslims, who are generally innocent and law-abiding. Terrorists don’t fit a profile. “…Arabs, Muslims and South Asians are no more likely than whites to be terrorists.” (American Civil Liberties Union ACLU) Asked on 60 Minutes if a 70-year-old white woman from Vero Beach should receive the same level of scrutiny as a Muslim from Jersey City, President Obama’s Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta said, “Basically, I would hope so.
Support legal immigration only. Oppose amnesty for those who enter the U.S. illegally (illegal immigrants). Those who break the law by entering the U.S. illegally do not have the same rights as those who obey the law and enter legally. The borders should be secured before addressing the problem of the illegal immigrants currently in the country. The Federal Government should secure the borders and enforce current immigration law.
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The phrase “separation of church and state” is not in the Constitution. The First Amendment to the Constitution states “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…” This prevents the government from establishing a national church/denomination. However, it does not prohibit God from being acknowledged in schools and government buildings. Symbols of Christian heritage should not be removed from public and government spaces (eg., the Ten Commandments should continue to be displayed in Federal buildings). Government should not interfere with religion and religious freedom.
Samesex Marriage Liberal
Government has the right to use eminent domain (seizure of private property by the government–with compensation to the owner) to accomplish a public end.
Marriage is the union of people who love each other. It should be legal for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender individuals, to ensure equal rights for all. Support same-sex marriage. Opposed to the creation of a constitutional amendment establishing marriage as the union of one man and one woman. All individuals, regardless of their sexual orientation, have the right to marry. Prohibiting same-sex citizens from marrying denies them their civil rights. [Opinions vary on whether this issue is equal to civil rights for African Americans.]
Conservative
Conservative
Respect ownership and private property rights. Eminent domain (seizure of private property by the government–with compensation to the owner) in most cases is wrong. Eminent domain should not be used for private development.
Religion & Government
Marriage is the union of one man and one woman. Oppose same-sex marriage. Support Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), passed in 1996, which affirms the right of states not to recognize same-sex marriages licensed in other states. Requiring citizens to sanction same-sex relationships violates moral and religious beliefs of millions of Christians, Jews, Muslims and others, who believe marriage
Liberal
is the union of one man and one woman.
Private Property Liberal
Conservative Airport security – Choosing passengers randomly for extra security searches is not effective. Rather, profiling and intelligence data should be used to single out passengers for extra screening. Those who do not meet the criteria for suspicion should not be subjected to intense screening. The terrorists currently posing a threat to the U.S. are primarily Islamic/Muslim men between the ages of 18 and 38. Our resources should be focused on this group. Profiling is good logical police work. “If people are offended (by profiling), that’s unfortunate, but I don’t think we can afford to take the risk that terrorism brings to us. They’ve wasted masses of resources on far too many people doing things that really don’t have a big payoff in terms of security.” – Northwestern University Aviation Expert, A.Gellman.
Conservative
Support the separation of church and state. The Bill of Rights implies a separation of church and state. Religious expression has no place in government. The two should be completely separate. Government should not support religious expression in any way. All reference to God in public and government spaces should be removed (eg., the Ten Commandments should not be displayed in Federal buildings). Religious expression has no place in government.
WWW.AMERICAN CHRISTIAN VOICE.COM | VOL.12 #6
Social Security Liberal The Social Security system should be protected at all costs. Reduction in future benefits is not a reasonable option. [Opinions vary on the extent of the current system’s financial stability.] Social Security provides a safety net for the nation’s poor and needy. Changing the system would cause a reduction in benefits and many
people would suffer as a result.
maintain international peace and security. U.S. troops should submit to UN command.
Conservative
Taxes Liberal Higher taxes (primarily for the wealthy) and a larger government are necessary to address inequity/injustice in society (government should help the poor and needy using tax dollars from the rich). Support a large government to provide for the needs of the people and create equality. Taxes enable the government to create jobs and provide welfare programs for those in need. Government programs are a caring way to provide for the poor and needy in society.
Conservative Lower taxes and a smaller government with limited power will improve the standard of living for all. Support lower taxes and a smaller government. Lower taxes create more incentive for people to work, save, invest, and engage in entrepreneurial endeavors. Money is best spent by those who earn it, not the government. Government programs encourage people to become dependent and lazy, rather than encouraging work and independence.
Conservative The UN has repeatedly failed in its essential mission to promote world peace and human rights. The wars, genocide and human rights abuses taking place in many Human Rights Council member states (and the UN’s failure to stop them) prove this point. History shows that the United States, not the UN, is the global force for spreading freedom, prosperity, tolerance and peace. The U.S. should never subvert its national interests to those of the UN. The U.S. should never place troops under UN control. U.S. military should always wear the U.S. military uniform, not that of UN peacekeepers. [Opinions vary on whether the U.S. should withdraw from the UN.]
War on Terror
CONTINUED
The Social Security system is in serious financial trouble. Major changes to the current system are urgently needed. In its current state, the Social Security system is not financially sustainable. It will collapse if nothing is done to address the problems. Many will suffer as a result. Social Security must be made more efficient through privatization and/or allowing individuals to manage their own savings.
to the U.S. The world toward which the militant Islamists strive cannot peacefully co-exist with the Western world. In the last decade, militant Islamists have repeatedly attacked Americans and American interests here and abroad. Terrorists must be stopped and destroyed. The use of intelligence-gathering and military force are the best ways to defeat terrorism around the world. Captured terrorists should be treated as enemy combatants and tried in military courts.
Welfare Liberal Support welfare, including long-term welfare. Welfare is a safety net which provides for the needs of the poor. Welfare is necessary to bring fairness to American economic life. It is a device for protecting the poor.
Liberal
Conservative
Global warming, not terrorism, poses the greatest threat to the U.S., according to Democrats in Congress. Terrorism is a result of arrogant U.S. foreign policy. Good diplomacy is the best way to deal with terrorism. Relying on military force to defeat terrorism creates hatred that leads to more terrorism. Captured terrorists should be handled by law enforcement and tried in civilian courts.
Oppose long-term welfare. Opportunities should be provided to make it possible for those in need to become self-reliant. It is far more compassionate and effective to encourage people to become self-reliant, rather than allowing them to remain dependent on the government for provisions. Compiled by the Editors. Copyright 2005, (revised 2010)
Conservative Terrorism poses one of the greatest threats
StudentNewsDaily.com
Political parties are inherently designed for corruption and failure
United Nations (UN) Liberal The UN promotes peace and human rights. The United States has a moral and a legal obligation to support the United Nations (UN). The U.S. should not act as a sovereign nation, but as one member of a world community. The U.S. should submit its national interests to the greater good of the global community (as defined by the UN). The U.S. should defer to the UN in military/peacekeeping matters. The United Nations Charter gives the United Nations Security Council the power and responsibility to take collective action to VOL.12 #6 | WWW.AMERICAN CHRISTIAN VOICE.COM
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Arab Spring or Conservative Fall??
BY CLARE BYRNE FROM AGENCE FRANCEÂPRESSE
It is a World Wide Divide Paris (AFP) - High-flyer Emmanuel Macron enjoyed a meteoric rise from investment banker to economy minister but the reform-minded prodigy faces an uphill climb in his bid to become France's youngest-ever president. In his two years in President Francois Hollande's government, 38-year-old Macron confronted Socialist orthodoxy head-on, questioning the 35-hour work week -- a totem of the French left.
His businessÂfriendly policies riled many leftist colleagues and activists. During a public outing in June, trade unionists pelted him with eggs. But the swipes at the man dismissed by one veteran Socialist as a "start up" politician have failed to dent his ambitions. "If approval was a
criterion in this country, nothing would ever get done," Macron said last year. His willingness to defy convention -- saying he is "neither of the left or the right" -- also extends to his personal life.
Emmanuel Macron visits the Alstom factory in Belfort, eastern France, last year (AFP Photo/Frederick Florin)
At 16, he fell in love with a teacher from his high school -- a woman some 20 years his senior -- and they have been married since 2007. In August, Macron resigned from the government to prepare his presidential bid, repudiating his mentor Hollande, who is considering standing for a second term despite disastrous approval ratings. Over the past few months Macron has travelled the country with his "En Marche" (On the Move) movement to take the political temperature before honing his programme. A poll last month showed 49 percent of the French having a favourable opinion of him. Among leftists, however, he has work to do to win over voters to his unique brand of compassionate liberalism. Born in the northern French city of Amiens, Macron has a masters in philosophy, writing his dissertation on Machiavelli, who theorised the scheming nature of statecraft, and German philosopher Hegel. He then followed the well-trodden path to France's political class by graduating from the elite Ecole Nationale d'Administration (ENA). Macron also found time along the way to learn German and become an award-winning pianist. After a short spell as a tax inspector, he was snapped up by the Rothschild banking group in 2008. He quickly climbed the ranks, brokering a deal between food giant Nestle and pharmaceuticals company Pfizer that earned him millions in commission.
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In 2011, he advised Hollande during the Socialist
leader's rise to the presidency, even as the candidate declared the world of finance to be his enemy. The following year, Hollande appointed Macron to his staff and two years later, to general surprise, promoted the political unknown to economy minister. Macron's first big test in office was to convince the change-averse French to accept reforms aimed at reviving growth and employment, for example by allowing shops to open more often on Sundays and liberalising inter-city bus travel. The measures sparked angry protests. Prime Minister Manuel Valls, a potential rival for the presidency in the event Hollande decides against running, ultimately had to force the "Macron law" through parliament without a vote, to prevent leftist rebel MPs from sinking it. Macron's marriage to a divorcee with three children has titillated the French media, usually cautious about delving into politicians' private lives. His wife Brigitte Trogneux told Paris Match magazine in April: "At the age of 17, Emmanuel said to me: 'Whatever you do, I will marry you!'" His attempt to chart a midway course between the left and the right has gained him a following among young, cosmopolitan liberals. It is these "winners from globalisation", as the daily Le Monde described them, who flock to his rallies, along with business figures. His appeal among the wider electorate remains untested, however, and he has certainly rubbed many up the wrong way. In June, angry union activists hurled eggs at Macron over his advice to a member of the powerful CGT union that "the best way to afford a suit is to work". www.AFP.com
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quotes about entitlement “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money.” ― Margaret Thatcher
“If this country is ever demoralized, it will come from trying to live without work.” ― Abraham Lincoln
“Man is not, by nature, deserving of all that he wants. When we think that we are automatically entitled to something, that is when we start walking all over others to get it.” ― Criss Jami
“Every one is worthy of love, except him who thinks that he is. Love is a sacrament that should be taken kneeling.” ― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis
“It is easy, when you are young, to believe that what you desire is no less than what you deserve, to assume that if you want something badly enough, it is your Godgiven right to have it.” ― Jon Krakauer “You have to do your own growing no matter how tall your grandfather was.” ― Abraham Lincoln “You cannot help people permanently by doing for them, what they could and should do for themselves.” ― Abraham Lincoln “What separates privilege from entitlement is gratitude.” ― Brené Brown
“When we replace a sense of service and gratitude with a sense of entitlement and expectation, we quickly see the demise of our relationships, society, and economy.” ― Steve Maraboli “Instead of communicating "I love you, so let me make life easy for you," I decided that my message needed to be something more along these lines: "I love you. I believe in you. I know what you're capable of. So I'm going to make you work.” ― Kay Wills Wyma Cleaning House: A Mom's Twelve-Month Experiment to Rid Her Home of Youth Entitlement “The abusive man’s high entitlement leads him to have unfair and unreasonable expectations, so that the relationship revolves around his demands. His attitude is: “You owe me.” For each ounce he gives, he wants a pound in return. He wants his partner to devote herself fully to catering to him, even if it means that her own needs—or her children’s—get neglected. You can pour all your energy into keeping your partner content, but if he has this mindset, he’ll never be satisfied for long. And he will keep feeling that you are controlling him, because he doesn’t believe that you should set any limits on his conduct or insist that he meet his responsibilities.” ― Lundy Bancroft, Why Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men “I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.” ― James Madison “Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government.” ― James Madison
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“Resolution, like responsibility, is a product of ownership, and kids can't resolve a conflict until they figure out how they contributed to it.” ― Richard Eyre, The Entitlement Trap: How to Rescue Your Child with a New Family System of Choosing, Earning, and Ownership “Legalism breeds a sense of entitlement that turns us into complainers.” ― Tullian Tchividjian, Jesus + Nothing = Everything “Narcissistic personality disorder is named for Narcissus, from Greek mythology, who fell in love with his own reflection. Freud used the term to describe persons who were self absorbed, and psychoanalysts have focused on the narcissist's need to bolster his or her selfesteem through grandiose fantasy, exaggerated ambition, exhibitionism, and feelings of entitlement.” ― Donald W. Black, DSM-5 Guidebook: The Essential Companion to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders “He never did rid himself of the feeling that he had been denied his rightful place. It kept him from being goodnatured, and made him unwilling to forget grudges.” ― Warren Eyster “Systemic processes tend to reward people for making decisions that turn out to be right—creating great resentment among the anointed, who feel themselves entitled to rewards for being articulate, politically active, and morally fervent.” ― Thomas Sowell, The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy “Death reminds us that life is a temporary privilege, not an endless right.” ― Craig D. Lounsbrough
2 Thessalonians 3:10 For even when we were with you, this we commanded you, that if any would not work, neither should he eat. James 4:6 But he giveth more grace. Wherefore he saith, God resisteth the proud, but giveth grace unto the humble. 2 Thessalonians 3:12 Now them that are such we command and exhort by our Lord Jesus Christ, that with quietness they work, and eat their own bread.
just don’t mail the cheese secret that the church could handle Government Cheese Itallisthenocharitable works our country needs
I
My grandmother was nervous about something going wrong with the Apollo Mission. She was praising our government for making it all possible.
if we were empowered by the government to do so. If you took the billions upon billions of dollars that the government wasted in entitlements from our taxes and handed it over to the private sector, it would be amazing. I remember when the Department of Motor Vehicles was run by my state of Missouri. You had better pack a lunch to get your tags because the line was so long. Now that the state has handed it over to citizen contractors, the process has
Priority packages of its size come automatically with $50.00 insurance. They denied our claim of $50.00 despite the retail value being nearly $300.00! Their reason was that I couldn’t prove that the contents were worth at least $50.00.
Interesting enough, just a few hours earlier, she was lamenting the governments’ incompetence with her SSI check and her foodstamps. Even at a young age I couldn’t understand why the government gave her a big block of cheese each month.
BY JOHN G. SACOULAS
t was at my grandmother’s house at almost 11:00 pm on a Sunday night in Ambridge, Pennsylvania. The date was July 20, 1969. Me and my brothers were excited about watching Neil Armstrong step on the moon’s surface.
A week later I was mailed shards of the box and none of the contents. There was a note explaining that somehow our package was destroyed.
My reaction was, “If I send a package that comes with a $50.00 insurance policy, the U.S. Postal service is obligated to get it to my destination.”
My father was not in favor of government supplements but tried to explain the complex issues of how it helped our farmers and poorest citizens. Eventually as a family we realized that it was up to everyone’s family and church to do what the government tries to do so inefficiently.
been more efficient and definitely faster.
Irresponsible family members do not have to heed the advice and assistance of family members because they can take refuge in the “non-judgment” of their Uncle Sam.
I long for the day when the U.S. Postal system is turned over to private “for profit” companies. Fedex and UPS are great examples OF HOW TO GET IT DONE.
There is no “interventions”. There is no speaking truth to those who need to hear it.
A few months ago, we shipped a PRIORITY box of the American Christian Voice Magazines to our distributor in Wisconsin.
I reasoned that if I sent a box of packing peanuts and you were not able to do your job, it is irrelevant to what I sent. I guarantee you that Fedex or UPS would pay the claim immediately upon acknowledgement of their failure to deliver the package. I hope that PresidentElect Trump reforms the Postal service and makes it privatized. By the way, it doesn’t only cost 47 cents to mail a letter. You have to divide the annual 20 billion dollars the taxpayers spend to prop up an antiquated system. That is a very expensive letter!
Branson 417.334.7291 Ava 417.683.3612 Forsyth 417.546.4464 www.OzarksFamilyVision.com Our practice has proudly served the TriLakes area with a tradition of quality service and a friendly staff since 1978. The doctors and staff take great pride in offering every patient the absolute best in vision care. Our expert doctors and experienced staff will take the time to answer all of your questions, explain treatment options, and provide the highest quality eye health treatments available. At Ozarks Family Vision Centre we have a mission and we take that mission seriously. Come visit our modern facilities and you will clearly see what sets us apart. VOL.12 #6 | WWW.AMERICAN CHRISTIAN VOICE.COM
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