From: News with Views
WHICH STD FACTORY ARE YOU DATING?
By: Devvy
January 19, 2013
NewsWithViews.com
Many can remember the ad with the slogan, “You’ve come a long way, baby.”
America’s culture has come a long way since the 60s. For decades it has resembled a filthy sewer and shows no signs of returning to decency. Children are being sexualized with markets targeting little girls as young as kindergarten age. Cable television (which includes ABC, CBS, NBC) has become nothing more than a purveyor of soft porn. Sexual imagery is everywhere. The filth used to be confined to porn channels like HBO, Cinemax and others which I have never had in my home. Now, it’s the ‘big three’ (ABC, CBS, NBC) and all the other networks that consistently pump sin and sex into households every night of the week.
I always wonder how any parent can allow their child or teen to watch what’s offered up by the stupid tube? I suppose it’s actually rather simple. Yesterday’s children and teens become parents. They also sat in front of the sex machine (TV) and apparently see nothing wrong with their children being indoctrinated into the world of sex and sin at 10 or 12. Is it any wonder preteens and teens get pregnant? Those teen mothers grow up and have teens that get pregnant. It’s a vicious cycle that has brought horrible consequences for girls and boys right through adult hood.
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For those unfamiliar with the communist goals exposed so long ago, here is a refresher:
Congressional Record–Appendix, pp. A34-A35 – January 10, 1963 Current Communist Goals
Extension of Remarks of Hon. A.S. Herlong, Jr., of the Florida in the House of Representatives
24. Eliminate all laws governing obscenity by calling them “censorship” and a violation of free speech and free press.
25. Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio, and TV.
26. Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as “normal, natural, healthy.”
Communism cannot flourish in a country where God is of paramount importance in people’s lives. The way it was from the first pilgrims. The Communist International has never wavered in its commitment to bring down these united States of America. From the same list above:
27. Infiltrate the churches and replace revealed religion with “social” religion. Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity which does not need a “religious crutch.”
28. Eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in the schools on the ground that it violates the principle of “separation of church and state.”
Related:
The Low-Cut Top Epidemic: May We Be Holy
Carol
The symptoms are obvious. Laws address the symptoms; but are powerless to heal the cause. I am more than a little tired of professing Christians who claim to read their Bibles and yet seem to put more faith in the power of a dysfunctional political process to solve society’s ills than they do in the transformational power of Grace.
Yes, people do seem to be looking for love in all the wrong places–not just in sexual promiscuity but in the accumulation of materialistic status symbols. Does the bumper sticker “I am the proud parent of an honor student at [blank] school imply that if the child was not an honor student the parent would not be a proud of him or her?
People are valued more for what they “bring to the table” than for who they are. Almost all of life in the post-Enlightenment/Industrial West has become commodified.
Mother Teresa seems to have diagnosed our problem quite accurately:
I think the world today is upside down. Everybody seems to be in such a terrible rush, anxious for greater development and greater riches and so on. There is much suffering because there is so very little love in homes and in family life. We have no time for our children, we have no time for each other; there is no time to enjoy each other. In the home begins the disruption of the peace of the world. –Mother Teresa
We think sometimes that poverty is only being hungry, naked and homeless. The poverty of being unwanted, unloved and uncared for is the greatest poverty. We must start in our own homes to remedy this kind of poverty.–Mother Theresa
“The greatest disease is the lack of love.”
— Mother Teresa
“America is a land that is starving for love.”
–Mother Teresa
“The life of the contemporary bourgeoisie is a wearying frenzy of work, work, spending, and work, with some time left over for civic duties, commodified leisure, sex, family, and—maybe—a spiritual life.” —Eugene McCarraher, “Theology at the barricades,” Commonweal, July 13, 2001
“There are thousands and thousands of people out there living lives of quiet, screaming desperation who work long, hard hours, at jobs they hate, to enable them to buy things they don’t need to impress people they don’t like.” ~ Nigel Marsh
If you think Christians are free from this sort of cultural conditioning, you have not attended a church wedding and reception in an upper middle class neighborhood!
“I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ. The materialism of affluent Christian countries appears to contradict the claims of Jesus Christ that says it’s not possible to worship both Mammon and God at the same time.” –Mahatma Gandhi
The only place we will find the unconditional love we seek is in an experience of Divine Love. Unfortunately, the *God* that many Christians believe in and preach is Calvin’s Cosmic Bully, more like Baal than the Abba/Father that Jesus revealed.
The Moral Majority/Religious Right are contemporary versions of the Pharisees of Jesus time–of all the sinners that Jesus met, the only ones who really seemed to piss Jesus off!
The typical moralist sees grace as a means to fulfill a commandment. He puts the commandment in the first place and sees the difference of Old and New Testaments in the observance of the Decalogue. In the Old Testament they did not have the grace to keep the commandments; now in the New Testament they have sufficient grace if they use all the means, the sacraments, and so on. This is an anthropocentric, moralistic approach which makes the grace of Christ and finally Christ Himself only the means for the law, for the commandments . But primacy is not the law, the commandments “thou shalt” and “thou shalt not”; the primacy is our Lord, who in his grace, his tremendous love, comes to encounter us. –Bernard Haering, C.Ss.R., Redemptorist Moral Theologian
“The root of Christian love is not the will to love, but the faith that one is loved”.–Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation
And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.
~Raymond Carver, “Late Fragment”
Anyone who thinks that passing more laws is going to even come close to solving our social problems needs remove their legalistic theological glasses and re-read the Gospels through the eyes of faith in Divine Loving-Mercy and the healing power of Grace.
The Wrong Way to Read the Bible
http://theresurgence.com/2010/10/10/the-wrong-way-to-read-the-bible
Two opposite errors exist in approaching the Bible. One is not to read it. The other is to know it so well that you miss Jesus. Jesus pointed out this error: “You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life” (John 5:39-40).
Are you surprised to believe this error exists? We constantly talk about reading and studying the Bible as an unqualified good. But clearly, the way we read the Bible is just as important as reading it.
Missing Jesus
So how can you know if you might be reading the Bible, looking for life, but missing Jesus completely? Here are a few clues:
You read the Bible to reinforce what you believe, not challenge what you believe.
You imagine yourself as the type of person who believes the things you read about.
You think the things you read are especially applicable for people you know, but not for you.
You imagine yourself as the hero of the story, not the person or people who are unbelieving. You frequently ask in your heart, “How could these people be so unbelieving?” For instance, when you read the story of the Israelites wandering in the desert you might say, “How could those Israelites grumble about food and drink when they just saw God part the Red Sea?” But you are completely blind to how you grumble at work or home when you’re afraid of losing something.
You love the attention garnered from your knowledge of the Bible, but give little thought to how you have applied what you have read.
Maybe the Bible should come with a warning label: “Beware: reading this book incorrectly will make you twice as fit for hell as when you began.”
Don’t miss Jesus. Go to him and find life.
Matthew 23:15 (New International Version)
15 “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when you have succeeded, you make them twice as much a child of hell as you are.
“The law is only one of several imperfect and more or less external ways of defending what is better in life against what is worse. By itself, the law can never create anything better… Establishing respect for the law does not automatically ensure a better life for that, after all, is a job for people and not for laws and institutions.” – Vaclav Havel