Pages

August 26, 2012

America's Charade

Counterfeit Christianity and a counterfeit economy; perhaps the best summation of America's affairs as it stands this seemingly final hour.  America's economic peril is no different than peril faced by other empires.  The freedom experiment started in 1776 is in no way guaranteed success through the generations, rather it must be fought, paid for, and understood by each new generation.  The culture though has changed to the point, as author Metaxes' interview points out, that the very ideas of self governance and dependence on God that this country was built on, have been lost and with that has brought a very real potential that the idea that founded this country may be permanently lost.

God is patient, but just, in time.

Excerpt from Interview with Eric Metaxes
At the National Prayer Breakfast, you talked about dead religion, which is the subject of your new book.What does the phrase "dead religion" mean to you?

Dead religion is the default mode of fallen human beings. Since the fall, mankind has tried to find a way to God that avoids God. We want to find a way to Heaven that avoids the cross. Dead religion is any religion, including bastardized counterfeit Christianity, of which there has always been plenty, in which we, through our own acts, can earn our way to Heaven.

Moreover, what that does is it inevitably sets up a pecking order where some of us are morally superior to others. That is not true Christianity. True Christianity is where we recognize we are fundamentally unable to get to Heaven, to connect with God. Therefore, we must humbly ask Him to come to us. We must ask Him to do what He wants to do, which is to bridge the gap between humanity and the divine. So dead religion is any time you have something that is counterfeit. I would say that which is counterfeit of God's real desire for us is opposed to humbling ourselves and asking Him to save us.
From Jesse's Cafe:
The almost frenetic preoccupation and adherence to the Nazi ideology in the latter stages of the war, when it was obvious to any rational observer that they could not win, is remarkable. I had been particularly struck in my reading some time ago with the 'wolf packs' of Nazis who had raged through Berlin, rounding up old men and even boys who had not joined the Volkssturm, and hanging them, even while the Russians were shelling the Reichstag. It never made sense to me until today.
"The radio announced that Hitler had come out of his safe bomb-proof bunker to talk with the fourteen to sixteen year old boys who had 'volunteered' for the 'honor' to be accepted into the SS and to die for their Fuhrer in the defense of Berlin. What a cruel lie! These boys did not volunteer, but had no choice, because boys who were found hiding were hanged as traitors by the SS as a warning that, 'he who was not brave enough to fight had to die.'

When trees were not available, people were strung up on lamp posts. They were hanging everywhere, military and civilian, men and women, ordinary citizens who had been executed by a small group of fanatics. It appeared that the Nazis did not want the people to survive because a lost war, by their rationale, was obviously the fault of all of us. We had not sacrificed enough and therefore, we had forfeited our right to live, as only the government was without guilt."

Dorothea von Schwanenfluegel, Eyewitness account, Fall of Berlin 1945
This is an almost perfect illustration of the credibility trap. One cannot allow the illusion to falter, even a little, to the bitter end. And as the fraud fades, the force intensifies, becoming almost rabid in its deflection. Because that illusion has become the center of a hollowed person's being, their raison d'être, a mythological justification for their existence.

If the ideology had been a lie, then they are not heroes and gods on earth, but monsters and criminals, and their life has been self-serving and meaningless, without significance and honor. And that is the credibility trap.

And this is the US financial system today. 


No comments: