I recently read an article which made me think of the following:
I grew up in the city but moved to the country in the 8th grade. I can remember going out in the field behind our house with our neighbor and shooting his dad's 12-gauge and 4/10 shotgun. I can also remember seeing at high school kids that would drive their trucks to school with a gun rack and with at least one gun, usually loaded. I am sure you could probably make the same observations at the other country schools in the area. Amazingly, I do not ever recall reading or hearing about mass shootings in any of those high schools. What has changed in America is not the accessibility of guns, but the character of man.
I am sure there are those that remember starting every school day with the pledge and a prayer. I was not privileged to be in that era, but I do recall that even in my time I remember when girls got pregnant in high school they were ashamed. There was a time when abortions were illegal, when the divorce rate was not 50%, because couples stayed together for the kids' sake, when there were no X rated movies, when milk cartons didn't have missing kids faces on them. I remember being taught to respect authority and to say "Please" and "Thank You" and to respect your elders. I hear people say that the good old days weren't always so good, but would any of those people tell me you think these are better?
These days high school football games are covered by local and national news. The news coverage is not about the football teams, but about the defiance of a court order by one brave little Texas town (Santa Fe) to preserve the right to pray before a football game. The more this country struggles to free itself from religion, the more we become entangled in the consequences. If people are taught that they came from slime and or monkeys, the obvious questions and consequences must follow:
What is the purpose of my existence? (Hopelessness)
Who made you the boss of me? (Lawlessness)
Why are your rules good and mine bad? (Relativism)
What does it matter how I live if I came from slime and return to
slime? (immorality and inhumanity)
I realize that in any given poll, the vast majority of Americans claim to believe in God. I claim to believe that running is good for me but that does not make me a runner. Putting on my running shoes and running makes me a runner. The climbing abortion rate, murder rate, divorce rate, alcoholism and drug abuse rate, child and spousal abuse rates contradict that claim and prove that actions speak louder than words. It is an obvious truth that the best time you will ever make on any American city freeway is on Sunday morning because there are no traffic jams getting to church. Why should there be with the condition of the "Church" today! For those who believe that separation of church and state is not enough and that the world would be better off with no church at all, ask yourself this question. How many hospitals, universities, orphanages, homeless and abuse shelters have been founded by the ACLU or American Atheist Society?
The question that people should be asking is not "Why does God allow tragedies?", but "When will we realize that no nation, in the history of the world, has ever separated itself from God and evolved to a better society?" Of course, to answer, you would have to know and read about history. Most people, it would seem, prefer People magazine over the Bible. Choose you this day whom you will serve, as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.
In Christ, Adam
Adam's Stuff
