Friday, June 28, 2013

Interesting article -- The Source of Our Moral Decay

Okay I’m still sick but I read this article the same day that I read the other article I posted a couple days ago. Interestingly the day after I read the article I read about the Texas state legislator who pulled the filibuster in favor of abortion. The article I read in the Deseret news mentioned that this particular Texas state legislator was a single teenage mom who turned her life around and went to Harvard. Or something like that. Anyway, putting two and two together it makes me wonder how her child feels about her filibuster. Apparently if she had the chance she would have murdered her child before it was born. At least that’s what I get out of her filibuster.
So I decided to post this article that I read at American thinker about the source of moral decay. It is written by the same author as my last post from American thinker. He has interesting ideas. Although I don’t agree with everything he says, most of it is true. If nothing else, it will make you start to think. Here is the article:


May 8, 2013

The Source of Our Moral Decay?

By Paul Shlichta


Like many senior citizens, I have been bewildered by the rapid degeneration of our American society. A half-century ago, we were a decent people and a benevolent force in global affairs. Even then, we had to contend with drugs, violence, pornography, and the materialism engendered by prosperity, but we somehow managed to keep these malignancies at sub-critical levels.
But by 1990, even though the threat of Communism seemed to be fading away, we had become aware that something was seriously wrong. Consider Michelle's famous "Pollyanna" monolog in TV's "Knots Landing":

People SHOULD be nice. Nice should be the norm. I hate it that I can't trust anyone! I hate it that I can't put my daughter on the front lawn by herself! I hate it that I have to lock my car, and that I have to worry about an alarm system in my house, and I can't send cash in the mail! That's not the way it's supposed to be...

This resonated in the minds of many as a belated tocsin that our American society had begun to decay.

Since then, things have worsened at an ever-increasing pace. Drug traffic has become so prevalent and profitable that drug cartels virtually rule sections of  a neighboring country and have established a vast fungus-like infrastructure within our own. The institution of marriage has degenerated to the point where homosexuality, promiscuity, and date rape are "the new normal," half of all marriages end in divorce, and over 40 percent of our babies (the ones that escape abortion) are born to unwed mothers. Lying and cheating have become so commonplace that a substantial fraction of all resumes contain false entries and students routinely cheat on tests and buy term papers on the Internet.

I have no tangible proof, but I have come to believe that the primary source of our decay is the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973. I contend that abortion is slowly killing us.

Abortion may be the moral equivalent of AIDS. Our bodies, though under constant attack from bacteria, viruses, and cancers, can normally keep most or all of these invaders at bay.  The primary symptoms of the HIV virus, such as a week or two of fever or soreness, are so mild that they often go unnoticed. But AIDS eventually destroys the immune system, thereby allowing the already-present invaders and a host of new ones to ravage the body unchecked. Ultimately, the AIDS victim dies from one or more infections that otherwise would have been trivial.

In the same way, the death of some 50 million  babies -- or rather, the hypocrisy and moral evasion required to allow those deaths -- has hardened the collective American conscience to the point where it can easily tolerate other moral degeneracies and ignore their obvious destructive effects on our society.

As might be expected, this moral AIDS has had a particularly virulent effect on the practitioners of abortion. The horrors described during the trial of Kermit Gosnell -- the beheadings and snippings of spines to kill babies that survived abortions -- sound like things done in concentration camps. The attempts of the media to ignore or downplay these deeds are reminiscent of the Nazi efforts to hide their "Endlösung". Even more horrible is the contention that Gosnell's clinic is merely the most recent of many such cases.

This is not the first time that we have suffered from such an infection. Starting in the mid-seventeenth century, the institution of slavery had a similar poisonous influence. For two centuries, the American public managed to ignore or rationalize this monstrosity until they were ultimately forced to pay the price of 620,000 deaths in a horrible war [3].

Ancient examples of the effects of child-sacrifice -- which is essentially what abortion is -- are not encouraging. Carthage was one of the most progressive and technologically advanced civilizations in the pre-Christian world. It was in many ways preferable to its rival, Rome, except for its quaint custom of having parents throw their babies into the fire as a way of begging favors from their gods. Scholars disagree as to how prevalent this "peculiar institution" was in Carthaginian society, but it was certainly a major reason (or excuse) that Rome cited for obliterating its rival.

If I am right, then our battles against violence, drugs, sexual deconstruction, and other forms of moral degeneraton are merely symptomatic treatments. Until we end the horror of abortion, we will continue to decay -- or perhaps it is already too late.

If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination. Once begun upon this downward path, you never know where you are to stop. Many a man has dated his ruin from some murder or other that perhaps he thought little of at the time.                      
- Thomas de Quincey, in "Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts" 

  As has been discussed elsewhere, the Roe v. Wade decision was essentially the work of one man, Justice William O. Douglas
  The AIDS acronym could be reinterpreted as "Abortion Is Destroying our Society".
  Contrary to the proclamations of many preachers, I don't believe that God ever actually punishes. It is rather that He has instituted moral laws, more subtle, but as inexorable as the laws of physics, that cause evil actions to automatically entail equivalent retributive consequences.
 

Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2013/05/the_source_of_our_moral_decay.html at June 28, 2013 - 01:06:40 PM CDT

Wednesday, June 26, 2013

Supreme Court overturns DOMA


I still have pneumonia so I’m feeling quite ill but I wanted to post the church’s response to the Supreme Court overturning Defense of marriage act a.k.a.DOMA today. I also read an article yesterday that I almost posted but didn’t which goes along the same line. I thought it was well-written and brings out a  few important points.

so here is the church’s statement followed by the article from American thinker. Enjoy.

"By ruling that supporters of Proposition 8 lacked standing to bring this case to court, the Supreme Court has highlighted troubling questions about how our democratic and judicial system operates," LDS Church spokesman Michael Otterson said. "Many Californians will wonder if there is something fundamentally wrong when their government will not defend or protect a popular vote that reflects the views of a majority of their citizens.
"In addition, the effect of the ruling is to raise further complex jurisdictional issues that will need to be resolved.
"Regardless of the court decision, the Church remains irrevocably committed to strengthening traditional marriage between a man and a woman, which for thousands of years has proven to be the best environment for nurturing children. Notably, the court decision does not change the definition of marriage in nearly three fourths of the states."




June 25, 2013

What's wrong with Same-Sex Marriage?

By Paul Shlichta


This year, June's wedding bells had a discordant tone, as they ushered in a raft of same-sex marriages. I hereby invoke a panel of experts -- Fr. Thomas Vandenberg, G. K. Chesterton, and Kurt Vonnegut -- to explain why such marriages are a dangerous debasement of the concept of marriage.
Fr. Vandenberg's new book, Rediscovering a Pearl of Great Price , is an inspired exposition of the full meaning of Christian marriage, It should be required reading for couples planning to marry, although some of the passages may come as a surprise:

The greatest gift a husband can give his children is to love their mother, and the greatest gift a mother can give her children is to love their father. That is what will keep the proper balance in the family and make their home environment secure. That is what will free the children from their primary fear, which is to be abandoned by one of their parents. Why do they fear that? Because that is what has happened to so many of their friends at school.

Marriage is supposed to have the ambitious goal of providing children with a nurturing and reassuring base from which to learn to face the world. Therefore, parents must not only be good persons, not only a man and a woman (so as to provide the dual role models psychologists say they need), but also so unshakably devoted to each other that their mutual love can withstand all the temptations and shocks that life will hurl at them, as well as the abrasion of living with each other.

To this end, sexual passion and the bewildering differences between the sexes jointly play a vital role. As Chesterton put it:

The differences between a man and a woman are at the best so obstinate and exasperating that they practically cannot be got over unless there is an atmosphere of exaggerated tenderness and mutual interest.  To put the matter in one metaphor, the sexes are two stubborn pieces of iron; if they are to be welded together, it must be while they are red-hot... 

Therefore, as Fr. Vandenberg goes on to emphasize, sexual intercourse is not merely a permitted "perk" or a reluctantly tolerated means of procreation but rather a vital and holy part of marriage -- a divinely sanctioned means of demonstrating and intensifying conjugal love to make it withstand the rigors attendant upon raising children.*

Fortunately, as with all animals, men and women have the proper equipment for such activities. The corresponding parts of the male and female body interact quite neatly for both mutual pleasure and procreation.

Not so for homosexual men and women. Whether or not there is anything wrong with their desires, they simply don't have the proper apparatus to fulfill them. They must resort to clumsy makeshifts, like cargo cult devotees trying to make airplanes out of straw. Alternatively, they submit to grotesque operations, trying to alter their bodies to suit their desires. The artificiality of these attempts to mimic normal sexuality will inevitably distort the emotions that arise from them and will tend to adversely affect any children living with them.

Homosexuals who engage in such desperate expedients shouldn't be condemned for wanting to do so. As the psychoanalyst in Kurt Vonnegut's God Bless You Mr. Rosewater  explained:

Let's assume that a healthy young man is supposed to be sexually aroused by an attractive woman not his mother or sister. if he's aroused by other things, another man, say, or an umbrella, or the ostrich boa of the Empress Josephine or a sheep or a corpse or his mother or a stolen garter belt, he is what we call a pervert. Let us hasten on to the admission that every case of perversion is essentially a case of crossed wires...

In fact, there is neurological evidence that at least some homosexuals are wired differently and cannot help their proclivities. Others contend that homosexuality may be one of the aftereffects of sexual abuse during childhood. In recognition of such factors, the Catechism of the Catholic Church proposes the apparent paradox of condemning homosexual acts while urging that people afflicted with homosexuality be treated with sympathy.

But we cannot debase the whole concept of sex and marriage merely to oblige them. The objective of what a gay activist has called the ""war we've already won" is to reduce marriage to a lowest-common-denominator status that will inevitably include polygamy, which is already being touted on ABC-TV as  "normal" and being campaigned for in Canada. That's too high a price to pay for making homosexuals feel better about themselves.

As Fr. Vandenberg points out in his appendix on same-sex marriage:

Society, for centuries, has had a stake in marriage....It set certain standards for marriage because it needed marriage to be strong for the well-being of the community; it wanted to help strengthen and support it in order to foster good social order, especially around the generation of new life and the raising of children so they would grow up to be responsible members of that community...This extended relationship of the couple to the larger community is evidenced by the civil requirements for a valid marriage...An obvious example would be laws forbidding marriage between couples who were first cousins.

Unfortunately, the institution of marriage is currently being attacked by several forces that, deliberately or inadvertently, are destroying it and thereby undermining our society:  

  • The current fad of cohabitation. Single mothers usually do not assume this role voluntarily but are forced to do so by the perfidy and selfishness of men who desert them when they become pregnant. In consequence, the children suffer from the absence of a father and seek a male role model and mentor, often by joining gangs.
  • Ultrafeminists, who regard men as "the enemy". They encourage the idea that men are unnecessary for raising children and regard lesbian couples as the new "normal". To this end, they cite psychological studies that fall apart when examined.
  • Our protosocialist state, which seeks to diminish the concept of family in order to make the state the primary "parent". This may be one reason why liberals are so enthusiastic about same-sex marriage -- because it weakens the status and importance of families.

But whatever the causes, the debasement of the concepts of marriage and family will destroy us. Lycurgus achieved it in ancient Sparta and produced a nation of racist brutes. The USSR tried it, with partial success, in the last century and begat a dysfunctional society that is now painfully groping its way back to normality. These are hardly encouraging precedents. The legalization of same-sex marriage is a decisive step down that slippery slope.

Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2013/06/whats_wrong_with_same-sex_marriage.html at June 26, 2013 - 12:20:31 PM CDT

Sunday, June 23, 2013

Relief Society Lesson -- This Is My Work and Glory


This Is My Work and Glory
Elder M. Russell Ballard
Of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles
April 2013 General Conference

The source of the priesthood power is God Almighty and His Son, Jesus Christ.

The power of the priesthood is a sacred and essential gift of God.

Priesthood Authority versus Priesthood Power

Priesthood authority is the authorization to act in God’s name. The authorization or ordination is given by the laying on of hands.

The power of the priesthood comes only when those who exercise it are worthy and acting in accordance with God’s will.

“The Lord has given to all of us, as holders of the priesthood, certain of his authority, but we can only tap the powers of heaven on the basis of our personal righteousness”—President Spencer W. Kimball

During the glorious days of the Restoration and the reestablishment of the Church of Jesus Christ in the world today, John the Baptist; Peter, James, and John; Moses; Elias; and Elijah came to the earth and restored through the Prophet Joseph Smith all of the keys and authority of the priesthood for the work of God in these latter days.

It is by these keys, this authority, and this power that the Church of Jesus Christ is organized today, with Christ at the head directing His living prophet, Thomas S. Monson, and assisted by duly called and ordained Apostles.

Men have the unique responsibility to administer the priesthood, but they are not the priesthood.

Men and women have different but equally valued roles. Just as a woman cannot conceive a child without a man, so a man cannot fully exercise the power of the priesthood to establish an eternal family without a woman. In other words, in the eternal perspective, both the procreative power and the priesthood power are shared by husband and wife.

It is crucial for us to understand that Heavenly Father has provided a way for all of His sons and His daughters to have access to the blessings of and be strengthened by the power of the priesthood.

As the literal spirit children of our loving Heavenly Father, we have unlimited, divine potential. But if we are not careful, we can become like the wilted tomato plant. We can drift away from the true doctrine and gospel of Christ and become spiritually undernourished and wilted, having removed ourselves from the divine light and living waters of the Savior’s eternal love and priesthood power.

The primary purpose of this priesthood power is to bless, sanctify, and purify us so we can live together with our families in the presence of our heavenly parents…

“The Priesthood is an everlasting principle, and existed with God from eternity, and will to eternity, without beginning of days or end of years” – Joseph Smith

Sunday, June 16, 2013

Happy Father's Day!

Happy Father’s Day, Dad! Thanks for all you do for me. I love you!