Pro Rege Papers

Here is something that I got emailed a few days ago. It really chronicles the deterioration of the next generation in this culture. A boy can’t keep a bird’s egg or a raccoon’s tail in Wisconsin because of the law. Frivolous lawsuits and socialist feminist laws are choking the good ole American boy spirit. Guys aren’t playing outside and becoming manly enough to take pain and other such things that come from being outdoors with your friends all the time. They stay inside and get glued to a screen. It has an effect on girls too, but not quite as much as the guys. It’s part of the pervading influence of feminism in our society today, and it is destroying the next generation of men. Anyway, here is the long lament (I did not write the following):

To those who were born before 1975:

First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while they carried us.

They took aspirin, ate blue cheese dressing, tuna from a can, and didn’t get tested for diabetes.

Then after that trauma, our baby cribs were covered with bright colored lead-based paints. We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors or cabinets. When we rode our bikes, we had no helmets, not to mention, the risks we took hitchhiking.

As children, we would ride in cars with no seat belts or air bags. Riding in the back of a pick up on a warm day was always a special treat. We drank water from the garden hose and NOT from a bottle. We shared one soft drink with four friends, from one bottle and NO ONE actually died from this. We ate cupcakes, white bread and real butter and drank soda pop with sugar in it, but we weren’t overweight because… WE WERE ALWAYS OUTSIDE PLAYING!!

We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the streetlights came on. No one was able to reach us all day. And we were O.K. We would spend hours building our go-carts out of scraps and then ride down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes. After running into the bushes a few times, we learned to solve the problem.

We did not have Playstations, Nintendo’s, X-boxes, no video games at all, no 99 channels on cable, no videotape movies, no surround sound, no cell phones, no personal computers, no Internet or Internet chat rooms………WE HAD FRIENDS and we went outside and found them!

We fell out of trees, got cut, broke bones and teeth and there were no lawsuits from these accidents. WE ate worms and mud pies made from dirt, and the worms did not live in us forever. We were given BB guns for our 10th birthdays, made up games with sticks and tennis balls and although we were told it would happen, we did not put out very many eyes.

We rode bikes or walked to a friend’s house and knocked on the door or rang the bell, or just yelled for them! Little League had tryouts and not everyone made the team. Those who didn’t had to learn to deal with disappointment. Imagine that!!

The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke the law was unheard of. They actually sided with the law!

This generation has produced some of the best risk-takers, problem solvers and inventors ever! The past 50 years have been an explosion of innovation and new ideas. We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned HOW TO DEAL WITH IT ALL!

You might want to share this with others who have had the luck to grow up as kids, before the lawyers and the government regulated our lives for our own good. And while you are at it, tell it to your kids so they will know how brave their parents were. Kind of makes you want to run through the house with scissors, doesn’t it?!

Many people pretend neutrality in their views. Journalists say time after time that they’re unbiased in their reporting. Educators, bloggers, and many common people usually pretend impartialness in their writing and speaking. In reality though, there is no absolute neutrality that a human being can possess.

All humans have an opinion on everything. Unless you’re going to say something completely factual like, “At 5:30 pm, Sally went to the store,” you can’t be completely unbiased. Bias is part of humanity since the fall. We cannot control our bias in what we say. We insert it unconsciously. Even the sentence above could be biased toward Sally, since it doesn’t mention anything about who was with her. She could have been a kidnapper, and was taking a victim to a store that she owned to hold that person hostage. We don’t know, but that is a very important part of biasness today in reporting is leaving things out.

People can have a completely wrong view if they don’t know all of the information in a certain case. If you leave out one, small, but essential fact, the story could take on a whole new meaning that could be completely false.

Educators always have bias toward a certain view. You can’t avoid making a statement in commentary on an event. Bias also directly affects the way you interpret an event. People sometimes ignore facts in their prejudice. Take the Hezbollah-Israel conflict, for example. Some people say it’s a case of an aggressor overwhelming a small organization of poor, unprivileged people. Others say that it’s a case of defensive measures to insure that the organization does not use terrorist tactics against the country. It all depends on your bias as to how you accept and interpret the evidence. The same thing applies to science. Creationists say that such and such is proof of creation, whereas evolutionists say that it’s proof of evolution. It depends on what evidence you’re looking at, and what your bias is.

Photos and videos can give impressions from the angles they’re taking the picture from. You can see the amount of deception that pictures can contain from the Reutergate incident and the following discoveries having to do with “The Green Helmet Guy”, “The Collapsed Building that was Destroyed Over and Over Again”, etc. More are coming out everyday. Just read a few of the things coming out of Little Green Footballs.

There is also no neutrality in worldview. You can’t be partly Christian and partly secular, or Muslim, or what-have-you at the same time. They are what you call mutually exclusive views. Either you accept God and the offer of the Gospel, or you are not saved. It’s that simple. There’s no “balancing your good works against your bad ones”. That’s a myth, and if you’re trusting in it, you are headed for trouble.

Having been accused as a bigot, I feel a need to respond to someone who can’t stand intolerant people.  I got involved in a discussion on Saber Point which eventually took me to Romantic Dandy, the blog of someone named Percival. He has called Stogie, Aunty Belle, me, and a few other bloggers “bigots”. Meanwhile, he and his friends over on Romantic Dandy are ranting over how everyone from every religion just needs to get together and love each other, and how they can’t stand dissent from their views. I will attempt to address a few of Percival’s points (see his post too) in this post, though he seems to ignore much of what Aunty Belle and I are saying.

First, Islam is a religion and not an “ideology.”

Islam (as well as all other religions) contains a certain ideology that defines their outlook of the world. I didn’t say religion, because that connotates an attack on their way of life (that’s what the word religion means). I am not attacking the Arab way of life by any means. Many of the points for the way Muslims should live their lives, as prescribed in the five pillars of Islam, are noble. I believe in helping the poor, etc. However, I do not agree with all of them, and by no means think that you can be saved by just being a good guy. I am attacking the ideology, doctrines, and end products of Islam, which are completely false, against Christianity, and non-rational.

Second, you define bigotry as “condemning a whole group of people because they exist.” I’m not aware of any group of people ever having condemned another group for possessing the property of being itself.

What about racists? They are conventionally called bigots. They hate Africans, Asians, etc. for being the way they are. An African American cannot help the color of his skin, yet racists hate him for it. A Muslim can get out of Islam, and become a Christian, although it is harder in Islam than in Buddhism, for example. The recent incident in Afghanistan well illustrates that.

An accurate definition of bigotry is more like ‘condemning a whole group of people because you ascribe certain negative qualities to the people who belong to that group.’ Bigotry is a humungous negative overgeneralization about a large group of people.

Although I disagree with that definition, let’s use it for debate purposes.

The official definition of bigot, according to Webster, is someone who is prejudiced or intolerant. I’ll admit; I am prejudiced heavily toward Christianity, just as you are prejudiced heavily toward universalism, liberalism, and secularism. I try not to be intolerant of people, I try to talk with them first, but I’m not perfect. I might point out that you aren’t the most tolerant, either.

Anyway, you are implying that Aunty Belle, Stogie, and I are condemning specific persons themselves. You are implying that we hate certain Arabs. I definitely do not. It’s hard, the way they behave, and my being a fallen human; but I still do not hate them. I have rebuked Stogie for this several times. On the whole; however, Stogie focuses his attention toward Islam, not individual Muslims. He hates them for their beliefs, (which are capable of changing, as I explained earlier) not parts of their existence (which are incapable of changing, as I explained earlier). The vast majority of Arabs believe in Islam, that’s not an overgeneralization.

…the hate I’m hearing at the moment isn’t coming from a Muslim.

I am not hateful towards Arabs as a people; I am hateful towards their ideology, Islam. Read my comment over again if you’re not sure.

[The minority of] Muslims who are bigoted, violent, and don’t begin to understand the teachings of their own religion,

So you’re saying that you, a Westerner who studied at Chicago, not Riyadh, know more about their religion than they do? That’s very presumptuous. Many people say the same about Christianity who don’t know a thing about basic doctrines.

…serious criticism of terrorism coming from Muslim clerics. Try getting some of your news from the BBC, or out of Canada, or even NPR here in the states!

I do get a lot of my news from the BBC, actually. You missed my entire point that I said in the context to that question about Muslim clerics. I said, “If you ask a head of state or a Muslim in the US, [or Europe, etc.] then they will say that they are not radicals.” They want to make the best possible impression. If you ask a usual, small Arab town, Muslim imam, you will get little, if no condemnation of what terrorists say and do. You’ll get the same result if you ask the majority of leading clerics.

I’m sure that if you want to take particular lines from the Quran out of context and emphasize/distort them; you could find angry/vengeful/hateful verses. Ditto Judaism. Ditto Christianity.

Yes, that’s true. The difference between the verses in the Bible that say that, and the verses in the Quran that say that, is that the Bible is saying that God will punish those people, whereas the Quran clearly encourages Muslims to do the avenging themselves.

Percival goes on to give an excuse for people to become terrorists. He says that because a Palestinian had his relatives killed, and his house destroyed by a “precision” bomb, they have a right to become terrorists. They have a right, then, to strap themselves up with a bomb and blow up an Israeli bus filled with innocent civilians, just for revenge. He then asks what difference there is between Israeli violence and terrorist violence. The major difference between them is that one attacks civilians willingly, whereas the other focuses on civilians primarily for their attacks. There are plenty more differences, as I explain here.

[your] point seems to be that Christianity is “the best.”

Wow, he finally caught on! At least he made one right conclusion. Christianity is the only true religion. All others are fakes.

Then someone named Lady Wordsmith chips in and offers a Universalist proposition:

“We may all bow at different times and say our prayers in different ways, but we all offer the same praise and ask for the same grace.”

Try reading the Bible, compare it to the Quran, etc. and you’ll think differently.

I’ll leave all of you with my telling of what a radio talk show host said to a Muslim, posted in a comment on Saber Point:

I remember that one guy who was filling in for Rush Limbaugh one day about a month ago, who was arguing with a Muslim. The Muslim said that Islam was a religion of peace, and that the majority of Muslims are pacifist Pillsbury doughboys, etc., etc. The host said to him, (I don’t know the exact quote) “If terrorists are such a minority in Islam and the most Muslims are against jihadi violence, then why is there not an uproar and outrage when they do acts of terror? I mean, when the sexual abuse of boys by Roman Catholic priests was uncovered, the Pope and the Vatican cracked down on them. There was a huge trial and scandal and those people were punished. However, when Muslim terrorists blew up 3,000 New Yorkers, you didn’t see that kind of response. You saw people dancing in the streets with their fingers raised in the V-sign.” The Muslim couldn’t answer back, and proceeded to shift the focus of the argument away from what the host had said.
It was interesting to listen to.

Axinar wrote a post about abortion in his blog. It started when I said that Andrea Yates’ killing of her five children was not an insane act, but a desperately wicked act. Then I said that, “there are many, many, mothers who kill their own children, and no one calls them insane. In fact, the government even helps them. It’s called abortion: the now legal murdering of a mother’s children by her willing consent.” That comment got Axinar going, and he published a lengthy response to me about abortion. Here is my answering comment (which ended up being as large as his post):

Are you saying that I quote the Bible a lot, or that I’m solid in my position, or that I present the evidence and (if I do say so myself) win the argument?

BTW, your link to the Marie Claire article is invalid. If you could get that working, I could understand your points more.

Some women have “post-partum depression” where they are fairly dehabilitated, but there are very few women who are unable to take care of their baby. So you are questioning the intelligence of those women that regretted having an abortion by saying that they didn’t remember the circumstances.

“Lifelong grinding poverty?” That’s an extreme generalization. There are many single mothers that survive easily. They can also marry. Besides, with today’s government welfare and private charity, very few people are “grindingly poor.”

“Health risks staggeringly greater than abortion?” Not with today’s technology and techniques.

“Bringing more humans into an already over-crowded world.” You’re talking about cities, Western Europe, China, and Japan. In every other part of the world there’s room for more people. There is such a surplus of food that the prices are so low that farmers have to rely on government subsidies.

If the mother does not want the child, (or if it was an “accidental” pregnancy) adoption is a wonderful way to give unwanted children a home with parents who can’t have any, or want more children.

Your answer “no” to those questions is purely opinion.

“Do we consider a miscarriage a death by natural causes?”

Yes, we do. Once the sperm and ovum unite, that is a human being. It is very small, but it is a human being. If it is human being and it miscarries, then that is a death by natural causes, rather than man-made causes in abortion.

“Do we name a miscarriage?”

Yes, we do. My mother miscarried two babies, Jonah and Jirah. Babies were traditionally named, even if they died. Many mothers still do today.

“Do we cremate or bury a miscarriage?”

In ceremony some people do. Of course it is optional, but it doesn’t really matter.

“Do the cells a woman passes in a miscarriage constitute a human being?”

Yes, they do. They contain all the genes for a human being. They comprise a human being, even though he/she is very small.

The cells cannot survive outside the mother’s womb, they need to be protected, just as a little child cannot be expected to balance his finances to provide food and shelter for himself. But the cells are still fully human.

“Legalized abortion SAVES lives - the lives of [single mothers, etc.]”

So you’re saying that if you have a child you’re destined to die early? That’s just false.

“…countless millions who either aren’t ready or have absolutely no business being parents in the first place”

In the first place, those who aren’t ready (or “who have no business” trying) to have a baby should not even have sex. In the second place, if the person has a baby but doesn’t want it, adoption is a perfectly valid option, as I explained before.

An integral part of Karl Marx’s theory of communism is that the supposedly poor workers (proletariat) are being oppressed by the supposedly rich capitalist employers. Collectivists say that the proletariat is in a very bad condition. They insist that they are much worse off than the capitalists. However, these are comparative terms that communists are using.

The question is: “What are they comparing present conditions with?” It is certainly not the past. The working population is better off and richer than ever before. Capitalism got the proletariat out of serfdom to feudal lords in the Middle Ages. As far as I can see that’s a change for the better, not worse.

So if they’re not comparing it with the past, they must be comparing it with the future. This is obviously the case. Utopians have given us a picture of a glorious, peaceful world that can be brought about by instituting socialistic programs. Novels like Looking Backward, by Edward Bellamy gave this impression, and urged us to move civilization forward by their ideas.

Now, I’ll admit, the present can look very gloomy compared with an imaginary paradise. However, that hardly means that the imaginary future will come about by the programs that socialists propose. It hardly proves their theory. Nor does it prove that things are horribly bad now.

Besides, those utopias have not come about. Looking Backward was supposed to be fulfilled in 2000. It’s 2006, and we still don’t have a paradise, even though many of Marx’s ideas have been put into law. There have even been some groups that have followed Marx’s instructions to the letter, but all attempts have failed.

Socialists need to get into reality, and look at where we are compared to where we have been, not what someone wishes we were.

The labor unions used to be a plague on the United States. They were extremely violent in the 1880’s and ‘90s, and practically ruled business in the U.S. until Ronald Reagan stopped them with his fortitude. They are still very influential in Europe.

One of the things that I have thought is very interesting is that the main fight of labor unions is not against employers, though that is part of it, but against other non-union employees.
Unionism is based on socialism. They probably wouldn’t say it outright, but they believe in the basic doctrine of Karl Marx’s communism: that the common workers are being oppressed by the employers and/or capitalists. This is based on Marx’s labor theory of value: that an object receives all of its value from the labor put into it. According to Marx, the workers do most of the wealth producing, but they receive very little of the benefits; the employers and capitalists do. Thus there is a great injustice.

Now, that’s not very good economics. There are many other factors in value besides the labor put into the product. Anyway, the unionists believed this basic communist premise, and set about to get for themselves more of what they saw as the profits of their labor. So they joined together and used intimidation to get better wages, fewer work hours, etc. from their employers.

The conflict comes to a head when the unions get those terms of easy work. They attempt to establish a monopoly on the labor in a certain field of expertise. They try to make the employers agree to only accept union members as employees. They exclude and take violent action against those who are willing to work for the standards and wages of the company, rather than the union. When the union calls a strike, they try to prevent other workers (called by the unionists “scabs”, “rats”, or “strikebreakers”) from coming to the company to relieve the labor shortage. This is when violence takes place.

If you look at the episodes of the 1880’s and ‘90s, you see what kind of things labor unions can do when they have the opportunity. You can see some of the crazy ideology that they put forward. Just read some of the accounts of the Great Railway Strike of 1877, or the Haymarket Riot of 1886, or the Homestead Strike of 1892, or the Pullman Strike of 1894. The unions have moderated in terms of violence since then, but the basic ideology is the same.

After WWII until the 80s, the unions had almost established complete control over large companies. They wielded so much power of the strike with all their members that the large companies were forced to bargain out deals or face a massive strike that would devastate their company. This carried on until Ronald Reagan came into office. He decided that enough was enough and that government was going to stand up to these people, at least the government employees.

When the Air Traffic Controller’s Association struck in 1981, Reagan just held out and refilled the posts with spare workers and willing controllers that agreed to work extra hours. After a while, the union members started to come back to the job because they couldn’t hold out without money for long. Then the private companies got the idea and started doing the same thing. Over the years, they gradually broke a large amount of the power of the labor unions.

You know it really shows where this country is when the Motion Picture Association of America gives a film a PG rating for Christian elements in the plot.

Alex and Stephen Kendrick direct Facing the Giants, a movie about the struggles of a football team in the South. There is an evangelical component in the movie that earned it a PG rating for adult themes. Apparently the MPAA believes that Christianity should not be something children are exposed to, along with violence, bad language, and nudity. Yes, that stuff is poisonous. Look at all the lives that have been ruined by the Christian message. Heaven forbid that parents should let their children see THAT!

That’s nonsense of course, but it just shows the direction this country is inching toward.