1. The U.S. Constitution: particularly the freedom to worship as we choose. Imagine living in an age, or a country, where your religion is determined by the state. It's a freedom well worth protecting and defending.
2. The U.S. Armed Services: God bless our brave men and women in uniform. It is because of them—and the grace of God—that we dwell safely in this wonderful country of ours. They more than deserve our support and prayers.
3. Capitalism: That's right, the good ol' free enterprise economic system touted by none other than John Calvin. When one considers the alternatives, it's no contest. For all its grand ideals, communism was rife with abuse and failed miserably. As for socialism, ask the middle classes of socialist countries about their tax burden and quality of healthcare. While abuse is inherent in any economic system, and must always be checked, entrepreneurialism and free market enterprise is part and parcel of the history of a prosperous America.
4. Largesse; Our National Consciousness: Largesse means "liberality," or "generosity." Typically, it is generosity that goes beyond the norm; abundant beneficence. It manifests in global giving to the poor, and right here at home when neighbors reach out to neighbors. Largesse is at the core of how we Americans view ourselves and how we respond to national and global challenges. Our optimism and can-do attitude match the vast open skies of the West, the Great Plains of the Midwest, the sweeping seashores of the Atlantic and Pacific, and the soaring mountain chains that crisscross this breathtaking nation. We think, act, and feel as big as the 3,000-mile-wide cord that connects us. Big stores, big skyscrapers, big cars (hopefully fuel alternatives will allow us to keep them!), big ideas, big dreams. Don't ever feel guilty about employing righteous and healthy largesse in your life. After all, God is Largesse.
5. Conveniences We Take for Granted: Americans who have travelled overseas are only too aware of the joy of these conveniences. Clothes dryers, air conditioners, dishwashers, microwaves, hair straighteners, escalators, vacuum sweepers, etc., etc. Every country is known for its love of something or other. France loves its food, Italy loves its art, and we Americans love our conveniences.
6. Customer Service: True, customer service is better in some areas of the country than others, and there will always be that incompetent clerk who will drive one to utter distraction, but by-and-large customer service in America is superb. (Think Costco, Nordstrom, Wal-mart, etc.) One need only consider India, where shoppers aren't allowed to touch, or closely observe, anything in a store before buying, let alone return anything, to appreciate this point.
7. Educational Choice: Don't like the public school in your area? Send your children to a private school, and take your pick from any number of religious institutions running them. Don't have the money to send your children to a private school? Homeschool (that is if you live outside California).
8. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC): Granted, we have a long way to go to clean up the airwaves in this country, but at least we have something, compared to Europe where network television is shockingly amoral. Remember Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction?" Europeans were stumped at the public outcry against it. Such American puritanism they snarked. I rest my case.
9. Our Infrastructure: Rule of Law on Highways, and the Courage and Kindness of Strangers. Again, think India where pedestrians, bicyclists, dogs, mules, carts and cars all share the road in common. One Indian friend of mine noted that the worst road in America is better than India's national highway. Not only are American highways efficient and well-maintained, but they are used by drivers who, for the most part, obey the law. Try driving somewhere like Marseilles, France, where no one reads, or cares about, road signs. If that were not enough to be thankful for, far more Americans are known for their quickness to come to the aid of someone in need or in danger—on the road or elsewhere—than the few who make headlines preying on such victims. When disaster strikes in America, Americans rise to the aid of their countrymen.
10. Peanut Butter: Any kind, but Skippy is my favorite.
Skip (dad) always dreamed of being a professional ball player. Played legion ball and did real well. I think I smell a little Stage Dad going on.A couple of years ago, I was at a game with a friend, and prior to tip-off, they announced the singing of the national anthem as they always do.
“Please rise as we honor God and America with the singing of our national anthem,” said the announcer. When I pointed out to my friend that there are no words in the anthem referring to God, he accused me of being cynical.
Really?
My generation has the stigma of being unpatriotic, at least within the context of what has been considered patriotism in the past. We don’t have the same general affinity for flags and patriotic songs as generations before us have. Most of our parents lived through Vietnam, the most culturally divisive war in American history since the Civil War, and the repercussions helped shape our view of our government and our global standing as a nation.
There are a few points of resistance with which I know many of my peers can relate. One has to do with the McCarthy-like strategy of suggesting you’re either “fer us or agin’ us.” If you don’t support the idea of preemptive strikes in Iraq, or the greater war on terror, then you’re not patriotic.
This sort of gauntlet, once it’s thrown down, can do nothing other than cause schism. You feel forced to pick sides, and if you differ with those drawing the line in the sand, it places you on the outside of the patriotic circle.
Another point is the ongoing Pledge of Allegiance debate. Some insist that people should not be forced to pledge faithfulness to a nation “under God,” while others contend this position is a direct attack on America itself. Never mind that the phrase “under God” was added to the pledge just over a generation ago.
And, the idea that ours is a Christian nation is a fallacy. In fact, most of our founding fathers were either deists or agnostics who championed the principle of practicing the religion of one’s choice. However, they also asserted the freedom from the mantle of organized religion all together, if one so chooses.
Finally, the matter of patriotism commingling with religion is particularly disturbing to many younger folks. In a time when America was more religiously and culturally segregated, it was easy enough to think everyone believed and looked the way we did. Now, in a much more pluralistic society, the notion of “status quo” is increasingly abstract in every walk of life.
Some see this as a threat to valued traditions, while others look at such critical questioning and thought as an opportunity. For someone who grew up singing patriotic songs in church, and looking at an American flag next to the cross, such symbolism seems perfectly natural. For those of us raised to inspect all leadership and traditions with a critical eye, such things cause us a moment of pause.
There are those who actually believe that America is the home of God’s new chosen people. Most thinking people will agree this is absurd, but this notion is not promoted any more often or passionately than it is from some pulpits on Sunday mornings. For others, the flag and patriotic songs feel right in church, and they have never questioned their place there.
There are those of us, however, who were raised around as many Jews and Muslims as Christians, and living with neighbors, most of whom didn’t look like us. Anything that even suggests a “God loves us more” attitude smacks of elitism, exclusivity and a sense of arrogance, rather than a love of country.
I thank God for being born in this country, and for the many privileges it affords me. I am grateful to those who have preserved the principles of freedom and democracy upon which it was founded.
But the next time you encounter someone who doesn’t express their patriotism in the same way you’re used to, ask questions first and really listen to where they’re coming from, rather than assuming their behavior is patently un-American.
Meanwhile, look for more and more social pressure, and possibly laws, to limit the number of children couples can have. Elimination of the unfit (mentally ill, physically handicapped or simply old) will be examined, and seen as a humane solution to many of our problems. Suicide will be regarded as a sacrificial act. We are in danger of being brainwashed into a culture of death.
Mary Harrison
Newport News, Va.
As a historian, I find this trend fascinating. After all, since humans climbed out of the trees and began surveying the lion-infested Savannah, none have ever lived in a period more prosperous, secure and stable than Americans do today. The U.S. is not only the wealthiest and most powerful country on earth now, but in all of history. There's never been a better time and place to be alive than America in the 21st century.
So why all the decline theorists?
Here's my theory: Prosperity and security are boring. Nobody wants to read about them. The same phenomenon occurred in ancient Rome, the last state to acquire such a firm hegemony. By the second century B.C., Roman citizens were affluent and their empire no longer had any serious rivals. With the dangers past and the money rolling in, they developed a taste for jeremiads. If you had a stylus, ink and scroll you could hardly go broke telling the Romans their empire, culture and way of life were yesterday's news.
Can you expect God to keep blessing America, not matter what? Will a time come when God chooses to curse America? That seems to be a question that American’s do not want to think about.
"At the appointed time he will invade the South again, but this time the outcome will be different from what it was before. 30 Ships of the western coastlands will oppose him, and he will lose heart. Then he will turn back and vent his fury against the holy covenant. He will return and show favor to those who forsake the holy covenant.
Their feet rush into sin;In fact all of Isaiah 59 deals with people who prey on society and innocents.
they are swift to shed innocent blood.
Their thoughts are evil thoughts;
ruin and destruction mark their ways.
According to what they have done,
so will he repay
wrath to his enemies
and retribution to his foes
Perhaps we ought to redefine what sustainability is. It ought not mean organic soy milk, fair-trade coffee, the Toyota Prius, or voting for Obama along with the rest of your sorority. It should be more radical than that. It should be an unabashedly pro-human philosophy, as we should recognize that sustaining humanity is our top mission, not sustaining nature. This means using nature for human benefit, not Gaia’s. It means giving economic vitality to humans by creating trade pacts where they can export to the world market. It means opposing autarky. It means recognizing that human life is more important than nature, and affirming humans’ mastery of nature. This sustainability is really humanism, and is the stuff of the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and the Globalization, where in each case people have created systems to increase fertility, wealth, and freedom.
I spent some time speaking in San Francisco recently… There are smartly dressed yuppies, wealthy gays, and chic business people everywhere downtown, along with affluent tourists, all juxtaposed with hordes of street people and a legion of young service workers at Starbucks, restaurants, etc. What is missing are school children, middle class couples with strollers, and any sense the city has a vibrant foundation of working-class, successful families of all races and backgrounds. For all its veneer of liberalism, it seems a static city of winners and losers, victory defined perhaps by getting into a spruced up Victorian versus renting in a bad district, getting paid a lot to manage something, versus very little to serve something. All in all, I got a strange creepy feeling that whatever was going on, it was unsustainable–sort of like an encapsulated Europe within an American city. The city seems to exist on tourism, and people who daily come into the city to provide a service, get paid–and leave….
I remember SF in the late 1950s and early 1960s as a kid visiting with his parents. A much different place altogether of affordable homes, vibrant docks, lots of construction—and children everywhere.
Since Gordon Brown on Thursday launched what he called "the greatest revolution in our energy policy since the advent of nuclear power", centred on building thousands of new wind turbines, let us start with a simple fact. Nothing conveys the futility of wind power more vividly than this: that all the electricity generated by the 2,000 wind turbines already built in Britain is still less than that produced by a single medium-sized conventional power station. There are nearly 50 nuclear, gas or coal-fired power plants in Britain today each of which produces more electricity in a year than all those 2,000 turbines put together.
I make no apology for returning to this subject because the "100 billion pound green energy strategy" published last week, by what is now laughably known as the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR), contains not only many smaller deceptions and self-deceptions but one so great that almost everyone has fallen for it. The starting point is the EU's requirement that, to combat the "threat of climate change", we must drastically reduce our CO2 emissions, chiefly by building thousands more wind turbines.
It is quite clear from the paper that BERR's officials know we haven't the faintest hope of meeting our EU target in this way. So its number-crunchers have been working overtime to squeeze down the amount of energy we source from wind to the lowest figure it thinks can be made to sound plausible. Until last week BERR had been claiming that our EU requirement meant that we must generate 38 per cent of our electricity from renewables, the largest contribution coming from 11,000 offshore turbines, representing 33 gigawatts (GW) of capacity. But all this has changed dramatically. They now talk only about the need to meet 32 per cent of our total EU renewables target through our methods of electricity generation, with only 32 per cent of that needing to come from wind - and that, they say, can be done with a mere 7,000 new offshore and onshore turbines.
However, our present generating capacity is 76GW. By 2020, on projected demand, to replace one third of one third of our capacity with wind power would mean generating an average of 10GW. And herein lies the central misconception which bedevils the entire debate. Because of the wind's intermittency, turbines generate on average at less than a third of their capacity. Thus to contribute 10GW would need 30GW of capacity, which would require up to twice as many turbines as ministers are talking about - needing to be erected at a rate of more than four every working day between now and 2020.
In practical terms, even if they grossly bend the planning rules (as MPs voted for last week), there isn't the remotest chance that anything like this number of turbines could be built in time to meet their target. For instance, the world only has five of the giant barges that can install monster turbines offshore - and for more than half the year our weather conditions make installation impossible anyway.
But in addition we should also need to build at least 20 new conventional power stations simply to provide back-up for all the times when the wind is not blowing - at a time when, within seven years, we already stand to lose 40 per cent of our existing generating capacity through the closure of almost all our ageing nuclear power plants and half our major coal and oil-fired power stations (due to the crippling cost of complying with an EU anti-pollution directive).
It is a total mess. The reality is that, thanks to the dithering and wishful thinking of our politicians, it may already be too late to avert that breakdown of our electricity supply which would be one of the most serious disasters Britain has ever faced. And, ironically, no one at present looks more likely to inherit this mess than David Cameron - whose only response to last week' s pie-in-the-sky from Gordon Brown was to say that the Government should have been building all those useless windmills years ago.
Today it is said we live in a secular society in which many people---the best people, the most enlightened people---do not believe in any religion. But I think that you cannot eliminate religion from the psyche of mankind. If you suppress it in one form, it merely re-emerges in another form. You can not believe in God, but you still have to believe in something that gives meaning to your life, and shapes your sense of the world. Such a belief is religious.The whole article is worth reading and next time you see some human caused global warming fundamentalist raving about how we are all going to die, just think Jim Jones.
Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism. Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists. Why do I say it's a religion? Well, just look at the beliefs. If you look carefully, you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.
There's an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there's a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment. Just as organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs, imbibe.
Eden, the fall of man, the loss of grace, the coming doomsday---these are deeply held mythic structures. They are profoundly conservative beliefs. They may even be hard-wired in the brain, for all I know. I certainly don't want to talk anybody out of them, as I don't want to talk anybody out of a belief that Jesus Christ is the son of God who rose from the dead. But the reason I don't want to talk anybody out of these beliefs is that I know that I can't talk anybody out of them. These are not facts that can be argued. These are issues of faith.
And so it is, sadly, with environmentalism. Increasingly it seems facts aren't necessary, because the tenets of environmentalism are all about belief. It's about whether you are going to be a sinner, or saved. Whether you are going to be one of the people on the side of salvation, or on the side of doom. Whether you are going to be one of us, or one of them.
Reason is the greatest enemy that faith has: it never comes to the aid of spiritual things, but--more frequently than not --struggles against the divine Word, treating with contempt all that emanates from God.But since the devil's bride, Reason, that pretty whore, comes in and thinks she's wise, and what she says, what she thinks, is from the Holy Spirit, who can help us, then? Not judges, not doctors, no king or emperor, because reason is the Devil's greatest whore.
A person becomes a spiritual leader when his life lines up:
