Last week I said that life without belief in God was and is incoherent. This is a followup piece to that. My thesis here is that we are near the ‘end of the age” Jesus talked about, because we (as in all of us everywhere and throughout time) have built our houses on sand. The Bible says that “the fool says in his heart, there is no God”. We scoff at that. We have become fools. We live among fools. Our captains lead ships of fools. We cannot save ourselves.
Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that America was great because America was good. I paraphrase rather than quote him here, because what he said then is no longer true. That’s right. America is no longer good.
In fact, America has ascended the world stage as a contender for the most epically failed state in the history of the world. It is perhaps - only perhaps - still the world’s superpower, but it has not been a force for good for a very long time. Indeed, a case can easily be made that America has made the same tragic mistake as Judas Iscariot: it sold its soul for money. As we have conspired to bring down regimes we find to be unacceptably undemocratic, we have grown fat on the spoils of the wars and devastation we have brought on ther countries in the process.
Consider this from The Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Center:1
On the day Solzhenitsyn was arrested, February, 12, 1974, he released the text of [this essay] “Live Not by Lies.” The next day, he was exiled to the West, where he received a hero’s welcome. This moment marks the peak of his fame. Solzhenitsyn equates “lies” with ideology, the illusion that human nature and society can be reshaped to predetermined specifications. And his last word before leaving his homeland urges Soviet citizens as individuals to refrain from cooperating with the regime’s lies.
But do we even know how to discern the truth? More to the point, do we even want to know what it is? We refuse to look at evidence that COVID was a planned release of a lab-engineered virus, or that the last Presidential election was wrought with fraud, because if true, the implications are that there is massive corruption at almost every level of our society. We still hold to the notion that Lee Harvey Oswald was solely responsible for the death of John F Kennedy, and that he acted alone. We accepted that lie, because we couldn’t bring ourselves to believe that the CIA (or the Mafia, or some unknown group of conspirators) was actually responsible. And as a result, the lies became embedded in our history, and have been like the yeast that Jesus said would spoil the whole batch. There is a price to pay when we refuse to challenge a narrative that seems hard to believe.
Consider this from AmericanDecency.org -
Perhaps his most famous quote, though, is this one: “More than half a century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”
Yet we think that we are powerless, or at least that the cost of regaining our freedom is simply too high. And yet Jesus himself told us that “In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.” John 16:33 He also said “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what shall a man give in return for his soul?
Again back to the Solzhenitsyn Center-
We have so hopelessly ceded our humanity that for the modest handouts of today we are ready to surrender up all principles, our soul, all the labors of our ancestors, all the prospects of our descendants—anything to avoid disrupting our meager existence. We have lost our strength, our pride, our passion. We do not even fear a common nuclear death, do not fear a third world war (perhaps we’ll hide away in some crevice), but fear only to take a civic stance.
We have internalized well the lessons drummed into us by the state; we are forever content and comfortable with its premise: we cannot escape the environment, the social conditions; they shape us, “being determines consciousness.” What have we to do with this? We can do nothing.
But we can do—everything!—even if we comfort and lie to ourselves that this is not so. It is not “they” who are guilty of everything, but we ourselves, only we!
Some will counter: But really, there is nothing to be done! Our mouths are gagged, no one listens to us, no one asks us. How can we make them listen to us?
To make them reconsider—is impossible.
The natural thing would be simply not to reelect them, but there are no re-elections in our country.
In the West they have strikes, protest marches, but we are too cowed, too scared: How does one just give up one’s job, just go out onto the street?
All the other fateful means resorted to over the last century of Russia’s bitter history are even less fitting for us today—true, let’s not fall back on them! Today, when all the axes have hewn what they hacked, when all that was sown has borne fruit, we can see how lost, how drugged were those conceited youths who sought, through terror, bloody uprising, and civil war, to make the country just and content. No thank you, fathers of enlightenment! We now know that the vileness of the means begets the vileness of the result. Let our hands be clean!
A rich young ruler once asked Jesus, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” His answer surprised everyone. “Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone.2 You know the commandments: ‘Do not commit adultery, do not murder, do not steal, do not bear false witness, honor your father and mother.” “All these I have kept from my youth,” he said. On hearing this, Jesus told him, “You still lack one thing: Sell everything you own and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow Me.”
But when the ruler heard this, he became very sad, because he was extremely wealthy. Seeing the man’s sadness Jesus said, “How hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of God! Indeed, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”3
We are no longer the shining city on a hill. Most of the world sees us as a provocateur and an enemy, not as a friend. It will be more than a single generation before we rid ourselves of the stains and sins we are currently controlled by - if we ever do. Virtue once lost is exceedingly hard to earn back.
Again back to American Decency
How did we get here?
Patrick Henry warned us about the path that leads to where we now sit: “Bad men cannot make good citizens. It is when a people forget God that tyrants forge their chains.” And Lincoln stated in his Proclamation Appointing a National Fast Day: Patrick Henry warned us about the path that leads to where we now sit: “Bad men cannot make good citizens. It is when a people forget God that tyrants forge their chains.” And Lincoln stated in his Proclamation Appointing a National Fast Day: “We have been preserved, these many years, in peace and prosperity. We have grown in numbers, wealth and power, as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace, and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us; and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own.”
The USA may or may not survive. It may or may not recover it’s former position as the world’s only superpower, or it’s status as the shining city on a hill. But we have a way to regain our individual souls. One way only.
As for me and my house, we will follow the LORD.
Vladimir Putin has made Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago required reading for Russian high-school seniors. Imagine that. The evil Russian dictator wants young Russians to learn about the crimes of the Soviet regime.
Eyewitnesses knew enough about the Jewish Law to realize that Jesus was suggesting that he WAS God.
I think by this he was suggesting that anyone who values his possessions above his relationship with God is not likely to enter His Kingdom.
Thank you for sharing Solzhenitsyn’s paper. Read it some while ago. Not sure how, when push comes to shove, how will deal with untruths. It has been on my mind since read “Not by Lies “ so am writing a book about renewing one’s mind. I know the day will come and I have 17 grandchildren to mentor.
John Archer
Thank you for sharing Solzhenitsyn’s paper. Read it some while ago. Not sure how, when push comes to shove, how will deal with untruths. It has been on my mind since read “Not by Lies “ so am writing a book about renewing one’s mind. I know the day will come and I have 17 grandchildren to mentor.