Do you ever find yourself wondering what America’s Founding Fathers would think of their America in 2019?
I find myself wondering if, frankly, The Constitution over which they tortured themselves has much relevancy today. And if it doesn’t, why do we spend so much energy defending it, or shredding it? Maybe it’s no longer of much use. It was written as a reaction to the subjugation of the New World Colonists to England. It was a new idea. The people, the citizens, would no longer be subjects of or owe fealty to a foreign power, or a lord or king or to a tyrannical government of its own. And for a couple of centuries it was a guide for a nation which grew to become the most powerful nation in Mankind’s long history. It worked remarkably well because its government was, at least in theory, of the people, by the people and for the people. But “the people” have become the problem.
They say all good things come to an end. In all generalities lies some truth.
Before America’s Civil War, French diplomat, political scientist and historian, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote “A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can
only exist until the voters discover they can vote themselves
largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority
always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the
public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over
loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age
of the world’s greatest civilizations has been 200 years.”
More recently, Maggie Thatcher put it a bit more succinctly: The problem with socialism is that sooner or later you run out of other people’s money.
And so, here we are, a bit more than that 200 years into The Great Experiment. America has expended an ocean of its most precious blood, sweat and tears, building this nation. But among many there is great dissatisfaction with the results. The irony is that today’s dissatisfaction is to be found primarily among those who have benefited most from the least amount of effort! The young simply want what they want, and want it now. They no longer seem to believe they can stand on their own two feet, work hard, and get what they want on their own. One senses they have no desire to embrace America’s traditional moral sentiment: get ahead by working hard and being good.
Perhaps it’s not their fault. It’s how our culture has evolved. Who wants to work hard when you can “get by” on your wits?
Americans can’t get enough of puppies, kittens and kiddies. We coddle them. Spoil them rotten. Combine that with the craftiness of spoiled brats in getting what they want, and tradition and responsibility fly right out the window.
So we now have a raft of young politicians tossing caution and even the slightest hint of fiscal practicality to the wind, openly promising free college, free health care, free abortions and whatever else they can think of to generate attention and votes. A kind of new age melange of socialism, capitalism, progressivism, globalism and democracy.
Perhaps we should think of it as Neo-Marxism or cultural Marxism where the Left attempts to impose not so much class division by wealth – poor versus rich – but now by race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, faith and any other way they can invent to divide us. But the division is not simply to put us in neat little boxes, it’s intended to turn one box against another.
Our Constitution was not created to handle this kind of problem. It was assumed at the start that America would never be over-populated. That we would always need more people. It would never have occurred to the Founders that their invention would ever be populated by close to 350,000,000 people, many of whom are not citizens but who receive many of the same benefits, and in many cases more, than its citizens. I suspect they would be horrified to see thousands of homeless people living in squalor, many of them veterans. They would be horrified by the drug-infested tent cities. Their Constitution was not created to deal with this. This was a thing of Roman demise.
This generation’s anxiety-driven need to be inclusive has overwhelmed their common sense, assuming they had some in the first place. They demand inclusiveness for every division and subdivision of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and deviancy except...except...for traditional white Americans. Those whose progenitors created the freedoms we take for granted, those who fought to maintain these very freedoms today’s generations enjoy, and now abuse.
What would the Founders think about free college where the young are sent to be indoctrinated in anti-traditional American sentiment? And beyond college? After indoctrination, why would a graduate feel any debt to the country which he grew up in, and now despises? Will he develop a desire to serve his country in some positive way? Embark on a useful career? Start a good family? Buy a house and become a useful member of a community?
More likely many will gravitate to becoming political activists. Or anti-facist fascists. Or members of the army of so-called journalists — which is pretty much the same as political activism — very few of whom seem to be contributing anything positive beyond partisan politics. Does America really need another journalist? Purveyors of trivia and sowers of dissent? Does America need one more lawyer? Working like mice to chew loopholes in The Constitution. Or doll-faced tv talking heads carping with that perpetually adolescent voice they all seem to have adopted?
Almost predictably, America’s wonderful Constitution has become the very instrument of its demise. The freedoms which the Constitution guarantees have enabled
our greatest institutions to be infiltrated by the very enemy of that
Constitution. Leftists and their obsession with Marxism
have virtually taken over America’s legal system, institutions of learning, medical, healthcare and pharmaceutical industries, entertainment, journalism, publishing, and daily chip away at our manufacturing, technological, agricultural, defense, transportation and even sports industries.
Virtually every potential failure of The Great Experiment can be traced to the simple fact that there are now far too many who have no underpinning of or love for traditional American values. It is as alien to aliens as aliens are to America’s laws.
Our politicians have failed the nation. Law, applied unequally as it is now, has failed the nation. Today’s culture, without morals, has failed to lift our spirits. The Great Experiment is not exactly turning out great except for a small number of the mega-wealthy. A handful of the mega-wealthy wielding their power over the rest of our 350,000,000 citizens isn’t what the Founders hoped for in this Great Experiment, is it?
By opening our borders and treasury to millions upon millions of immigrants from countries whose cultures are incompatible with traditional America, we now have a nation so divided, with a plethora of industries devoted to further the divide, that we have passed the point of any hope for assimilation. We hear a lot of blather about “bringing us all together.” Claptrap. It’s clear the more we talk, the wider grows the gap.
Tocqueville warned that modern democracy may be adept at inventing
new forms of tyranny by pushing the noble goal of equality to a radical degree. Is this not exactly what we are experiencing now? Tearing down statues. Renaming places. Labeling anyone who disagrees with the new tyrants as racist, homophobic, misogynist, xenophobic, Islamophobic and a plethora of other Marxist-inspired epithets.
If despotism
were to take root in a modern democracy, opined Tocqueville, it could be a much more pernicious version than the oppression which existed under Roman emperors or
tyrants of the past, who could only exert oppressive influence on a
relatively small cluster of people at a time. In contrast, despotism under democracy could see "a multitude
of men", uniformly alike, equal, "constantly circling for petty
pleasures", uncaring about their less fortunate fellow citizens, with the few benefiting under the will of a
powerful state which would exert an immense protective power. In this, Tocqueville anticipated Hitler, Mau, Stalin et al.
Must America’s traditionalists simply accept the idea that we’ve had our 200 years, and allow our nation to continue it’s descent into whatever chaos follows the failure of a democracy? I do not believe Americans are ready for that. What to do, what to do?
No one knows a simple, quick or painless ways to change the course, or revitalize an experiment of this size and complexity. But some experiments are simply failures — not worthy of continuing. Our three branches of government are constantly at war... not just with each other but within each. After a couple of hundred years, perhaps it’s time to invent a new and better form of governing. Before the dictators leave us no options.
Opening Scene
It’s the next Star Trek assignment issued to Captain Kirk by The Federation: correct situation on a Federation Planet whose population density is the proximate cause of its demise.
Plot twist: This time it’s not the planet Gideon. Kirk is shocked when he learns it’s his own home planet – Earth!
Pockets of Hate
It’s not an issue of “how many people can Earth support?” Whatever the number may be, the existential threat stems from local density; too many humans jammed together in megalopolises.
Worse, these urban areas have become peppered with unassimilated peoples from many different cultures and nationalities which do not easily mix. Many are non-citizens of the nations to which they have migrated. Many literally hate the native culture and citizens into which they are now embedded. They constitute growing pockets of hate which national leaders are loathe to deal with, or even to publicly criticize because of political correctness (a fact not lost on ghettoists, who are clever enough to use politicians’ squeamishness to great advantage). And so, the density is allowed to grow like a cancer which threatens the very existence of any nation in which it grows.
Clashing Cultures
On the other hand, the world’s large nations contain vast regions of geography which are very sparsely populated or virtually unoccupied. As Commander Spock quickly analyzes, it is not total world population which causes the problem, but density – human friction, the clashing of cultures. He tells Kirk that like rats in a cage, when local population density reaches critical mass, like a nuclear chain reaction, the rats begin to turn on each other. They begin to go... well... squirrely. In case you’ve missed it; it was in yesterday’s news. It’s in today’s news. It’s in every day’s news.
Density. Critical mass.
What a Mess
The crew of the Enterprise can see how the humanity mass has polluted air, ground and sea. Mountains of refuse, the detritus of life, has piled up like the magma spewed from giant volcanoes. Human density produces huge profits for corporations less and less connected to the people they produce for. The need to survive drives those less fortunate to more and extreme measures.
Crime
Doctor McCoy shows Kirk a chart where 10% of Earth’s population turns to criminal activity in order to survive, or simply because the friction of human activity produces subcultures of criminals. Spock shows how, in Earth’s ancient history, world population might have been 2,000,000, and that would mean 200,000 rats would be causing trouble in the then-known geography. Bad enough. But, spread across the known world of the time, it was dealt with. Harshly to be sure.
Jump ahead to now. Current world population is approaching thirty-five thousand times as many as in ancient times... the total number of humans currently living was estimated to have reached 7,620,000,000 as of May 2018. Over seven billion humans! – at that 10%, it ups the number of deviants to 700,000,000.
“700 million criminals!” Kirk shows his shock, “Attracted to densely populated urban areas?”
Spock points out that, “Whereas the ‘known world’ was expanding in ancient times, Earth’s ‘known world’ is now all there is for Earthlings unable to escape the planet.”
So, despite notoriously under-estimated crime statistics, the crime problem is actually far greater than in the past. And it can only get worse as population density doesn’t just continue to grow but actually accelerates.
Add to all this the growing number of misfits, and we might have as many as 3,000,000,000 problem people on the planet.
“Think of it,” Uhura whispers, “A planet in this galaxy with a population of seven billion...”
“Yeh,” says Chekov, “Three billion of whom can’t be trusted or who can’t take care of themselves. It’s like Leningrad.”
Final Scene
Seeing the population of his home planet so deteriorated, Captain Kirk, not unfamiliar with The Old Testament, realizes the solution involves draconian measures. Such a large population cannot be moved. Population reduction along the lines of The Great Flood is The Federation’s solution. But Kirk, who is often accused of “playing God,” refuses to do what has to be done. He turns to Spock and mumbles sadly, “Let’s get the hell out of here.
“Chekov, plot a course for the Aldeberan System... Sulu, go to warp ten as soon as the course is laid in.”
“But Captain... the Federation Directive...”
“To hell with it. Let nature take care of it, not us...”
“Nature?” ask Uhura.
“A pandemic,” answers Doctor McCoy.
The bridge crew stares at the Captain for a second or two before
he slowly nods and, putting his hand on the young navigator’s shoulder, gives the command, “Engage.”
Cue Star Trek closing theme; fade to black.
But Modern Man feels he no longer has a need for God. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say he’s replaced the Almighty God with the almighty dollar. Or rabid politics, or other unholy things. God has not appeared and interceded in any obvious way in any of the affairs of Mankind, nor has He directly punished Man since biblical times. So Modern Man believes he can get away with anything as long as he doesn’t get caught. Man believes if there even ever was God, He no longer watches us, no longer cares about us. He is a God in absentia.
The sad truth is Modern Man has mocked, ignored and shunned God to death. “God is Dead” declared Nietzsche as far back as 1882. So, intellectuals replaced God with Science. After all, reliable, repeatable, practical Science performs what seem like modern
day miracles. But even if Nietzsche was right, in order for God to be dead, He must have been alive at one time. So, what has become of God?
Texts of ancient civilizations all around the world are filled with tales, myths, even observations of advanced beings who were described as gods. They are described with different names, different appearances, different powers, and different creation myths. But if there is a one true God, Creator of the Heavens and the Earth, He or It is not one of these.
None of the ancient gods claimed to be the only god. In fact many of them warred among one other. Perhaps one exception is Jehovah, Yahweh, the god described in The Old Testament. Jehovah claimed to be the creator of the heavens and the Earth. Which would mean he also created all those other gods.
Before some begin to scream that Allah is the one true god, allow me to point out that Jehovah and Allah must be one and the same. This god appeared to Abraham in The Old Testament. Jew and Muslim both consider Abraham to be their patriarch. Judaism and Islam are both monotheistic – each believes there is only one true God. Therefore both must accept that the one god who appeared to Abraham – the god who promised his two sons each would be the progenitor of great nations – must be one and the same. Otherwise The Old Testament account of Abraham makes little sense.
To understand the mystery of the gods, it is important to understand that all ancient gods, An, Bal, Isis, Thoth, Viracocha, Zeus, The Jade Emperor, et al., were human-like beings possessed of highly advanced abilities, most certainly of a technological nature, though not necessarily technology as we define it. Seeing the wonders wrought by this technology, our ancient ancestors naturally believed these beings were divine, come down from “up there.” Perhaps. Or they may have been survivors of a much earlier, much more advanced civilization which developed here on Earth. According to the creation myths of ancient Sumer, they created our human ancestors for the purpose of relieving the gods of manual labor. They accomplished this by manipulating the genes of primitive Earthlings.
It seems, for some unknown reason, that all the ancient gods and their offspring, after being here for at least 13 millennia, left our planet sometime around the 5th Century B.C., half a millennium before the appearance of Jesus. The existence and activities of the ancient gods here on Earth are cryptically revealed to us through verbal history, myth, and ancient texts.
According to Sumerian, Akaddian and other seminal creation epics (of which the biblical Genesis, is a later recension) a group of gods built the earliest cities, starting in Mesopotamia, where most likely the biblical Garden of Eden was located. Under the strict tutelage of the gods, during this period the new Mankind began to flourish.
Many generations later, disgusted with the evil ways of Mankind, one of the gods appeared to the biblical Noah (called Utnapishtim, Ziusudra, Atra Hasis and other names in the earlier texts) instructing him to build an ark in order to survive the coming Great Flood.
Much later, in the Third Millennium BC, he appeared (more than once!) as a human, face to face to Abraham. Centuries later, he appeared to Moses. However Moses and his tribe were not allowed to see this god face to face. But he laid down the law – Commandments – and brought about many wonders in the Exodus. In later years, he seems to have revealed himself only in dreams and visions to Hebrew prophets such as Jeremiah. Forcing us to believe the words of prophets... or not.
Why do we no longer hear from these gods? Or see them? Or wonder at their miracles? Is this why so many today no longer believe in any kind of god... they need some simple proof? Let me be clear: I have been describing highly advanced beings the ancients thought of as (lower-case “g”) gods. These are not to be confused with the notion of (the capital “G”) God, Who if He or It exists is the First Cause, the Creator of all things.
I have the deepest respect for theoretical science in its search for answers to the deepest mysteries of our existence. But science is no closer to answering the deepest mystery than were ancient philosophers: what is the origin of our universe? How did all this come to be? What was the First Cause in Aristotle’s philosophy? Not how did it evolve – science has a good handle on that – but how did it come into being? The idea that the vastness of space and all its contents created itself out of nothing, inflated, banged and evolved in some natural process, the multiverse theory not withstanding, seems as improbable as it being created by some omnipotent sentient force we call God.
Perhaps these questions are less important to us as individuals as the question, if there is a God, does He hear our prayers, does He intercede in the affairs of one person, does He watch over us and keep us safe? Does He still care about His creation, Mankind? And if He doesn’t, what difference does it make whether we believe in Him or not?
Many who believe in God have a difficult time understanding why everyone doesn’t believe in God. As a believer, I clearly understand why atheists don’t. Is it possible to reconcile a scientific view with a belief in God?
† † †
Let us return to that extraordinary and seminal claim, known to a majority of the world’s population: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth.”
It is the very first sentence in Genesis, the first chapter of The Old Testament, the Torah, the Bible. Variations of this claim appear in the ancient writings of virtually every civilization on Earth. Hebrew tradition claims Genesis, along with the next four books of the Old Testament, were written, or at least inscribed, sometime around the 15th Century BC, by Moses. The earliest Sumerian creation texts date to at least 4000 BC.
In ancient times, skepticism seems to have been somewhat rarer than it is today. However, in our time, skepticism and cynicism have taken the place of faith. No one is more skeptical than I. And yet, despite walking away from my own religious upbringing, I am a deist. I believe in an Almighty God. Based on what? Is there any actual evidence for my belief? Or is simple faith enough? The God I believe in may find purchase in your own faith.
They say God works in mysterious ways. What mysterious ways? The best we can do is to believe that God intercedes in some way to cause whatever may seem like a miracle. The saying is reduced to a cliche. The bottom line is, if God ever directly interceded in Man’s history, there is no actual evidence of it. One might say, if there is a God, and if God wants us to believe in Him, and serve Him, and love Him, then He might want to think about giving us some tangible proof to fortify our faith. We know Mankind has always operated at a low moral level, but believers want to be certain we are believing in something more than a mythical idea, we want God to give the world some hope that good will indeed triumph over evil.
“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth.” Obviously Moses couldn’t have witnessed the beginning, so how could he possibly have known anything about what happened in “the beginning?” This isn’t a trivial question. After all, Genesis 1:1 is the most important and significant verse ever written!
One possibility is that Moses wrote down what he had learned from Egyptian creation myths, which again were variations of Sumerian creation myths from earlier times. Another possibility is that Moses made it all up. Or perhaps Moses was somehow inspired to write it. But Genesis claims that while Moses led the Hebrews out of Egypt and across the Sinai, God (or somebody Moses believed was God) called him up to the summit of the Mount, and dictated, or inscribed many things, including the Commandments.
If this event, allegedly witnessed by hundreds of thousands of Moses’ followers, didn’t actually happen, then perhaps Moses wrote down what had been verbal history. If so, we are left with the same problem. No human could have been there “in the beginning.” So how could this verbal history been anything but myth? But every myth, however spectacular, has roots in some actual event. This one clearly had to have been created by someone in a much earlier era than that which Moses lived.
There are many creation myths which date to centuries, indeed millennia before Moses’ time. Sumerian creation myths come to mind, as well as Indian, Egyptian, Chinese and Peruvian and others. They all present the same insoluble problem. No Sumerian, Indian or Egyptian could have been alive in the beginning to have witnessed it. Logic dictates this cannot be the answer, for if it were, it would mean than Moses – or someone earlier – simply made up the story.
But if Moses and the others made it all up, how could something so obviously “impossible” have survived for so many millennia while being challenged by more humans than any other words? There must be something so seminal about this claim that we humans – at least some of us – feel it in our very bones. In our genes.
Perhaps Moses was somehow divinely inspired to write it. Many in ancient times claim to have had lucid dreams or hallucinations wherein they were visited by superior beings who imparted to them some divine knowledge which they were to pass along to the world. Gudea received specific plans and “blueprints” for constructing a monumental temple to his god. This is how religions start. But if Moses had a dream or an hallucination on Mount Sinai, hundreds of thousands of his tribe witnessed some of this hallucination, all at the same time, from the foothills of the mountain upon which Moses claims he encountered God, or someone he believed was God. It was from here that Moses came down with the Ten Commandments, and much more which his God related to him. Moses was, according to his followers and even the Egyptians, a brilliant and inspired man, but how likely is it that on his own, Moses invented The Ten Commandments, and the genesis of the universe?
Until Science shows conclusively how the universe came into being ex nihilo, from nowhere and nothing, we cannot rule out that Genesis could be literally correct – God, created the heavens and the Earth – and billions of years later, when the time was right, He, or someone representing Him, gave the story to Moses and many other ancient leaders.
So, God, wherefore art Thou? We need You here, now, as a spiritual darkness befalls Mankind yet again. Mammon, and the desperate effort by so many to bow to this false god is corrupting every facet of human endeavor. From the highest holy houses to the political chambers of every nation, and in every human endeavor, corruption is devouring righteousness. Evil has become big business.
I have studied the Old Testament for decades. The more I dig between the lines, the more skeptical I become regarding the goodness not only of the Hebrew god of the Old Testament, but of the gods of all ancient civilizations. The Old Testament is filled with violence and killing on a massive scale. Only in the midst of Mankind’s epic battles such as America’s Civil War, World War I, World War II, do we see carnage comparable to that found in the ancient texts of all these civilizations, the Old Testament paramount on that list.
Do we want to believe in a god who could wreak such terrible havoc on the very people he created? Can we feel good about a god who calls himself by the name Jealous? Who warns his people that he is a jealous god who will surely kill those who defy his commandments? A god who favors one tribe over all others? How can that kind of god, one so vindictive, be the same God who created the heavens and the Earth? I can’t see it. Praying to an angry, vindictive and often petty god does not make me feel holy. Not at all.
Which is why I no longer adhere to any particular religion. I am but a simple deist who believes in an Almighty sentient force which created the universe and exists somehow within it, directing its course by acting on the quantum level, creating fluctuations in the fields, which ultimately manifest themselves as changes in the realm in which we exist.
Of course, God is not a man. He resides in heaven only in a symbolic sense. Although I suppose, should He need to, He could manifest himself as a man. Or a woman. Or a tiger. Or a blade of grass. Whichever it is, I pray Almighty God returns to help us, because we obviously cannot help ourselves.
