Hello Friends!
I've captured several thoughts on current issues facing our nation and the world abroad and will share them for you to ponder. The true church remnant (Bride of Christ) is under extreme persecution and we must, as Christians, understand all that is taking place today and pray that the Lord would show us what He would have us do to stand in the face of these evil threats set against our God-given rights and freedoms. I will address these thoughts via separate articles over the next few weeks. Here we go with number one...
Freedom's Real Foe
"Freedom is under attack" has been the battle cry since 9/11. Freedom is indeed under attack, but our intelligence sources indicate Osama bin Laden is not the chief culprit. The attacks on 9/11 were on America, not freedom. In reality freedom has long been under attack by institutions in the West, who have sought to destroy the foundations upon which western thought, culture and law rest. In its place a new global, pantheistic, and socialist paradigm is seeking hegemony, while its proponents must still give lip service (at least publicly for a while) to the old one. This stealth attack, mounted steadily for almost a century, represents a far greater threat than any airplane or biologic attack because it is more insidious and many victims do not even recognize they are under assault.
"Freedom is under attack" has been the battle cry since 9/11. Freedom is indeed under attack, but our intelligence sources indicate Osama bin Laden is not the chief culprit. The attacks on 9/11 were on America, not freedom. In reality freedom has long been under attack by institutions in the West, who have sought to destroy the foundations upon which western thought, culture and law rest. In its place a new global, pantheistic, and socialist paradigm is seeking hegemony, while its proponents must still give lip service (at least publicly for a while) to the old one. This stealth attack, mounted steadily for almost a century, represents a far greater threat than any airplane or biologic attack because it is more insidious and many victims do not even recognize they are under assault.
The attack on western culture began in the halls of academia and has now metastasized to politics, the media and even the church. Western society has been shoved off a fact-based mode of thought (didactic) rooted in logic, reason and a belief in absolute truth, to a relative (dialectic), constantly-changing system, where there is no knowable truth, where feelings reign supreme and where the outcome justifies the means - known as moral relativism. Nowhere does this appear more blatantly than in the arena of politics.
The Delicate Balance
Since 9/11 politicians have been speaking of the need to preserve the "delicate balance" between civil rights and the need to respond to terrorism in a time of war. They say this without blinking an eye, oblivious of the fact that the founding fathers didn't foresee any kind of "delicate balance" when they wrote the Constitution and its Bill of Rights. They envisioned an impenetrable wall, beyond which government could not go under any circumstances, except as allowed in the Constitution itself.
They have been justified in their viewpoint since history shows that a delicate balance rapidly becomes a slippery slope, which always tips in favor of ever-increasing government control and away from citizens' rights. Indeed, as several books published in the last decade clearly document, the greatest potential source of terror in the 20th century came from unrestrained, unaccountable governments. More than 100 million people were starved, gassed, shot, tortured, buried alive, strangled, and poisoned not by terrorists, not in war, but by their own governments.
Rights not Privileges
A privilege is something that is granted by the state to its citizens and can be revoked by the state at any time the state sees fit. A perfect example is the U.N.'s own Declaration of Human Rights, where any of the "rights" enumerated therein can be revoked at the whim of the U.N. Rights on the other hand are irrevocable conditions possessed by the citizenry, in which the state may not revoke for whatever reason. Most notably, certain unalienable rights, which are a gift from God.
The difference between the two, thanks to the leftist indoctrination prevalent in public schools, is now thoroughly blurred in the western mind. Even the original purpose of the rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights has been altered thanks to historical revisionism and those attempting to restore the original meanings are publicly ridiculed as kooks. What part of "...shall not be infringed" don't they understand?
The Great Paradigm Shift
Currently the West is in an epic power struggle - away from traditional thought and a free society towards a totally socialized, planned society where government controls everything from womb to tomb, including how we believe and worship. Incumbent in this struggle is a move away from national sovereignty and into this "new order" that everyone from Henry Kissinger to Vladmir Putin keeps talking about but never define publicly what it really means.
In order for the new womb-to-tomb paradigm to be implemented, the old collection of "rights" has to go. But proponents of the new vision face a dilemma in that they must give lip service to the existing legal structure at the same time they gut the same institutions of their power. So a new process of end-running the law has been instituted, which gives the appearance of leaving existing laws in place, while making it impossible to have the usufruct of such laws.
The Great International Blur
How does one abolish laws and rights without directly doing so?
1 Make so many laws regulating a guaranteed right that it is impossible to exercise the right. The second amendment to the US Constitution, for example, says that the right to bear arms shall not be infringed. However, there are so many gun laws in some places, it is impossible to carry a weapon without incurring the risk of being charged with a felony. If you're willing to risk years in jail or staggering legal costs, go ahead and exercise your right.
2 Turn over a large amount of "lawmaking" to unelected, unaccountable bureaucracies and non-government organizations that generate "regulations" which have the force of law but are never voted upon by any accountable lawmaking body via the electoral process. Most of our lawmakers today never read the bills they are passing and there is much mischief in the details. "Pass the bill to find out what it says" is the mantra of the day on Capital Hill.
1 Make so many laws regulating a guaranteed right that it is impossible to exercise the right. The second amendment to the US Constitution, for example, says that the right to bear arms shall not be infringed. However, there are so many gun laws in some places, it is impossible to carry a weapon without incurring the risk of being charged with a felony. If you're willing to risk years in jail or staggering legal costs, go ahead and exercise your right.
2 Turn over a large amount of "lawmaking" to unelected, unaccountable bureaucracies and non-government organizations that generate "regulations" which have the force of law but are never voted upon by any accountable lawmaking body via the electoral process. Most of our lawmakers today never read the bills they are passing and there is much mischief in the details. "Pass the bill to find out what it says" is the mantra of the day on Capital Hill.
3 Have the courts continually reinterpret laws to "find" new meanings in them that were not intended by the original framers of the law or to interpret things away that were intended - the case law approach. Remember that under the new paradigm there are no absolutes, so law can be tortured to say whatever we want it to mean. Legal Despotism = Moral Relativism applied to the law.
4 Expand a law far beyond what the lawmakers ever intended and what citizens were promised. Drug property forfeiture laws are a prime example, which allow property to be confiscated on the mere accusation (not conviction) that a crime has been committed. Originally, Americans were told that the law would only be used against drug-dealers. But within a decade forfeiture laws had exploded to over a hundred and most did not involve drugs at all. Another example is the use of RICO racketeering laws to prosecute abortion clinic protestors.
5 Stretch or blur jurisdiction or claim jurisdiction where the area is unclear. Courts in Belgium claimed jurisdiction over what Ariel Sharon did in Lebanon. Spain wanted to try Agosto Pinochet for things he did in Chile. A kangaroo court in the Hague tried to accused war criminal Solobodan Miloscevic even though the court and the laws did not exist when the crimes were committed and the court has dubious jurisdiction granted by who knows whom? The U.S. seems very anxious to deny persons on the international scene those rights we deem to be precious here.
6 Enforce laws selectively, especially for achieving particular political purposes. While much coverage has been made of the process against Slobodan Milosevic, no effort was ever made to round up Fidel Castro or Idi Amin (fled to Saudi Arabia) for their "crimes against humanity."
7 Turn jurisdiction over to international bodies by means of treaties or other agreements. This process is being used to transfer sovereignty and wealth. Most Americans would be hard pressed to name even one member on the NAFTA or GATT commissions and yet these people make binding decisions affecting commerce and jobs for thousands of people. All by means of agreements, which were really treaties, but weren't called such to keep it from having to be ratified by the Senate.
7 Turn jurisdiction over to international bodies by means of treaties or other agreements. This process is being used to transfer sovereignty and wealth. Most Americans would be hard pressed to name even one member on the NAFTA or GATT commissions and yet these people make binding decisions affecting commerce and jobs for thousands of people. All by means of agreements, which were really treaties, but weren't called such to keep it from having to be ratified by the Senate.
8 Use executive orders (US) or ministerial decrees (UK) to do end runs around lawmaking bodies. This could be seen both in actions by Britain's Prime Minister in shoving the UK deeper into the new "United States of Europe" (aka the European Union), where it will shortly lose all of its sovereignty, as it's citizens do not understand or study their own history. Sound familiar? America be warned.
President Clinton was prolific in his use of executive orders to end-run Congress, especially in the area of non-ratified environmental treaties. As a matter of fact, unknown to most Americas, presidential executive orders have kept a healthy number of official "emergencies" going for years to enable end-runs around Congress in various areas.
This list of end-runs is anything but exhaustive. Frequently the end-runs are executed in the name of some good or in handling a crisis where there is invariably much debate among "experts" about each one. However, one pattern is becoming clear: we are systematically gutting the legal structure upon which western civilization has stood for centuries and the new proposed order would be unpalatable to most westerners if they really understood what it meant.
In Closing:
Do you remember when the Interstate 35W bridge collapsed in the Twin Cities and the resulting chaos that followed? The structural rot that caused the collapse had been progressing for many years - if not decades. Right down to the last second it looked like a bridge and it served a bridge's function. However, when the break finally came, it happened in just moments and swept away all that were relying on it. The same rot is occurring to the western legal system via the case law process - which does not refer to original intent, but to the current whims and desires of the judicial courts.
We'll see where this is going in our next article, entitled "Antichrist Doesn't Wear Tights."
We'll see where this is going in our next article, entitled "Antichrist Doesn't Wear Tights."
Blessings on your success!
Shane <><
Lighthouse Publications <><
"Dedicated to the Never Ending Search for the Creator's calling within You" (TM)
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