mourning and great weeping
Rachel weeping for her children
And refusing to be comforted,
because they are no more."
--Jeremiah 31:15
When the prophet Jeremiah wrote those words he was referring to the children of Israel who were being sent by their enemies out of their country into captivity. Centuries later in the Gospel of Matthew the verse is repeated again to refer to the plan by King Herod to kill all the male children, two years old or under, in the hope that the slaughter would include the infant Jesus, whom Herod believed was a threat to his throne. Herod failed. He is dead. Christ lives.
In response to the Connecticut carnage there was no shortage of "solutions" suggested this weekend. Gun control. Regulating death-oriented video games that the shooter reportedly spent hours each day immersed in. Mental health reform. Armed guards in every school. Some of these solutions make sense and others don't. All of them miss the real point.
What is happening in our society that spawns these young, twisted men who can kill the innocent so easily? First and foremost, as a nation, we are running from G-d. Our Founders put Him in the most important statement of the American founding in the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
Few of our children know those words. But they have been taught that our Constitution has enshrined in it a right to destroy inconvenient life.
The Founders believed liberty came directly from G-d. With their knowledge of Scripture, they knew each child was made in the image of G-d. That is why everyone had dignity, value and worth.
Today's children are taught by our culture that we are a cosmic accident. Something slithered out of the primal slime and over billions of years evolved into a human being. We are cousins, ten times removed, to the ape at the zoo eating his own excrement.
G-d is pushed out of every public place. The number of Americans professing they are atheists, agnostics or faithless grows yearly and is reported breathlessly by happy social scientists and reporters as evidence that we are putting away the old superstitions.
In early America, most believed their evil acts would have to be accounted for in front of a G-d of Judgment. Today increasing numbers of the young believe there is no throne, no G-d, no cross.
When a young man massacres innocents, we have been trained to believe that the act was due to improper levels of chemical enzymes and misfiring synapses. As we learn more about our cells, we forget more about our souls.
Were Hitler and the countless Germans who cooperated in the killing of six million Jews, and who made lamp shades out of their skin, simply the products of an inadequate German mental health system? Or should we revisit the existence of evil?
Having robbed children of any sense that their Father is in Heaven and that they are His creation, we then launched an experiment in raising them without earthly fathers too. Having neither a Father in heaven or a father in the home, young men define their manhood by spreading their seed in random couplings. Young women, searching for the love our hearts yearn for, make themselves available.
They try to fill the emptiness of their lives with a snort of cocaine or needle filled with heroin. Overstretched police departments can't keep up with the wreckage. Kabul is safer than a warm night in Chicago.
Virtually every one of these markers of moral decline is off limits for the national conversation that we are being told we must have in the wake of the Newtown shootings. And being off limits, we are condemned to seeing more horror, more death, more broken families, more demonic acts of evil.
The sphere of safety will shrink. The unthinkable will become reality. If, as our Founding believed, only a virtuous people can be free, our tombstone will remind us that the wages of sin is death.
Connecticut's state motto is a Latin phrase, "Qui Transtulit Sustinet," meaning, "He who transplanted still sustains." The founders of the state meant G-d. He had transplanted them to the new land. He would sustain them in their time of troubles. He will sustain us still today, but only if we rededicate ourselves to becoming One Nation Under G-d.
In response to the Connecticut carnage there was no shortage of "solutions" suggested this weekend. Gun control. Regulating death-oriented video games that the shooter reportedly spent hours each day immersed in. Mental health reform. Armed guards in every school. Some of these solutions make sense and others don't. All of them miss the real point.
What is happening in our society that spawns these young, twisted men who can kill the innocent so easily? First and foremost, as a nation, we are running from G-d. Our Founders put Him in the most important statement of the American founding in the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
Few of our children know those words. But they have been taught that our Constitution has enshrined in it a right to destroy inconvenient life.
The Founders believed liberty came directly from G-d. With their knowledge of Scripture, they knew each child was made in the image of G-d. That is why everyone had dignity, value and worth.
Today's children are taught by our culture that we are a cosmic accident. Something slithered out of the primal slime and over billions of years evolved into a human being. We are cousins, ten times removed, to the ape at the zoo eating his own excrement.
G-d is pushed out of every public place. The number of Americans professing they are atheists, agnostics or faithless grows yearly and is reported breathlessly by happy social scientists and reporters as evidence that we are putting away the old superstitions.
In early America, most believed their evil acts would have to be accounted for in front of a G-d of Judgment. Today increasing numbers of the young believe there is no throne, no G-d, no cross.
When a young man massacres innocents, we have been trained to believe that the act was due to improper levels of chemical enzymes and misfiring synapses. As we learn more about our cells, we forget more about our souls.
Were Hitler and the countless Germans who cooperated in the killing of six million Jews, and who made lamp shades out of their skin, simply the products of an inadequate German mental health system? Or should we revisit the existence of evil?
Having robbed children of any sense that their Father is in Heaven and that they are His creation, we then launched an experiment in raising them without earthly fathers too. Having neither a Father in heaven or a father in the home, young men define their manhood by spreading their seed in random couplings. Young women, searching for the love our hearts yearn for, make themselves available.
They try to fill the emptiness of their lives with a snort of cocaine or needle filled with heroin. Overstretched police departments can't keep up with the wreckage. Kabul is safer than a warm night in Chicago.
Virtually every one of these markers of moral decline is off limits for the national conversation that we are being told we must have in the wake of the Newtown shootings. And being off limits, we are condemned to seeing more horror, more death, more broken families, more demonic acts of evil.
The sphere of safety will shrink. The unthinkable will become reality. If, as our Founding believed, only a virtuous people can be free, our tombstone will remind us that the wages of sin is death.
Connecticut's state motto is a Latin phrase, "Qui Transtulit Sustinet," meaning, "He who transplanted still sustains." The founders of the state meant G-d. He had transplanted them to the new land. He would sustain them in their time of troubles. He will sustain us still today, but only if we rededicate ourselves to becoming One Nation Under G-d.
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