A redated post
According to Chuck Missler:
•Over the past 30 years, our population has increased 41%, but our Gross Domestic Product has tripled, and our social spending has had the benefit of a 500% increase. Impressive by any standard.
•And yet, we have had a 500% increase in violent crime, a 400% increase in illegitimate births, a 400% increase in the divorce rate, a 300% increase in single parent homes, a 200% increase in teenage suicides, and a 75 point decrease in SAT scores.
•Each day in America there are 2,795 teen pregnancies and 4,219 teenagers who contract a sexually transmitted disease. Every 64 seconds a baby is born to a teenage mother; five minutes later, a baby will have been born to a teenager who already has a child. Ten hours later, 560 babies will have been born to teenagers.
•Over the past 30 years, we have conducted over 31 million abortions; every day there are 1,106 teen abortions alone! (When John the Baptist began his ministry, he was only 9 inches long and weighed about a pound and a half. In the womb, he was Spirit-filled, and leapt for joy).
•We are a nation in peril. We lead the industrialized world in murder, rape, and violent crime. In elementary and secondary education, we are near the bottom in achievement scores. There is a coarseness, callousness, cynicism, banality, and vulgarity signalling the decivilization of our nation.
•An analysis of these, and virtually every social and cultural indicator, clearly shows a marked deterioration since the early 1960s. What event transpired then to cause this rapid and catastrophic destruction of our American culture? We outlawed God from our schools!10
10 1962, Engel v. Vitale, the U.S. Supreme Court declared school prayer "unconstitutional." 1963, School District of Abington Township v. Schempp and Murray v. Curlett, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Bible reading in schools was an "establishment of religion." 1980, Stone v. Graham, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Ten Commandments cannot be posted on the wall of a schoolroom.
Amazing. The decision that keeps Protestant children from having a teacher lead them in the Hail Mary caused this much trouble? This looks like a world-class example of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. Christians don't help themselves by indulging in this kind of rhetoric.
10 comments:
Perhaps the removal of school prayer (Protestant or Catholic) is a symptom of the seizure of education, media, and other organs of culture by anti-western Marxists?
Over as What's Wrong With The World, Mr Feser has a small post about the new "New Atheist" atheistic summer camp, being funded (at least in part) by Mr Dawkins; Richard’s Holiday Camp
"New Atheists like Richard Dawkins feign outrage at any suggestion that their creed itself amounts to a kind of religion – even as (for example) they issue their own suggested revisions of the Ten Commandments (see The God Delusion, pp. 263-4). Now, a reader informs me, Dawkins has decided to sponsor his own version of Bible Camp. I kid you not. All Dawkins needs now is a camp song; have fun coming up with your own lyrics."
Here is my submission:
Here at Camp Quest we
Learn our Dest'ney
Is but to be
Worm Food!
Here at Camp Quest one
Learns to question
All things Xtian:
True Rood!
Here at Camp Quest they
Tell us some day
Life will ix-nay:
Don't brood!
Here at Camp Quest I
Never did (a)pply
Reason to my
Cert'tude!
Here at Camp Quest you
Can be sure to
Know you are too
Worm Food!
The real culprit is John Dewey who changed the purpose of American education from life preparation to job preparation.
I'd link it to the decline of Christianity generally rather than to any thing particular like school prayer.
@Ilion - These anti-Christians always give themselves away. Like Phillip Pullman, who upon convincing himself that C.S. Lewis was engaged in brainwashing, decided to write his own children's books. Have you read Stephen Hawkings' children's books? He, too, thinks that brainwashing children to "protect" them from Christianity, is a function of children's literature. The books are truly terrible.
When you see what Dawkins, Pullman, and Hawkings think about humans, you can understand why their "literature" is so bankrupt and crude.
You're right Vic,
Catholics in the 1800s were using
the court system to try and get the Protestant King James Bible and prayers out of the schools long before non-Christians in the 1990s with their court cases.
In fact one Catholic neighborhood in Philly in the 1800s near the time of the Civil War rioted over their children being taught the King James Bible. People were killed, neighborhoods set aflame, gun boats commandeered by counter-rioting Protestants to fire canons into the Catholic neighborhood. Sheesh.
Ilion,
Birds gotta fly, worms gotta be fed.
I just wonder, have you seen the other side, behind the metaphysical curtain?
I don't know what happens after death. I'd like to know. But reading various religious texts from the ancient Near East, they begin with Sheol (where nearly everyone but great heroes went after they died), and evolve concepts of an afterlife during the Inter-testamental period, and then there's today's Near Death Experience stories, which are remarkably diverse, including visionary stories from every religion and culture.
Sincerely, I'm unsure what to make of it all.
And yet, we have had a 500% increase in violent crime,
While this claim was likely true back in 1993 when William Bennett said it (http://www.columbia.edu/cu/augustine/arch/usadecline.html), since 1993, violent crime has decreased 40% or so. So the correct increase in violent crime for 1960-2009 is now something like 260%, and dropping. Clearly, something has been going right for our "nation in peril" since the 1990s.
I imagine most of the figures in the quoted article are similarly out of date.
Crime data can be viewed here:
http://www.ucrdatatool.gov/Search/Crime/State/RunCrimeStatebyState.cfm
Well, when the total population increases you can expect other things to increase as well, such as violent crime. That would account for some of it, but not all. Personally, I think the large increase in crime over the last few decades in America has more to do with A) increasing poverty levels in America and B) the decreasing effectiveness and efficiency of our justice system.
Even if "prayer" was still a part of civic education, who's going to save the children from the message in the pulpit?
Messages like:
E.W. Bullinger's "The Witness of the Stars" or Missler's "The Gospel in the Stars"---think "Astrology 101"...or call it "Astro-theology", if you prefer.
"Guess what...there's a Face on Mars!! Hallelujah!!!"---even if there really was a supernatural "face" on Mars, would such a "lawless" and "unbelieving" Nation---a Nation with a 400-500% increase in crime owing to the removal of school prayer---really care anyway? Actually...they might...if it's covered on TMZ or TBN.
"Y2K: It's the End of the World as we know it"---it definitely was the "end of the world", in terms of book sales after Jan. 1, 2000, for publishers looking to cash in on the so-called "cyber-apocalypse". It was also the "end of the world" for all those trees that nobly gave their lives up for the sake of Y2K-hype---you will be sorely missed
"The Anti-Christ is alive and well...somewhere...muahahaha" <---that's the Devil's laughter, of course. Something to consider: perhaps the identity of the Anti-Christ is to be revealed in the person of the "Sasquatch"....who is currently leading a feral existence in the wilderness until the fullness of his time has come; that is, that he may make his appearance and terrible power a palpable force amidst the global tyranny of "The New World Order".
"RF-ID micro-chip implants are the 'mark of the beast'....it's clearly prophesied in the book of Revelation."
The irony is that the doom-sayers are part of the problem rather than being part of the solution.
I had a hard enough time growing up as things were for me. But you can't imagine how much more difficult my life became when I started reading and absorbing and living the thoughts of Hal Lindsey, Tex Marrs and Dave Hunt at 17 years of age. And I had virtually no Christian guidance when I began these studies---impressionable youth that I was.
Let Government take away "prayer" in schools....but I can still pray. So can you. But Government can't take away our union and communion with God, in Christ. And it is that message (i.e. our union with Christ) which gave our ancient forebears hope in the face of trouble. God knows they put their "faith" in neither world rulers nor society.
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