The honoring of power over reason is that which makes one an authoritarian.
For the Authoritarian, power is more important than laws. Laws become whatever Authoritarians impose on others.
Authoritarians are far more likely to exhibit “sloppy reasoning, highly-compartmentalized beliefs, double standards, hypocrisy, self-blindness, a profound ethnocentrism, and — to top it all off — a ferocious dogmatism that makes it unlikely anyone could ever change their minds with evidence or logic.” The Authoritarians, p75; Dr. Bob Altemeyer, University of Manitoba
Dr. Altemeyer proposes that Authoritarians are products of strict parenting, “strict fundamentalist parenting”. His non-scientific proposal, used as a form of projection, targets Christians and Christian homes. But strict fundamentalism is native to the Authoritarians at the Gate.
These Authoritarians are the Ruling Class and their minions on steroids. As such, they will lecture you to death with their Authoritarian Fundamentalism.
Consider the authoritarian lecturing of “the science is settled” and “you are a denier if you don’t agree with our confident knowledge.” The “settled science” fundamentalists are dogmatic, believing that they have all knowledge. So they will impose climate change on you. In authoritarian Ruling Class minds, their might makes it “right.”
Truly, it is the “settled science” Authoritarian Fundamentalists who employ “sloppy reasoning, highly-compartmentalized beliefs, double standards, hypocrisy, self-blindness, a profound ethnocentrism, and — to top it all off — a ferocious dogmatism that makes it unlikely anyone could ever change their minds with evidence or logic.”
Consider also, the settled social science dogmatism of the teeny-tiny LGBTQ+ cabal. These Authoritarian Fundamentalists demand that you submit to their belief system: “We of LGBTQ+ convictions determine what is right and wrong. Christians should not.” “We have rights.” “Christian rights are to be subordinated to our rights.” “Christian convictions are too rigid, too fundamentalist.” And so again, we see the “highly-compartmentalized beliefs, double standards, hypocrisy, self-blindness,” and profound egocentrism that characterizes Authoritarian Fundamentalists.
To wit, recent Authoritarian Fundamentalism case history:
Who are these Ruling Class Orcs? Who are these aggressive scavengers and opportunistic Kulakovores? They are Ruling Class America and the minions who do their hunter-gatherer bidding. They are the Democrats and Republicans who accrue power unto themselves; they are the political parties that refuse to elect a person of principle. They are the un-elected: the bureaucrats, the administrative state, the regulators, the social engineers, the ones whose careers are dependent on the government. They are the ones who have no boundaries but will set boundaries for you. They are the ones with secret servers, the ones who call themselves “saviors of the planet” and those in the confident “know”.
They are the Progressives, the elitists, the “living Constitutionalists” and those who are a law unto themselves, the “settled science” purveyors, the “green agenda” evangelists, the followers of the Scientism cult, the denigrators of religious convictions as “irrational”, the high priests of secularization, the climate change Inquisitors, the #SJW, #BlackLivesMatter, the LGBT, the gerrymandering, the feminists, the abortionists, the eminent domain Dishonest Johns, the Democratic Socialists, the diviners of what is best for you, the Barbara Boxers, the union bosses, the public school educators, the “It takes a village” people, those offended by “Merry Christmas”, the ones who come between you and your children, the ones who tell your kids what to eat in school, the establishmentarians, the deniers of viewpoints other than their own, the ones who say “Are you kidding?” when questioned about a Constitutional basis for their enacted laws, those who deem “this is for your own good”, those of the Unconstrained Vision, the initiators of unintended consequences, the federal workers, the EPA and DE, the Lois Lerners, the Commissar State, the Saurons, the Sarumans…all those bent over and feeding from the government trough.
What is in said trough? Kulaks. Heaps of Kulaks.
“They called us kulaks because we had a house with a galvanized iron roof and four horses, three cows, and a fine orchard by the house. The first thing in the orchard was a spreading apricot tree, and there would be heaps of apricots on it every year.” From Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s short story Apricot Jam
Kulaks? We have property. Some of us have mansions but most have enough to call home. We marry, have children, raise children, have grandchildren and bury (and not discard) loved ones. We are Pro-life even knowing that life is hard. We push and prod ourselves and our charges to excel, succeed, to grow out of adolescence into maturity. We pray and prepare. We worship our God and we rejoice with others when a sheep is found. We sweat, blister and toil. We provide and protect. We shoot bows and arrows and guns but not at each other. We take off our hats when we see our nation’s flag in a parade. We tear up when America the Beautiful is sung. We thank veterans for their service. We appreciate. We have dignity and values that were not handed down to us from government. We base our decisions on right and wrong and not on what our friends let us get away with saying.
Many of us believe that there are God-given laws and precepts that define our responsibilities and our freedoms. We sing “Amazing Grace” not for money or show but because we know sinning first hand and will admit it in a song and on our knees. Many of us are in the Kingdom of God and some of us are in the Fellowship of the Ring seeking to overthrow the world view of this age. We give thanks. Gratitude defines us. Whining is abhorred by us. We help out neighbor. We utterly detest government’s intrusion into our lives. Aspirations and love move us, not government mandates. We kulaks are the country class.
“Describing America’s country class is problematic because it is so heterogeneous. It has no privileged podiums, and speaks with many voices, often inharmonious. It shares above all the desire to be rid of rulers it regards inept and haughty. It defines itself practically in terms of reflexive reaction against the rulers’ defining ideas and proclivities — e.g., ever higher taxes and expanding government, subsidizing political favorites, social engineering, approval of abortion, etc. Many want to restore a way of life largely superseded. Demographically, the country class is the other side of the ruling class’s coin: its most distinguishing characteristics are marriage, children, and religious practice. While the country class, like the ruling class, includes the professionally accomplished and the mediocre, geniuses and dolts, it is different because of its non-orientation to government and its members’ yearning to rule themselves rather than be ruled by others…
Nothing has set the country class apart, defined it, made it conscious of itself, given it whatever coherence it has, so much as the ruling class’s insistence that people other than themselves are intellectually and hence otherwise humanly inferior. Persons who were brought up to believe themselves as worthy as anyone, who manage their own lives to their own satisfaction, naturally resent politicians of both parties who say that the issues of modern life are too complex for any but themselves. Most are insulted by the ruling class’s dismissal of opposition as mere “anger and frustration” — an imputation of stupidity — while others just scoff at the claim that the ruling class’s bureaucratic language demonstrates superior intelligence. A few ask the fundamental question: Since when and by what right does intelligence trump human equality? Moreover, if the politicians are so smart, why have they made life worse?” (emphasis added) From Angelo M. Codevilla’s America’s Ruling Class –And the Perils of Revolution. Read it and weep, kulaks.
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“As long as anyone can remember, our family lived in the village of Lebyazhy Usad in Kursk Province. But then they put an end to the way we thought to live. They called us kulaks because we had a house with a galvanized iron roof and four horses, three cows, and a fine orchard by the house. The first thing in the orchard was a spreading apricot tree, and there would be heaps of apricots on it every year.” …Before they deported us as kulaks, they tried to make us tell them where we had hidden our goods. Otherwise, they said, we’ll chop down your apricot tree. And they chopped it down.” From Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s short story Apricot Jam
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Here’s government overreaching to binge on you. Chomp, chomp, chomp…
Who are these Kulakovores? They are Ruling Class America and the minions who do their hunter-gatherer bidding. They are the Democrats and Republicans who accrue power unto themselves. They are the un-elected: the bureaucrats, the administrative state, the regulators, the social engineers, the ones whose careers are dependent on the government. They are the ones who have no boundaries but will set boundaries for you. They are the ones with secret servers, the ones who call themselves “saviors of the planet” and those in the “know”, Progressives, the entitled, the “living Constitutionalists”, those that are a law unto themselves, the “settled science” purveyors, the “green agenda” evangelists, followers of the Scientism cult, the #SJW, #LGBT, #BlackLivesMatter, the gerrymandering, the eminent domain Dishonest Johns, the union bosses, the public school educators, the “It takes a village” people…the Hannibal Lecturers.
The power-hungry…
They came for your body parts, your eminent domain:
The Ruling Class Cannibals endorse Planned Parenthood. The slaughter of the innocents provides these Cannibals with body parts to increase their food supply. They care more about the environment.
Warning: the video below is graphic. Watch the first minute if you can’t take any more.
They came for your independence, your guns:
The Ruling Class hates independence. The Collective would rather you meekly join the others in their Solyent Green plant.
Guns, in American history, have been the last resort to thwart tyranny. If I haven’t revealed approaching tyranny to you in these posts then you are a minion of the Ruling Class Cannibals.
Tyranny for Ruling Class Cannibals is not being able to have complete control over your flesh, not being able to cause a thrill go up your leg, not being able to throw you in a boiling pot at will.
Obama gun control extrapolated means that you are to be protected at a whim of the Ruling Class Kulakovores. Good luck with that, dead men walking.
They came for your values (and for your reprogramming):
The Ruling Class Cannibals love to tax people to death before consuming them. But the RCC will never be taxed like their meal tickets. These headhunters have tax havens where they hide their money away from the RCC’s chopping block.
The Ruling Class Cannibals want to determine who lives and who gets eaten alive, whose convictions are deemed worthy and given the “dignity” thumbs up and whose convictions are deemed too morally restrictive and impertinent to an overreaching court and thus requiring a thumb down. Progress and not permanence is of the essence to these fast foodies.
The Ruling Class Cannibals seek to replace the U.S. Constitution and the laws derived from tried and true classical Judeo/Christian/Greco/Roman thought for the International House of Pancakes law. Such an overturning of our legal foundation would allow these flesh-eaters to season the pot by appropriating the multicultural concepts of relativism, nihilism, animism and kulakcannibalism that the rest of the blood and flesh world bring to the table. To wit, Andrew C. McCarthy’s The globalist legal agenda
[U.S. Supreme court Justice Stephen Breyer’s latest book] The Court and the World is similarly a call for judicial supremacy, this time under the guise of international “interdependence.” The courts are once again pitched as an enabling agent of democratic choice, but on a supra-national scale.
The world, though, is a very undemocratic place—though perhaps no more undemocratic than Supreme Court diktats that remove controversies like abortion and “same-sex marriage” from democratic resolution.
How to explain the difference between progressive pretensions to “activate” liberty—i.e., to vouchsafe “the right of all persons to enjoy liberty as we learn its meaning,” as Justice Anthony Kennedy vaporously put it in imposing same-sex marriage on the nation—and progressive judging’s actual affect of curtailing our freedom to live as we choose? This inversion of democracy, it turns out, flows naturally from Breyer’s inversion of the judicial role—a philosophy of judging shared by a working majority of his Court, the bloc of five unelected jurists whose edicts control ever more of what was once democratic space.
“[O]ur American judicial system,” he contends, should “see itself as one part of a transnational or multinational judicial enterprise.” Inconveniently (but, alas, not insuperably), the only “judicial enterprise” licensed by the Constitution, from which federal judges derive their authority, is the protection of Americans from overreach by our government and the remediation of other harms inflicted by third parties in violation of laws enacted by our elected representatives.
Interpreting the law as written—an intellectual challenge that is vital to the rule of law even if not sufficiently stimulating for many a robed social engineer—is not so much an enterprise as a discipline. In our system, it is supposed to be the politically accountable branches that get to do the enterprising. Nor does the discipline of judging take on a “transnational or multinational” character merely because some small percentage of the parties implicated in legal disputes is of foreign extraction—even if, as Breyer rightly observes, modern technology has made the percentage larger by making the world smaller.
What does Breyer see as the objective of this global judicial enterprise? The advancement of “acceptance of the rule of law itself.” This “rule of law,” you’ll no doubt be shocked to learn, bears an astonishing resemblance to the rule of lawyers—in particular, the judges along with the army of equally unelected transnational progressive lawyers who urge them on.
International law is especially fertile soil for growing this empire.
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Of course the courts are vital, but in their place. That is not the place envisioned by Justice Breyer: global maestro. American courts, however, are a core component of our government and thus the servant, not the master, of our people. They ensure our rule of law. Thus fortified, it is the United States, not a congeries of jurists and international law professors, that remains the indispensable force for good in a troubled and dangerous world.” (emphasis added)
Ruling Class Cannibals will tell you that social justice means that what you own is not yours, it is to be taken from you – create an injustice in order to create social justice. Your delicious ends justify their means.
May I offer you a wafer-thin Kulak, sir?
They came for you as dessert:
A wafer-thin mint for the Ruling Class Cannibals? You will be up-chucked but they’ll take you.
Ruling Class Cannibalism doesn’t fall far from the limb:
Who are these Kulakovores? They are Ruling Class America and the minions who do their hunter-gatherer bidding. They are the Democrats and Republicans who accrue power unto themselves. They are the bureaucrats, the administrative state, the regulators, the social engineers, the ones whose careers are dependent on the government, the ones with secret servers, the “saviors of the planet”, those in the “know”, Progressives, the entitled, the “living Constitutionalists”, the “settled science” purveyors, the “green agenda” evangelists, the #SJW, #BlackLivesMatter, the gerrymandering, the eminent domain Dishonest Johns, the union bosses, the public school educators, the “It takes a village” people…the Hannibal Lecturers.
The power-hungry…
They came for your family:
“The ruling class is keener to reform the American people’s family and spiritual lives than their economic and civic ones. In no other areas is the ruling class’s self-definition so definite, its contempt for opposition so patent, its Kulturkampf so open. It believes that the Christian family (and the Orthodox Jewish one too) is rooted in and perpetuates the ignorance commonly called religion, divisive social prejudices, and repressive gender roles, that it is the greatest barrier to human progress because it looks to its very particular interest — often defined as mere coherence against outsiders who most often know better. Thus the family prevents its members from playing their proper roles in social reform. Worst of all, it reproduces itself.
Since marriage is the family’s fertile seed, government at all levels, along with “mainstream” academics and media, have waged war on it. They legislate, regulate, and exhort in support not of “the family” — meaning married parents raising children — but rather of “families,” meaning mostly households based on something other than marriage. The institution of no-fault divorce diminished the distinction between cohabitation and marriage — except that husbands are held financially responsible for the children they father, while out-of-wedlock fathers are not. The tax code penalizes marriage and forces those married couples who raise their own children to subsidize “child care” for those who do not. Top Republicans and Democrats have also led society away from the very notion of marital fidelity by precept as well as by parading their affairs. For example, in 1997 the Democratic administration’s secretary of defense and the Republican Senate’s majority leader (joined by the New York Times et al.) condemned the military’s practice of punishing officers who had extramarital affairs. While the military had assumed that honoring marital vows is as fundamental to the integrity of its units as it is to that of society, consensus at the top declared that insistence on fidelity is “contrary to societal norms.” Not surprisingly, rates of marriage in America have decreased as out-of-wedlock births have increased. The biggest demographic consequence has been that about one in five of all households are women alone or with children, in which case they have about a four in 10 chance of living in poverty. Since unmarried mothers often are or expect to be clients of government services, it is not surprising that they are among the Democratic Party’s most faithful voters.
While our ruling class teaches that relationships among men, women, and children are contingent, it also insists that the relationship between each of them and the state is fundamental.That is why such as Hillary Clinton have written law review articles and books advocating a direct relationship between the government and children, effectively abolishing the presumption of parental authority. Hence whereas within living memory school nurses could not administer an aspirin to a child without the parents’ consent, the people who run America’s schools nowadays administer pregnancy tests and ship girls off to abortion clinics without the parents’ knowledge. Parents are not allowed to object to what their children are taught. But the government may and often does object to how parents raise children. The ruling class’s assumption is that what it mandates for children is correct ipso facto, while what parents do is potentially abusive. It only takes an anonymous accusation of abuse for parents to be taken away in handcuffs until they prove their innocence. Only sheer political weight (and in California, just barely) has preserved parents’ right to homeschool their children against the ruling class’s desire to accomplish what Woodrow Wilson so yearned: “to make young gentlemen as unlike their fathers as possible.” — The Ruling Class — And the Perils of Revolutionby Angelo M. Codevilla
They came for your children and their “privilege. They came to put them on the menu:
Here is what is going on in social engineering social studies.
Ruling Class Cannibals (RBC) Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump et al, all have a taste for power. And that means that your hard-earned tilled-the-earth money is on the menu so as to whet the appetites of would be RBC voters.
Oh sure, these social warriors will tell you that they want to make things “fair and equal and right”. But, these Kulakovores are bibbed up and ready to devour you and yours at a power lunch trough feeding. Their mere mention of “Wall St.” has already marinated your tender #Occupywallstreet minds.
Raising the minimum wage by coercive law is an injustice done to business owners and stockholders. Such increases steal the owner/investor’s income. Period.
It is immoral for someone to take my wealth and give it to someone else. Only when there is an injustice between two parties should there be restitution. (Being born black is not an injustice unless you are deemed unworthy of being born by the Ruling Class. Welfare and Domination are the perverted restitutions offered by Democrats).
The Ruling Class Cannibals are at the gate!
They came for your… Hold on! Don’t do me like that! Time for a bit of truth telling. The following will give the Ruling Class indigestion!
Utopia comes from the Greek: οὐ (“not”) and τόπος (“place”) and means “no-place“, a non-existent place.
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And now a few clarion words from Claremont Institute Senior Fellow Angelo M. Codevilla:
“This dismissal of the American people’s intellectual, spiritual, and moral substance is the very heart of what our ruling class is about. Its principal article of faith, its claim to the right to decide for others, is precisely that it knows things and operates by standards beyond others’ comprehension.
While the unenlightened ones believe that man is created in the image and likeness of God and that we are subject to His and to His nature’s laws, the enlightened ones know that we are products of evolution, driven by chance, the environment, and the will to primacy. While the un-enlightened are stuck with the antiquated notion that ordinary human minds can reach objective judgments about good and evil, better and worse through reason, the enlightened ones know that all such judgments are subjective and that ordinary people can no more be trusted with reason than they can with guns.Because ordinary people will pervert reason with ideology, religion, or interest, science is “science” only in the “right” hands. Consensus among the right people is the only standard of truth. Facts and logic matter only insofar as proper authority acknowledges them.
That is why the ruling class is united and adamant about nothing so much as its right to pronounce definitive, “scientific” judgment on whatever it chooses. When the government declares, and its associated press echoes that “scientists say” this or that, ordinary people — or for that matter scientists who “don’t say,” or are not part of the ruling class — lose any right to see the information that went into what “scientists say.” Thus when Virginia’s attorney general subpoenaed the data by which Professor Michael Mann had concluded, while paid by the state of Virginia, that the earth’s temperatures are rising “like a hockey stick” from millennial stability — a conclusion on which billions of dollars’ worth of decisions were made — to investigate the possibility of fraud, the University of Virginia’s faculty senate condemned any inquiry into “scientific endeavor that has satisfied peer review standards” claiming that demands for data “send a chilling message to scientists…and indeed scholars in any discipline.” The Washington Post editorialized that the attorney general’s demands for data amounted to “an assault on reason.” The fact that the “hockey stick” conclusion stands discredited and Mann and associates are on record manipulating peer review, the fact that science-by-secret-data is an oxymoron, the very distinction between truth and error, all matter far less to the ruling class than the distinction between itself and those they rule.
By identifying science and reason with themselves, our rulers delegitimize opposition. Though they cannot prevent Americans from worshiping God, they can make it as socially disabling as smoking — to be done furtively and with a bad social conscience. Though they cannot make Americans wish they were Europeans, they continue to press upon this nation of refugees from the rest of the world the notion that Americans ought to live by “world standards.” Each day, the ruling class produces new “studies” that show that one or another of Americans’ habits is in need of reform, and that those Americans most resistant to reform are pitiably, perhaps criminally, wrong. Thus does it go about disaggregating and dispiriting the ruled.” (emphasis added)
Beyond the excerpt: I commend Codevilla’s entire article to you. In fact, I urge you to click on the link and print out the article. Sit and read it and be forever changed by its content. I pray that the article opens your eyes and that moral courage arises in your heart.
Now, perhaps, you know these culprits, the Unconstrained Visionaries, by their characteristics: snobbish, name-calling bullies; cliquish; desiring kinship w/other like-minded people; seeking power by government association; demanding rule by ‘right’; believing themselves morally and intellectually right; saying “You must obey us because we know better”; blinded to their ‘well-intentioned’ actions leading to horrible unintended consequences; believing they know better than you; applying a “living constitution” template to every legal decision; using science as leverage without any depth of scientific knowledge; posturing “settled science” to quash dissent; believing they “have the one true faith”; deeming that intentions and not results matter most; obtaining snobbery wielding government power;… combining attitude with government power, coercive.
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Utopia Has No Room for You (and Swaddled Truth) in the Inn.
Us Christians, we abide in Christ wherever we are. We’ll leave the Light on.
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Background on the Constrained and Unconstrained Visions, the intuitive assumptions that shape our worldview:
“We have entered, as I see it, a spiritual limbo. Our educational institutions are no longer the bearers of high culture, and public life has been deliberately moronised. But here and there, sheltered from the noise and glare of the media, the old spiritual forces are at work” Roger Scruton
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“When a common culture declines, the ethical life can be sustained and renewed only by a work of the imagination.”-Roger Scruton
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“Jesus prayed, “This is eternal life, that they may know You . . .” (John 17:3). The real meaning of eternal life is a life that can face anything it has to face without wavering. If we will take this view, life will become one great romance— a glorious opportunity of seeing wonderful things all the time. God is disciplining us to get us into this central place of power.” Oswald Chambers
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“No power on earth or in hell can conquer the Spirit of God in a human spirit, it is an inner unconquerableness.” Oswald Chambers
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To those who have had no agony Jesus says, “I have nothing for you; stand on your own feet, square your own shoulders. I have come for the man who knows he has a bigger handful than he can cope with, who knows there are forces he cannot touch; I will do everything for him if he will let Me. Only let a man grant he needs it, and I will do it for him.” The Shadow of an Agony,Oswald Chambers
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“If we wish to erect new structures, we must have a definite knowledge of the old foundations.” John Calvin Coolidge
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Atheism is a post-Christian phenomenon.
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If social justice looks like your hand in someone else’s pocket then you are stealing.
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“In Sweden, giving to charity, absurdly, came to be considered a lack of solidarity, since it undermined the need for the welfare state.” – Roland Martinsson
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“…to love democracy well, it is necessary to love it moderately.” Alexis de Tocqueville
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Capitalism seeks to help others through a servce or product it provides. Free Market Capitalism is the most moral and fair economic system available to man. Capitalism augments personal growth, responsibility and ownership. Charity flourishes under capitalism. Charity dies under subjective “fair share” government confiscatory policies. Socialism redistributes ambivalence and greed.
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“We are to regard existence as a raid or great adventure; it is to be judged, therefore, not by what calamities it encounters, but by what flag it follows and what high town it assaults. The most dangerous thing in the world is to be alive; one is always in danger of one’s life. But anyone who shrinks from that is a traitor to the great scheme and experiment of being.” G.K. Chesterton
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Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent.
It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage – to move in the opposite direction. Albert Einstein
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“You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you odd.” Flannery O’Connor
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“There is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him.” C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce
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“Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him” (Job 13:15).
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God’s grace is not about the allowance for sin. God’s grace is about the conversation God allows regarding sin.
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From the book of Proverbs: We are not to favor the rich or the poor. We are to pursue justice.
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“Always keep in contact with those books and those people that enlarge your horizon and make it possible for you to stretch yourself mentally.” Oswald Chambers
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One goldfish says to another, “If there is no God who keeps changing the water?”
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“The truth is always there in the morning.”
From Cat On A Hot Tin Roof script – playwright Tennessee Williams
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God blesses those who hunger and thirst for justice, for they will be satisfied.
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“America’s greatness has been the greatness of a free people who shared certain moral commitments. Freedom without moral commitment is aimless and promptly self-destructive.” John W. Gardner
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“Men of integrity, by their very existence, rekindle the belief that as a people we can live above the level of moral squalor. We need that belief; a cynical community is a corrupt community.” John W. Gardner
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“In the world it is called Tolerance, but in hell it is called Despair, the sin that believes in nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to know nothing, interferes with nothing, enjoys nothing, hates nothing, finds purpose in nothing, lives for nothing, and remains alive because there is nothing for which it will die.” Dorothy L. Sayers
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“Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.”
G. K. Chesterton
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“The battle line between good and evil runs through the heart of every man.” Alexander Solzhenitsyn
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This is what the LORD says:
“Stand at the crossroads and look;
ask for the ancient paths,
ask where the good way is, and walk in it,
and you will find rest for your souls.
But you said, ‘We will not walk in it.’
-The prophet Jeremiah, 6:16
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“…our common task is not so much discovering a truth hiding among contrary viewpoints as it is coming to possess a selfhood that no longer evades and eludes the truth with which it is importunately confronted.” James McClendon, Ethics: Systematic Theology, Vol. 1
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