One must start with a deformed theory of human nature to comprehend the rationale for the welfare state.

The cornerstone of Western civilization, beginning with the Old Testament prophets and classical Greek philosophers, was the belief that human nature is constant, unchanging over the ages.  Liberal-progressive-socialist theory, inaugurated by French intellectuals before and after the bloody French Revolution of 1789, propounded the theory that human behavior can be controlled and changed by restructuring society.

In pre-French Revolutionary society, constancy of human nature meant that a good and just society depended upon every individual’s aligning himself with God-given natural law, intuited through religion and philosophy.  No matter whether the ruler was good or bad, every individual needed to do the right thing, to deal fairly with others, to aid widows, orphans, and others in need.  Every individual ultimately would be judged by his Maker.

Liberal-progressive-socialism, exemplified in psychology and the other so-called social sciences established by French intellectuals, hypothesizes in contrast that humans have no capacity to intuit a Divine Creator or a natural law imparted by His Mind, which created the universe.  Humans are just products of Darwinian evolution, beings whose fundamental characteristic is response to external agents of pleasure or pain.  Intellectuals therefore can manipulate evolution with laws and regulations to compel people in the mass to respond as the intellectuals intend.

The cornerstone question, then, is whether individuals can be relied upon to perceive their own best interests, or whether only Ivy League intellectuals and Democrat/Socialist Party politicians can know wherein lie the best interests of the masses, e.g., electric cars, shutting down industries that create jobs but emit CO2, and supporting mafia-style labor unions and “green” ventures.

If the Judeo-Christian Western civilizational paradigm is correct, government should encourage religion as the best means to impart individual morality and responsibility, and government should give maximum free rein to individual initiative and creativity.

If President Obama and his fellow liberal-progressive-socialists are correct, ultimately everyone should be employed by the government, because only government is able to improve peoples lives, only government perceives what is best for the masses, only government can protect helpless members of the mass from predations of capitalist businessmen.

Svetlana Kunin, who grew up under the liberal-progressive benevolence of the Soviet Union, explores the implications of those differing views in an op-ed piece appearing on the Investors’ Business Daily website. Read Who Created Prosperity? Bureaucrats Or Individuals?

[This article was originally published in The View From 1776 blog.]

Many people have a hard time believing all the stories about the Marxists in our government. Many people do not want to believe we have such thinking in the highest levels of leadership. In any case, it’s not the product of an overactive, jaundiced imagination.

One or comments may be excused as just a politician catering to a particular crowd or having a bad day. Yet, even those explanations are unacceptable considering the power some of these people have over our lives. It is not only unacceptable, but frightening as well, when we consider that these people don’t like our country and they don’t like us. They don’t like our prosperity and they don’t like our freedom.

One of the first things we need to do is understand is who our enemy is and what they want to do to us. This video compilation is a good start. Then each of us has to decide what we, personally need to do about it.

Liberal-progressives frequently assert that socialism is more in accord with original Christianity than Christianity itself.

Jay Richards, writing in the Washington Post, debunks that thesis.

See also Social Activism and the Social Gospel and Religious Left and Same Old Social Gospel.

Even before the 1917 Russian Revolution, leading universities in the United States had begun a transition from the Christian roots of our nation into atheistic, secular materialism in their teaching of the so-called social sciences.

Nominally-Christian theological seminaries were in the vanguard of the movement toward socialism. Rochester Theological Seminary’s professor Walter Rauschenbusch, one of the best known socialist spokesmen of his era, was a founder of the Social Gospel movement late in the 19th century. Social Gospel was nothing more nor less than socialism masquerading as Christianity.

Social Gospel embraced the avowed aims of socialism, which sound similar to the results that flow from the Bible’s commandment to love one’s neighbor as he would wish to have his neighbor love him. The insurmountable problem is that socialism, and therefore Social Gospel, is atheistic and materialistic, i.e., the antithesis of Christianity and religious Judaism.

To believe that Social Gospel is true Christianity is to believe that the Soviet dictatorship of the proletariat was truly democratic.

In “Christianizing the Social Order” (1912), Professor Rauschenbusch wrote:

“The Socialists found the Church against them and thought God was against them, too. They have had to do God’s work without the sense of God’s presence to hearten them…..Whatever the sins of individual Socialists, and whatever the shortcomings of Socialist organizations, they are tools in the hands of the Almighty…….Socialism is one of the chief powers of the coming age……God will raise up Socialism because the organized Church was too blind, or too slow, to realize God’s ends.”

Two other prominent seminaries, among many others, were active promoters of socialism. Their spokesmen also were nationally known figures: Dr. Harry F. Ward of Union Theological Seminary in New York and Dr. Bernard Iddings-Bell of St. Stephens College in Annandale, New York.

Dr. Ward wrote “The New Social Order,” to express sympathy for Socialism and to laud the Bolshevik revolutionary movement in Russia, which he regarded as a desirable replacement for the Russian Orthodox Christian Church. Dr. Ward also was chairman of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which actively defended the terrorist tactics of the radical IWW labor organization, whose members murdered more than a dozen employees and executives of industrial companies they sought to intimidate with demands for labor seizure of management control.

Dr. Iddings-Bell in “Right and Wrong After the War,” in this case World War I, advocated Sigmund Freud’s version of Marxian materialism, in which human life is controlled by hunger and the sex urge. From this theory of secular and materialistic human nature, he concluded that (1) private property should be abolished; (2) income earned from investments, savings accounts, and rental property is robbery; (3) the family as a social unit should be abandoned except as a temporary arrangement for purely sexual relations.

In his sermon delivered on May 23, 1920, at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, Dr. Iddings-Bell gave his support to revolutionary labor demands for abolishment of the wage system and control of industry by communistic labor unions.

He declared that the New Social Order had arrived and that people were obliged to accept it. Among other things, that meant that internationalism must replace American patriotism.

[This article was originally published in The View From 1776 blog.]

Why are liberal-progressives so insistent about raising taxes, despite the risk of prolonging and deepening unemployment?

Liberal-progressives outraged by the failure of Democrat/Socialists to win direct tax hikes on “the rich” in the recent debt-ceiling deal assert that such tax increases are necessary, not only to reduce the deficit, but also as a matter of moral principle. What is the basis of that assertion of moral principle?

Morality has to do with the principles by which a society or a religion determines the difference between right or wrong conduct.

Judeo-Christianity, in the Old Testament and the New, teaches that acquiring wealth is acceptable conduct, if done legally and ethically. But the wealthy are to see themselves as the beneficiaries of God’s grace and to regard themselves as stewards of what God has bestowed upon them. They are to deal fairly and charitably with widows, orphans, the infirm, and others who have fallen on hard luck. The Judeo-Christian ethic is an individual one. Each person is answerable to God for his own conduct.

Liberal-progressive morality arises from the godless, materialistic secularity of the socialist religion. The role of God in human affairs is dismissed and replaced with the presumed superiority of human Reason in the abstract. History is moving forward as an independent evolutionary force, in the Marxian sense, inevitably toward a good socialist society. Individuals play no role in this historical process outside their membership in various social and economic classes. Only the political and intellectual elite see what is best for members of these classes, and it is their obligation and privilege to determine how members of those classes are to live their lives.

Anything that stands in the way of this historical process is immoral in the purview of liberal-progressivism. Judeo-Christian ethics and our historical free-market economic individuality must be crushed.

Because the major aim of theoretical socialism is equality of income and elimination of privilege, the collectivized socialistic political state must take from “the rich” and redistribute their income to favored social and economic classes.

That is liberal-progressive morality.

[This article was originally posted in The View From 1776 blog.]

That’s what is different now in our leaders that we have NEVER had before. With all due respect for his office, and with my continued prayers for his personal safety and wise decisions, I must tell you that I believe that our current President holds a view of government that is not supported by the American Constitution. Whether he is merely a socialist, or truly the Marxist he now appears to be matters little. The fact is, unless Americans act now and continue to stand regardless of the cost, the Constitution will be shredded by those who believe that freedom is a grant of government rather than a gift from God. We will lose the freedom to speak what we believe, worship as we choose, prosper according to our ability, and protect what we have.

Fifty six men in Philadelphia in that long hot summer of 1776 ended their task by penning a document. That document marked each and every one of them as a criminal. By signing the Declaration of Independence, they broke the law, and put themselves and their families in extreme danger. Even with that cost in mind, they pledged to one another and to us their posterity their “lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor.” Because of them we can take that same stand today without breaking the law (at least for now). we can still say what we think, and basically live our lives in relative freedom.

That is really the problem. Because we are still free and relatively comfortable, most of us probably think we are safe. There is still a high level of complacency that resists the kind of active opposition to tyranny that is called for. The thing is, that is exactly what the founders faced in 1775. Most people living in the American colonies had it pretty good. They could own their land, raise their crops, and run their businesses with minimal interference from the British government. Our Founding Fathers saw the beginnings of tyranny in the form of increased regulation of business, limitation of freedoms, and increased taxation to fund government programs designed to increase government power rather than protect American prosperity.

Let that thought sink in for a moment and then ask yourself this question: How is that different than what we are facing today?

Thankfully, an armed revolution is not needed today. The only thing necessary to halt America’s march toward Marxist tyranny is for each of us to stand up, speak up, and spread the word that here in this blessed land, we do not serve at the pleasure of the government, they serve at the pleasure of the people. Whether those in leadership today who are committed to a socialist economy ever change their hearts or not is of no consequence in our efforts. What they need to know is that their jobs depend on them changing their actions. When enough Americans voice their convictions, backed up by their voter participation, so that politicians begin to fear for their positions, they will change the way the lead and vote. That is what matters now.

I continue to pray for a spiritual awakening in America. That is a crying need across our land. There is no doubt that each of us must do all we can to spread the Gospel of Jesus Christ. That Holy mission is not lessened by the current political and economic crisis. The truth is, our mission to reach the lost depends on our response to the current circumstances. How long will we be allowed to openly spread the gospel if our rights are destroyed? How long can we fund evangelical outreach if taxes increase to 75% or more on every dollar we earn?

Not only can that happen, if we do nothing, it has to happen. The Social Security Administration sent me a letter just last week that said that by 2014, at current rates, yearly revenues to that system will only fund 78% of yearly benefits. With the rapid increase in retirement costs from baby boomer retirees, that will only get worse. That is just one program. That chilling prediction does not include the extra $11,000 in debt for EVERY CITIZEN as a result of the currently proposed Obama budget. It does not factor in the additional $9,400 in debt added to each one of us by the already approved bail out monstrosity. That figure does not include the extra TRILLIONS of dollars in new spending sought by the current President and leaders in Congress. The bottom line is, if they get all they want, there will be nothing left for anyone else. The government will own everything, run everything, and control every aspect of our daily lives. There is a word for that kind of government. The word is SOCIALISM.