Into this witch’s brew of too much work, divorce, and fatherless families is added the burden of the State. The “Great Society” programs increasingly thrust government into everyone’s lives. Welfare was set up so that families got more money if fathers left home!
Another attack came when Progressive/Liberal policies, forced on us by the liberal Warren Court, began to create a secular society. Prayer was taken out of school in 1964. The attack was far more subtle than that, though. Under the guise of “catching up with the Soviets, math and science were emphasized. In biology, that meant greater emphasis on one of the basic doctrinal underpinnings of Progressivism, Socialism, and Communism: evolution.
“What difference can that make?” one may ask. A great deal when you consider what it says about the worth of each human life. It gave Marx the idea that History was headed for an inevitable utopia of human equality and fairness under Socialism. Marx stated, and socialists like Lenin, Hitler, and Stalin, et al., put into practice that because this Utopia was inevitable, then ANY means to achieve was right. Thus, anyone who disagreed with or stood in the way of the “self-evident” truths of Socialism could be killed, by the millions if necessary. Somehow, killing millions was always “necessary”.
Socialism always invents “victims” of capitalism, male domination, racism, heterosexuality, and “the system”. Then, because of these “injustices”, new “rights” had to be invented to get them out of their dilemma. Liberals could rarely get the majority of Americans to agree with their ideas on the merits (because they had no merit), so they appointed Federal Judges who had been steeped in Progressivism in Law School. Believing that the Constitution was “a living document” whose meaning could be changed or ignored at whim, the courts imagined and enforced all kinds of new constitutional “rights” that the Founders and jurists had missed in the first 150 years of our nationhood.
In Griswold vs. Connecticut, the Supremes created a “right to privacy” (to buy condoms). In Roe vs. Wade, they extended that right to privacy, based upon “penumbras and emanations” of various amendments, created a new right for women that legalized abortion. This was judicial legislating, NOT Constitutional interpretation! As a result, we have killed about 50 million Americans in the womb since then. Make no mistake, Roe vs. Wade means that all unborn were declared the non-human property of their mothers, who could kill them with impunity and without any need for justification. It was exactly the same reasoning the Dredd Scott Court used to determine that once black man was property, he remained non-human and was always property, until his master released him. Just as denial of the slave’s humanity was necessary for slavery, so denial of the humanity of the humanity of the unborn is held today.
This means that once you accept and declare ANY part of humanity non-human, then it is only a short step; a 51% majority vote of the people, a legislature, or a court, that’s makes any other group that is out of favor become “non-human”, without rights, and therefore “killable”. Now, take a child who sees that at least one of his parents decided he wasn’t worth staying around for, and then teach him that under certain conditions of convenience, (rather than medical necessity) that “inconvenient” people can be rationalized as non-human and killed. What kind of value is he going to place on the lives of others?
Evolution acts upon kids’ psyche in other ways. “Survival of the fittest” allows those who deem others inferior to bully those inferiors. Some of the bullied will avenge themselves by getting firearms, which then makes THEM the “fittest” to survive. Why do today’s kids not value the dignity and lives of others? If you are told that the universe was created by chance, that the world, and therefore all life, was a cosmic accident, how much value can put on human life?
In a Judeo-Christian culture, kids are taught that they are special creations of God and that He has a purpose for everyone’s lives. Jer. 29:11. Our secular schools, though, laugh at that idea. Instead, kids are taught that they and all people are merely the chance descendants of the vomit of a primordial slime pit. We’re taught that life has no meaning or purpose, so we might as well grab for all the gusto and live selfishly for as long as we can. Now which of these would make YOU want to get out of bed and go to school or work? Which would cause you to look favorably on your fellow man? Which would make you want to plan for the future so as to improve society and yourself?
“As a man thinks in his heart, so is he.” Prov. 23:7.
Finally, we have largely unsupervised kids who can view violence, murder, and porn on various media for hours on end. “Whatever is drilled in training comes out in combat.” So says Lt. Col. Dave Grossman and Loren Christensen in their book, On Combat (Warrior Science Pub. 3rd Ed. 2008). Realistic video simulations of combat have taught modern American soldiers to be far more effective killers in combat than they were in WWII and Korea. The very same brain-imprinting occurs when kids play video games or watch violent media.
While only a small percentage of kids are predisposed to kill, the psychiatric and the medical profession are virtually unanimous in saying that violent “shooter” type games and violent movies are part of the make-up of every teen-to-20’s mass killer. The two Columbine murderers watched Natural Born Killers (a movie about two psychopathic spree murderers) 53 times! In 1958, no one could afford to watch Psycho that much.
When kids play “shooter” games they don’t shoot targets, they shoot people. They don’t shoot one bad guy and stop, either, they keep going and get emotionally rewarded for more kills. Id. at 81-91. These games break down our natural aversion to killing other people, especially in kids who are psychologically disposed to killing.
One of the common traits shared by all young mass murderers is their obsession to beat the previous “high score” of prior killers. Where does this motivation come from? It comes from the video arcade mentality. We live in a world where the young have become obsessed with fame (although it’s not fame, but mere notoriety). Remember the Olympic athletes who were polled as to whether they would take a hypothetical drug that would win them the gold, but kill them at age 30? A significant percentage answered that for the fame, they would take such a drug.
When we publish and repeat these killers’ names in the press, they get exactly what they were seeking, even though they realize they will likely be dead and never hear it. They willingly trade their entire future lives for a moment of infamy, because to them, it’s better than being unknown. In short, teen mass killers arise because we’ve lost godly standards and values.
We need to return to a culture based on Biblical principles. The middle verse of the middle chapter of the Bible says, “It is better to take refuge in the Lord than to trust in man.” Ps. 118:8. In Col.3:2 we are told, “Set your mind on things above, not on the things that are on earth.” I pray each of us may seek the Lord for guidance as parents, voters, and citizens, so we may return to a day when our children didn’t set out to slaughter each other.
Image: CCO Creative Commons; https://pixabay.com/en/hoodie-sweater-dark-night-evening-691449/
