We were visiting friends yesterday and during that we went for a walk through a forest of schist boulders to a salt lake. Which was dry. We walked on the surface of the lake, past footprints made n the mud by previous people, and our shoes were dry. It is late summer here, in fact Autumn: the weather is cooler (it never gets that hot here), but inland summer is holding on.
During that walk my son was asking economic and demographic questions. The discussion turned to Israel and the Arab world and I commented that the birth rate for Arabs in Israel had decreased (as the rate for Jews increased). My friend argued as he was taught, that this was a good thing. My son said instead that it was not, and asked why.
Jeremiah gives some hints.
1The word of the LORD came to me: 2You shall not take a wife, nor shall you have sons or daughters in this place. 3For thus says the LORD concerning the sons and daughters who are born in this place, and concerning the mothers who bear them and the fathers who beget them in this land: 4They shall die of deadly diseases. They shall not be lamented, nor shall they be buried; they shall become like dung on the surface of the ground. They shall perish by the sword and by famine, and their dead bodies shall become food for the birds of the air and for the wild animals of the earth.
5For thus says the LORD: Do not enter the house of mourning, or go to lament, or bemoan them; for I have taken away my peace from this people, says the LORD, my steadfast love and mercy. 6Both great and small shall die in this land; they shall not be buried, and no one shall lament for them; there shall be no gashing, no shaving of the head for them. 7No one shall break bread for the mourner, to offer comfort for the dead; nor shall anyone give them the cup of consolation to drink for their fathers or their mothers. 8You shall not go into the house of feasting to sit with them, to eat and drink. 9For thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel: I am going to banish from this place, in your days and before your eyes, the voice of mirth and the voice of gladness, the voice of the bridegroom and the voice of the bride.
10And when you tell this people all these words, and they say to you, “Why has the LORD pronounced all this great evil against us? What is our iniquity? What is the sin that we have committed against the LORD our God?” 11then you shall say to them: It is because your ancestors have forsaken me, says the LORD, and have gone after other gods and have served and worshiped them, and have forsaken me and have not kept my law; 12and because you have behaved worse than your ancestors, for here you are, every one of you, following your stubborn evil will, refusing to listen to me. 13Therefore I will hurl you out of this land into a land that neither you nor your ancestors have known, and there you shall serve other gods day and night, for I will show you no favor.
14Therefore, the days are surely coming, says the LORD, when it shall no longer be said, “As the LORD lives who brought the people of Israel up out of the land of Egypt,” 15but “As the LORD lives who brought the people of Israel up out of the land of the north and out of all the lands where he had driven them.” For I will bring them back to their own land that I gave to their ancestors.
16I am now sending for many fishermen, says the LORD, and they shall catch them; and afterward I will send for many hunters, and they shall hunt them from every mountain and every hill, and out of the clefts of the rocks. 17For my eyes are on all their ways; they are not hidden from my presence, nor is their iniquity concealed from my sight. 18And I will doubly repay their iniquity and their sin, because they have polluted my land with the carcasses of their detestable idols, and have filled my inheritance with their abominations.
19 O LORD, my strength and my stronghold,
my refuge in the day of trouble,
to you shall the nations come
from the ends of the earth and say:
Our ancestors have inherited nothing but lies,
worthless things in which there is no profit.
20 Can mortals make for themselves gods?
Such are no gods!21“Therefore I am surely going to teach them, this time I am going to teach them my power and my might, and they shall know that my name is the LORD.”
If you sow the wind, you reap the whirlwind. Over my lifetime, the elite have advocated a sense of entitlement among the population, where one’s personal comfort and happiness is the greatest good. A consequence of this freedom of choice has been a silent holocaust of infanticide.
Rather, when I think about the circumstances of my conception and birth I am just glad to have made it out alive. I was born at a time when the abortion rate was almost 40%..and some of my half-siblings were not quite as lucky to survive this ongoing holocaust.
While abortion was made frequent by technological innovation..leaving babies to die is as old as human existence. I imagine bastards throughout time have felt a little grateful to dodge the infanticide bullet.
[As a complete aside, Motherhood has always been a choice. The ancients had abortifacients -- if it were not so, the Hippocratic Oath would not proscribe the provision of such. And exposure of infants occurred into recent times in many lands. Many women have abandoned their children while in the womb or after birth. For various reasons, and Christians have always proscribed these]
WHen the iniquities of a nation reach a point that people abandon duty just to survive, and the good flee, then society is in desperate straits. What is happening in the USA at present is that many men are just giving up on relationships — not because they have been called like Jeremiah to do so, but because it is simply too risky. The regulations are so much in favour of divorce that it takes a woman of fervent faith to resist this when the marriage (inevitably) goes through those periods when her husband is a boor, is boring, and there are men who appear more vibrant and more powerful around her. [To say nothing of the mass media. No human being can compete with the culturally perfect masculinity (or femininity) of the leading men or ladies. The actors playing those parts know they are fake. Society has forgotten that].
And then things start crumbling. Liberty comments at Hillbuzz:
My family has lived in Chicagoland since before the fire. They were in Chicago until the early 1900s and we have been in the near suburbs since then (Oak Park).
I went to high school in the city during some of the worst of the worst times in the late 80s early 90s in a national crime statistic neighborhood.
I have never seen the crime and violence so out of control. It’s terrifying. Places I used to drive through confident that as a ‘non combatant’ during the day I was safe are now scary with young men walking and running around brandishing guns in a way that never would have happened before.
I tlak to friends who are CPD officers and they have ZERO respect for the mayor and chief McCarthy. They may not have like mayor Daley… but they respected him. If you read Chicago cop blogs and talk to friends who are cops you learn just how out of control parts of the city have gotten. It’s post apocalyptic in the South and parts of the West sides.
Talking to older family members who have seen a great deal in this city (teachers in the CPS back in the 50s-60s) and they are dismayed and shocked at what is going on. I used to never think that Chicago could become Detroit… but lately I just don’t see how it can be avoided.
When men are no longer wanting to be fathers, that is a sigh: because men have been told that being a father is of no value. When women abandon their babies, that also is a sign.
That the people are now without vision. And without vision, a nation will perish.
