This world is fungible. All is temporary. What we consider fixed, and powerful, and worthy of emulation will be cast down. We are not the peak of civilization. We have not progressed. And to claim we can judge others on fine things when we tolerate great evil in this time is beyond arrogance in its stupidity.
Third, by condemning the past we assume that we of the present are morally superior and easily meet the standards that we impose on others. But round up the monsters of the 19th century: None matched the death tolls of the 20th-century mass-murderers Hitler, Mao, and Stalin.
Have not the beheadings, drownings, and incinerations carried out by ISIS already trumped both the numbers and the cruel methods of the Spanish Inquisition?
By condemning the past we assume that we of the present are morally superior and easily meet the standards that we impose on others.
Are today’s sex-and-violence raunchy movies, Internet sites, and video games more morally uplifting than what the public enjoyed in 1750 in their candlelit hours? Was the liberal heartthrob Bill Clinton’s morality superior to that of Calvin Coolidge, in terms of the way each treated his employees and his family?
Are we to suppose that the current New York Times best-seller lists include all sorts of novels of a sort that Jane Austen and Charles Dickens could not match?
Are there many moralists like Jesus, Socrates, and St. Thomas Aquinas on the modern lecture scene? Perhaps the Supreme Leader of Iran, his holiness Ali Khamenei? Or Barack Obama, the Nobel laureate? Or those social-justice warriors, the Revs. Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and Jeremiah Wright?
Well, the answer to all these questions is “no:. They are rhetorical. Not to say that there is not good things being created and made and good teachers preaching: but it seems at this time those are the people who the academy damns with extreme fervour.
THe conversations between trusted men, again, are different from the public proclamation. As if this has not happened. But this time will end, and this world is not all there is. We need to hope in Christ, and not in an ayatollah or practitioner or the Racist scam.
Since all these things are thus to be dissolved, what sort of people ought you to be in lives of holiness and godliness, waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be set on fire and dissolved, and the heavenly bodies will melt as they burn! But according to his promise we are waiting for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells.
Therefore, beloved, since you are waiting for these, be diligent to be found by him without spot or blemish, and at peace. And count the patience of our Lord as salvation, just as our beloved brother Paul also wrote to you according to the wisdom given him, as he does in all his letters when he speaks in them of these matters. There are some things in them that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other Scriptures. You therefore, beloved, knowing this beforehand, take care that you are not carried away with the error of lawless people and lose your own stability. But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To him be the glory both now and to the day of eternity. Amen.
(2 Peter 3:11-18 ESV)
I think the leaders of the West are corrupt. It would be an insult to compare them to pygmies or morons: the former are more intelligent and the latter more moral.
While U.S. military officials “say the charges are too far-fetched to merit a response”, what is much more far-fetched is the idea that they cannot bomb the Islamic State’s oil facilities for fear of endangering the Desert Snail Darter or whatever their lame excuses are.
The US outrage over Russia’s intervention in Syria, as well as the Turkish ambush of the Russian plane, are clearly indicative of the fact that the Obama administration is allied with ISIS and wants it to succeed in taking out Assad. After all, we know US forces are not welcome there by either the Syrian government or the Iraqi government.
Before you dismiss the idea that the US is actually pro-ISIS out of hand, keep in mind that the US government also bombed the Serbs in order to keep them from defeating the Muslims in Bosnia.
I checked the link. The Iraqis consider ISIS a creature of the USA; I don’t trust the Iraqis that much, but I trust the US State Department far less.
What are we to do? We are not to accede. If we are removed from the public world. we are to concentrate on living a righteous life. We are to be the contrast with this fallen time. And we are to not fall into the errors of the heretics: those who use postmodernism to damn Paul and Praise Peter, or twist scripture to their own ends.
Even if the liberals praise such to the skies.