The Long and Short of It

[HKHaugan]

For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal (2Cor.4:18).

Herein is embedded the difference between religious liberals and biblical conservatives. Liberal religionists live for the temporary. Biblical conservatives live for the eternal. Liberals center all their attention on what they can get for the moment. Conservatives center their attention on individual initiative, creativity and the work necessary to achieve. These two are the polar opposites that define a population’s politics.

Liberals operate under the aegis of what can be seen, “Live fast, die young, and have a good looking corpse (from the 1947 movie Knock on Any Door).” The last two parts make up the bravadoesque attitude that blinds the ‘I-want-it-my-way’ mindset to the consequences of the destructive reality that lies in its wake. Liberal philosophy is all about anarchy; doing whatever whenever with whom or to whom wherever the opportunity presents itself. Liberals are not concerned with the next moment only the now moment. As one country song puts it, “Let the devil take tomorrow, tonight I need a friend.”

Let’s take a modern example. The bottom line in pro-choice is not really the protection of women’s health rights. That’s just its fig leaf phrase to cover participating in sex without restriction. All the rhetoric about ‘my body-my choice’ is the bleating noise of self-denial trying to drown out the possible inevitability of abortion.

The same can be said for the issue of homosexual rights and its paranoid clamor. You can carry this self-centered dynamic into all the so called ‘rights’ issues, the anti-Israel sentiment and the austere quiet when it comes to the fear of Islamic colonialism. Every day Arab rockets shower Israel only to find political and religious liberals blaming Israel for the attacks. Liberals pretend to believe in religious freedom but only because they fear Islam. They attack Christianity knowing that its teaching to turn the other cheek frees them to insult and persecute openly professing Christians. Educational leadership in public schools across the country yields to this persecution supported by religious liberals who deny the absolute constant moral truths of the Bible in order to compromise with the culture for their survival.

That’s what liberals do. Modern liberalism is possessed by multiple spirits of arrogance, pride, greed, superiority, lust and division which explains the attitude of getting what you can while you can.

Liberals spend more time looking for someone to blame rather than a way to fix a problem.
Liberals spend more time pouting and making up slogans than looking for solutions and working to solve issues.
Liberals spend more time looking for things they can be offended about than supporting positive moral behavior.
Liberals spend more time trying to silence and then destroy those who don’t agree with them than concentrating on a way to promote creative production.
Liberals spend more time trying to figure out how to make the government pay for their future than to encourage and develop private industry.
Liberals believe you can create wealth by printing it.
Liberals spend more time twisting historic ideals into ego satisfying verbiage than working on values and ethics that have built our civilization.
Liberals don’t want to advance the working man, they want to control him.
Liberals define economics as taking from those who invent, produce and create wealth and giving it to those unwilling to do what it takes to be the same.
Liberals spend more time making excuses for poverty and racism than getting at their source.
Liberals scream about straw men by naming causes based on issues instead of dealing with human beings as persons with the spiritual needs that meet the reality behind poverty, racism and oppression. (Add your own experiences of ‘straw men’ if you like.)

Now here is liberal strategy: create a negative issue whether real or not, define it as the fault of conservatives, choose an egotistical power hungry idealist around whom people can rally, get people to fund ‘the cause’, create emotional propaganda that invents a ‘we’ and ‘they’, stir up hungry media looking for controversy, lobby in political circles, create a paranoid hostility toward ‘the right wing enemy’ until the whole society is divided to the point of breakdown then step in and take over, all of which ends up with the few controlling the many through fear and intimidation.

Liberal dictatorships always claim to know what’s best for ‘the people.’ Wasn’t that Hitler’s claim in National Socialism? And Stalin’s in the ‘Soviet Socialist Republic’? And Karl Marx’s in Communism along with Mao’s own stricter version? There’s always some human being whose secular idealism becomes fascism. Who can possibly say mankind does not need someone from outside this world to direct us?

Liberal philosophy is secular at its core and therefore anti-God and most definitely anti-Christ in spirit. Liberalism is most vulnerable to power-seekers who prey on the weaknesses in human nature to achieve control. Liberal philosophy historically has led to government control that ends in dictatorship which secularizes government structures through power as in the National Socialist Party in Germany, the Communist Parties in Russia, East Germany, China, Cuba, Cambodia, Albania and the many more like them that built false hope with ‘rights’ sounding phrases resulting in the slaughter of 6,000,000 Jews in Germany, 40,000,000 Christians in Russia, Muslim killings of Christians in most African countries with large Muslim populations and untold millions in others. It’s always interesting to note that appeasement as a political tool never works. How soon liberal intellectuals forget the name Neville Chamberlain in their attempt to revise history.

Conservative philosophy, especially biblically influenced thinking, leans on individual skill and initiative to be creative in the development of goods and services that satisfy material needs in order to free human beings for relational, social and educational growth. It encourages the free enterprise system where profit enables economy to expand, its employment expanding with it and its production of the greatest anti-poverty machine in history. But not everything called conservative is truly conservative. We have several kinds of conservatism: secular, political, institutional, social and religious. After we get into this you may want to suggest more categories.

But right now we’ll start with those five. It’s important to be able to distinguish what makes them different. They share one thing in common, humanism. All of them operate in the belief that human beings possess the internal capacity to be right and moral without the benefit of any external code except mutually agreed upon law based on human experience. This has proven historically disastrous. One has only to look at the French Revolution, China under Mao’s Cultural Revolution and the German Democratic Republic of East Germany in the Cold War. Right now every country in western civilization is watching the incoming tide of secularism, the civil religion of fear, and its depersonalizing anti-God spirits opening the doors to dictatorship and its consequence---revolution. Prophetic? No. Historical? Yes.

Especially dangerous is religious institutionalism whose spirit is pride (belief that God is more in one denomination than another). It compromises historically validated biblical truths in order to protect leadership control and power. This is done by revising historical biblical meaning with subtle substitution. Instead of God’s definition of love being obedience to His will as Jesus taught it becomes feeling good about people regardless of their belief and behavior. It makes excuses for behavior based on secular psychology, cultural accommodation and emotional acceptance. Morality is what you feel not what you believe. Feelings are personal and therefore true so what any person chooses to believe overrides all outside concepts of morality. The problem is that religious leadership compromised means God’s people betrayed.

The bottom line is that mankind left alone is mankind on a ship without a rudder ending up in a whirlpool of self-destruction. Is there a way out? Absolutely! That is for our next page.

Hint: It’s where we started, “For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal (2Cor.4:18).”