Faith Alone, Bible Alone...what can be said?

 I am tired of the 500 year old debate regarding "Faith Alone" and "Bible Alone" doctrines.  If we hold to either we are faced with great contradictions...With the bible alone we are faced with accepting outside authority when we seek to answer the question of, how did God bring us the Holy Scriptures?  With faith alone, we are lambasted with the question of grace, does God only choose a few to be saved by grace, when in scripture He wills that all be saved, 1 Tim 2:4? 

If we can not reject God's grace, then does he really love us?  If we force something or someone to love us, do we truly feel loved, so then why would God do such a thing?  He wouldn't.  If God forced us by grace to be saved through faith alone, then there would be no need for redemption, forgiveness, healing, sanctification, or justification, because sin would be God's fault, and not ours.

Self-Education = Freedom

Already I have been bombarded with the patronizing of many.  They say, "Oh am happy for you.  You do what's best for your family...I just hope you put your children in social activities."  Well, these may all be well intentioned, but it seems the indoctrination of compulsory public education has really taken hold when people feel that social activities provided by public education outweigh the degradation and government controled curriculum provided as well. 

Outside of sports, the many experiences with reality that children are exposed to in public education are rather like those experienced by inmates; bullying, sexual harassment, scheduled yard time, limited access to information, state controled diet, state controled curriculum, etc.  People feel these social activities prepare students for the real world, well if our country continues to turn into a corporate fascist/communist socialist society, then by all means public education is preparing them quite well.

I on the other hand wish to see students learn independence.  They must learn how to learn so they can self-educate, this is a major component of education that is really non-existent, with the exception of some experiential learning curriculums.  Knowing how to teach one's self leads to freedom.  With the internet and libraries a person could learn anything he/she wants, that is if  he/she knows how to self-educate with external resources. 

Homeschool is not about laziness, social inaptitude, or extremism.  It is about freedom to explore and learn without rigid boundaries determined by the government as to what should be taught or learned.  Here is an enlightening and entertaining video, please watch and enjoy.

 

Source: youtube.com via Dominic on Pinterest

Paradox: Homeschooling

Woe to you that call evil good, and good evil: that put darkness for light, and light for darkness: that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter.
Isaiah 5:20, DRB
If a woman says, "I wish to teach and raise my own children."  She is met with arguments such as,

"It is wrong to shelter your children from the world...they are going to be met with hardship and disappoint. How will they know how to cope with that, especially if they are not submerged in the world?"

My response, though as a father, is , "The world is like an ocean, and a child a swimmer.  If I were to teach my child to swim by always throwing her into the ocean, what then should I expect?  She will most certainly drown.  Rather if  I were to teach her to swim in a pool, then move her into a lake, then into a sea, then the ocean, what do you think her chances of surviving  may be? She will survive.  To claim that raising a child in the midst of corruption, malevolence, half-truth, sexual immorality, dishonesty, and any other immorality would benefit a child, is like claiming if I put my child in a federal prison they will come out a saint.   Now raising them exposed to moral judgement, benevolence, truth, sexual purity, honesty and other virtues, this will no doubt increase her chances at sanctity.

A Journey: From Socialism to Freedom

It has been said that a woman has been removed from her most powerful role in society. She has been duped.  She is now raised by the state through the public school system which embeds the ideology that raising a family is archaic, anti-feminist, and all together oppressive.  She has been successfully thwarted by the state to no longer have any power at all...she no longer builds society through the family. Rather she engages in less influential pursuits...like a career.  She fixes the singular problems of a thousand people rather than confronting and molding the thousand complexities of raising a single child.

We are indoctrinated to think that raising our children implies giving up control to the state through the school systems and to do anything other than this means we are sheltering and creating socially inept citizens...it is quite the contrary.  Young men no longer feel there is any responsibility on their part because the fruits of their loins can be raised by the state agencies or altogether eliminated through eugenicist groups.  These young men leave the women to feel trapped and unable to care for these children...some women heroically do their best to raise them on their own but they must work outside the home thus giving up control to the state.  Each time the state steps in...though it may have the best interests of the family in mind at first...has now inadvertently made it easier for the father and mother to give up responsiblity and furthermore it has taken the power away from the family. 

We ask ourselves why the world and our country are falling apart...it is because the building blocks have been weakened from being solid bricks (the family) to pebbles (the individual).  We are not a nation of God-fearing families we are a nation of aimless orphans raised by Godless socialists.

Please listen to this commentary by a man who saw the fall of society well before most people were even aware, G.K. Chesterton's "Uneducating the Educated": http://ewtn.edgeboss.net/download/ewtn/audiolibrary/gk05.mp3

Cafeteria Catholic

You can't be half catholic, either you are or you are not. 

Planned Parenthood = Holocaust

Planned Parenthood is one of the best organizations at deceiving the masses.  It functions under the same principle as telling a bunch of jews at Auschwitz they need to go into this room to take a shower...then they all get gassed.  Does anybody know that Margaret Sanger influenced the genocide of WWII as a proponent of eugenics...which Planned Parenthood operates under?

Listen to this from G.K. Chesterton: Eugenics

What is good? What is evil? How do you know? It has been said if your actions lead to an outcome you desire such as “happiness,” then you are making ethical decisions. There is obvious fault in this. If your desires disturb the happiness of another then it would be selfishness on your part. Is selfishness good if it impedes on another’s happiness? In order to determine a set of actions as good in an absolute sense, without God, it would be a process of trying to make everyone happy with one set of “rules” so to speak. This is obviously a prodigious task of endless trial and error. Is it even possible? Should we settle for each individual to make a relative set of rules that defines what is “good?” If it is left to the individual person to decide, then the outcome will inevitably impede the happiness of another due to our finite existence. We would have to be omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient to know the effects our decisions have on all stakeholders.

There are many who go through great pains to rule out God in deciding what is good and what is evil. They want to do “good,” but not because they are told to do so, rather because they want to. I ask such as these, “Why do you want to do “good?” Again, we spiral back to the pursuit of happiness, doing “good” leads to happiness. How do you know you are happy? Well, happy is a feeling you have when your lot in life is befitting a desire you possess. Joy on the other hand is much different; it is an assurance that seizes the heart in response to doing what is right in the absolute sense.

Ethics is the pursuit of happiness or is it the pursuit of joy? By pursuit this implies the goal may or may not be reached, but the mode of reaching it, is Ethics. This mode is a labyrinth we travel through blind folded. We come to a dead end and turn around and try another route. Our ethics may lead to happiness, but if we are not happy then we conclude we are doing something wrong in our lives, something unethical, we must have taken the wrong route. I ask you, if we are suffering is it because we are unethical? The Jews of the New Testament believed this, this is why they scoffed at lepers, tax collectors, Samaritans, and the like, “Those unclean, untouchable, people are suffering because they sinned or their ancestors sinned.” Could this really be how things work? We know the story of the Good Samaritan; it is often the person humbled by suffering and sin that turns out to be the most unselfish and empathetic to the plight of others. Is ethics more than a pursuit of happiness then? Is happiness just a possible, but not guaranteed, byproduct of doing what is right and good?

I am a mathematics teacher at a public high school. I feel educating someone is a righteous pursuit, an ethical one. Many days I am quite unhappy though, but there is a certain satisfaction in knowing that a few kids know more than they did before. My unhappiness is most often due to unmotivated, unappreciative, and emotionally neglected students. I put all my effort and heart into giving them something divine (knowledge) and they treat me like I am a prison guard. Is this an implication that I am unethical for educating, or that public education is unethical in its current form? The real point is, just because we are doing good does not mean we will be happy, but we will have a certain amount of joy.

Who decides then, what is good? Is it us individually through trial and error? It may be if we do not read more than one book. We may just travel the labyrinth of ethics blindly running into walls and falling into crevices that we may never escape due to ignorance. We may gain sight through reading a couple more books, but still wonder aimlessly through the maze. We may find larger insight through studying and discussion, but still be found wanting. Instead of all this, we may finally discover there is a route through this maze that leads to a discovery of a joy beyond our past finite experiences, something so profound that it is worthy of the title GOD. We may actually discover that this route can only be accessed through humility and faith rather than our merits alone.

"Sir, my concern is not whether God is on our side; my greatest concern is to be on God's side, for God is always right." - Abraham Lincoln