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A New American Revolution? Nope - And Here's Why...

1/8/2016

2 Comments

 
Picture
With no one to vote for on either side of the aisle, many Americans are looking for another option, even if it means the usually denigrated Third-Party option.
 
And among sincere right-wing conservatives, there is even talk of creating a new movement.
 

But spiritually speaking, it just doesn’t seem viable at this point.
 
First of all, Hashem is taking down all the lies and obfuscations, both on the personal level and on the global level. I see this in my personal life and others have mentioned seeing this, too.
 
He's just not letting us get away with poor behavior and faulty thinking anymore.
 
And there are just too many lies and obfuscations, even among right-wing conservatives.
 
Here are some examples...


​The Pursuit of What Exactly?

As great as the American Constitution has been (historically speaking), the fact is that the Pursuit of Happiness as an inalienable right is ultimately a bad idea.

Pursuit of Meaning or Pursuit of Truth or the Pursuit of Self-Betterment would have been more in line with what Hashem really wants from us.
 
Of course, the Founding Fathers never imagined the level of debauchery and indolence pursued by Americans today.

That Puritan culture could not have foreseen that people would want to be so dependent and mindless.

So a revolutionary movement based on the Constitution, which emphasizes the Pursuit of Happiness, can’t succeed at this point.

​There are too many individuals who define happiness as being plugged into chemicals (legal or otherwise), mindless & snarky entertainment, and electro-magnetic gadgets. 
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Legitimatizing Polytheism? No More Excuses

PictureThere's nothing there....
Secondly, the vast majority of right-wing conservatives believe in some form of Christianity (or if they are Jewish, they believe in others' right to believe in Christianity).
 
Okay, this gets a bit tricky because the Constitutional right to practice your own religion without persecution has been a tremendous chessed for the Jewish people and unparalleled in Jewish history.
 
Yet Christianity is just plain false. So you can't support its "right."
 
Anything beneficial in it was paraphrased from Judaism.

So if you want the good stuff, you might as well go straight to the original Jewish source.

Furthermore, at this point, there really isn’t any excuse to believe in Christianity today (and all the more so, any other religions—particularly openly idolatrous ones).

There is just too much information available, both from a Torah point of view (the Torah is very clear about monotheism, Jews as His Chosen Nation, and not adding to or subtracting from the Torah, etc.) and from a historical point of view.

I mean, Christians don't even have a singular bible.

(Their bible consists of a bunch of letters tacked on to the end of ours.)

It's the most bizarre thing.
 
So many people correctly abandoned Christianity upon discovering that it is based on a bunch of letters written by regular people.

(Unfortunately, they end up as atheists, agnostics, worshippers of anglicized Buddhism, or a wishy-washy liberalized belief in some kind of greater power—all of which has been, ironically, worse for society than Christianity. But hardly anyone wants to admit this.)

There isn't even a one authentic source-copy of this gospel collection, not to mention that hardly anyone can read the original letters because they consist of a hodge-podge of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek.

Altogether, no reasonable person could possibly buy into this, which accounts for the increase of converts to Judaism and bnei Noach.

Reading accounts from America's earlier days, you find people who believed wholeheartedly in God, but do not mention Christianity's founder as a synonym for God as Christians do today:
 
  • Thomas Jefferson's bible famously had all references to human divinity blocked out.
 
  • John and Abigail Adams referred often to God specifically in their diaries and letters. John Adams worried about guarding his eyes and keeping his mind pure as a single man while Abigail Adams felt that an outbreak of cholera was God's punishment for slave-ownership.
 
  • Maine midwife Martha Ballard (1735-1812) mentions Hashem repeatedly in her diary, but she calls Him "Lord," "God," and "our Great Parent;" she never interchanges Him with their founder. In fact, as far as I could tell, she never mentions their founder at all and she only went to church when compelled.
​
  • Laura Ingalls Wilder (1867-1957) mentions God only, both in her fictionalized books and in her original biography. She only attended churches if she liked the preacher, but like many Americans of her time, she felt perfectly capable of conducting a relationship with God on her own.
 
  • Whether black or white, earlier Americans frequently referred to the Jewish Bible and found great inspiration specifically within the Tanach as opposed to the Christian bible. Many of the most popular names of that time were clearly taken from the Tanach.
 
Yet today's Christians seem to be more "Christian" than their forebears.

Mindlessly interchanging "God" and "Lord" with the name of their founder is a particularly disturbing example of this.

And this is despite today's easily available scholarship to the contrary.
 
Hashem shomer peta'im, but what excuse exists today for being such a peti?
 
In His Great Compassion, Hashem judges us by the resources we have available to us and by our capabilities.

Theologically speaking, the capabilities and resources apply to everyone today.

Yes, I respect and am sympathetic to the tremendous emotional hardship in breaking away from their deeply ingrained tri-theistic belief system.

​But still. People can become (or at least start on the path to becoming) either Torah-observant Jews or Noachides. 
 
I honestly believe that any movement which denies the Truth of Torah and basically considers Hashem to be a liar (may He have mercy) can no longer succeed.
 
There are just no more excuses. 


​The Objectification of Women as a Conservative Value - Huh?

PicturePortrait of the New Conservative Woman - now that's HOT!
Thirdly, too many truly right-wing conservatives have proudly absorbed the seedy values of the Left.

You can barely read or listen to a right-wing conservative article or podcast without being assaulted by bawdy images or foul language.

And that's not all.

Self-defined religious conservative women have chosen to objectify themselves almost as much as secular Liberal women.  

Today, we have female-only versions like:
  • the “Hot” Judge
  • the “Hot” Pregnant Mommy
  • the “Hot” Newscaster
  • the “Hot” Geek...

...which Christian conservatives have imposed upon themselves by creating:
  • the “Hot” Christian
  • the “Hot” Right-Wing Conservative Pundit
  • the “Hot” Pro-Lifer
  • ...and so on.

Men never do the above, nor are they encouraged to. 

On the contrary, they'd look foolish doing so & face mass mockery for it.

The raunchiness permeating this otherwise religious and conservative group is something you’ve probably noticed yourself by now.

​In sum, a group in which women knowingly & eagerly make themselves eye-candy (with the enthusiastic approval of their like-minded male idealists) cannot succeed.
 
And like secular Liberals, prominent right-wing conservatives have even given up on pushing pre-marital abstinence, despite this being a strong tenet of their religion.

Instead, they focus on fighting abortion by promoting adoption and birth control.

This is just a sample of reasons why I truly believe that things cannot get better in America and why even a well-intentioned revolutionary movement is doomed to failure.
 
There are other reasons, too, but this post just focuses on the spiritual ones.

All in all, we could know better and there is enough information and enough people speaking the Truth for us to know better.

​Hashem has been stamping out our excuses and giving us plenty of time to figure out the right way.

L'sheker ein regalim - Falsehood has no feet to stand on. 
 

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They label it as Truth. But if you look a little closer, you'll see that their "truth" is completely made up of....lies.
2 Comments
yaak link
3/8/2016 02:27:13

I agree with much of what you wrote.

The only thing I don't understand from your post is that in a democracy, I don't know why I cannot support someone's right to believe in XYZ religion if they so choose. No one is saying that XYZ religion has any truth to it - just that they have a right to believe in it if they so choose. Not that it's right - but in a democracy, they have a legal right to be wrong as long as their wrong values don't interfere with anyone else's. Your critiques are correct, but misplaced. Perhaps, you should be saying that democratic values should be replaced by Torah values.

The right-wing conservatives in America may be wrong in their religious beliefs and their objectification of women, as you rightly pointed out, but they are very right in many other ways. They are an imperfect barrier from America going faster into the abyss than it is going.

Reply
Myrtle Rising
3/8/2016 10:13:41

In hindsight, I think I should've acknowledged what you yourself pointed out: The right-wing conservatives do indeed serve as a beneficial barrier and that it is the Christian right who have done the most in the fight against same-gender marriage and abortion. This is true and something to be grateful for, I totally agree.

Regarding your other points: Halachically speaking, do people have the "right" to believe in things that aren't true? They have the option to do so, but isn't the purpose of bechira chofsheet (free choice) to give us the opportunity to choose wisely, which enables (so to speak) Hashem to heap reward upon us?

Also, the very belief in anything other than strict monotheism harms the very believer and his or her society, which makes it hard to support as their "right." To me, this isn't much different than supporting someone's "right" to self-harm.

To illustrate: A righteous giyoret once stated her feeling that the extreme Liberalism today actually derives from Christianity. One turning point for her was when a prominent Christian leader went to comfort a murderer in prison, but he made no such visit to the victim's side. Her sense of justice rebelled at this. "What about the family of the victim?" she asked. "They're the ones truly in need of comfort." She didn't understand why innocent people held less value to that leader than a murderer.
I never thought of it before, but seeing things in that light, it makes sense.

Yes, you are right that I am basically saying that democratic values should be replaced by Torah values. American colonists actually did try to run their society according to Torah values as they understood them (and, for lack of a knowledgeable Jewish guide, they didn't understand how to apply the values). I guess we're all aware of how they made mistakes resulting from interpreting Tanach too literally and superficially; if they'd had a knowledgeable rabbi with whom to consult, things would've gone much better.
But their fundamental intention was very good, as far as I can tell.

Thank you.

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