\n\tAnother year; but hardly business as usual. The world ended on December 21 last year, or so they were telling us right up to the day. Those pesky
\n\tMayans\u2014who knew that they had it so wrong about the apocalypse! Of course a certain Family Radio speaker had backdated the event to a few months earlier;
\n\tbut is equally silent now about what happened, or didn't happen. Someone once said that "making predictions is very difficult, especially about the
\n\tfuture." It's usually said that the tumble-tongued Yogi Berra made the comment; but there are many other attributions\u2014Mark Twain being more plausible and
\n\tConfucius likely to claim first use.\n<\/p>\n
\n\tWe had an election at year's end, and I had thought this editorial could comment on the surge of optimism that we'd be riding by now. I can hardly remember
\n\tas flat a reelection moment. (Although Clinton with an impeachment looming and Nixon with smoking tapes do come to mind.) Certainly the reelected president
\n\thas made no overweening comments about wanting to use political capital. Maybe that's bad\u2014at least a number of Web prognosticators have characterized the
\n\tstrategy as "stand back and let it happen." But is that fair! Not even a president controls reality.\n<\/p>\n
\n\tBruce Springsteen in "Tonight in Jungleland" veers toward the Simon and Garfunkel imagery of "the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls,"
\n\twhen he sings "Outside the street's on fire in a real death waltz between what's flesh and what's fantasy. And the poets down here don't write nothing at
\n\tall. They just stand back and let it all be." Ignoring the Beatles allusion, I have to say the imagery is apt: outside our own shaky neighborhood, the
\n\tstreets of the world are increasingly on fire\u2014literally. And let's not kid ourselves; there is the smell of smoke and more than the odd crackle on our own
\n\tincreasingly unquiet streets. I recently watched a relatively evenhanded documentary about the abortion wars in the United States: it was titled "Lake of
\n\tFire." And I wonder; What is our culture about to be thrown into?\n<\/p>\n
\n\tSo often in the past we have called upon the "guardians" of the American experiment for their advice on what they meant by such things as democracy,
\n\tfreedom, and religious liberty. It's become de rigueur for religionists enamored of the Christian nation model to quote the more godly statements, even as
\n\tthey ignore the contrary ones and, even worse, things that show deist views, Masonic confabulations and, worse still, outright support of the French
\n\tterror. I was impressed by a late 2012 PBS special on religious freedom that handled all of this in a way that was uplifting and respectful of the
\n\tinternational wonder that these men wrought. Yet they feared pure majoritarian democracy and expected the people to easily and at some point revert to the
\n\texcesses that led to the revolution in the first place. It is amazing to read the late life correspondence between Adams and Jefferson, and to come across
\n\tJefferson's opinion that Christianity would not survive in the United States. Obviously he was wrong on that count\u2014but how's a mere mortal to know? Unless
\n\tone is reading Bible prophecy, of course!\n<\/p>\n
\n\tCould these men have seen us heading so deliberately off the fiscal cliff? Maybe Hamilton, I guess.\n<\/p>\n
\n\tCould these men have seen economic crash and meltdown in our future? Well, they had seen the South Sea Bubble burst in Europe! But I doubt they ever had
\n\tintimations of a debt that is expressed in trillions or multiples of the gross national product. You've got to go to Revelation to pick up on a global
\n\tscenario in which all the merchants lament because "in a single hour all this wealth has been laid waste," (chapter 18, verse 17). Sometime up ahead that
\n\twill happen, even though 2008 gave us a little taste of how it happens.\n<\/p>\n
\n\tAfter the crash of 2008 we wait to see what will happen next time. After the Arab spring we wait to see what a seemingly unstoppable cycle of revolution
\n\twill bring to the Middle East and Middle Earth. And the bright star over the Sea of Japan this near Christmas brought little hope for that region. Help!
\n\tWhat next?\n<\/p>\n
\n\tLewis Carrol, of the Alice in Wonderland<\/i>, fantasy, but actually an accomplished mathematician, wrote that "if you don't know where you are going, any road
\n\twill take you there." Too many of the roads up ahead signal trouble. We need to know where we are going\u2014not necessarily whether the world will end one day.
\n\tI often tell seminar attendees that I can stake my life on one prediction: the world as we know it is about to pass away. Beyond this present world
\n\tconstruct is likely a time of runaway technological control and dislocation. Beyond is sure to be a time of declining resources and more wars for access.
\n\tIt will be a time of more natural disasters caused by such things as unnatural global warming. And, I can already sense, a paradoxical swing toward mass
\n\tfaith expression, even as many will come to regard minority faith views as a luxury that species survival cannot afford.\n<\/p>\n
\n\tMore than 100 years ago the people who eventually began this magazine got into quite a debate about how religious liberty should be projected to the
\n\tnation's thought leaders. Some wanted to keep the argument to historical and legal points. Another group insisted on the necessity of giving those
\n\targuments together with a biblical framework. They insisted that religious freedom in the United States must be linked to biblical faith and eschatology.
\n\tAnd in particular they mentioned the Bible Sabbath (a matter of much debate within Christendom) and the second coming of Jesus Christ (a central teaching
\n\tof Jesus, without which one would have little more than the wise sayings that Jefferson redacted from the Gospels).\n<\/p>\n
\n\tThis magazine has continued that second approach. We know that the second coming of Jesus Christ is the only perfect solution to all that ails the world
\n\tand our nation. And we sense that it may be soon. But as the apostle Paul wrote, "That day will not come, unless the rebellion comes first, and the man of
\n\tlawlessness is revealed" (2 Thessalonians 2:3).\n<\/p>\n
\n\tThere might come a day when the basic tenets of the Constitution are practically put aside: that certainly will be a time of crisis for religious freedom
\n\t(but we defend it because that day can be pushed back).There may be uncertain times ahead for social cohesion. There may be stormy days more blustery than
\n\tany mega-storm yet seen on the East Coast. But keep an eye on the horizon. Poet Gerald Manley Hopkins wrote how at such a time "morning; at the brown brink
\n\teastwards, springs." We must be watchers for that event. We must not be easily daunted by ill-informed end of the world prognosticators and, worse, their
\n\tsolutions. Keep freedom alive in your heart and in your actions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Another year; but hardly business as usual. The world ended on December 21 last year, or so they were telling us right up to the day. Those pesky Mayans\u2014who knew that they had it so wrong about the apocalypse! Of course a certain Family Radio speaker had backdated the event to a few months earlier;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[198],"tags":[30],"class_list":["post-5398","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-january-february-2013","tag-january-february-2013"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5398","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5398"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5398\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5398"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5398"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5398"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}