What is Civilization?

January 14, 2012 1 Comment

English: Newly enfranchised women voting in th...

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I recently heard a presentation by Rabbi Daniel Lapin on WallBuilders Live! He spoke to the question of “What is Civilization?” Lapin asserts that the world today is engaged in a epic struggle between civilization and barbarism. Lapin claims that there is only one civilization. The society built upon the precepts in the Bible. People and society are prone to that third law of thermodynamics otherwise known as entropy. We tend to on our own go toward barbarism as a default state. Only with the civilizing influence of the Biblical principles will we rise from that barbaric inclination.

Some of the defining characteristics of civilization include: respectful treatment of women, private property rights, and sanitation practices. Only in civilized society do women have any place of respect. In barbaric society men relate to women as either hermaphrodites or callous womanizers. In civilized society we find the concept that we can purchase the rights to a particular area of land. In barbaric society we believe that we are simply advanced animals. Animals really have no sense of the ownership of property. Animals only protect their own territory but do not claim it has their own. Communism, socialism and other similar materialistic, humanistic, philosophies denying the place of private property. You can spot marks of civilization by how people deal with waste and filth. In civilization sewage is disposed of safely and properly if you visit an Occupy Wall Street encampment you will quickly see whether you are dealing with civilized people or barbarians.

If you tell legislators they can resolve all teenage problems by painting a blue spot on the left ear of all teenagers, they would implement that policy in short order. However, if you tell legislators you can eliminate virtually all teenage problems by having a strong Bible-based education, they will refuse. They would rather have the problem than that solution. In barbarism there is a primal pleasure that comes with destruction. Many who are in the Occupy Wall Street movement are participating in that wrong minded pleasure. As teachers we want to be part of building up young people and civilized society. According to Lapin (and I tend to agree) the only way to accomplish that end is with Biblically based teaching.

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Growing up Global vs. American Exceptionalism

December 30, 2011 4 Comments

English: Composite image of the Earth at night...

View of Earth's lights at night

I’m all for being respectful of and interested in other cultures. Some of my closest friends are from different cultural backgrounds. Unfortunately it is becoming increasingly popular among today’s educators to attempt to cast our lives on the planet as being more meaningful as global citizens rather than American citizens. This practice once again unmoors people from the historical context of real life and attempts to build a fantasy world that has never worked and will never work on this side of heaven.

If you forget where you come from you don’t know who you are. If teachers do not teach the role that America has played in history in the last century (or rather focus on America’s mistakes rather than her successes see my post on poststructuralism), it is no wonder that students blindly accept notions that:

  • America should become like Europe and the rest of the world
  • America should bend over backwards to somehow make up for our place in the world power structure
  • We as Americans should subject our futures and our economic well-being to severe risk because of pseudoscientific environmental doomsday nonsense

Rather than teachers guiding their students to be global citizens, we should instead be teaching children what has made America great… What has made America strong… Why America has been the refuge of choice for millions of people over the last two centuries. We should not teach children that America needs to become like the rest of the world. That is a huge mistake on the part of many politicians and teachers today.

The documentary Agenda: The Grinding Down of America shines some telling light on this discussion. I recommend obtaining a copy and watching it at your earliest convenience. Agenda explains how teaching our children socialist concepts has been weakening America for the last several decades and threatens to destroy her from the inside out.

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Goals

December 23, 2011 1 Comment

If you aim at nothing you’ll be sure to hit it.
With the approach of 2012 just around the corner many people talk about New Year’s resolutions. I’ve not really been a fan of New Year’s resolutions in my life. However, in recent years I’ve had some success with goalsetting. I use a form which I download from Dan Miller’s 48Days.com website on life and career coaching. I also use Zig Ziglar’s guidelines and Dave Ramsey’s perspective as well.
Zig Ziglar has quite a bit of encouraging audio content available for free through his weekly Inspire podcast. His talks are both motivating and informative in regard to how and why to set goals. My significant learning from Zig this coming year is more carefully track my goals. In 2011 I was much more consistent with the goals I had devised a way to track.
Dave Ramsey says a goal has five characteristics. A goal is specific and measurable, has a deadline, is owned by the goal setter (not put on them by someone else), and is written down.
Dave Ramsey, Dan Miller, Zig Ziglar, and most principles of success writers explain that you need goals in all the major areas of life in order to be truly successful. Dan Miller’s goalsetting worksheets cover seven areas which are called the wheel of life. They are: financial, physical, personal development, family, social, spiritual, and career. You need to be addressing all seven areas of your life for your wheel of life to roll smoothly. If you neglect one area, you have a flat tire.
During this Christmas and New Year break which most educators enjoy, take some time to think about and write down some goals for your life.

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The Great Recovery

December 17, 2011 Leave a comment

If you are a teacher in California these days, you might be having to live a little leaner these days. My wife and I have been using Dave Ramsey’s financial materials for a few years now. He has a method for handling finances in a practical methodical way. If you are needing help managing your income and expenses I highly recommend Dave Ramsey’s program.

I received an article from Dave Ramsey’s The Great Recovery movement entitled What Should You Expect from your Candidates? I appreciate Dave’s usual no-nonsense approach to politics. He emphasizes the fact that I have a lot more to do with what happens in my personal finances than Washington does. I need to vote and participate in our political process to get the best available leaders in office. But if I am waiting around expecting Washington or Sacramento to fix my financial situation, I’m going to be waiting a long time. And their solution will never work as well as something I could have come up with on my own. The thing that will fix my financial situation best is my own paying attention, learning, working hard, living on a budget, etc.

A quick summary of the characteristics includes the following:

  • Integrity
  • Cuts wasteful spending
  • Common sense
  • A good steward of money
  • Someone who listens
  • Strong leadership ability
  • Quick problem solving

If you’d like to read the article in its entirety click on this link What Should You Expect from your Candidates? You can also follow the link to learn more about The Great Recovery: a national recovery program that is guaranteed to be successful because it doesn’t depend on Washington. The Great Recovery appeals up the chain of command from Washington to fix our national financial problem. The Great Recovery appeals to We The People.

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Pearl Harbor Day, Dec. 7

December 7, 2011 Leave a comment

Posters like Allen Saalberg's strengthened Ame...

If we forget where we have come from we won’t know who we are. Pearl Harbor Day unfortunately is an important day in our history. WallBuilders Broadcast. It has fallen into obscurity in the last 70 years. This is another example of our left leaning media and higher education establishment pointing Americans away from our true history.

December 7, 1941 was very much like September 11, 2001. The United States was attacked without warning by a foreign adversary. Both heinous attacks provoked us to openly enter a war. The attack on Pearl Harbor day provoked our entrance into and justification for our actions in World War II. The attack was committed by the military forces of Japan against our military forces in Hawaii. The terrorist attacks of September 11 were committed by terrorists against civilians. While our war on terror (in fact, no war, ever) has resulted in some collateral damage against civilian people and sites, our overall war effort has been our official military forces against the rather unofficial insurgent, terrorist forces in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other terrorist-friendly places.

A couple of historical notes that might be of interest today:
September 11, 2001 attacks in New York City: V...

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The Barbary Coast war in the Marine Corps hymn we hear the words from the halls of Montezuma to the Shores of Tripoli. The Shores of Tripoli referred to our first war after our war for Independence. North African Muslims were attacking American ships at sea, taking Americans hostage, and then charging ransom for American citizens to be returned, usually in very poor condition from their treatment. In other words that war in the early 1800s was a war on terrorism. Here is a link to the WallBuilders Live! presentation that discusses this point. It has been packaged for sale since I first heard it back in 2007.

Just as the liberal media distractors have pulled our attention and favor away from our war on terror, liberal edu-crats have all but silenced the education of our young people on World War II. Watch this video where Ray Comfort asks young adults questions about Hitler. Many of them seem to have no idea who he was and what brutality he led in Europe during World War II.

Let us not forget our heroes, our fallen, or our past on Pearl Harbor Day.

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Hear the Republican Candidates Speak up on Life and Family issues

December 3, 2011 Leave a comment

Just a quick post to spread the word on this unique look at some of the leading conservative presidential candidates. I have been a bit turned off by some of the debates I’ve seen with the Republican candidates. There are some important issues that I’m not really hearing about. I have a feeling the people organizing these debates don’t really want the candidates to have a chance to speak out on pro-life, pro-family issues. Well, someone arranged for an event that dealt directly with these issues. It was the Thanksgiving Family Forum held in Des Moines, Iowa on November 19. If you did not get a chance to see it you can click on the link provided below.

I would like to address the issue of allegations against Hermann Kane that have come up this past month. If there is a factual basis for these allegations, they are an issue to consider in his candidacy. We cannot separate private morality from public integrity. To think we could do so would be foolhardy. At the same time, if it comes down to it, because of his overall more conservative stance, I would rather have a Herman Kane in office than another four years with Barack Obama. Obama has been driving our blessed nation toward the precipice of socialism since he came into office. This has to end.

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Teachers as Culture Warriors

December 2, 2011 Leave a comment

Rebecca Hegalin spoke recently on FamilyTalk about becoming a culture warrior. Our culture is pushing against parents and families to uproot their influence in children’s lives. Mandatory preschool and daycare, full day kinder, no parent opt out for various social programs at school. All of these are examples of the Nanny State encroaching on responsibilities of the family. As Daniel Lapin would say the zookeeper taking over the care of the baby animals in the zoo. This encroachment impacts students in significant ways. As the family has been eroded away in our nation, children come to school more commonly in a state of crisis because they have no secure family environment.

Wall Builders had an episode with John Stonestreet of Summit Ministries and the Colson Center. They discussed the concept of Christians moving toward the tipping points in our culture in order to multiply our impact. Entertainment, journalism, politics, and education are all positions that wield extra leverage in our culture. As teachers we have a significant impact on our students. The left knows this and has been targeting schools from primary up through graduate courses with their ideology. Currently, it is not generally acceptable to be openly Christian in the classroom. In fact, there are reports of teachers being relieved of their duties and even sued because of their commitment to openly living our their faith. Thankfully there are a phalanx of conservative Christian legal firms that will take on clients whose 1st Amendment rights are being violated in this way. Please see my Resources page for a listing of some legal organizations that help in these situations.

We need Christians who are both willing to speak up and take a stand for what is right as well as push back when there are attempts at repression. Unfortunately, it is intimidating (at least for me) to be what seems to be a lone conservative voice in a sea of liberal leaning media, policies, and colleagues. I’m afraid of professional or social backlash myself. How about you, dear reader? Do you have concerns about taking a stand for moral causes or for Christian representation in this environment?

Mrs. Hagelin is the author of two books: Home Invasion: Protecting Your Family in a Culture That’s Gone Stark Raving Mad and 30 Ways in 30 Days to Save Your Family.

John Stonestreet publishes (among other things) a one minute radio/podcast minute called The Point Radio. He addresses current issues from a Christian worldview.

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Tipping Points

November 18, 2011 1 Comment

Chuck Colson in his Breakpoint Commentary discussed the idea of Tipping Points in culture. Just a few activists have pushed our culture to the brink of legalizing same-sex marriage and managed to define the debate in large part by a favorable portrayal of homosexual characters in media.

WallBuilders discussed this concept recently with Colson teammate John Stonestreet of Summit Ministries. They made the point that a minority can move the majority opinion if they act on the leverage points of culture. Summit Ministries provide classes for youth and adults on Christian worldview training. Doing the Right Thing is a DVD series for Christian worldview training.

If we Christians will get more active and exert influence at the leverage points of culture, we will move our culture back in the direction of godliness, morality, and eventually prosperity. For us as
teachers we are already at one of the leverage points of culture. Unfortunately most of us do not take a distinctly Christian stand there (myself included). If we are not courageous and begin to do so, we will continue to lose the culture war.

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Marginalizing Christians in Education

November 13, 2011 Leave a comment

gavel

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There is an effort to marginalize and eliminate the Christian voice from education and the public square. Liberal groups, though they tout a message of tolerance, are actually quite intolerant of Christians expressing or following their beliefs and ethics in the public square.

If you have felt concerned about getting sued or attacked for your beliefs as a Christian, you might be interested in knowing about a story which transpired recently in Florida. A high school history teacher expressed his view that the legalization of so-called same-sex marriage was wrong on his Facebook page. A complaint was filed by someone (not one of his students) and the teacher was put on administrative leave. The school district and principal was contacted by Matt Staver’s Liberty Counsel. They Informed the superintendent that it was legally clear that teachers do not lose their 1st amendment rights when they take their teaching jobs. The teacher was reinstated with no further punitive action. Click here to hear the WallBuilders episode on this event.

If you as a teacher have felt like your Christian views and practices are unwelcome in the public school setting, you could benefit from the support and encouragement of Christian Educators Association International (CEAI). This association’s goal is to support and encourage Christian teachers in the public school setting. They have conference opportunities to meet and connect with other teachers. They know that many teachers got into public education as an opportunity to be missionaries there. There is a training event coming up in the Los Angeles area in the spring. This month they had an article in their magazine Teachers of Vision. It explains some of the misperceptions and misinformation regarding expressions of faith (especially the Christian faith) of teachers in the classroom. I’ll try to add more information on these CEAI activities in later posts.

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Collective Bargaining needs Balance

October 29, 2011 2 Comments

Map of USA with Ohio highlighted

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The Ohio state teachers union wants the California teachers union to support them. There is a move in Ohio like the one in Wisconsin to reduce collective-bargaining rights. We’ve been asked to make phone calls to support the Ohio teachers union. I myself was disgusted by the childish behavior of the Wisconsin unions and liberal politicians in regard to these collective-bargaining votes back in the spring.

There comes a time in getting on a budget that requires sacrifice. When a family is trying to clean up their financial mess, they have to choose some areas to cut back their lifestyle. When a government is trying to clean up their financial mess, they have to choose some spending areas to cut back on. Those Wisconsin protesters did not seem to understand this and basically raised a big stink and cost their state time and money instead.

Collective bargaining has a place in balancing the needs of individual workers with the needs of the organization. Unfortunately some of the contractual obligations organizations have become entrapped by are no longer viable. Refusing to back off on these is ruins what Steven Covey called the production capacity of an organization. Basically killing the goose that lays the golden egg.

In recent years and in the coming months and years more of us in education are going to be called on to make some sacrifice because of the poor financial state of our nation and/or state. When that time comes for me, I don’t plan to whine, protest, or complain. I will do what must be done. I don’t plan to call anyone in Ohio to encourage them to do otherwise. I suspect there are many other teachers who did not agree with the unruly protests last spring in Wisconsin. I would be interested in your take on it.

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