The title is a play on "You've got to be carefully taught" from the musical "South Pacific".
You've got to be taughtTo hate and fear, you've got to be taught from year to year
It's got to be drummed in your dear little ear
You've got to be carefully taught.
You've got to be taught
To be afraid of people
Whose eyes are oddly made
And people whose skin is a different shade
You've got to be carefully taught.
My belief (and world views are ALWAYS "beliefs" vs "facts") is that we are spiritual beings living in a created universe with a purpose defined by a loving God, who have an eternal future in the loving presence of God and fellow believers through the death and sacrifice of his Son Jesus Christ.
To the extent that I can understand the world view of the authors of the top linked column, it is "We live in a randomly evolved universe with no inherent meaning but that which we will into being by some process which will evolve in the future to be "better" by some unknown standard". I'll label that "Secular Humanist" (SH).
To some extent, up to say "1950-60", America and even Europe still somewhat followed my world view. Since then, we have been increasingly following the SH world view, and according to the author of the column, the results so far, well, suck. The worldview of Western civilization put men on the moon, the worldview of SH has a lot of trouble identifying men, but it has put them in women's bathrooms.
"Hazy nostalgia for George W. Bush carries broader risks. If Bush really wasn’t so bad, then Trump is more of a dramatic switch from ages past than he’s already been judged. His administration is a comet carrying alien life, as opposed to the edge of a continuum stretching back through decades of Democratic and Republican misrule. Normalizing Bush weakens our already weak grip on history, making it that much harder to see how today’s political harvest was also cultivated by the administrations of Clinton, who signed NAFTA and unleashed Wall Street, and Obama, who continued the Wall Street bailouts and allowed 90 percent of wealth creation during his tenure to accrue to the top 1 percent.
If Bush had never been president, or an execution-happy Texas governor, he might be a great buddy to talk baseball with. Even now, despite everything, it’s possible to empathize with his anguished conscience and maybe grant him whatever fleeting solace he finds in his paints and his bubble baths. But that’s really between him, his minister and his therapist. The country cannot afford any more sentimentalized politics."They included Nixon in the column as well, and I'm quite certain they could go back for all of US and western history, the Founders, the Reformation, and Enlightenment, DaVinci, Augustine, Christ, Plato, Abraham, etc and point out that it ALL sucked! And we can't afford any sentiment about it -- the past SUCKED ... ergo the future is so bright we need to wear shades by comparison -- except for this nasty current "Trump bump" in the road ... and of course all the crap that preceded it.
Now that we are clear on that, let me make a couple comments.
First, you actually DON'T have to be "carefully taught" to prefer same and dislike different, which can be fanned into "hate" by things like wars, flying planes into buildings, losing your job, others voting for Trump, or reading articles like the linked.
We are born preferring "like" over things, creatures and people that are different, unfamiliar, strange, etc. I'd call it the way God created us -- evolution would just say "it has generally led to survival". What you DO have to be carefully taught is to love your enemies, which Christ teaches and clearly SHs do not.
We are also born with a built in natural affection for our parents and our "kin" as in blood relatives, even shoestring ones. Somewhere in that set of "good feelings well met" is the draw of our "tribe", "homeland", etc. Things like love, and yes that awful "sentiment" are also a part of us (in my world view), even MORE wired into our spiritual selves than our physical. Ideas that SHs find completely abhorrent like "love your father and your mother", "love of God and country", are part of that "sentiment" that is "unaffordable".
So you DO have to be VERY carefully taught to hate your past, your country, your civilization, your system of government, your parents, your relatives and people that voted for Trump. The linked column is an attempt at our old friend the INVERSION -- the place where Satan lives. It is an article that asks you to believe the OPPOSITE of what built Western civilization, and therefore tear it down and start over.
The SH world view has been being taught nearly exclusively in this country since at least the '50's (see "God and Man at Yale") and it has flowered into increasingly mainstream embrace, especially among the "millennials" of views like the linked column. One of the features of the SH worldview is that it tends to lead to not having children. While there is the vague promise of "a better future SOMEHOW", the SH message coupled with the inductive "proofs" of science ( It worked great the last X times in a row!) is hard for them to sink their teeth into -- as evidenced above, even "The One", BO, turned out to be just one more failure, that like W and Slick before him led to the horror of Trump. Thousands of years of world history and all just crap! (well, except for that article I'm sure -- perhaps THAT is what mankind was leading up to, thus providing the "hope" to bring new life into the world).
Somehow, once you throw out sentiment, hope, love, etc tend to leave the now declared to be spiritless body with them. Oh, and "forgiveness" and "redemption" -- as evidenced in the column, certainly there is no room for those in the clear eyed SH view of reality.
And that folks, in one relatively short column and a few extra words is a class of world views.
'via Blog this'
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