Depoliticize America

"We must depoliticize American life -- to roll back the tide of government control over the individual's life. Politicians are expropriating a larger share of people's lives each decade. The expansion of government power is increasing like the invasion of a foreign army in the territory of one's own life. For politicians, the duty to protect always includes the right to control."

"America needs fewer laws, not more prisons. Rather than trying to dictate wages, or hiring, or the size of nectarines, or the use of private land, government should confine itself to protecting people against overt violence and fraud. Thomas Babington Macaulay, the British historian, wisely observed in 1839 that 'government should be organized solely with a view to its main end; and no part of its efficiency for that end should be sacrificed in order to promote any other end however excellent.' Government can make great contributions to social progress by upholding law and order, by maintaining a legal code that recognizes individual rights and the sanctity of contract, and by preserving national security. The important thing is not what government attempts, but what it achieves. We have abandoned the tasks that government can and should perform to pursue goals that government has no ability to achieve."

"The time has come for a repeal session of Congress -- time to recognize the failure of hundreds of existing government policies. Rather than further decimating people's rights and liberties, we should decimate the federal statute book and sharply reduce the domain of people's lives subject to political whim and bureaucratic fiat."

"Henry David Thoreau wrote, 'If you see a man approaching you with the obvious intent of doing you good, run for your life.' Unfortunately, the entire American society cannot pick up and run from the government. The time has come to face up to the pervasive failures and to radically reduce government officials' power to coerce, expropriate, and subjugate other Americans. The American public placed faith in the State, and the State failed. We need a new faith in individual liberty."

Milton Friedman in Capitalism and Freedom writes, "Fundamentally, there are only two ways of coordinating the economic activities of millions. One is central direction involving the use of coercion -- the technique of the army and of the modern totalitarian state. The other is voluntary cooperation of individuals -- the technique of the marketplace."

Hands Off

More and more people are becoming to see that big government is not good. In Hands Off Susan Lee, a prominent writer on economics who is on the editorial boards of the New York Times, Forbes and the Wall Street Journal as well as a professor at Columbia University has over the years come to see government as she says a "menace to economic health." She says "When I started writing about economic policy in the mid 1970s, I focused on smaller things -- regulations gone bad, laws with unintended consequences. But my bottom line was always that if government were a little smarter, or a tad more agile, it could make things right. That's what I had been taught by professors with models and equations that I dutifully and confidently copied into my notebook. Indeed, that's what I taught to my students."

"In the late 1970s, when I started to pay attention to what was actually going on in the real world, I began to suspect that this was a lot of hooey." She voted for Carter and thought Reagan was too simple minded. But she grew to see the light. She finally realized "that government activism -- no matter how pure of purpose, how cleverly planned and executed -- has three results: it gives rise to unintended consequences, it creates uncertainty and promotes short-term thinking in the private sector, and it leads to government regulation of many aspects of the economy that should be left alone."

"Like all authors, I am going to say that my argument is particularly important today. Right now, at this minute, the United States is at an economic turning point. The chief rival to our economic system, socialism, has been discredited. Our own system, liberal capitalism (or whatever you choose to call it), is victorious but wheezing a bit."

"In short, many people feel ... it's time to set off in a different direction. Two other roads beckon. The current administration is pushing the country down the one leading to more government activism, more government solutions. I hope to convince you that this involves a dangerous delusion about government competence and power and that the other road, the one that leads to less government is the way to go." She says it is not easy for her to say this because she has always believed in government having a "comprehensive, detailed, and activist policy." But she says that we can only have a healthy economy if we leave people alone. She says "that advice goes double when a big bad event hits the economy." At that time we especially must discipline ourselves to not turn to government.

She says, "I think my argument is a strong one. I also know that the difficulties in convincing you are not only with the message, but also with the fact that this is a book about economics." She goes on to challenge the reader to read her anyway even though they may think economics is dull and difficult.

 She gives some good advice that the Unificationists should support. "Regulation," she says, "however meritorious the goal" reduce productivity ....Thus, although the idea of having a powerful, helpful, and adept government to take care of problems as they arise is a comforting one, it is a delusion. And a dangerous delusion, in part, because relying on the government to respond to every glitch unsettles the economic environment." She teaches that "we should have confidence in free markets. This is a rather schoolmarmish reminder, but the failure of communism has settled the debate over which is better -- free markets or managed ones .... he short and long of it is we should be ready to accept less government and more responsibility .... we should be willing to explore opportunities, take risks, absorb failure, and stop running to the government to fix things that we think fall short of perfect."

She livens her book with examples of real life situations to show how damaging government regulators are when they show up to guide people's lives. I wish I had the space to go into some of these real life stories that bring to life the hell people go through because of meddling bureaucrats. The book Inquisition is a classic story of government regulators doing massive harm to good and decent people. All this regulation of "bureaucrats with the power to direct events has been the near suffocation of everyday activity for many businesspeople, especially those with small firms."

Legalize drugs

Ludwig von Mises writes in Human Action: "If it is true that government derives its authority from God and is entrusted by Providence to act as the guardian of the ignorant and stupid populace, then it is certainly its task to regiment every aspect of the subject's conduct. The God-sent ruler knows better what is good for his wards than they do themselves. It is his duty to guard them against the harm they would inflict upon themselves if left alone."

"Self-styled 'realistic' people fail to recognize the immense importance of the principles implied. They contend that they do not want to deal with the matter from what, they say, is a philosophic and academic point of view. Their approach is, they argue, exclusively guided by practical considerations. It is a fact, they say, that some people harm themselves and their innocent families by consuming narcotic drugs. Only doctrinaires could be so dogmatic as to object to the government's regulation of the drug traffic. Its beneficent effects cannot be contested."

"However, the case is not so simple as that. Opium and morphine are certainly dangerous, habit-forming drugs. But once the principle is admitted that it is the duty of government to protect the individual against his own foolishness, no serious objections can be advanced against further encroachments. A good case could be made out in favor of the prohibition of alcohol and nicotine. And why limit the government's benevolent providence to the protection of the individual's body only? Is not the harm a man can inflict on his mind and soul even more disastrous than any bodily evils? Why not prevent him from reading bad books and seeing bad plays, from looking at bad paintings and statues and from hearing bad music? The mischief done by bad ideologies, surely, is much more pernicious, both for the individual and for the whole society, than that done by narcotic drugs."

"These fears are not merely imaginary specters terrifying secluded doctrinaires. It is a fact that no paternal government, whether ancient or modern, ever shrank from regimenting its subjects' minds, beliefs, and opinions. If one abolishes man's freedom to determine his own consumption, one takes all freedoms away. The naive advocates of government interference with consumption delude themselves when they neglect what they disdainfully call the philosophical aspect of the problem. They unwittingly support the case of censorship, inquisition, religious intolerance, and the persecution of dissenters."

Consensual crimes

Peter McWilliams writes against government focusing on punishing people for prostitution, drugs, etc. in Ain't Nobody's Business If You Do: The Absurdity of Consensual Crimes in a Free Society. He writes, "almost everyone, at one time or another, has taken part in an illegal consensual activity." In his chapter "Why Consensual Crimes Have So Few Advocates" he writes, "Let's take a look at the various moving-and-shaking organizations and see why none of them protects our right to do with our person and property whatever we choose as long as we do not physically harm the person or property of another."

The first category is "Religions." He writes, "You name the religion and it's against one (often all) of the consensual crimes. Religious leaders -- and fundamentalists in particular -- don't seem to grasp the fundamental notion that keeping the government from criminalizing consensual acts between adults protects religion. If a government establishes its authority to control what people can and cannot do with their person and property, either 'for their own good' or 'for the good of society,' that same government can later begin dictating how much of one's person and property should or can be devoted to the discovery of, communication with, and worship of God. The essence of almost all religions is that one must choose, with one's free will, to worship God: a prayer said at the point of a gun is not a prayer. Likewise, the government has no business restricting how much of ourselves or our property we devote to religion. (It's already happening, of course, in the governmental suppression of 'cults.')"

He quotes Herbert Hoover saying, "Prohibition is a great social and economic experiment -- noble in motive and far-reaching in purpose." He writes, "Prohibition (1920-1933 R.I.P.) was known as The Noble Experiment. The results of the experiment are clear: innocent people suffered; organized crime grew into an empire; the police, courts, and politicians became corrupt; disrespect for the law grew; and the per capita consumption of the prohibited substance -- alcohol -- increased dramatically, year by year, for the thirteen years of this Noble Experiment, never to return to the pre-1920 levels."

"You would think that an experiment with such clear results would not need to be repeated; but the experiment is being repeated; it's going on today. Only the prohibited substances have been changed. The results remain the same. They are clearer now than they were then."

The motif throughout this book is that the 19th century had some values that need to be restored. I find it encouraging to see a renewed appreciation of the Victorians and our Founding Fathers. One of the signs that show people are beginning to get sick of this century as it keeps dropping to new lows of feminist thinking and lifestyle is the popularity of Jane Austen's novels and of movies being made of her novels. In an article in World and I (September 1996) an English professor wrote an article called"Mannerly Novels For an Ill-Mannered Age: Why, nearly two centuries after her death, is Jane Austen so bankable -- both in film and print?" The author says,"Austen presents favorably intelligent women who seek traditional roles and who are content in them and respected; she does not portray such women as witless, helpless victims yearning to discover themselves. She doesn't ridicule them as stay-at-home cookie-bakers. Austen plays to a desire for domesticity today's women often feel but dare not admit, sometimes even to themselves."

He ends by comparing the sick movie Thelma and Louise that exemplfies today's values with Austen who died 179 years ago but whose view of life is life affirming:"Movie producers and audiences will probably still be intriqued and amused by Austen's optimistic fiction 179 years from now. It is much less likely, in 179 years, the pessimistic Thelma and Louise will be anything more than a sociologist's footnote on the quaint, hate-filled idiocies of millennial feminism."

Ideological war

In Man vs. the Welfare State Henry Hazlitt gives many arguments for Libertarian philosophy. There are so many good libertarian books and magazines. I am tempted to write hundreds of pages going into all the arguments for limited government but I hope that what little I write will inspire you to study this important area of life. Hazlitt says that it is an uphill fight: "The task of the tiny minority that is trying to combat this socialist drift seems nearly hopeless. The war must be fought on a thousand fronts, and the true libertarians are grossly outnumbered on practically all these fronts."

"In a thousand fields the welfarists, statists, socialists, and interventionists are daily driving for more restrictions on individual liberty; and the libertarians must combat them." There are so many voices for statism. Hazlitt mentions one of the most famous writers champions for ever-greater governmental power and spending as Professor John Kenneth Galbraith who teaches the "theory that the taxpayer, left to themselves, spend the money they have earned very foolishly, on all sorts of trivialities and rubbish, and that only the bureaucrats, by first seizing it from them, will know how to spend it wisely."

Foreign affairs

As usual Fallen Man cannot walk the line of truth and wavers back and forth. Libertarians are no exception. Their blind spot is in foreign affairs. They want to keep our military within the borders of America. They are influenced by Satan in believing that we should not have fought overseas in wars such as World War II and the Korean War.

One of the most famous think tanks for Libertarians is the Cato Institute. It puts out satanic books against America sacrificing abroad. An example is the book Korea and U.S. Foreign Policy by Doug Bandow. In a review in the New York Times a writer on Korea, Frank Gibney, quite rightly criticizes him for advocating that America withdraw our 37,000 troops from South Korea. He writes, "Mr. Bandow hugely underestimates the catastrophe for the region that would result from a North Korean attack on Seoul, even assuming that the good guys win in the end."

Libertarian's blind spot on foreign policy hurts the cause of limiting government domestically. If they are so irresponsible in area of foreign affairs, people are inclined to think they are nuts on everything else. It is painful to see libertarians shoot themselves in the foot with their gutless and stupid stand against fighting evil abroad.

While we are on the topic of the military let's be clear on what Father wants America and those nations on the Abel side to do. Father believes in fighting evil men when they attack. He is for the wars fought in Korea, Vietnam, and the Gulf. He lashes out at America for being weak and not fighting enough and when they do, they don't fight strongly enough.

As I write, President Clinton has sent troops to Bosnia and so far the fighting has stopped. It took three years of watching on the evening news hundreds of thousands of people die and hearing stories of tens of thousands of women raped before America acted. It is disgraceful and shameful that America is so slow and timid against evil. In the day of hope tour in 1973 Father didn't hold back his contempt at America for not sacrificing enough. In God's Hope for Man speech in America he told Americans that they must be sacrificial: "It is a recognized fact that when America demonstrated the spirit of service and sacrificial duty in the world and went out of her way to help others in their need -- when America gave lives, money, and a helping hand -- she enjoyed a golden age. But now America has a selfish attitude. The domestic problems today are very difficult. America's situation is chaotic. Today there are greater division, more corruption, and graver problems choking this land."

It is even more sad that many Republicans, who are supposed to be the Abel side, were some of the greatest opponents to Clinton. Newsweek magazine wrote, "In the House, a meaningless letter asking the president not to send troops gained more than 200 signatures last week." Time magazine had an article titled "Uncertain Beacon" with a picture of a lighthouse. It said, "Bosnia proves two things: that the world needs U.S. leadership, and that Americans don't care to provide it .... 'If you look at the results, from Bosnia to Haiti,' Clinton said recently, 'from the Middle East to Northern Ireland, it proves once again that American leadership is indispensable and that without it our values, our interests and peace itself would be at risk.'"

"There is only one problem: the American people could hardly care less. More than that -- they are actively hostile to the notion of American leadership if it requires risking American lives .... They are not convinced that their sons and daughters should die for the sake of Sarajevo."

As I pound away in this book, one of the reasons we are so weak is that now "daughters" are sent to war. Time magazine goes on to say how "the U.S. has always tended to turn in on itself -- Washington famously maintained in his farewell address that 'it is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliance with any portion of the foreign world.' Jefferson, too, warned against 'entangling alliances.' Washington and Jefferson were wrong. It's always a challenge to find baby and bathwater in every situation.

Some of the arguments people have is that we should not intervene when the U.S. is not directly threatened. But that is not how we decide if we will act abroad. America is called by God to be the world policeman. We are to be like a grown-up parent who stops little children from blooding each other. Unfortunately, fallen man is about 16 years old spiritually and can't ever really be good at fighting Satan. Time quotes a Republican Congressman, Mark Neumann of Wisconsin, saying this immature and pathetic statement, "I evaluate whether this is something we should be doing based on my 18-year-old son. If I were to ask the question, Do I think my son should go to Bosnia?, I would have to answer no." So much for the Good Samaritan. So much for carrying the cross.

Men are so wimpified in the 20th century it is beyond words to express the pain countless millions have suffered because good men did nothing. The greatest act of cowardice in the 20th century was Truman firing McArthur and dooming the parents of the Messiah in North Korea to slavery. That Americans can watch TV and see sunken-eyed prisoners, defenseless men shot down into mass graves, thousands of hysterical women and girls tell of the horror of being gang-raped, and blood flowing down streets as children lay dead in Bosnia and then do nothing is unconscionable. But what do you do expect if men are no longer men. Men have no power because they have no masculinity. They let women boss them as congresswomen and in their business and in their home.

Satan cannot kill men's spirit completely. Feminism hasn't completely won. As much as Vice-President Al Gore is wrong on domestic issues, I appreciate him helping Clinton to have the guts to do something about the genocide in Bosnia. Newsweek reported that Gore "was appalled by the picture of a young Muslim woman who fled into the woods and hanged herself. 'My daughter asked me the other day why we weren't doing something about it,' Gore said. None of the assembled had an answer. 'Everyone around the room was very, very quiet,' says the administration official."

Abel often fails as we see when Time reported that when the administration sent people to Congress to talk about sending troops many Republicans were hostile. "Oklahoma Republican Senator James Inhofe said, 'If we're going to have hundreds of young Americans dying over there,' demanded Inhofe, glaring at Defense Secretary William Perry, 'is this mission justification for their deaths?' Perry stared straight at his inquisitor. 'Yes,' he replied unflinchingly."

Why have so many American men become so weak? Stephen Carter ended his book Integrity saying it is a disgrace that America did not help Bosnia sooner: "We saw in the aggression of the Bosnian Serbs the ruthless destruction of another people. Concentration camps. Mass murders. Rape, evidently as policy, to ensure an intermixing of bloodlines. For more than two years, the West did little more than wring its hands .... Some critics of American policy have argued that our strange willingness to do little proves that America has no principles other than those that happen to affect our citizens directly -- at least none worth fighting for .... We talk much nowadays of character education, which has always been, and remains, a fine idea. But the principal education for character that we do, we do by example. Virtually every proposed curriculum on values teaches children that genocide is wrong. In Bosnia, there is aggression and there is genocide, and America, like the rest of the world, took years to decide that there was something at stake worth fighting for. That dawdling will teach our children far more loudly than any values curriculum that we do not after all mean what we say."

"I ask again: What crime could be more horrible than genocide? If we do not see the planned elimination of a people as the horror of horrors, then what, as Moynihan asked, was the twentieth century for? And if we do see it as a horror, then what could more powerfully test our national will? Is that really how America of the late twentieth century is to be remembered in the history books: we will fight to protect our people and our oil, but if the rest of the world wants to engage in slaughter, that is the rest of the world's business?"

"Bosnia is not unique. We live in a world in which are committed unspeakable atrocities every day. These, too, are tests of our integrity -- of our belief in the existence of principles that transcend our self-interest and of our willingness to act consistently with those principles. And day by day, still appalled by our experience in Vietnam, we fail those tests."

"I tremble for my country."

He is right. But once again we have to sort the baby from the bathwater. Earlier in his book he writes against patriarchy. He says, "Modern feminists since Betty Friedan have powerfully exposed the ways in which the so-called traditional marriage can be stultifying for women." He is "surprised" though that so many women still continue to "prefer 'traditional' marriage, in which the husband is the head of the household -- and some studies suggest that the number in the second category is actually growing." He says he has no preference for any kind of marriage. But he goes on to denigrate the patriarchal home. He writes: "The notion that the husband is head of the household, in the sense of being absolutely in charge, is common to nearly every culture on earth. And the risk is always the same: without the existence of restraints, the power will tend to corrupt. In many cultures, and in fairly recent history in the United States, the right to beat one's wife for her defiance has been considered a part of the power of the husband as head." He goes on to say that absolute power corrupts absolutely and so we shouldn't be surprised that when men get power over their wives they beat them. He writes he is, "a believing Christian, and thus a member of a faith that has too often restricted the ability of women to use their God-given gifts in the world .... Consider the image of the traditional marriage presented by St. Paul, most notably in his letter to the Ephesians: 'For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is head of the church.' As a Christian who believes in a divinely inspired Bible, I am constrained to take this language seriously rather than to pretend, as some critics would prefer, that it doesn't exist."

He says this doesn't apply though because "too many men ... became corrupted by power .... The office of head of household thus had to lose its integrity in the unfair world that we have all built. The greater the power that one possesses, the less the likelihood that one will do the hard work of discernment on which all integrity, religious or secular, ultimately rests." He says "religious conservatives" must see the rightness of feminists who want to end men as being heads of the household.

I believe that the reason America was so slow in coming to the aid of Bosnia is because of the prevailing view that men are not the head of the house. If men are weak in the home, then they will be weak outside the home. Stephen Carter wants America to use its power to stop genocide in Bosnia and for men to not have power in the home. But you can't have weak feminist men in the home and strong men outside the home.

Carter points out many things wrong with America. For example, he says that "nobody wants to be the one to say that the retirees who receive Social Security payments are, for the most part, receiving not a return on an investment but direct subventions from the payments being made by today's workers toward their own retirements -- which, if done by a private investment firm, would be an illegal pyramid scheme." I argue that America has turned toward government insanities instead of the church and free enterprise because men gave up their role as patriarch, protector and provider of women. Men in the twentieth century gave women the vote. They gave up their power that Stephen Carter fears so much. But women in power is worse than men in power. Women have created an atmosphere of government. They do not understand the meaning of war and the free market. They are impatient in the market place and too patient against evil aggressors. Women do not belong in leadership in the public sphere. The most they should do publicly is help in charitable organizations.

America has reached rock bottom when we see a feminist First Lady Hillary Clinton working long hours every day for such projects as nationalizing health care to the wife of our leading conservative politician, Senator Bob Dole, who has never had children or adopted any and who pledged to go back to her job and will continue her career if she is First Lady. At least Hillary stays in the White House and takes her role seriously. Elizabeth Dole could care less. I can't think of a more damaging image than the First Lady going to a job to earn some big paycheck. Feminism truly rules.

President Clinton speaking through his Secretary of Defense has stated publicly that he will defend South Korea. This is the core providential responsibility of the President. Would Bob Dole do that? I wonder. Clinton's popularity went up when he sent troops into Bosnia and the Republicans went down when they opposed him. Maybe heaven is on the side of Clinton because of his stronger stand against international bullies. The Doles are looking a lot more feminist than the Clintons. And God hates feminism. Clinton looks like the lesser of two evils. What a glorious day it will be when we have leadership that doesn't cross the line -- strong on using force on aggressors and strong on fighting the temptation to use force to socialize the country.

Libertarians against deprogramming

In one of their Presidential platforms, the Libertarian Party made this strong statement against deprogrammers: "We condemn the attempts by parents or any other -- via kidnappings, conseratorships, or instruction under confinement -- to force children to conform to their parents' or any others' religious views. Government harassment or obstruction of unconventional religious groups for their beliefs or non-violent activities must end."

Demagogue ranting about the tyranny of capitalism

The argument that we need the federal government to be a "safety net" is wrong. Most people think incorrectly that the "middle" road is to have government intervene in drastic cases but not for others. The problem is that it becomes a slippery slope and government keeps growing. The logic is that once we start on a road we must go all the way with it. A good book on Libertarianism is Robert Ringer's Restoring the American Dream. He has a great quote from Thomas Macaulay, the British historian who predicted in 1857 what unfortunately has come true: "The day will come when (in the United States) a multitude of people will choose the legislature. Is it possible to doubt what sort of legislature will be chosen? On the one side is a statesman preaching patience, respect for rights, strict observance of public faith. On the other is a demagogue ranting about the tyranny of capitalism and usurers and asking why anybody should be permitted to drink champagne and to ride in a carriage while thousands of honest people are in want of necessaries. Which of the candidates is likely to be preferred by a workman? ... When Society has entered on this downward progress, either civilization or liberty must perish. Either some Caesar or Napoleon will seize the reins of government with strong hand, or your Republic will be as fearfully plundered and laid waste by barbarians in the twentieth century as the Roman Empire in the fifth; with this difference, that the Huns and vandals who ravaged the Roman Empire came from without, and that your Huns and vandals will have been engendered within your country, by your own institutions."

Ringer explains, as all libertarians do, that government is everywhere. For years anti-communists were accused and ridiculed for seeing a commie under every rock. Feminists were blind to Communism. Today, our feminist society, is blind to the evils of big government. Everything you touch from the moment you get up in the morning to the time you go to bed has been scrutinized by Big Brother. Ringer says, "The clock radio that awakens you is subject to many manufacturing and sales regulations. The music set off by the alarm mechanism comes from a station that is able to broadcast only because it has been granted a special government license it must comply with the government's idea of 'good programming' or run the risk of having its license revoked."

"After getting out of bed, you wash you face and brush your teeth with government-controlled water. The toothpaste you use has, of course, been approved by the government." I'll stop quoting at this point. You get the picture. He goes through an entire day and ticks off some of the things which is just about everything that government must approve.

Era of collectivist thinking

Ringer explains that people can't see clearly because all they know in the twentieth century is statism: "Another reality of no minor consequence is that most people living today have grown up in an era of increasingly collectivist thinking. They understand neither the realities of collectivism nor that there is a far superior alternative to it. Never having experienced the freedom of the early 1900's, let alone the freedom of our founding fathers, they have no way of realizing -- especially in view of the well-planned nothink and doublethink teachings of our public schools -- that what they are experiencing is not freedom."

William Simon is a former Secretary of the Treasury and author of a libertarian book that was a best-seller called A Time for Truth. He writes the foreward to Ringer's book and says that America has wrongly bought the argument that redistributing income through government force is wrong: "As Mr. Ringer points out, this redistribution process is really an attempt to level all people. It is coercive egalitarianism, which is the political curse of our era. It pretends to draw its moral force from the Constitution, which speaks of equality, but it is not the equality of the Constitution which is being sought."

"Constitutional equality means that every man in liberty is entitled to go as far in life as his wit, effort and ability will take him; it is equality of opportunity. Egalitarianism is the precise opposite. It punishes the hard-working and ambitious and rewards those who are not; it seeks equality of results regardless of individual differences. One of the most serious falsehoods that is being told the American people is that our present system represents the Constitutional vision of equality. They are being duped."

"Restoring the American Dream asks that we begin to reevaluate government functions on a moral basis."

Feminists want power

Feminists want power over men. A prominent feminist, Catherine Mackinnon, in debate against Phyllis Schlafly over the Equal Rights Amendment said, "To feminism, equality means the aspiration to eradicate gender hierarchy. We stand for an end to enforce subordination, limited options, and social powerlessness .... Feminism seeks to empower women."

The Art of Loving

A popular book on love is Erich Fromm's The Art of Loving. He is correct on some points and wrong on others. He correctly says that people think they don't have to study how to love -- that it's something innate. He says, "Most people see the problem of love primarily as that of being loved, rather than that of loving, of one's capacity to love .... People think that to love is simple." He says we must learn how to love. We should approach it as we would study "any other art, say music, painting, carpentry, or the art of medicine or engineering." Unfortunately, Fromm is not the person to learn from. The best textbooks on how to love are from people who really know what it is and who have accomplished building an outstanding marriage and family. Fromm had a bunch of lovers and wives and no children. Nevertheless, he make a few good points. He is right when he says, "almost everything else is considered to be more important than love: success, prestige, money, power -- almost all our energy is used for the learning of how to achieve these aims, and almost none to learn the art of loving." Fromm touches on the difference between men and women and that opposites attract. But his discussion is short and lightweight. Next to Father, the Andelins have the best books on love I've ever seen. True Parents teach and live the true way of love and that love must be God-centered. Fromm is an atheist and so he cannot be followed.

Where Fromm goes off the deep end is his criticism of capitalism and love of socialism. To him people will become loving when they live under socialism. To him, the play Death of a Salesman sums up the emptiness of capitalism that is based on greed and destroys the average person. Fromm is idealistic and longs for a day when there will be an end to the horror he sees around him. He wrote a book about what that kind of world that would be. He called it The Sane Society as opposed the insane one we live in. At the end of the book he wrote what is amazingly the vision the UC has. Fromm sees all religions as illogical and crazy but something in him (and probably from spirit world as well) led him to write: "It is not too far-fetched to believe that a new religion will develop within the next few hundred years, a religion which corresponds to the development of the human race; the most important feature of such a religion would be its universalistic character, corresponding to the unification of mankind which is taking place in this epoch; it would embrace the humanistic teachings common to all great religions of the East and West; its doctrines would not contradict the rational insight of mankind today, and its emphasis would be on the practice of life, rather than on doctrinal beliefs. Such a religion would create new rituals and artistic forms of expressions, conductive to the spirit of reverence toward life and the solidarity of man. Religion can, of course, be invented. It will come into existence with the appearance of a new great teacher, just as they have appeared in previous centuries when the time was ripe." He said "unification of mankind." So many have longed for Father, the "new great teacher" and never saw him. Finally, he has come! And he will begin the process that will ultimatley bring"unification of mankind" -- the dream of countless people like Erich Fromm.

Era of big government over

In his State of the Union Address on Jan. 23, 1996, President Clinton proclaimed, "The era of big government is over." This is the same person that a few years before tried to nationalize health care. Clinton started to become more conservative because America began to mistrust big government. Along with Marx and Stanton who wrote their goals of socialism, Charles Kingsley also declared himself a Christian Socialist in 1848. The social experiement of using government to solve all problems has failed since then. I hope the trend is to go back to 1848 and have limited government. The church is supposed to be the main organization that solves people's problems. Father says many times that government is object and religion is subject. For example: "The people in government have been beating the people in religion. The body always strikes the mind, right? They are each other's enemy." Father has no great love for government, but he has great love for the government of the family and the man being the president of his family.

Democracy is messy

One writer said, "Winston Churchill's jest -- 'Democracy is the worst form of government in the world -- except for all the other forms' -- is no joke. It is hard to conceive of a more chaotic design for government than one that invites absolutely everyone to participate in fashioning it. Deference to authority sometimes seems more comfortable than living with the responsibility of freedom .... Democracy is not tidy. It is a rough, obstreperous, messy form of political life. Montesquieu, that thoughtful and ingenious French predecessor of both the French and American revolutions, observed that where you find an orderly silence, there you will find tyranny. Whenever we find spirited voices raised in debate, where there is tumult and faction and unceasing talk, where men and women muddle their way to provisional solutions for permanent problems -- and so clumsily do for themselves what tyrants or bureaucrats might have achieved much more neatly and efficiently for them -- there we can feel assured that we are on the precious turf of democracy. Because democracy is finally -- more than any other form of government -- about people, just plain people."

Culture of Disbelief

Stephen L. Carter is a professor of law at the Yale law school. In his book The Culture of Disbelief: How American Law and Politics Trivialize Religious Devotion, he is right on some points and wrong on others. Let's look first at where he has a message that everyone should understand and then I'll tie that in with this chapter's theme of patriarchy. He writes that America as well as the world has a "woeful history of oppression of disfavored religious groups." He says America should not only respect other religions but should "celebrate" "religious pluralism." Sadly, it does not. The state is more revered than religion. Our culture is predominately secular and believes that "religion is something that should be believed in privacy, not something that should be paraded." The culture "says that anyone who believes that God can heal diseases is stupid or fanatical" and have taken 'mystic flight from hard truths' and has nothing to do with the real world." Our culture, he says, "holds not only that religious beliefs cannot serve as the basis of policy; they cannot even be debated in the forum of public dialogue on which a liberal politics crucially depends .... Religion is like building model airplanes, just another hobby: something quiet, something private, something trivial -- and not really a fit activity for intelligent, public-spirited adults."

Our culture is hostile to religion. He says that if you "tell a group of well-educated professionals that you hold a political position (preferably a controversial one, such as being against abortion or pornography) because it is required by your understanding of God's will" everyone will scatter and if anyone says anything they will challenge you "on the ground that you are intent on imposing your religious beliefs on other people. And in contemporary political and legal culture, nothing is worse."

"That awful phrase -- 'imposing religious beliefs' -- conjures up images of the religious right, the Reverend Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority, the Reverend Pat Robertson's presidential campaign .... We live in a secular culture, devoted to sweet reason. We aren't superstitious. Taking religion seriously is something that only those wild-eyed zealots do .... The message is that people who take their religion seriously, who rely on their understanding of God for motive force in their public and political personalities -- well, they're scary people."

"The message of contemporary culture seems to be that it is perfectly all right to believe that stuff -- we have freedom of conscience, folks can believe what they like -- but you really ought to keep it to yourself, especially if your beliefs are the sort that cause you to act in ways that are ... well ... a bit unorthodox. Consider our general cultural amusement each time the Reverend Sun Myung Moon of the Unification Church holds one of his joint marriage ceremonies in which he weds thousands of couples simultaneously -- always including some who have never met before, but were chosen for each other by the church. In Korea in the summer of 1992, some 12,000 couples were joined. Television commentators poked eager fun .... The idea seems to be that taking one's religion seriously is one thing, but letting one's church control the choice of a mate -- a life companion -- well, there a hint of irrationality creeps in. It is fine to be pious and observant in the small things, but marriage is serious! No normal person, evidently, would allow a religious leader to make so important a decision; and anyone who does so is worthy of ridicule."

Deprogramming of Maria Trapp

He continues with a heading "The Deprogramming of Maria Augusta Trapp" saying that one of his children's "favorite films is the much-beloved family classic, The Sound of Music. They have watched the videotape so often that my wife and I sometimes wonder whether there is a single line of dialogue that they have not committed to memory. We are glad they like the film, because it tells a clear, clean, spiritually uplifting story, in which the protagonists rely on wits and faith for their survival, instead of the ruthless destruction of the opposition that is today a staple of 'children's' programming. Because the kids so enjoy the story and the music, we decided one fine June weekend to visit the Trapp Family Lodge, nestled in the rolling green hills above Waterbury, Vermont. There, we thought, the children might learn about the connection -- or, perhaps, the disconnection -- between art and life. So off we went on a grand family outing. The children got a kick out of seeing the place where the real Maria and the real Baron Von Trapp once lived and walked and presumably even sang -- and so, to top it off, we gave in to their pleas and bought Maria's autobiography."

"What we learned from the autobiography was that Maria's religion was even more important to her than the film lets on. Because (she says this, right in the book) after she fell in love with Captain Von Trapp, she didn't just visit Mother Superior for a bit of sung advice about climbing every mountain and then make up her own mind, the way it happens in the musical. Oh, no. She went to visit Mother Superior and asked her permission. Not her advice, mind you, but her permission; Maria needed a yes or no."

"The answer Maria received from Mother Superior took the following form: 'We prayed to the Holy Ghost, and we held council, and it became clear to us ... that it is the Will of God that you marry the Captain and be a good mother to his children.' Did I say 'permission'? This was virtually a command. Maria quotes her own nervous answer to the captain: "Th-they s-s-said I have to m-m-m-marry you-u!' Not I can if I want to -- but I have to. And had Mother Superior refused permission, so Maria suggests, she would never have married the Captain, which would have meant no spine-tingling escape from Austria following the Anschluss, no best-selling book, no singing career, no lodge in Vermont, no musical play, no Hollywood film. She would have had a different life altogether, all because of the decision (dare we say the whim?) of one individual, a religious leader, her Mother Superior."

"Let us for a moment take Maria out of the mainstream and place her not in Roman Catholicism but in, say, the Unification Church; now imagine that the decision on whether she may marry the Captain rests in the hands not of Mother Superior but of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon. All at once her decision to consult with her religious superior before marrying takes on a cast either sinister or amusing, depending on one's preferences. At that point, Maria Trapp believes too deeply; she becomes a weirdo."

"Freud believed that deep religiosity was neurotic in nature, and many psychiatrists still do." He praises Robert Cole's "fine book The Spiritual Life of Children" because he "came to understand that religious commitments, whatever their characteristics, tend to be genuine expressions of human personality. Other therapists have not. That is why Stephen Arterburn and Jack Felton, in their 1991 book Toxic Faith: Understanding and Overcoming Religious Addiction, probably thought they were being progressive when they decided that some religious commitments were dysfunctional and others were just fine."

"What would Arterburn and Felton have thought of Maria's decision to seek the permission of her religious leader before marrying the Captain? They do not tell us, exactly, but they do give us this account of some of the goings-on in one church's 'toxic faith system': 'The pastor, or shepard as he was called, had final say in everything in the lives of his flock: whether to buy a house, take a vacation, get married, and even whom to marry.'" Even whom to marry. So if Maria really thought she could not marry without the approval of her Mother Superior, does that make the Catholic Church a kind of toxic faith itself, at least if people take it seriously?"

After going into the history of attacks on the Mormons where even the Supreme Court labeled them "subversive to good order" he says, "So, what does one do about the Mormons, Maria Trapp, and other people intoxicated by faith -- people who not only refuse to keep quiet about their beliefs, but actually place the demands of their religions above the secular society's demands of 'good order'? When mocking them doesn't work, we have another way to deal with them. In most of the world it would be kidnaping. In our media-dominated secular society, however, it is dressed up with the fancy name of 'deprogramming.'"

"...Even if (as is certainly true) some cults are every bit as evil as the culture paints them, our mainstream antipathy toward the religions we call cults has gone a bit too far. Our tolerance for the practice of deprogramming supplies the evidence. We must not make the error of approving illegitimate means -- kidnaping, psychological battering -- because of the importance we attach to the end. Perhaps more imperative, we must resist the pressure to define what is outside of the mainstream, what is eccentric, as necessarily 'subversive of good order.' For unless one views the purpose of religion as making the mainstream comfortable, there will always be religious people -- one hopes, lots of them -- who are guided more by faith than by the standards and demands of others, and who will therefore seem eccentric."

"This brings us back to Maria Trapp. Had she grown up in today's America instead of Europe between the world wars, and had her religion not been Catholicism, perhaps she would never have gone to Mother Superior seeking permission to marry; more to the point, she might never have been a person of the sort who would go to Mother Superior for permission to marry. But if she had been the type to ask, and if she had done it, she would likely have been ridiculed for letting some religious leader control her personal life, much like the Western press poked fun at the 25,000 people who were married by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon. And if the ridicule did not persuade Maria to change, perhaps some well-meaning deprogrammer, hired by her worried parents, would have snatched her up and subjected her to psychological battering until she renounced her devotion to the eccentric, domineering Catholic cult. And this would have been sad, because it would have meant no book, no play, no film for our kids to enjoy."

"And, incidentally, no religious freedom either."

He says Americans should respect the power that religion holds over many people: "Religions are in effect independent centers of power, with bona fide claims on the allegiance of their members, claims that exist alongside, are not identical to, and will sometimes trump the claims to obedience that the state makes. A religion speaks to its members in a voice different from that of the state, and when the voice moves the faithful to action, a religion may act as a counterweight to the authority of the state."

He says "the Supreme Court was ironically right in 1879 to call the Mormons 'subversive,' and why segregationists were right in the 1960s to apply the same epithet to the Souther Christian Leadership Conference -- for a religion, in its corporate self, will often thumb its nose at what the rest of the society believes is right."

"Democracy needs its nose-thumbers" because they strengthen the nation. He says, "When Alexis de Tocqueville visited the United States early in the nineteenth century, he wrote, in Democracy in America, that the young nation's 'religious atmosphere was the first thing that struck me on arrival in the United States.' Indeed, Tocqueville claimed, America was 'the place where the Christian religion has kept the greatest power over men's souls.'" He saw this was a good thing.

"...in Tocqueville's view, this meant that liberty was tempered by a common morality: 'Thus, while the law allows the American people to do everything, there are things which religion prevents them from imagining and forbids them to dare.' Put simply, as political scientist Rogers M. Smith has noted, Tocqueville 'believed that the support given by religious to virtuous standards of behavior was indispensable for the preservation of liberty.'"

"For Tocqueville, religions provided Americans with the strong moral character without which democracy cannot function; but, perhaps equally important, they helped to fill the vast space between the people and the government created in their name -- a space, Tocqueville recognized, that the government might otherwise fill by itself. In many countries, Tocqueville noted, people relied upon the state to solve all problems, and concomitantly lost their liberty." And that is exactly the thesis of this chapter. America gave up religion, especially the Christian belief of men being the patriarchs in the home and in society, and now it has degenerated to President Clinton.

God had worked to elevate patriarchy to be more Godly but Satan won by abolishing it with the women getting the vote. Men became feminized and turned to government instead of religion. Tocqueville knew this would happen if America gave up its religion. By giving up patriarchy it gave up the core of Christianity. Religion was crippled when women got power. Tocqueville saw America strong because it was centered on men focusing on the local. God was in the process of raising men, but women were impatient and usurped their power. Carter writes that Tocqueville "was pleased to see that America had found in its plentitude of private associations, 'associations in civil life which have no political object,' a replacement for the aristocracy that once stood, in theory, as a bulwark against government tyranny: 'The morals and intelligence of a democratic people would be in as much danger as its commerce and industry if ever a government wholly usurped the place of private associations." America is in danger now because government has taken over.

God was working in the last 400 years to prepare the world to accept the Messiah by raising its understanding of patriarchy and the woman's role in the home. Satan corrupted it and eventually destroyed it. Because women do not obey men, religion is dead. Christianity is weak. God had wanted men to respect other religions and to respect religious leaders. Instead the Messiah has been tortured and jailed by Koreans, Japanese and Americans. He is laughed at as a joke. He is trivial to people because religion is trivial. And religion is trivial because it has been lobotomized. Socialist/feminists have won. Professor Carter writes in the hope that America wakes up and begins to respect religion. He, unfortunately, has been feminized and rejects Ephesians 5 that says men are the head of the house. He is blind like everyone else to what has happened. Sadly he has helped the very people he tries to fight who work to make religion weak. Still, I'm grateful for whatever people can offer.

He correctly writes, "To insist that the state's secular moral judgments should guide the practices of all religions is to trivialize the idea that faith matters to people. When Martin Luther King, Jr., declared in his 'Letter from Birmingham City Jail' that a 'just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God,' he was not bandying words he was stating a bedrock commitment to the authority of God as superior to the authority of the state .... Nowadays, such commitments are evidently suspect, the mark of the fanatic, especially when urged in the service of positions often described as right wing."

America, he writes, must respect religious people who feel "religion is more real, more alive, more vital than the good opinion of others, which is why Maria went to her Mother Superior for permission to marry and why many followers of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon are willing to grant him the same privilege. The essence of religious martyrdom is the sacrifice that comes from the refusal to yield to what one's society demands."

Religion is a very subversive force

People must understand, he writes, that "religion is really an alien way of knowing the world -- alien, at least, in a political and legal culture in which reason supposedly rules. The idea that a group of people will refuse to bow, either to law or to what some are bold to call reason, is, of course, a very subversive one in organized society. But religion, properly understood, is a very subversive force; subversive, at least, in a state committed to the proposition that religious ways of looking at the world do not count. No wonder, then, that our political culture seems to be afraid of it."

Americans fear the UC now. What will happen in the future when the Church has millions of members? The first candidate for high political office will have to do as John Kennedy did when he ran as the first major candidate for President who wasn't a Protestant. He was a Catholic and had to answer questions about his relationship with the Pope. Would he do as the Pope said? He answered saying he would not. What will a follower of Sun Myung Moon or whoever is in charge of the Church say after Father dies? Our connection to Father or Mother or the True Children are closer than the Kennedy families are to the Pope. I hope America grows spiritually to not fear the UC. I hope those who run and eventually achieve political power are only men, not women, and that they will legislate for limited government and not use government force to make people do what they think is right such as banning drugs and pornography, making abortions illegal, supporting big government programs like social security and taxing the rich more than others. Even though we speak strongly against homosexuality, we should not legislate against them in any way. We hate the sin, but love the sinner. President George Bush was one of the speakers who came to Father's inauguration of his organization Family Federation for World Peace in 1996. He repeated what his wife, Barbara, had said in a speech that it is more important what goes on in the houses of America than what is going on in the White House. It's more important what goes on in blessed couples homes than what goes on at Church headquarters.

Stu Weber spoke at a Promise Keepers meeting once at a stadium of men. Weber said statistics show that more than 70 percent of young criminals come from fatherless homes."

"'The root of all wrongs?' he asked. Failure in the highest office in the land: the dad. It's the greatest title you'll ever have, and the most powerful office."

"Weber used the metaphor of a relay race to describe how fathers must pass on their 'heart' from generation to generation."

"You can't have sloppy hand-offs or fade at the finish. We need to recognize the incredible power that God has invested in us as individuals."

The Kingdom of Heaven of the Family

Father is more interested in the Family than he is in the Church or State. This book is about the keys to building the Kingdom of Heaven on earth. The key is families living close to other families. Father says we are to guide our life, not by political or religious leaders, but by superior families: "we should learn from the exemplary family" and we are to focus on helping other families " to guide the family which is in a bad situation. In such a way, let us establish the Kingdom of Heaven of the family. We should clearly know that the Kingdom of Heaven on earth cannot be established without the Kingdom of Heaven of the family." In other words the most power is in the family. God wants power to be placed in the hands of families to solve all problems. He says, "The family is the micro-church; it should be the agency of heaven. It should be the family that God wants to visit. At least three families should run one household ... the harmony among men is most important." It's more important because it is patriarchal.

Lao-Tze advocated limited government

Lao-Tze in 560 B.C. advocated limited government: "As restrictions and prohibitions are multiplied in the Empire, the people grow poorer and poorer. When the people are subjected to overmuch government, the land is thrown into confusion .... The greater the number of laws and enactments, the more thieves and robbers there will be. Therefore, the Sage says, 'So long as I do nothing, the people will work out their own reformation. So long as I love calm, the people will right themselves. If only I keep from meddling, the people will grow rich....' If the Government is sluggish and tolerant, the people will be honest and free from guile. If the Government is prying and meddling, there will be constant infraction of the law .... Verily, mankind have been under delusion for many a day! Govern a great nation as you would cook a small fish. (Don't overdo it.)"

God is against pacifism

There is a lot of controversy over whether it was right for America to drop the atomic bombs on Japan in World War II. Some believe it was cruel to kill innocent people such as children and we should have only attacked military sites. Others argue that it shortened the war. Some people are pacifists and say not only should we not have dropped the bombs but no one should kill another person, even in self defense. Pacifists do not believe in police forces or the military. They interpret Jesus as being a pacifist and quote his statement that we are turn the cheek. God and Jesus and the Third Adam are against pacifism. They want good to defend itself against evil. God was on the side of America and not only condoned the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan, He worked to inspire the building of them. Many people are even against nuclear power. God is for it.

America has often failed to be a good Abel to those nations in the Cain position. Nevertheless, the Cain nations are required to unite anyway. America has sacrificed many men who fought for good all over the world. There are many thousands of graves of boys who gave their life for freedom. Unfortunately, America, especially its leaders, have often not been sacrificial and righteous enough. Americans are often too isolationistic. It was wrong for America to wait so long to enter World War I and II. Tragically, it failed to even declare Korea or Vietnam a war and lost half of Korea and all of Vietnam to the Cain Communist nations.

Christian leaders have not always understood the amount of sacrifice needed to fight Satan. They have, like so many on God's side, failed to have the guts and heart and will to fight evil. Liberals were wrong in fearing President Reagan who revitalized America's military after the terrible years of decline under President Carter. God is on the side of the conservatives represented by the Republicans and Satan works mainly through the liberals represented by the Democrats. Abel is often not aggressive enough or sometimes even fails completely such as when the Republican Party went against President Clinton when he sent troops to stop the rape and killing in Bosnia. America is the world's policeman. Polls showed Americans were basically against Clinton's decision, but God was working through him to push America to do God's will and sacrifice. This is one reason why he was reelected a few years later. Americans need leadership and they will respond if led correctly, even unconsciously.

Those on God's side must not be timid in dying for freedom. The twentieth century has been so tragic because of the weakness of America, England and other nations to stand up to evil at its beginning stages. America was weak in sending soldiers to help the White Army fight Lenin's Red Army for the three years after the Russian Revolution in 1917. (In my book, 1920, I go into detail of how we abandoned the forces of good in Russia.) God wanted Americans to give their lives and give up living a luxurious selfish life and sacrifice internationally. By studying the Divine Principle and Sun Myung Moon's words and life we can now know clearly what we must do to fight Satan. The Messiah is on earth working tirelessly round the clock to teach America and the world its responsibility. He is teaching what is true spirituality. God is asking us to be champions for him by not just fighting evil with guns, but to win it with love, too. In some cases though we must resort to using force against evil people. We need to have a strong police and military and to use firm force when needed. The Messiah wants to then turn around and win those in the Cain position with massive love and to teach them God's way of life. Good must not fight with revenge. America was wrong when it persecuted Germans and Japanese who were living in America during the World Wars, but it was right when it served Germany and Japan selflessly by helping to rebuild their nations after we had bombed them.

History has been a continuous battle between God and Satan fighting for dominion of the world. God will eventually win, but history has been so tragic because Satan has attacked so much and so many people have shed blood. Satan's side respects strength. Before we can win them we need to first be strong and willing to use force against force quickly and decisively. Because America and other Abel nations were wimps like Chamberlain was when he didn't stand up to Hitler and Wilson didn't support the White Army in Russia's civil war, fascism and communism just got worse and then many millions of people had to die and millions more be enslaved.

By understanding this we can begin to walk the line between weakness and arrogant cruelty. By understanding the Divine Principle we can understand the past as well. The Bible becomes clear. The official Unification Church book on the Principle, Exposition of the Divine Principle says,"When the Israelites were about to leave Egypt ..., Satan worked through the Pharaoh to wage a bitter struggle to keep them in bondage. By virtue of this, God's side was entitled to strike him with three super-natural signs. Similarly, in the Last Days, Satan has been putting up his last struggle to undermine God's side .... God's three counterattacks to Satan's aggressions have manifested themselves as the three world wars." Mankind must make what the Messiah calls indemnity conditions. God's people must pay the price for freedom from Satan. For some that sacrifice will be the total sacrifice of giving their lives in war.

In the Exposition of the Divine Principle we read,"whether or not an individual or nation belongs to God's side or Satan's side is not always in agreement with the judgment of our common sense or conscience." If we are"ignorant of God's providence" then we will be moved by Satan to make the wrong decisions. Many people, for example, misunderstand the Bible. The Principle book says,"the Israelites invaded the land of Canaan and killed many Canaanites seemingly without much justification. To someone ignorant of God's providence, their action might seem evil and cruel; nevertheless, it was just in the sight of God. Even if there were more good-hearted people among the Canaanites than among the Israelites, at that time the Canaanites collectively belonged to Satan's side, while the Israelites collectively belonged to God's side."

The same argument could be used to explain the tragic story of the American Indian. They were supposed to unite with White settlers who were on God's side. God's plan was to build a powerful Christian nation. The Indians did not own this country. God owns it, and He was behind the Europeans coming with Christianity. Of course, we all know that they were not all Christians and many Christians did not always fulfill their role of being good Abels. Because of this, it is easy to throw the baby out with the bathwater and focus too much on the crimes of Abel. Christianity is the Abel religion for the last 2000 years and other religions and beliefs should have united with it instead of fighting it. Now the Unification Church has the Abel religion and Christianity should unite with it instead of trying to kill it. America needs to stop persecuting the Third Adam and follow him. Satan whispers in most people's ears to fear the side of good. Abel must defend itself, but it needs to understand to use only persuasion to get its truth out and not use force to make people do right. God is behind efforts to limit government so it won't use force to make people do what those in power think is right. At the same time, God is behind a strong, active military to fight force with force.

Women are often more inclined than men to be pacifists. Men must be strong and fight the isolationistic and pacifist ways of women. America needs to support our troops in places such as South Korea where we have at this printing 37,000 soldiers ready to help fight the Cain North Korea. In the event of war America should win a victory and take control of North Korea and force the nation to accept democracy and vote for peace loving leaders. President Bush did not do this in Iraq after he won the Gulf War and evil continued. It was right that General MacArthur forced democracy on the Japanese people after World War II. America is not to initiate violence but if good is attacked, then those evil men who start the fighting must be fought with total victory. President Truman weakened during the Korean War and lost North Korea to Kim Il Sung. MacArthur was in the Abel position and wanted total victory. Because of Truman's weakness, millions of people were doomed to slavery in the North, including the family of the Messiah. The purpose of the Korean War was to free the Messiah from a death camp. The Principle explains why there have been so many wars in the twentieth century. It's the final showdown between God and Satan. These are the last days. World War II was Armageddon. Satan's goal is genocide. God's goal is for men to be good Samaritans, not gutless wimps. The Messiah comes to fight evil. God is hoping that the Messiah would be protected, but he was beaten until near death because he helped the underground against the brutal Japanese tyranny when he was a boy and then tortured by the Communists in North Korea. The Messiah is so grateful for General MacArthur for saving his life, he made a movie costing 100 million dollars in today's money called Inchon in honor of one of the greatest military events in history, if not all of history. The Messiah caused Reagan to become President and saved Reagan's life when he was shot so he could go on to strengthen our military and America's will to fight communism. Then the Messiah embraced President Gorbachev and became his friend. Father has said that he couldn't join the military because of his special mission to be everyone's parent, but he said he wishes he could have because it is one of the most honorable things a man can do. (I don't have that quote in front of me, but if you find it please send it to me so I can give the actual quote.) Father praised George Washington by saying it was like David against Goliath and like David he only won because God was with him.

America must see with spiritual eyes, with international eyes and not be so quick to see many conflicts around the world as simply civil wars that are none of our business and with the attitude that we do not have the resources to come in and act like parents and stop the fighting and build peaceful democracies. During this time of restoration we are called to sacrifice. We are called to stretch ourselves to the maximum. We must be bold and courageous and not misunderstand that Jesus and all true saints for God use violent measures sometimes. The peace movements against U.S. involvements are of Satan. Jesus said he did not come with peace, but a sword. Sometimes that is a literal sword. Mainly, though, we must fight with words and never take a vacation or retire from fighting. We have to fight the good fight. To be sensitive means that we must not be adverse to blood. Millions of people believe animals shouldn't be killed for food. They are wrong. Hunting and fishing are spiritual. Of course we have to hunt and fish correctly. Our brave police officers have to be careful to use force properly but too often well-meaning but naive people have hurt their efforts to get the bad guys because of judges and lawmakers who are sometimes too soft on criminals.

Father said in his interview with Frederich Sontag in his book Sun Myung Moon and the Unification Church that it is God's will to fight back when attacked. Sontag asks Father what he thinks about his image that many"are fearful because they think the movement will resort to a militaristic posture and that you will command your members to go out with guns. What do you say about condoning force or violence to attain your goals?"

Father responds:"It's been God's principle never to attack first. God never attacks first. Evil and Satan always take initiative and try to destroy, but the heavenly side has the responsibility to defend itself." Having said that he goes on to say the Church is not focused on the military, but on education:"I preach our movement as essentially nonviolent and nonmilitaristic. Our movement has the greatest weapon -- if you use that word -- truth. We also have the greatest target: the human heart." He says"We are conquerors by love, conquerors by truth, but not by violence, not by weapons." He says that"Communism is trying to take the world by force. But God will take the world by love. We must become the embodiment of this love." He ends by saying that he is not interested in being a political leader but he supports those leaders, such as the President of Korea, in being anti-Communist and for having a strong military:"I have never met President Park ... Yet In principle, I support a strong defense, and an absolute anti-Communist policy."

Gutless conservatives

Conservatives have wimped out. David Frum is an example of this isolationistic stance the Republicans have taken. In What's Right, he says in a chapter titled"Not This Quagmire,""Liberia, Somalia, Bosnia, Haiti, Rwanda. Since the end of the Cold War, the Western world has been confronted with a series of human disasters that seem to demand our help. And yet, when we do help -- as we did in Somalia -- the results disappoint everyone. What ought people of conscience to think?" Because the Republicans did not support President Clinton in sending troops to Somalia, there was disunity and this is what probably causes most failures.

Frum writes,"Our moral duty is clear: we must do what we can. If it is in our power to deliver food and water to people who would otherwise suffer and die, we must. But another thing is clear too: our duty to help is limited." He goes on to say that we cannot be the world's policeman. In Africa, he says, for example, we should"wait the decades it may take for the Africans to" quit killing themselves and learn to live peacefully. In the meantime we should send some food when millions are starving because they are refugees, but even then our efforts are limited and many innocent people will die. He says we must not send troops and"enforce peace" by taking control of the country and appointing"a new government made up of the least-bloodthirsty people in the country, recruit, arm, and train a new army for the new government, and leave Western troops there for whatever length of time it took the new authorities to consolidate their rule."

Thank God there were more sacrificial men years ago to fight Hitler and Kim Il Sung. Are conservatives going to defend South Korea if attacked? Thank God we have troops there already and have a history of commitments to help them. As for everywhere else, the Republicans have wimped out. Perhaps this is the reason why Clinton got elected and reelected in spite of the massive efforts of the Washington Times. I don't know. But I was pleased to see Clinton send Secretary of Defense Perry to South Korea to give the message that we will fight the North Koreans if they attack after a spy submarine from North Korea was found in the South. The Korean people are always on alert and this scared everyone because it is a tactic of North Korea to send an advance crack team of assassins to prepare the way for war.

Clinton may be disgusting as he goes around dropping his pants for a woman named Paula Jones who is trying to take him to court and having his wife lead the charge to socialize medicine, but he seems to have the guts and heart to be a good Samaritan. Martin Luther King was an adulterer, but Father said he was the greatest man of the twentieth century for the good he did. Until North Korea comes to its senses, let's pray that the Commander-in-chief is someone who will fight even though the polls say the majority of Americans side with the feminist ideology of being isolationistic. One of the most moving scenes I have ever seen in a movie is when Laurence Olivier played MacArthur in Father's movie, Inchon. After Kim Il Sung had invaded South Korea in 1950 MacArthur stood in front of a map and waved his hand over the top of Korea and said,"They're dead." Then he proceeded to plan on Inchon that would take place later. We have to be like surgeons sometimes and not let the suffering of others get us down as we go for a future victory. It will take time to raise the Republican conservatives as well as the Democrat liberals to a higher level so they can understand that we are to sacrifice more. Women, especially, have to be educated. They are the real force behind the men wimping out. Men must stand up to the well-meaning women and act with strength to overthrow evil rulers when they attack others. It was right to impose democracy on Japan after they bombed us at Pearl Harbor. God bless President Clinton for stopping the raping of tens of thousands of women in Bosnia, even though the Republicans and feminists hated him for doing it.

Father talks of power

Father is the wisest man who has ever lived. The longer I live the more I see the wisdom of Father. I think it was in Mortimer J. Adler's How to Read a Book that he said a great writer is different when you are 20 years old than when you are 40 years and different when you are 60. As we mature and grow, the classics don't change, we do and we come to admire them more or see them as less. I noticed that as I get older Father is the same, but I grow and find him greater. Mark Twain said,"When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years."

What does Father say about power? He says after searching for the"great principles of the universe" he discovered that the greatest power in the universe is the"power of our Heavenly Father" and that power is"manifested by the True Parents of earth":" As a youth, I was called upon by God to investigate the great principles of the universe. As I searched, through prayer and study, I came to discover the great truth humankind has been seeking throughout history, and the great Principle through which all humanity can return to true love and consummate true world peace."

"Human will power alone is not enough in today's decadent world to return to the original order of true love as desired by God. We may only return through the power of our Heavenly Father, and His power is manifested by the True Parents on earth."

The power of True Parents is the power of love. They bring"the original order of true love."

Thank you for reading this book. Please let me know your thoughts. My E-mail is: JohnGodwin@DivinePrinciple.com.

Pledge

I promise to become a powerful person. James 5:16 says,"The prayer of the righteous is powerful and effective." I will be a righteous person who has powerful prayers that are effective in moving spirit world and this world to accept the Divine Principle and live God's way of life. Every person needs to be educated on how to use power wisely -- from government power of military and police to the importance of decentralizing power to men as patriarchs in their home. The State must return to the libertarian principle of being a limited government as envisioned by our Founding Fathers. Pacifists and other weak people must be taught that we must be strong physically and spiritually, work hard and be willing to suffer and, if necessary, die for freedom when Satan's forces attack God's side. We must fight those who would hurt our family, our neighbors, our country, our God. We can only become powerful if we unite with True Parents who teach us by word and deed how to fight Satan by uniting our minds and bodies and uniting families and nations through the marriage blessings and living as trinities in beautiful communities.

 Signed ___________________________________________________________________

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