By J. D. Pendry
A cheerful headline isn’t it. Looking at history, all of it for as far back as you care to look, there’s a distinct pattern of human destruction. From ancient times to present day, every atrocity, every genocide, every ethnic cleansing, religious persecution and other evil visited upon humans are owed to some degree to disrespect, degradation, dehumanization, and destruction. These are the undeclared tenets of many deadly philosophies. It’s a constant theme nowadays and with multiple targets. So many marks the damn is bound to burst. Producing a new flood of destruction. It’s men versus God. For America and the world, it’s about which path to take.
I am neither theologian nor Biblical scholar. I routinely read the Holy Bible. Not near as often as I should, but I read. It is fascinating to me when an ancient message resonates with me and applies to today’s much broader, much more divided, much more dangerous world. There are also times I feel the pain of being poked in the chest behind the unspoken question: Are you listening?
Take the story of the Apostle Paul. Saul, before he became Paul, was a zealot for the law. The laws of ancient Judaism many of which, like any civil society, were not from God but were man constructed. Paul was a determined enforcer of the law hunting, arresting, and even watching executions by stoning of early Christians. That was until he saw the light. In modern day lingo, we might say Saul had his come to Jesus meeting. Paul then became an evangelist for what God had to say rather than what men had to say. Before that, what did he do? Disrespected, degraded, dehumanized, and tried to destroy the people of The Way – early Christians.
Christian persecution is as old as the faith itself and continues today. “Christians remain one of the most persecuted religious groups in the world. Christians throughout the world continue to risk imprisonment, loss of home and assets, torture, beheadings, rape and even death as a result of their faith.” Open Doors, 2017 World Watch provides a list of the top 50 countries for Christian persecution. The United States is not on the list because the persecution here is more subtle. Although, in recent years it’s been a bit more brazen. No one has reached the point of outright murder, but we see the other things. Businesses sued for refusing to violate the tenets of their Christian faith and everyone is aware of the assaults on businesses like Chic-Fil-A, assaults on Christian holidays, assaults on Christian symbolism. There’s no uproar from the great megaphone holding media. No defense of Christians. Even many Christians remain silent rather than openly standing firm for their faith and religious freedom. Can you imagine living in a country where Christian hatred is in the majority? Don’t imagine, click on the links above.
When you degrade and dehumanize any segment of humanity whether it’s for the color of their skin or religious beliefs, it ends up in atrocity like slavery or genocide. In America, we fought a war to end slavery. Other countries banned slavery as well, but modern-day slavery still exists in countries across the globe with estimates as high as 40 million. Right here in the land of the free there is the booming business of sex slave trafficking. There are illegal immigrants everyone seems so concerned with living on under-the-table slave wages trapped and, in a position to do nothing about it. Here, we seem only able to focus on the past and the atrocity we corrected. We cannot accept our history and move on, instead we are told we need to change it.
By doing that we refuse to live in the present. Hitler’s Germany dehumanized a segment of people including Jews, the disabled, Gypsies, and anyone else that did not fit the master-race mold. He killed millions. We killed Hitler and ended his final solution. Here in America, we dehumanized unborn children and set about murdering more than 60 million of them. That’s our American Genocide. We own it. Our most egregious atrocity. The greatest ever committed. We wrote it into law. And it continues. Will we ever see the light?
Across America, we’ve spread the cancer of human destruction. Political opponents are demonized. Movies are made about hunting people degraded and dehumanized as deplorable for sport. We disrespect Police Officers beginning from the very top of our national leadership characterizing them as acting stupidly.
Our Police Officers are disrespected, degraded, dehumanized and routinely shot. Many do not have the support of their state and local governments. What will these states and cities with the major problems do when they begin to walk away? Anarchy? Vigilantism? Gang wars? Is that a goal?
Labeling and dehumanizing people to perpetuate destructive ideology is no accident. It’s a method. A strategy to eventually transform America into something unrecognizable. A one-party dictatorial hell hole.
Traditional liberalism or conservatism no longer compete. They formed the establishment country club and focused on their wealth. Leaving us with a mess. Instead we face the likes of Neo-Nazis and assorted wing nuts, a label with which the media paints Americans with broad strokes. We have extreme progressivism, socialism, and communism and even the rise of Islamism in our Congress which the media either heartily promotes or pretends does not exist. All these ideologies have much in common: Godlessness, hate driven, anti-family, pro total government control in whatever form it takes and dehumanizing any opposing voice and great swaths of humanity they’d prefer to render into serfdom or eliminate altogether.
Americans. If we seek it out, the light is there for us.
…if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land. 2 Chronicles 7:14 (NIV)
© 2019 JD Pendry – All Rights Reserved
E-Mail JD Pendry: jd@jdpendry.com
Website: Pendry’s American Journal
