CGR FRIDAY 063023 John O Connor

Up next, your chosen Truth Network Podcast is playing now. Up next, your chosen Truth And the corporations don't know whether to spit or go blind, you know, so they, like they don't say anything on Bud Light. It's really so sad to see. I like, you know, I mean, the fact that that Bud Light has persisted, you know, I mean, you get a guy like Garth Brooks that comes out and says that, you know, everybody that doesn't support Bud Light and the trans queer is an a-hole.

And I'm going to serve him, you know, I'm going to serve that brand in my bar. And then you look at, you know, the Indiana Jones movie, they're projecting that it's going to be a bomb. Marvel has bombed. All of these woke films and entities that come out are just dying on the vine. Target.

I mean, look what's happened to Target. And yet they still persist, John. I don't get it.

I don't understand. Well, it's the whole concept of progressivism. The whole idea is that you never remember the whole idea of progress.

You never stop. What may be a good accommodation between sort of conservative values staying the same and reform. A good conservative wants to reform and liberals have always wanted to reform. Now liberals get to the point where they're progressive and there's no limit to where they go. So we go from equality of opportunity for minorities to superior opportunity.

Or equity. Yeah. So so that's the problem with the whole progressive project. They don't know where to stop. And really, most of them really favor socialist prescriptions far ahead of what our society really is about. So the progressives have gone way ahead of the rest of the population.

And I think that ahead almost indicates that, well, we will go there or we would like to go there. But I would suggest that that's absolutely not true. I don't think that that, you know, I know that there's been an indoctrination.

I know that for 60 years now or so, education has been moving that direction in the last 25 years, it has moved very hard left, which is why we have kids coming out of high school and so on, even grammar school now that are saying, well, Marxism, we should we should have Marxism we should be doing. What was the book and animal? Animal Farm? Animal Farm? Yeah. You know, I mean, Animal Farm was an example of what not to do.

And and yet Animal Farm is exactly what these kids think is a great idea. Well that's right. I remember when Obama talks about being on the right side of history, which is somewhat of a oxymoron. Yeah.

And a puffed up idea that somehow you're pressuring. You know what the right side of history is. You know where history is going, but it's very much a Marxist concept that over time we're going to have this proletariat heaven on earth. The political philosophers would say it's millenarianism.

We're going to have a thousand days of this beautiful society on earth. And it does borrow from the Christian tradition. It just absolutely.

I'm just going to say, you know, that's the problem. It's a secular religion is what it is. And so that's their vision is this secular religion in which history progresses. But of course, all evidence is that when you go that way, you starve three million people in Ukraine and so forth as Stalin did. And or you tear up society the way Mao did in China. So there's never been an official or a successful Marxist society. Plato was the first to come out in favor of communism, basically, and Aristotle right afterwards said, hey, this isn't going to work.

Man treasures most dearly that which he calls mine. You have to have and Adam Smith said the same thing. You can't have collectivist solutions.

And you know, so that's what they want. And it's society is going to be destroyed for the last 200 years. Pastor Greg, we've had tremendous human flourishing because of the Industrial Revolution and fossil fuels and individual impetus and initiative.

And a poor person today is much wealthier than a wealthy person was 250 years ago. Well, the other piece to this is is that we've we have always understood that our foundation is God. And our foundation is our liberty that's found in and our rights are endowed, meaning that they are a part of who we are. They're not something that's out here in someone's hand, whether it be gods or man's, they're literally who we are life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, our founders understood that that's what made us us. Because remember that that came out of that puritan movement from the early 1600s that had fled England when the king decided to say, I am God. And so so that so all of their belief system had been birthed out of that hundred plus years leading up to the revolution.

And it was actually the preaching of the love the 1740s to the 1770s were the were the men in the pulpit reminded Americans, hey, wait a minute, don't forget your heritage. Don't forget why you're here. You're here because of liberty.

You're here because God called us to this place, and endowed us with these principles, which are worth dying for. And now we are being enchained once again, and we must throw off those shackles and choose, will Jesus Christ be our king? Or will man be our king? We will never have true freedom unless Christ is king. Well, we cannot and what it translates to politically is, we cannot have a king or some authoritarian person controlling our thoughts and our beliefs. And that's what that Protestant revolution was all about.

That's how America was founded the dignity of the individual. Now what is progressivism all about? It's all about social control, social controls of what you can think. They want to tell us how to invest, you can only invest in this, you can only do that.

By the way, you can't have a gas stove, you can't do this, you've got to do that. So it's completely authoritarian, and which is against the principles that you're talking about. Because the foundation of that is freedom of conscience. And by the way, the Supreme Court apparently, you know, believes that too. I think they came out with a ruling today about that and on the LGBTQ.

About 303 Creative? Yeah, exactly. So which they are, and they also came out with a positive ruling about the postal worker saying that he has a right to his Sabbath. That's right.

That's right. So those things are very important. I've gotten involved in some of these religious liberty cases myself. Can I throw something else in here, John, that you brought up?

Because I think it's an interesting piece to this puzzle. You mentioned that, you know, that the other side has a social construct. And so they are forcing, you know, what you can say, what you can't say, their social construct. They have defined, and they've spent quite a bit of time doing it, Christianity as simply a social construct.

And they have accused Christianity of being a social construct that constricts people's rights. Right. And which is exactly what they're doing. But the first thing they had to do was to get people to believe that it was the other side that was doing it, so that they could then do it.

Right. So here's what happens. The dynamic is they decide they're going to impose an extreme way of thinking on everybody else.

And when people try to throw off those shackles, now they're dangerous human beings have these terrible threats to democracy. Well, these are people who just want freedom of conscience. So I don't know any Christian who says that the other guy can't believe as he wishes. I think that's one of the things that Christians believe. You have your own God as you find him, where you find him, and so forth. And if you don't want to have one, well, that's your choice. But that's a far cry from somebody saying, oh, because Christians believe that they're impinging on my rights.

No, they're not. You don't see Christians out there doing that. All Christians want is a freedom of conscience.

They don't want to send a five-year-old to school that's going to get indoctrinated with some. Well, let me read something that I feel like God dropped on me this morning. I don't remember Milo Yiannopoulos, a great guy, actually has converted to Christianity.

I haven't seen him in a little while, but I had him on my show right after that, and we had some great conversation. So let me read this. Christian morality allows one to live within the culture immorally. One of the things that I think made Milo so powerful in his voice was he never made excuses for the fact that he was living an immoral lifestyle and making a sex choice.

He was more of an arbitrator of knowing the difference between right and wrong and realizing that it was conservative values, Christian values that allowed him to live within the culture and live out his immoral lifestyle. But not just his immoral lifestyle, the immoral lifestyles that were being left out, because unlike in other social constructs where absolute morality meant that individuals are going to pay the ultimate price in a Christian biblical worldview, certain immorality is, while not preferred nor even encouraged nor even granted a stamp of approval, it's quote unquote not illegal. At one point, our laws about adultery or fornication were made more harsh. Over time, those laws were bent. So adultery and fornication became quote unquote more mainstream. But the only reason they were allowed to exist without a capital punishment is because of a biblical morality that recognized that the life had greater value than ending the life because of those acts. In the same manner, divorce at one time was considered to be not only immoral but illegal. As divorce became more accepted, legally it also had breached the barrier morally.

Unfortunately, the acceptance of a widespread basis of divorce has also led to the destruction of a family. But again, as you said, within a Christian biblical worldview, the bottom line is, is that life outweighs most everything else. The only capital punishment is for murder, or perhaps, you know, a horrific rape case. But otherwise, life always outweighs everything else in a biblical culture.

Right, right. Now our laws are based to some degree on biblical principles, but we're not enforcing religion. When we say, Thou shalt not kill, that's what we're saying.

It's not a religious concept at all. But so… It's pragmatism. It's pragmatism. I mean, God's laws—this is the thing, I have a couple that's been on my program several times that writes about pragmatism—and God's laws that He instituted were instituted into a pagan culture where people were dying and killing one another, and all kinds of chaos was happening. And so the Creator said, I'm going to pull this group of people out, I'm going to give them laws, I'm going to give them a societal structure, and I'm going to show the rest of them how I intended people to live, and they're going to prosper if they follow my rules and my laws, because it works. Because it just works.

They're not killing each other. They're not going to be sick all the time because they're going to have certain codes regarding cleanliness, certain codes regarding sexual morality. All of those things are going to be in place.

And guess what? They actually work, and they make for a healthy culture. Well, that's right. And contrast that with the beginnings of really progressivism comes from Rousseau, the French philosopher who led to the French Revolution, when he said, if you don't go along with the quote, general will, we can force you to be free. Man shall be forced to be free. Now, that's anti-Christian, that's anti-democratic, it's anti-enlightenment, but those ideas that you can force somebody to be free versus the mainstream Judeo-Christian tenets of living freely as a person who's endowed with dignity from the Creator. One has dignity and so forth, and you cannot control that person's life beyond the normal prescriptions of behavior that would harm society. You can keep people from stealing, you can keep people from harming another. But otherwise, as to their own morality, well, so be it. And that's a matter for religion.

So what you do is you have the difference between Augustine's City of God, City of Man, and then you have somebody like Rousseau who tries to smush those things together and start regulating behavior down to the nth degree. And so what do we have? We have the French Revolution where people are figuring out who to kill next. Let's put this group in the guillotine.

And that's what we've still got today. We've still got a bunch of people who think they can put together this ideal millenarian society but they have to, in order to do that, you have to force, you have to get mind control, you have to force everybody to march the way you want them to march. And that's what's always been the problem with communism, with progressivism, with socialism, is you can't do that to people.

It does not work practically, whether even if it were a good idea, it doesn't work. Ultimately, at the end of the day, John, man's innate nature is evil. It really is. Man is born with a sinful nature, and that sinful nature is going to choose a selfish outcome, not one that has altruism associated with it, but one that is literally not only destructive to those around them, but ultimately destructive to the individual themselves. It's self-destructive, the kind of nature that man has, which is why Christianity and that supernatural encounter with Christ that exchanges that nature, it's why John Adams said, our Constitution, because it is a Constitution that promises and guarantees rights.

It's not restrictive, it's unrestricted in the sense that the majority of it is you have a right to this, you have a right to this, you have a right to this. It's all about rights, but rights without morals will fail. Well, that's right, and I think the idea is that our Constitution was devised very cleverly and very wisely to recognize that people are greedy, you have a tendency to mob, a tendency to do wrong things, and so what happens is we have these checks and balances, and so what happens is our own individual instincts will now lead to good things.

That's what Adam Swift was all about. He was a professor of moral philosophy when he wrote his book. He was not an economist, he said, look, people pursuing their own selfish interest, if they do it in the right way, and so forth, without breaking any laws, will end up helping the common good, whereas, he says, if you try to have a collectivist solution where supposedly people are acting for the public good, then what they're going to do is they're only going to end up enhancing private wealth, and so that's what we've got. What happens, who is getting wealthy in this particular democratic government?

It's all the people on K Street who are coming in and getting their green energy grants for $100 billion, while all of us are paying five bucks at the pump. So that's an example of how supposedly working in this wonderful public interest helps a few people privately, but harms society, whereas if you let people unleash their creative and inquisitive nature, you're going to find tremendous technological process, as we're doing. We're going to find far more oil, we're going to have a cleaner society, if we allow the individual within certain structures to do as he wishes, and we take advantage in a way of part of man's sinful nature that way.

Yeah. Well, and again, you can't force someone to go to the cross, but I think that our founders had a pretty ingenious way of understanding, and this is one of the things. In the early days when people would come here and they would see, just like Alex de Tocqueville, they would see that the morality of the church is what was leading to the success of the people, and they would crave that. Man wants to be saved. I mean, at the deepest levels, man wants. I know Christ says, and it's true, that light came into the world and man chose darkness over light because of his nature, but once he really encounters that light, he wants that light.

He wants what is right in that, because God made us that way, to draw us to him. And ultimately, that's what happens. What they're doing is they're cutting the light out, and that's why they're winning, and we've got to fight back. Well, that's right.

Yeah. John, thanks so much. As always, I love our conversations. I appreciate you taking some extra time to be with me this morning. Thank you. This is a great talk, Pastor Greg. Good talk to you. Let's do it again.

Absolutely. Postgatebook.com. Postgatebook.com is the website. You can pick up The Mysteries of Watergate, What Really Happened. You can pick up Postgate, How the Washington Post Betrayed Deep Throat, Covered Up Watergate, and Began Today's Partisan Advocacy Journalism. Very insightful books to help us, again, continue to understand what it is that we're fighting today.

John O'Connor, thanks for being with me. Take care. You've been listening to some extra time here on Children Generation Radio. Get more at the website, ChildrenGenerationRadio.com. ChosenGenerationRadio.com. If you'd like to hear this again, if you'd like to listen again, if you missed any part of it, go to the Listen tab, and this will immediately be up here, and probably within two minutes, you'll be able to access the audio version of this at the Listen tab at ChildrenGenerationRadio.com. God bless you, and have a great weekend.