That's a fact Jack. Reminds me of a high school sports rivalry we had between our town and another town 15 miles down the road. It nearly became a civil war in itself. Football with the town to the west, basketball with the town to the east. So ridiculous. (We won both by the way)

"Occupy Wall Street (OWS) was a protest movement against economic inequality that began in Zuccotti Park, located in New York City's Wall Street financial district, in September 2011.[7] It gave rise to the wider Occupy movement in the United States and other countries.

The Canadian anti-consumerist and pro-environment group/magazine Adbusters initiated the call for a protest. The main issues raised by Occupy Wall Street were social and economic inequality, greed, corruption and the undue influence of corporations on government—particularly from the financial services sector. The OWS slogan, "We are the 99%", refers to income and wealth inequality in the U.S. between the wealthiest 1% and the rest of the population. To achieve their goals, protesters acted on consensus-based decisions made in general assemblies which emphasized redress through direct action over the petitioning to authorities.[8][nb 1] "

Seems like the same dingbats that protest and want dumb stuff when democrats are President?

You can never have too much free stuff.

free is good unless you are the one payin for it all the time.

1% pay 99% receive.

Ohhh, for the day of reckoning..

Of course there is financial inequality. People are not all born with the same ability to earn. The only equality that is kinda possible is equality under the law. Yet even that can not be equal as not everyone can earn enough money to hire a lawyer.

Mark, I mean ZionHeritageFarm (my mistake in saying Mark) your wrong about people today. When this country got started a handful of educated wealthy men, talked a sackful of uneducated, get by best you can farmers, into picking up arms and starting a new country. It was the best of them that met to declare independence and later write the constitution. To say we have no men of that caliber today is foolish.

The free loaders demanding more free stuff will have to be dealt with or they will destroy this country and find out what doing without really is. Welfare, no matter what the intention was, just like the drug prohibition, no matter what the intention was, IS NOT WORKING. It is making things worse and will be the destruction of the United States if allowed to continue.


Capitalism, not socialism built this country. Socialism is tearing it apart. Yes we are a socialist country. Absolutely a socialist country now. We have created a culture of people who believe they are entitled to have the same things you worked to provided yourself, and you have a responsibility to provide them with it.

Good morning danny. I see you mentioned my post as being inaccurate. You call it wrong. I'm not sure which part that would be, because I never said we have no men of that caliber today. We have especially intelligent people. I don't read where I said we aren't, but I offer that since the human brain hasn't molded into a better machine in millinea, perhaps now it's a matter of what do we use our brains for?

I mentioned as a culture, we don't routinely read literature or books (or the Bible) unless specified by employment. That's accurate.
For leisure and for religion, our forefathers were readers of their Bibles and literature.
I mentioned technology. I believe that's accurate.
I mentioned porn being an epidemic. That is accurate.

I agree with you that capitalism built a middle class of a country with liberty granted to all with equality from God. There have been wealthy elites in all societies have there not?
So maybe we could say the wealthier middle class helped build this great nation, land of the free, home of the brave, one nation under God?

Just thoughts on TMan on a Saturday morning sir.
I'd also offer that it was those educated wealthy men that risked much, as well as many colonials who were urged to become literate as a result of the Protestant Reformers a century earlier. To estimate they were all uneducated is not truth. Some were, yes. But the colonies was started by devout Protestant Reformers who dreamed of a "New City on the Hill" and so had to be able to read Scripture to know the Word of God. The Puritans were very literate, and so were most of their descendants.

As an example, Thomas Paine's book pamphlet "Common Sense" was a "best seller" in modern terms having sold 500,000 copies or 20% of the 2.5 M population of 1776. What book today sells like that? There was a thirst for freedom from the boot & jack and a literacy of grammar, syntax, and understanding that we may not have even been taught in high school.

Here is a excerpt from that pamphlet brother. You think it was an uneducated populous that figured out this type of speaking? I offer - they were sharper than many today who are an inch deep, mile wide.
Our forefather were not uneducated as you would view them. They knew a few things deeply. Their God was one of those subjects;

The laying of a Country desolate with Fire and Sword, declaring War against the natural rights of all Mankind, and extirpating the Defenders thereof from the Face of the Earth, is the Concern of every Man to whom Nature hath given the Power of feeling; of which Class, regardless of Party Censure, is The Author. Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries By a Government, which we might expect in a country Without Government, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer.
- Thomas Payne - Common Sense (1775)


It was a time of robust debate amongst many, not a few.

Blessings
Mark

Mark I apologize. It was ZionHeritageFarm that said m en today were not made of the same stuff. I read through here and got it in my head somehow that was your post.

No worries brother. You know we love Williamsburg, KS

I completely agree with you. When they try to burn Bonner county, which is my North Idaho home, that's when I will start losing my you-know-what. They make things for defending your home nowadays.

danny,
You're signature line quote from Ben Franklin is an example of the deep thinkers of the 1700's.
I just took an exam on that period of church history in particular and it's interesting to see just how human rational thought develops and how it leads us to today. You often mention the church and wealth, and corruption between theology and society, and you're pretty close to where the Protestant Reformers like Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin perhaps thought in the 1500's. They saw a Church decimated by the Medieval (600-1500 AD) period of corruption and more within the Holy Church. Thus the term; middle evil. The early Church was Holy and had been corrupted. Theirs was a mission to return to the Churches Holy roots per se.

But the Reformers were products of the Renaissance that started in Italy in response to centuries of corruption at many levels. Monastery teaching gave way to Scholastics (those who do not use their hands) in Universities and students now sat in rows, not a circle. Great teachers emerged to teach these lines of students. Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau were monumental forces of intellect in their day that gave rise to the Enlightenment Era of the 1600-1800's that first swept through Europe and then America (funny how that same train still occurs now? First Europe, then the Americas). In that Enlightened Era emerged great humanistic, rationalistic (mostly German) philosophers and some theologians (Kant/Hegel/Scheiermacher/Freud/Darwin/Ritschel) who now offered the beginnings of what we now see more of on the nightly news = the subjective, empiric manner in which to views one's life. The grand questions of life and man's existence, that had been answered and in many ways not even questioned for 1500 years now suddenly opened wide to the thought of one's feelings, one's own perception, one's own experience = empiricism.

Ben Franklin, Thomas Paine, Edgar Allen, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington were all devout Christians who deeply studied and wrote about God in an Enlightenment sense. God existed, He created the world, but these earlier framers of our great nation were Deists = they believed that with what they observed (evil in the world) that God existed but that He had left man to his own devices and perhaps even walked away from His Created. These colonials, as are all deists, couldn't figure out the Trinity of God (how could one God be 3 Persons as the church proclaimed? That is hard to figure our rationally?), so they were by and large Monotheists believing God is One and only one. And they framed this nation in a wonderful glow of God given rights, or so it seems by their writings.

Then the modern age (1880-1960) of great technology emerged, where man could spread the news of one's own findings faster, no longer tethered by a corporate body of "other people's views" or that unprovable "religion" which had been relegated to just another cultural category on the shelf. Pick it up when you need something. Call on God for help.

So here we are.
In what today's great thinkers call the post-modern era (1960's - ?) where truth in science has now been discredited at levels unthinkable during the previous modern era. New science is disproving old unshakable science at so many levels as man progresses. As far as orthodox religion, it's tied to miracles, and while post-moderns like miracles, they don't know how they occur because truth is individualistic, so answers are all over the place. Many post-moderns are spiritual but don't really know how to explain it.

As a summary of how man views his salvation, and how we got to where we are as a world intellectually;
Romanism: First 1500 years AD; Authority & Salvation was to be found in the relationship between man & church & God
Protestantism: 1500 - 1700 AD; Authority & Salvation was to be found in Holy Scripture (discarded the traditions of the Church) and the relationship between man & God
Rationalism: 1800's until now; Authority & Salvation is to be found in philosophical and ethical systems of man (discarded God) and the relationship of man with himself.

We are a product of our past and our kids will be a product of us and those before us. Just seems to be the way God has the train headed down the tracks. Most have no clue where we have come from because they don't teach this "worthless" stuff in school. School teaches stuff with the name trans in front of it. Good stuff. Needed stuff. For tomorrow's leaders!
We are smart to learn from the past and strategize accordingly.

Individualism = empiricism = my experience matters to me = is here to stay = for at least the foreseeable future.
We're in that era. And no power of government can stop it, short of total control.
Maybe that's the plan?

I'll turn to the One who is building the train tracks, because with all these centuries of man working and working;
The Truth of the Gospel has not budged one inch.
Christ came for our sins, was killed and rose again.
The rest of this can hover around like a coyote caught in an MB550!

Blessings from TX y'all!
Mark

Technically it started with Adam and Eve

But more recent for America I believe welfare starting in 1935 has lead us into liberal mind rot

No self responsibility , no self reliance , no morals.........

It all started going downhill when men stopped wearing bow ties.

and started dancing.

Yup, when a person don't have to use his brain to figure things out, it shrinks and shrivels up.

It all started to go downhill when our currency turned to a debt backed currency.

Q