We explore real-life reformation here in this informed, online community.
British prison psychiatrist Dr. Anthony Daniels has made a study of the sin nature, and how we moderns develop creative modern ways to suppress the truth in unrighteousness.
He writes, “The disposition to excuse ourselves is an old one, remarked upon by Shakespeare, among others. Edmund in King Lear says that "we make guilty of our own disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars; as if we were villains by necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion, knaves, thieves and treachers by spherical predominance, drunkards, liars and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in by a divine thrusting on . . ."
“Yes, indeed, that is how we are. My patients are always saying things like "The beer went mad" to explain their habitual drunkenness, as if beer drank them rather than the other way about. Inanimate objects take on a life of their own, as if they had free will, or at least agency, not the men who created or used them.
“Nine out of ten people who stab someone to death say "The knife went in," rather than "I stabbed him." One man who had shot someone in a pub brawl said to me, in the course of his narration: "A gun arrived and it went off." Guns are strange creatures, unpredictable in their conduct.
“It is not only objects that have independent volitions, but human interactions, which are no respecters of the people involved in them. Thus fights break out, as if they existed antecedently to anyone's decision to hit someone else; relationships, by contrast, break down. "It" didn't work out; or "it" wasn't working. "It" turns out to be shorthand for every possible kind of infidelity, violence, cruelty, abuse, neglect and so forth.
“Substances, too, have a will of their own. About a half of heroin addicts, when asked why they started, say, "It's everywhere," the "it" in question being heroin. Thus they take heroin for the same reason that mountaineers climb Everest: because it is there. But if it's everywhere, why doesn't everyone take it? This is not a question that much preoccupies my patients.
“Shakespeare wouldn't have been surprised by any of this, of course, since it accords perfectly with human nature as he knew it. What might have surprised him, however, what is genuinely new and what he surely would never have guessed, is that an entire [welfare] class has grown up whose livelihood depends upon the acceptance at their own word of those who make guilty of their own disasters the sun, the moon and the stars.”
--James 2:12
GK Chesterton on adultery:
"The revolt against vows has been carried in our day even to the extent of a revolt against the typical vow of marriage. It is most amusing to listen to the opponents of marriage on this subject. They appear to imagine that the ideal of constancy was a yoke mysteriously imposed on mankind by the devil, instead of being, as it is, a yoke consistently imposed by all lovers on themselves. They have invented a phrase, a phrase that is a black and white contradiction in two words - ‘free-love' - as if a lover ever had been, or ever could be, free.
"It is the nature of love to bind itself, and the institution of marriage merely paid the average man the compliment of taking him at his word. Modern sages offer to the lover, with an ill-favored grin, the largest liberties and the fullest irresponsibility; but they do not respect him as the old Church respected him; they do not write his oath upon the heavens, as the record of his highest moment. ...
Opinion by Lau Vegys:
America's problems aren't fixable with patriotic sentiment. They're mathematical realities that don't care about your flag-waving.
The national debt recently hit $37 trillion. By 2033—the same year Social Security's trust fund runs dry—we're looking at debt exceeding $50 trillion. Interest payments alone will consume nearly half of all tax revenue.
At that point, the Federal Reserve will have no choice but to print tens of trillions of dollars to bail out the Treasury. The resulting inflation will make the early 1980s look like a picnic.
And of course, as I mentioned in a recent piece, whether it's $37 trillion now or $50 trillion in about eight years, the headline number is just the tip of the iceberg.
Add it all up—Medicare, Social Security, federal pensions, and other off-the-books promises—and the real financial hole the U.S. government faces is closer to $150 trillion. That’s nearly $1 million per taxpayer.
The Guardian reports that 15,000 Afghans were relocated to the UK in a secret scheme, while Breitbart reported that nearly 24,000 Afghans were brought in, with the British government earmarking £7 billion to secretly house and import them.
The UK taxpayer has no choice but to pay up, while government transparency was lacking.
Whether all these Afghans were vetted remains unknown. Given the reputation of the UK along with many Western countries, the vetting process for migrants is nearly nonexistent, and highly questionable in this case in particular.
Also, in the spring of 2023, while Rishi Sunak was prime minister and many UK military families had no heat or hot water, the government continued to host illegal migrants in plush hotels, at the cost to taxpayers of $8.5 million USD a day and rising. And while homelessness was up over 27% in Britain, illegal, mostly Muslim migrants from the Middle East and Africa, were royally served in those plush hotels. Now it comes to light that in...
