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I don't tend to quote Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 – 1882) because he had lingering errors in his theology. But with most Americans of his generation, the Bible was still a dominant influence. Emerson and the culture were in agreement that
God exists,
God is perfectly just,
God defines sin,
God hates sin,
God justly punishes the sins of individuals
and chastens nations for the prevailing sins of individuals.
Emerson was not the only observer to note that by the 1830s, Christianity was fading away in America. De Tocqueville documented this late in the decade when he published "Democracy in America."
Emerson's comments, below, on a particular sin of his day correspond to today's sin of the voting Ohio majority on "abortion rights."
"It showed how prosperity has hurt us, and that we could not be shocked by crime. It showed that the old religion and the sense of right had faded and gone out; that while we reckoned ourselves a highly cultivated nation, our bellies had run away with our brains."
Emerson observed that the essence of courtesy, of Christianity, of love, "is to prefer another, to postpone oneself, to protect another from oneself. That is the distinction of the [good], to defend the weak and redress the injured, as it is of the savage and brutal to usurp and use others…The end for which man is made is not crime in any forms, and a man cannot steal without incurring the penalties of the thief. A man who commits a crime defeats the end of his existence. He was created for benefit, and he exists for harm…The habit of oppression cuts out the moral eyes, and, though the intellect goes on simulating the moral as before, its sanity is gradually destroyed. "
"Paradise is under the shadow of swords;…divine sentiments which are always soliciting us are breathed into us from on high and are an offset to a Universe of suffering and crime; that self-reliance, the height and perfection of man, is reliance on God. The insight of [Biblical] sentiment will disclose to him unexpected aids in the nature of things. The Persian Saadi said, “Beware of hurting the orphan. When the orphan sets a-crying, the throne of the Almighty is rocked from side to side.”
Emerson preached against the fear of man, and conformity to cultural and moral decline.
"He only who is able to stand alone is qualified for society. And that I understand to be the end for which a soul exists in this world—to be himself the counterbalance of all falsehood and all wrong. “The army of unright is encamped from pole to pole, but the road of victory is known to the just.”
Pro 2:6 For the LORD gives wisdom; From His mouth come knowledge and understanding;
Pro 2:7 He stores up sound wisdom for the upright; He is a shield to those who walk uprightly;
Pro 2:8 He guards the paths of justice, And preserves the way of His saints. NKJV
Any investment in bioscience research comes with 100% risk because one never knows if a particular strategy will produce beneficial outcomes.
Publicly traded pharmaceutical companies have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to maximize profits and the only sure way to generate profits is through regulatory capture.
So Big Pharma just lies about its products and buys off the regulators (and the politicians and the media) every time.
The biggest profits come from giving a drug to the entire population in the name of preventive care — vaccines and now statins.
By pathologizing natural human emotions, the makers of psychopharmaceuticals also seek to sell treatments to nearly the entire population.
Causing harm increases profits by 100x or more (a single injury can produce a lifetime of profitable treatments).
Said simply, causing harm and disease massively increases the size of the market for pharmaceutical products so that’s Big Pharma’s business model today.
Dr. Toby Rogers
The “Putin apologist” smear is as omnipresent today as the same kind of smear was in 2002 in the US, deployed against anyone who questioned the wisdom of the coming war on Iraq. It’s designed to shut down thought. As usual, Hungary is the one dissenter from the EU consensus.
Rod Dreher
The case for getting out of NATO encompasses four fundamental propositions:
First, the Federal budget has become a self-fueling fiscal doomsday machine, even as the Fed has run out of capacity to monetize the skyrocketing public debt.
Second, the only viable starting point for fiscal salvation is slashing the nation’s elephantine Warfare State by at least $500 billion per year.
Third, the route to that end is a return to the “no entangling alliance” wisdom of the Founders, which means bringing the Empire Home, closing the 750 US bases abroad, scuttling much of the US Navy and Army and withdrawing from NATO and similar lesser commitments elsewhere.
Fourthly, jettisoning NATO requires debunking its Origins Story and the false claim that it brought peace and security to post-war America when what it actually did was transform Washington into the War Capital of the World, dominated by a panoptic complex of arms merchants, neocon warmongers and a vast Warfare State nomenklatura.
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