So Help Me, God

Editorial

And since all sober inquiries after truth agreed that happiness derived from virtue, that form of government with virtue as its foundation was more likely than any other to promote the general happiness. --John Adams.

The Senate Democrats would prefer to drop the customary oath of office where they affirm that such and such is the truth "So Help Me, God." They are not controlled by any sense of godliness, and neither is the country. Bill Clinton carried his Bible when he left church services, walking from the sanctuary with his wife, but he sometimes had a liaison with a female in the afternoon. As the world knows, he was a serial adulterer. Now we have Gary Condit whose behavior is the same, except that his paramour disappeared and was probably murdered. The Congressman is not ashamed of his conduct with Chandra Levy, or other women with whom he spent time, and wishes to continue in public office, seeing no contradiction between his behavior and his ambition.

In his book published posthumously, Vulgarians at the Gate, Steve Allen said the coarsening of our culture doesn't happen by accident.

The consequences of rearing millions of initially innocent children in a social atmosphere characterized by vulgarity, violence, brutish manners, the collapse of the family, and general disrespect for traditional codes of conduct is enough to chill the blood of even the most tolerant of observers.

Steve Allen believed that only untalented comedians rely on jokes revolving around sex, drugs, and obscenities, stock in trade for many who now think of themselves as "funny." Perhaps some present comedians are decent people, but it is difficult to think so when their lives are dependent on vulgarity.

The Journal of the American Medical Association says that one in five high school girls has been physically or sexually abused by a dating partner and this abusive behavior has led some girls to binge drinking, promiscuity, drugs, and use of laxatives and vomiting to lose weight. Though the survey of the medical association did not say so in this report, I would assume that many physically abusive boys drift into gangs and criminal behavior.

David Satcher, the Surgeon General appointed by President Clinton, wrote "A Call to Action to Promote Sexual Health and Responsible Sexual Behavior." Prostitutes were one of his sources. He also received advice from the Alan Guttmacher Institute, and Sex Information and Education Council of the United States. Dr. Satcher concluded that there is no scientific evidence that the advice for abstinence until marriage is effective. He urged schools to adopt curricula that praised self-control but handed out contraceptives. In 1994, when Satcher headed the Centers for Disease Control, an $800,000 national advertising campaign advised, "Latex condoms are available in different sizes, colors, and textures. Find one that is right for you."

Many of us are old enough to remember days of innocence, when parents warned us about improper, dangerous behavior. They were uncomfortable in this duty, and were far from perfect in their inability to convey their message, stuttering in their confusion, but they did a better job than present bureaucrats who spell out the facts with pictures. Some of us did not know about sex until late teens and some thought that babies came in some mysterious way from the cabbage patch.

Today we aim to destroy the Boy Scouts because they refuse to allow sexual deviates to be in charge of innocent boys; evil entertainment companies take aim at children with explicit sexual lyrics, R-rated films, and magazines loaded with sexual content. The first 122 pages of the summer catalog for clothing by Abercrombie and Fitch has naked models. The magazine was so explicit that the attorney general of Illinois called for a national boycott of the company. Abercrombie and Fitch responded by wrapping the magazine in cellophane paper!

At Rodeph Sholom School in New York City, a note was sent to all parents this July saying the school "will not be celebrating Mother's Day and Father's Day this year." The reason? Holidays do not enhance writing and arts programs. Such holidays are not positive experiences for all children." Notable in the assumption is that traditional values are discarded. To the extent that traditional values are discredited, we may call in question the validity of our schools. Values are at the center of all education, even those dealing with the natural sciences.

The American Civil Liberties Union filed suit to have a Ten Commandments monument removed from the lawn in Vincennes, Indiana. A similar monument was recently removed from Elkhart because of psychic pain caused to one who did not want it. He rarely saw it, but "I know it's there. It offends me." Such a person offends me. The Supreme Court of Indiana approved the removal of the monument. The ruling stated that monument is opposed to the popular theory of separation of Church and State. The U.S. Supreme Court voted against hearing an appeal.

Why have we lost our sense of godliness? A belief in God has been associated for centuries with a belief in the existence of a Creator. The argument from design was that the world as we know it could not be a result of chance so that someone, or something, must have been responsible for its creation. Evolution threw that theory into doubt. The world as we know it results from natural selection and the rejection of weaker species or those who could not adapt to their circumstances.

Another theory said the life force that surged through all living beings, human as well as animal and vegetable, was the expression of the Creator if not God Himself. This brought the creation theory back into respectability. The weakness of the theory was that Creative Vitality seemed different from a personal God, a Heavenly Father, One to whom we give our all, our life, and whom we obey above all else.

Because of the confusion about the meaning of "God" and the refusal of many to believe that creative power demands our highest virtue, many call themselves atheists or use excuses, as senators do, to do away with the traditional pledge.

The mistake is to define precisely the word "God." The word must be of indefinite definition. The broader, undefined meaning of "God" is that it points to what is ultimate in our life and what we believe is ultimate in life for all people. The ultimate meaning of life for crude people may be sex or money or power. We know what they believe by their behavior. They may have fine talk but their talk is lies. When Clinton or Condit talk of their morality we know their morality not by their talk but by their behavior.

The modern world is wrong when it insists we must know what we mean by "God." It is basic that we do not define the word. God is that which we worship before all else, but we cannot know precisely what this is that we worship before all else. In World War II, Pastor Martin Niemoller was told to speak quietly and say nothing contrary to the teachings of the state.

We are to save the Christian community from being put in the same pot as the world. We must keep ourselves distinct from the world by our virtue.

He spoke against the ultimate voice of the state and was killed the Nazis.

Communism fell because the only religion permitted the people was the religion described by the state. The people demanded freedom. The economic theory of socialism meant poverty. Underneath these practical matters however was an understanding that the voice of the state and the Voice of God were separate and opposed to each other. It was necessary for the state to forbid the functions of the church or to permit only those that were agreeable to the state, but the Voice of God could not be repressed because it is native to man to aspire to something higher and more dignified than crass politics. What is this to which we give our ultimate loyalty? That which demands our ultimate loyalty we call God, and so have all men.

At the moment, youthful Palestinians with the full vigor of their idealism, give their lives to kill the enemy, which happens to be Israelis. Why is their belief in God misleading? Because any action that kills innocent men, women, and children is by definition evil, or is so in our understanding-though it is sanctioned in the Koran.

Muslims oppose the West because they believe we have become a godless society, filled with immorality and perversions; they have a point. If we are not a godless society, filled with immorality and perversions, we are moving in that direction while those who are supposed to lead society are unwilling to do so.

Islam has many contradictions. On the one hand, they try to work with others to promote peace and to eradicate immorality, fear, hate, disease, poverty and injustice. On the other hand they believe in fighting, which is the meaning of "Jihad."

The believers fight in the way of God, and the unbelievers fight in the idols' way. Fight you therefore against the friends of Satan; surely the guile of Satan is ever feeble.

Islamic faith teaches the dead will be resurrected on Judgment Day, and sent to heaven or hell according to how they have lived. Heaven is a place of sensual pleasure where, in the heavenly garden, there will be buxom, dark-eyed virgins for all. Each man could expect seventy such burs who will never be sick, bad-tempered, or jealous. I could not find in the Koran what heaven will grant females! The West may lack sexual purity, but, obviously, Islam is more sexual than it claims.

The evil of Islam is not in the average citizen but in fanatic leaders who have lost touch with the meaning of decent behavior. The Christian tradition has been misled by fanatic leaders in the past, when Christians killed heretics in the name of the faith, but that wickedness has been held in check for centuries. Islam, similarly, must demand civilized values in its leadership.

In his discussion of the 14th Psalm, Martin Buber says that the oppressed are tempted to believe that God has forgotten them; but, no,

. . . the Presence of God appears, even that God who they thought was far from men and their doings, but who is in the refuge of the oppressed.

Buber says men believe either in God or in idols-his nation, art, power, knowledge, money, subjugation of women. Such idols illustrate that man elevates into supreme place what is unworthy to be called God. If a man wishes to repudiate idols he must embrace something superior. He must progress from I to Thou.

I do not believe in a self-naming of God, a self-definition of God before men. The Word of revelation is I am that I am. That which reveals is that which reveals. This which is is, and nothing more. The eternal source of strength streams, the eternal contact persists, the eternal voice sounds forth, and nothing more.