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Parents teach their children about honesty and integrity. Religions codify such precepts, the learned wisdom of thousands of years of learning to live together.
Then these children grow up to see presidential campaigns and life in today’s culture. They see candidates surge ahead as a direct result of dishonorable lying, cheating, innuendo, polarization. They see the very people who most publicly exhort ethical values become the most susceptible and responsive to this evil. We are teaching our youth that cheating will get them ahead in the world. Necessarily, we also teach them that people who see through the deceptions are to be reviled and bad-mouthed. We teach them that cheating can be in aid of the family, and must therefore be good, and by extension patriotic. We teach them that there is no real honor, except among fools. We teach that it is pro forma to preach the values we fully intend to violate each day, that parental ethical teachings and the socialization lessons of religion are dead ends.
That voice inside keeps saying this is wrong! I DO believe! Despite what the evil force at work in our culture today does I cannot give up and join in the race to the bottom! You hear it, too, even over the loud screeching of the Michael Savages and the Michael Reagans and the other preachers of hatred and violence.
We still have more hell to go through. When we come out the other side, the evil will stay behind, where it likes to be, in the darkness.
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