Welcome to the Liberty Insider.
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This is the program
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designed to
bring you up to speed
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and give you information
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and understanding on
religious liberty events
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in the US and around the world.
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My name is Lincoln Steed,
Editor of Liberty Magazine,
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a religious liberty journal
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published for
well over 100 years now
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by the
Seventh-day Adventist Church,
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and distributed to many
people in the community,
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in particular,
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politicians and
leaders in government,
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mayors and so on,
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all around the US and
indeed around the world.
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I want to share some
things with you today
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that I think are very pertinent
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to where we are in
these tumultuous times,
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very tumultuous worldwide,
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but in particular,
in the United States.
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In the whole impeachment
and election scenario,
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many people are wondering
just where this will go.
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I discovered a book
quite a few years ago,
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when I was working back
in my homeland of Australia,
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at the publishing
house in a little town
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called Warburton,
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this publishing
house that's again been run
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for over 100 years
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by the
Seventh-day Adventist Church
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and I used to sit there
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editing different
magazines and books on occasion,
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on the second level,
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and now and then I would go
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into the library
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and leave
through some of the books
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that they had
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and I noticed on
many of the books
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that as I opened the pages,
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a fine dust, a
brown dust would fall out.
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And then on some of the others,
I saw that it was like silt,
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layered up between the
pages and I asked questions,
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and I discovered
that the nearby stream
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had flooded in the mid 30s.
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And the water would come up
into the second story level,
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a literal deluge,
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almost an apocalypse
for what they were doing.
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And this one
book that I discovered
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was called The Christ We Forget.
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And I've got it at home now.
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And I've read and reread
and just recently read it
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and I noticed early
on that it was written
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by an English
journalist and politician,
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and of course the Christian,
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written by this man at
the end of World War I.
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And today, even historians
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and of course,
Europeans talk of World War I
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as the Great War.
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Not the war to end all wars
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that was thought so at the time,
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but wars and rumors of
wars till the end of time,
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according to Jesus Christ.
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But it was cataclysmic
to society, to civilization.
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And in the preface to his book,
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I want to share with
you just a few paragraphs,
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he said this, before the war,
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"It seemed almost unnecessary
to find time for the Bible.
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Many of us were making money.
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Others were busily earning it."
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Little irony there.
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"Our children were
getting on nicely at school.
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Certainly there
were grave evils,
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like drink, and
bitter social inequalities,
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and rancorous
political quarrels,
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and reckless extravagances,
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which gave us uneasy
twinges of conscience.
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But we drifted, in
tens, hundreds of thousands,
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from public worship.
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We ceased to pray.
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We quietly laid aside the Bible.
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Then suddenly we
were brought face to face
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with facts which
we had forgotten.
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One of those facts was
death, another was pain,
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another was suspense,
another was national duty,
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another was suspense.
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We learnt that
life is not a game,
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but a grim,
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heroic combat
between good and evil.
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For this crisis," he says,
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commenting on his observation,
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"For this crisis,
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we found that
we were unprepared.
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Men and women fled for refuge,
in some cases, to spiritualism,
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crystal-gazing,
and fortune-telling.
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Pleasure and romance
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played their part as comforters.
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Lives that had been frivolous
were consecrated to war work.
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And there was
the growing splendor
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of national unity
and personal sacrifice.
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Hopes of a better
dawn have encouraged us.
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We are sure that
faith will return."
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But then he says,
"But faith in what?"
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And at the end
of his introduction,
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he says, "We need a
revival, a new birth of life,
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a resurrection."
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And he concludes by saying,
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"We must all long for
the time, when once more,
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this same Jesus who died
shall be known again among men,
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not as a crucifix
merely, or as a shadow,
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but in all of
His fullness of love,
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of power, of wisdom, of
suffering, and a victory.
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Far, far happier would
be both homes and hearts.
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There would be more laughter
amongst us as of children,
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better pictures
and nobler literature,
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more wholesome pleasures,
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and the grand outburst
of missionary enterprise."
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You know, that's an
interesting little snapshot
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of what it was like in England
at the end of the Great War,
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moral meltdown,
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and the substitution
unless I'm misreading him,
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a substitution of a
sense of nationalism,
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and civil optimism
for deep spirituality.
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The same thing is in
the process of happening,
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certainly in the United States.
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I think it's not
just a religionist,
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anyone with an understanding
of history will see that,
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that the old faiths
not just Christianity,
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but primarily Christianity,
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but all the
religious faiths are struggling
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to assert themselves
against the new secularity.
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Science as it's often
ban it even in discussion.
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You know, we are
a scientific people,
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supposedly, we follow knowledge.
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Like Tennyson
said, like, like a star.
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But in reality,
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the modern man is
not overly logical,
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no more than ancient man.
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And a lot of sciences ignored,
as we've seen at the moment,
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even by our leaders,
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who should have a
little more respect
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for the most obvious rationality
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of science.
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In reality, we
are drifting toward
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a sort of a secular dream time,
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when we forget the
true faith of our fathers.
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Many in the United
States have seen this,
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the so-called Christian
Right are troubled mightily
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by the decline of religion.
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I listened
recently on public radio
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to the chief ethicist
from the Southern Baptist,
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discussing how
it's affected his church
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and he says, you know,
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our church
attendance is radically down.
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And amazingly, even
during the COVID disaster,
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he says, many people
have forsaken the church,
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and he doesn't understand
why because you would think,
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in a time of stress,
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people would reach for religion.
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But, of course,
they're not encouraged that way
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with social distancing.
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And the idea that
to meet in churches
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literally
dangerous to your health.
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But what we have
seen and we'll see more of
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is that those who are custodians
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of historical
religion in the United States,
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and those who have
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a political
vision at the same time
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are determined to somehow do
what the author of that book,
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The Christ We Forget was saying,
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somehow, they want to
reinsert religion into society.
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Now, how do you do that?
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The goal during the Vietnam War,
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I remember very well,
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since I was
subject to the draft,
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I watched it closely
and they were always saying,
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a battle for hearts and minds.
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They mostly
persuaded with napalm
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and scorched earth policies.
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But still it was indeed a
battle for hearts and minds.
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And the
so-called religious right,
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the moral majority,
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those people that are anxious
to advance faith in the country
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have that same problem.
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They see America
slipping away as it were,
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and how do you save it?
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And I'm afraid that they will do
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what has happened
over and over again
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in the past.
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They will seek a
legislative agenda
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to require people
to discover religion.
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And when I talk
about religious liberty,
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I've told people
over and over again,
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there's a simple
litmus test that you can apply
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as to whether religious
liberty is functioning.
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If there is coercion involved,
it is not religious freedom,
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even if people are
going through the motions
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of religion and
religious practice.
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And so this is
the great conundrum,
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the great contradiction
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that is facing the United States
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at the moment.
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You can read any
number of articles
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that point out that
clearly the United States
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and indeed the western world
is in need of a moral renewal.
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It's suffering a
crisis of confidence.
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You know, it's not
the economy dropping
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because of COVID.
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It's not trade imbalances.
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All of those things
are rather symptomatic.
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Even as this program
began, with the technicians,
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we were talking about,
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you know, what's happening now
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and, you know, where
will this go and so on.
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And what is obvious.
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We were talking about too
how civilizations come and go.
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What is obvious
to most any observer
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is that the
great American empire
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for want of a better word,
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this liberal guideposts
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for much of the modern
world is really floundering.
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It can't openly say
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that it wants to
conquer the world,
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it can't openly say
that it wants to bring
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a lifestyle to
the rest of the world
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because China and
other wannabes now
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are holding out
the consumerist carrot
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as much as the US.
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We can't easily say
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that we're
trying to Christianize
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the rest of the world,
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that would be
constitutionally inappropriate
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and inaccurate
about our society.
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Something is missing.
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Something is missing.
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But we are
clearly on a declining arc
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as far as a coherent society.
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And some of the
evidences of that
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are even social scientists
in other parts of the world,
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most famously, in Russia.
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They're positing that the
US is about to break apart.
00:12:02.92\00:12:06.09
I don't think so both personally
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or as a matter of prophecy.
00:12:08.56\00:12:09.99
But it is a moment
of truth and crisis.
00:12:10.03\00:12:13.53
Something must be done.
00:12:13.56\00:12:16.87
Stay with us.
00:12:16.90\00:12:18.23
And I'll come back shortly
to continue this discussion
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about where we are today
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and maybe parallels to
great crisis of the past
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and what crisis
lies ahead of us.
00:12:27.98\00:12:30.15