OCPAC Archives: St. Patrick and Education Choice

Published Monday, March 18, 2024

OKLAHOMA HISTORY CENTER

800 Nazih Zuhdi Drive, OKC, OK

THIS WEDNESDAY

Milton Friedman has cast a powerful shadow over the educational movement in America. This Wednesday, his organization's Vice President of Policy and Advocacy will present the solutions for educational transformation at both the state and national levels!

Bring a friend!!!

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ALSO THIS WEDNESDAY!!!

MAO's AMERICA

The Books Are Here!

A few of you have not picked up your copies.

If you purchased a copy in the January meeting . . .

Your copy of Mao's America

will be available this

Wednesday at the entry table.

Come and be a part of building

an informed Oklahoma!

Bring your family and friends Wednesday

Bring your pastor and buy his lunch!

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Lunch is optional for $10

Doors Open 11 AM

Meeting Noon to 1:15 PM

OKLAHOMA HISTORY CENTER

800 Nazih Zuhdi Drive, OKC, OK

$5 ENTRY FEE

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BOB LINN

The Footsteps of St. Patrick

When the Irish captured the sixteen-year-old English boy we know as St. Patrick, it was the beginning of the national transformation of Ireland. For six years, he shepherded his captor’s sheep.

It was during those six years that, by divine providence, Patrick devoted his life to the One the Scriptures call the great shepherd of the sheep and began to consider a future mission to bring Christ to the Irish.

He escaped to England where he spent the next 15 years studying for the priesthood. After his ordination, he returned in 432 A.D. to Ireland, inaugurating one of the most transformative missionary endeavors in history.

St. Patrick transformed a nation.

As Christianity developed,

it transformed both men

and governments.

Today, we a just under 200 years shy of celebrating the 1,000th year anniversary of the Magna Carta (June 1215). It established the idea that both the people and their king are under the authoritative rule of law. Many note that the Magna Carta owes its birth to the Christian scholarship of Alfred the Great (848 A.D.-899 A.D.) and his legal code.

So developed was Christendom by 1643 A.D. that Ireland, Scotland, the British House of Lords, the British House of Commons, and King Charles II all signed the Solemn League and Covenant which read, in part:

And because these kingdoms are guilty of many sins and provocations against God, and his sons, Jesus Christ . . . we profess and declare before God and the world, our unfeigned desire to be humbled for our own sins, and for the sins of these kingdoms . . . And this covenant we make in the presence of almighty God . . . to the glory of God, the enlargement of the kingdom of Jesus Christ and the peace and tranquility of Christian kingdoms and commonwealths.

As Christianity continued to flourish throughout Europe, its impact brought the Scientific Revolution.

Christendom produced men who based scientific inquiry on the Bible they loved. Among those earliest Christian men were Copernicus, Kepler, Descartes, and Boyle. Sir Isaac Newton wrote more theology than science, but his impact on the world through his “hobby” led Einstein to say:

His clear and wide ideas will forever retain their significance as the foundation on which our modern conceptions of physics have been built.” Einstein himself operated on Biblical foundations and considered science a discipline which uncovers the work of our Creator.

James Hannam, PhD (history of science, University of Cambridge), is the author of The Genesis of Science: How the Christian Middle Ages Launched the Scientific Revolution.

He writes concerning the Christians who began in the Middle Ages to develop the science that became the scientific revolution:

For them, science was the study of God’s creation. The metaphysical assumptions of Christianity, unlike those of the Greeks or even Muslims, turned out to be extremely conducive to uncovering true knowledge about nature. They weren’t trying to, but it was Christians who laid the foundations for modern science.

They were simply studying God’s creation so that they could become better theologians and Christians. The metaphysical background to Christianity turned out to be uniquely conducive to successfully understanding the working of nature.

Atheist historians such as Richard Carrier are wrong to say Christians neglected science and that pagans were on the point of a scientific revolution. On the contrary, Christianity was a necessary, if not sufficient, cause of the flowering of modern science.

In addition to establishing the foundations of science, Christendom produced the great music of Western Civilization.

On the heels of the German Reformation came Bach, the devout Lutheran known as the father of modern musical composition. He is the pride of the early 18th century.

CHRISTIANITY & BASKETBALL

I may as well point out, as we are in the midst of March Madness in the form of the NCAA basketball tournament, were it not for the Presbyterians, we’d not even have basketball!

Dr. James Naismith, Presbyterian minister, invented basketball

The ball was tossed into the peach basket!

Christianity is the foundation of

the American form of Government.

Dr. Benjamin Rush is considered to be one of the three most important founders of the American Republic. In his Defense of the Bible as a Schoolbook, he explained:

In contemplating the political institutions in the United States, I lament that we waste so much time and money in punishing crimes, and take so little pains to prevent them. We profess to be republicans, and yet we neglect the only means of establishing and perpetuating our republican forms of government, that is the universal education of our youth in the principles of Christianity, by means of the Bible; for this divine book, above all others, favors that equality among mankind, that respect for just laws, and all those sober and frugal values, which constitute the soul of republicanism.

Teaching the Bible to all America's youth is fundamental to American civics. There is simply no way to understand our founding documents without the commas our founders referenced. It is not a mission to convert them in school. Bible reading simply insures they are not unsophisticated and void of philosophical reference points.

Early in our Republic, President John Adams wrote:

Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

Without a citizenry in possession of an understanding of the history of Christendom and the content of the Scripture, it is not possible to be ruled by our constitution.

Leftist influence on nearly 100% of America’s children through the government’s system of schools has created in America a cultural mismatch for our form of government.

So traumatized is the culture today that Baron Eric von Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s towering book, Leftism, is proven true each day. He writes:

The imminent fear in the American noncommitted right is that the left . . .is riding the Wave of the Future!

How otherwise, could one understand that temperamentally very conservative boards of trustees of colleges and universities have repeatedly hired professors notorious for their leftist ideas?

How could one understand that archconservative American businessmen have sent their sons and especially their daughters to institutions of learning equally well known for their exorbitant rates and their extreme leftism, a leftism pertaining to politics, history, philosophy, economics – and morals?

How often do well-paid Marxists in such places indirectly and even directly tell intellectually innocent maidens – at their hard-toiling fathers’ expense – that their procreators are real scoundrels and blood-suckers?

Yet the hard-toiling fathers know all this and both parents accept this state of affairs with a sigh.

The American conservative stands in need of a magnanimous aggressiveness, a will to win, coupled with the liberality of those who believe in real diversity [individual liberty!].

His highly acclaimed sequel is Leftism Revisited.

____________

Marxist ideological propaganda whether emanating from the schoolhouse, the Sunday School, or the dinner table prepares a society for masochistic rot and is a cancer which must be stopped. To remain silent is to observe a people commit wholesale suicide when national therapy is available.

St. Patrick introduced a nation to Christ.

We must play our part just as he played his. This Wednesday, we will address the things we can do to right the ship through remediating American education.

Dmitri Myerezhkovski wrote in his brilliant book on the Communist Revolution, Tsarstvo Antikhrista:

Not on account of their own strength are the Bolsheviks powerful but only thanks to your weakness. They know what they want, but you do not know what you want.

Let’s shed our fears and the

defeatist theology we have

listened to far too long.

I hope to see you this Wednesday!

AND, DON'T FORGET!

ANOTHER BOLD WOMAN

XI VAN FLEET'S BOOKS ARRIVED

If you purchased

MAO'S AMERICA

You may get your copy this Wednesday!

Come help us change the world.

See you Wednesday!

_____________

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