Moral issues

Jobs and Deficits: The Moral Equation

October 20, 2011October 21, 2011 by Orthodox Editors

by Rev. Robert A. Sirico –

The Genesis account of creation tells us that from the beginning, humanity was created to work. God puts Adam in the garden to “work and watch over it.” The Scripture provides an insight into our nature: We are all, man and woman, called into this life to find our vocation, the work that is uniquely ours and contributes to the flourishing of the wider community.

This explains why we are naturally so troubled about what appear to be merely economic problems: intractable unemployment and the various schemes put forth by policy makers to spur job creation. But behind the question is the reality that we naturally prefer people to be productive contributors to our economic life.

How we accomplish that is the subject of the debate over our unsustainable budget and debt trajectory. Do we choose those policies that make room for more freedom in the market, unleashing the creative potential of the American worker, business owner and entrepreneur? Or do we default, once more, to political and bureaucratic measures that require heavier burdens of taxation and regulation? [Read more…]

Don’t drink the Kool-Aid

October 19, 2011November 12, 2011 by Orthodox Editors

by Marcia Segelstein –
In the not too distant past, traditionalists theorized that when it came to raising children, the answer was to retreat from the world. Use private or parochial schools. Or even better, homeschool. Raise up a generation of kids who would change the world by trying to raise them outside the world.

To some degree, I concur. Homeschooling and using Christian and other private schools are great options for those who have the time and resources.

I’ve spoken to many parents of young children who are absolutely convinced — even if using public schools — that their kids will be immune to un-Christian and anti-Christian influences. They’ll be able to infuse such strong values in their kids that they won’t be infected by the culture.

I know it works for some, and more power to them. But it doesn’t work for everybody. Not by a long shot. Like it or not, parents can’t control every aspect of their children’s lives: what they’ll overhear at baseball practice, what they’ll see on TV at a neighbor’s house, or on a computer screen while on a playdate. Peer pressure isn’t a fanciful concept: it’s real. [Read more…]

Why Is Class Hatred Morally Superior to Race Hatred?

October 18, 2011October 18, 2011 by Orthodox Editors

by Dennis Prager –

The major difference between Hitler and the Communist genocidal murderers — Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot — was what groups they chose for extermination.

For Hitler, first Jews and ultimately Slavs and other “non-Aryans” were declared the enemy and unworthy of life. For the Communists, the rich — the bourgeoisie, land owners, and capitalists — were labeled the enemy and regarded as unworthy of life.

Hitler mass-murdered on the basis of race, the Communists on the basis of class.

Because the Holocaust was unique in its industrialization of death and in its targeting of every Jew, including babies, for death, the post-World War II world has been rightly obsessed with eradicating racism (but not anti-Semitism!), i.e., the hatred of another solely because of race. But the world has not been obsessed with eradicating the other source of genocide: classism, or the hatred of others based on class. [Read more…]

Judge Judy – Here’s Who You Support With Taxes

October 11, 2011October 14, 2011 by Orthodox Editors

Judge Judy speaks out on where our tax dollars go in the case of Duane Brooks, Jr. who is scamming the government with all of his stipends, subsidies, and assistance – and using none of it for what it was intended for. These are the types of entitled, lazy, and irresponsible individuals your hard work and high taxes help support and enable.

[Read more…]

An Open Letter to a College Freshman

October 11, 2011October 14, 2011 by Orthodox Editors

by Timothy Dalrymple –
At last your time has come. Leaving behind the old world and the deep ruts you carved in the corner of that world that belonged to you, you’re off to explore undiscovered countries, to join a new and ever-replenishing society of fascinating people and learned scholars and impassioned artists and driven achievers, off to a place where the world is new and so are you. Whether or not your college years will be “the best years of your life,” they will almost certainly be among the most transformative.

The question is whether that transformation will be for the better. Unmoored from the people and places that once defined you, you’ll feel a fluidity in your identity that’s both thrilling and frightening. You may feel as though you can be anyone and become anything. I pray that you will become who you are — the individual you most truly and deeply are, the one God dreamt of when he made you — and not the person that you or your parents or your friends think you should be. In service to that end, I thought I would offer seven pieces of advice. [Read more…]

Steve Jobs Changed the World: Adoption Changed His

October 7, 2011October 8, 2011 by Orthodox Editors

Steve Jobs adoption pro-life by Ryan Bomberger –
The news hit me in the gut. I couldn’t believe I was seeing those few numbers, communicating his passing, beneath his photo: 1955-2011. Steve Jobs has, literally, changed the world. I’m typing this on my Mac, will check my emails and Twitter status on my iPad, and will stay in touch with everyone I love through my iPhone.

As a creative professional, his visionary work has helped my own visions become reality.

But his vision, his destiny and his ability to affect people, globally, may never have happened. Jobs was adopted as a baby and loved by his parents, Clara and Paul Jobs. The baby they took into their hearts and home had a purpose in life that would be unleashed by the powerful act of adoption. [Read more…]

Why Pastors Must Be Free To Preach On Politics

October 5, 2011October 5, 2011 by Orthodox Editors

Constitution Freedom of Speech and Religion by Alan Sears –
On Sunday, October 2, hundreds of pastors all over the country did something an astonishingly large number of their fellow Americans had forgotten they had the God-given right to do: namely, address political issues and candidates during a worship service.

Across the nearly 60 years since then U.S. Senator Lyndon Johnson pushed through an amendment to the IRS code threatening any church or pastor who gets involved in politics with IRS reprisals – specifically, the loss of the church’s tax-exempt status – conventional wisdom has congealed around the idea that pastors must stay out of politics. As extraordinary as that assertion is to anyone with even a cursory knowledge of our nation’s history, it’s a theme that’s been hammered home unrelentingly for decades by groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and Americans United for Separation of Church and State. [Read more…]

The ‘Hunger’ Hoax

October 5, 2011 by Orthodox Editors

by Thomas Sowell –
Twenty years ago, hysteria swept through the media over “hunger in America.”

Dan Rather opened a CBS Evening News broadcast in 1991 declaring, “one in eight American children is going hungry tonight.” Newsweek, the Associated Press and the Boston Globe repeated this statistic, and many others joined the media chorus, with or without that unsubstantiated statistic.

When the Centers for Disease Control and the Department of Agriculture examined people from a variety of income levels, however, they found no evidence of malnutrition among those in the lowest income brackets. Nor was there any significant difference in the intake of vitamins, minerals and other nutrients from one income level to another.

That should have been the end of that hysteria. But the same “hunger in America” theme reappeared years later, when Senator John Edwards was running for Vice President. And others have resurrected that same claim, right up to the present day. [Read more…]

It Is Not the Economy, Stupid

September 30, 2011September 30, 2011 by Orthodox Editors

America Liberty Freedom God by Bruce Walker –
Life is the pursuit of truth, of love, of honor, and of liberty. America was created not for purposes of comfort or money. It was created so that each of us could seek, unmolested by public needs, a private path to what is right.

Watching the Republican debates, listening to the droning of our dreary presidential flop, reading what wise pundits on the right as well as the left say, one might assume that economics was the standard of all policy and politics. Twenty years ago, when Bill Clinton ran for president, his mantra was clear: “It’s the economy, stupid!”

I pray that we do not surrender to the damnable vice of utter materialism. If we do, nothing can save us. America is a rich nation which is being drained and hobbled by those who hate it with unbridled venom. “God damn America!” Obama’s preacher screeched. All over the world and all over our nation, grotesque little monsters frown and sneer at our country. [Read more…]

Fr. Gregory: Aren’t Taxes Immoral?

September 22, 2011September 22, 2011 by Orthodox Editors

Taxes are Immoral by Fr. Gregory Jensen –
“In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” ~ Benjamin Franklin

Does the government have a moral right to levy and collect taxes on its citizenry? Or is taxation merely a legalized form of governmental robbery?

While I’ve now and then heard people argue that taxation has no moral basis, I must confess that I find this assertion deeply troubling. As a matter of prudence, not everything which is immoral can, or should, be illegal. There are a variety of reasons for this chief among them is that as a practical matter the enforcement of a law can sometime cause more harm than good.

For example, the worship of God is a moral obligation both in the Scriptures and under at least some theories of natural law (see Romans 1). However as a prudential matter, a law that required people to worship God would invariably lead to social unrest. [Read more…]