Submitted by M Tovey (United States), Jun 15, 2020 at 12:51
Morphing Secular Seditions to Society – A Differing Memory
There is the saying; when as a child I thought as a child; when as a man, I should think as a man. To be sure, this is a paraphrased version, but it does speak to this perspective: as a man thinks, so he is.
In roughly the same timeframe of Dr. Pipes' recall of societal changes in America specifically, perceptions of how Americans were subjected to changing ideologies varied dramatically, but the drama was more noticeable in the Californian environment that potentially anywhere else in the United States, let alone the declines of empire in the rest of the world and the global aftermaths. American stood alone for decades after being created from the most novel and noble aspirations of a government started by a decidedly inspired group of outcasts from former citizens of former empires. Freedom and liberty were not bywords – rarely would men die for wanting to worship an Almighty Sovereign, yet they did so here for the freedom to worship God and not the British (or French) king.
Fast forward nearly two hundred years, and the aspect of freedom to worship in liberty was challenged and redefined as being freedom to not worship supersedes the freedom to worship. America has been paying for this seditious rejections of Divine Providence ever since; and it will not stop until it is over.
Now to Dr. Pipes' contention, is the sunset of America's republican form of a freedom loving society on the horizon? This remains to be seen – but seeing the possibility was not in this observer's frame of reference, until as recently as the original attempt to down the Twin Towers. The seed of sedition was planted well before this, but the sense of the challenge to America's place in the global society took on a new meaning after the fall of the Soviet Union revealed that Soviet Communism was not America's greatest foe.
We now digress back to the California model of how a republic can be subverted, then become subversive in repressive ideologies, such things being observed in erudite and obtuse philosophical meanderings of the intellectual elite having been insinuated in the halls of education from a very long time ago, then coming of age in the mid-twentieth century; now being taunted as the new way of compressed/repressed thinking that is being foisted upon once free-thinking Americans; who are now being told to bow/bend their knees in homage to the rebellion.
And herein is this main contention; rebellion (to be distinguished here from revolution) has been in the works for longer than this observer's lifetime and from Dr. Pipes' time frame as well. America was able to withstand the regression back to tethered societies as long as Divinely provided freedom was considered worth fighting for and intervention against repressive governments were part of a national calling. This sacrificial thinking was seductively transferred to a global mindset, which in and of itself, was potentially noble; but the sedition ran ahead and the seduction was persuasive and indefensible.
So, as we have posited, is Dr. Pipes right? Again, that remains to be seen.
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