THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

I cannot get anybody to understand that the Declaration of Inddependence is a SILLY document beause it was written in the middle of a WAR.

There may have been a truly objective delaration of principles written inthe middle of a war by those in charge of fighting it, but I don't know of any.

The Declaration began by declaring all men, euqal, which a French libeal might have taken seriously, but nobody else. It then went on to delcare "inalienable rights." If they believed those rights were inalienable, there would have been no war.

Then they blamed everything onthe kind, not parliament. You would have to be a true ignoramus on British Government to bleieve THAT. TO have been a literate man who had lived his life under British Law, you would have had to be insane.

But nobody can understand ANY of this.

C.S. Lewis would get terribly upset when he woud hear what is spewed from every pulpit today: That Chrisitianity is good because it leads to a good society.

Lewish kept repeating, the ONLY question about Christianity is whether it is TRUE or not.

Preachers today talk about "Chrisitan" principles, by which they mean the Old Testament. Actually, Jesus repeated over and over and over that he came about NONE of that. When he criticized the rich, it was not for social revolution, it was because they were damning their own eternal souls. Compared to the loss of one soul, said Jesus, social justice is nothing.

The problem with this, of course, is htat it puts all your eggs in one basket. The preacher stops being a general social commentator and puts his entire life, his entire religion and, above all, his own livelihood on the bet that there is such a thing as eternal salvation.

In other words, those who do not believe him think he is a superstitious fool, and he can't take it.

So they stake everything on one sentence Jesus uttered, that he came to fulfill the law, not to replace it.

Nobody pays the slightest bit of attnetion to the fact that the Declaration of Independence was written in the middle of a war. Nobody pays the slightest bit of attention to the fact that when Jesus said, "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and unto God what is God's" he was avoiding a deadly trap set for him by hte peopl ehwo asked him the qiestion.

He didn't even look them inthe eye. He was not procaliming truth. He wasnot defending Caesar's rights. He kept drawing inthe sand for a reason.

But none of that matters. The fact that Jesus said he came to fulfill the law not to destroy it was the ONLY thing he could have said if he did want to be stoned on the spot. So every word of the Old Testament is as valid as every word Jesus spoke, and that's good because the Old Testament is full of worldly wisdom rather than an obsession about salvation.

If you think Jesus always said exactly what he meant you have never lived in a totalitarian society.

Hell, you've never lived in THIS society!

So people keep prattling on to me about how salvation would be nice, but it's all about Christian Principles leading to a Good World, THIS world.

That's what ****I**** believe. Please stop twisting it.