Monday, January 3, 2022
What Do You Value?
This article was written by a 26 yr old college student by the name of Alyssa Ahlgren, who’s in grad school for her MBA. What a GREAT perspecitve…
My Generation Is Blind to the Prosperity Around Us!
I’m sitting in a small coffee shop near Nokomis (Florida) trying to think of what to write about. I scroll through my newsfeed on my phone looking at the latest headlines of presidential candidates calling for policies to “fix” the so-called injustices of capitalism. I put my phone down and continue to look around.
I see people talking freely, working on their MacBook’s, ordering food they get in an instant, seeing cars go by outside, and it dawned on me. We live in the most privileged time in the most prosperous nation and we’ve become completely blind to it.
Vehicles, food, technology, freedom to associate with whom we choose.These things are so ingrained in our American way of life we don’t give them a second thought.
We are so well off here in the United States that our poverty line begins 31 times above the global average. Thirty-One Times!!!
Virtually no one in the United States is considered poor by global standards. Yet, in a time where we can order a product off Amazon with one click and have it at our doorstep the next day, we are unappreciative, unsatisfied, and ungrateful.
Our unappreciation is evident as the popularity of socialist policies among my generation continues to grow. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently said to Newsweek talking about the millennial generation, “An entire generation, which is now becoming one of the largest electorates in America, came of age and never saw American prosperity.”
Never saw American prosperity! Let that sink in.
When I first read that statement, I thought to myself, that was quite literally the most entitled and factually illiterate thing I’ve ever heard in my 26 years on this earth. Many young people agree with her, which is entirely misguided.
My generation is being indoctrinated by a mainstream narrative to actually believe we have never seen prosperity. I know this first hand, I went to college, let’s just say I didn’t have the popular opinion, but I digress.
Why then, with all of the overwhelming evidence around us, evidence that I can even see sitting at a coffee shop, do we not view this as prosperity? We have people who are dying to get into our country.
People around the world destitute and truly impoverished. Yet, we have a young generation convinced they’ve never seen prosperity, and as a result, we elect some politicians who are dead set on taking steps towards abolishing capitalism.
Why? The answer is this,?? my generation has only seen prosperity. We have no contrast. We didn’t live in the great depression, or live through two world wars, the Korean War, The Vietnam War or we didn’t see the rise and fall of socialism and communism.
We don’t know what it’s like to live without the internet, without cars, without smartphones. We don’t have a lack of prosperity problem. We have an entitlement problem, an ungratefulness problem, and it’s spreading like a plague.”
God FIRST!
I. THE DEVOUT RECOGNITION OF GOD SHOULD PRECEDE ALL PHILOSOPHY. The God whom we worship is not a metaphysical idea; a form of thought; a philosophical abstraction; but a living, personal, eternal Being, apart from and prior to all human thought. He is not a creation of the intellect, but the intellect’s Creator. We must begin with Him. Is not this one of the child’s first thoughts, and one which life’s long experience but deepens and confirms — that it was God who created all things? Does not the bare statement carry with it its own conviction? What need is there of proof? Who argues that there is a solid earth on which he stands; a sun shining in midday sky? Who constructs arguments to prove his own existence? And does not God stand at the beginning of all thought and all argument? And is not the denial of Him a sheer and wilful absurdity which no attempt at proof can make even plausible?
II. THE DEVOUT RECOGNITION OF GOD SHOULD PRECEDE ALL SCIENCE. The fact of His existence lies at the foundation of all physical science, and must be admitted as its first and most essential fact. For what is science in general, or a science in particular, but the knowledge of facts — their qualities, relations, and causes — arranged and classified? But if science begins by refusing to admit, or by failing to perceive, the First Fact, and the Great Cause of all things? Does nothing exist but what the knife of the anatomist, or the tests of the chemist can detect? Matter and force do exist, or matter under some plastic power passing through innumerable changes. But what is it? And is this all? Are there no marks of intelligence? — purpose? — will? Is there no distinction of beauty? — of right and wrong? And what are these but marks of the ever-present God? Atheism explains nothing, and Pantheism nothing. No! Science cannot discover God. It is in the light of God’s presence that science is best revealed. Science and philosophy alike presuppose HIM.
III. THE DEVOUT RECOGNITION OF GOD PRECEDES ALL MORALITY AND RELIGION. It lies at the basis of any sound ethical theory, and any true religious system of doctrine and practice. Religion, whether natural or revealed, is based on this fact. It is no more the part of religion than it is of philosophy and science to discover or to demonstrate the existence of God, but to worship Him. (F. J. Falding, D. D.)