Church, State, & Civil Disobedience: Dan Fisher at OCPAC Foundation Published Monday, August 14, 2023 AT THE HISTORY CENTER THIS WEDNESDAY DAN FISHER So well did our founders feather the political bed of the American Republic and so well has it been vigorously defended that we have become their complacent offspring. We have little sense that the cultural battle raging around is not a circumstance to endure, but a war to prosecute in His name. We are to pray that His Kingdom would manifest on this earth (Matthew 6) as we work to make our culture a Christian culture in obedience to His command in Matthew 28. Dan Fisher has made it his life’s theme to take up the banner of men like Dietrich Bonhoeffer and those feisty 18th century Presbyterians on whom the King of England blamed the American War for independence. Dan will make the point at this Wednesday’s luncheon that not only is civic engagement proper for the Christian, but it is central to his duty to mankind. The devout Christian will be seen nowhere on the side line. The saints of God are an engaged lot who will not stand idly by as a culture withers before the onslaught of secular tyranny. His highly-acclaimed presentation, the Black Robed Regiment, has proclaimed powerfully on stage, in film, in books, and through oratory, that it is the church which moves men and nations. It is therefore upon our own shoulders that God has laid the mantle of cultural recovery. The state, the nation, and the people of the world look to us as the world’s beacon of hope, freedom, and prosperity of the human spirit. He will deliver a message of victory as he unleashes the content of his most recent book, Unlimited Submission? He will have copies available this Wednesday. Come and be a part of building an informed Oklahoma! Bring your family and friends Wednesday to the Oklahoma History Center. Bring your pastor and buy his lunch! The future of a nation depends upon its shepherds to guard, protect, and guide the people of God that we may perform our roles well in both family and state. Please bring your friends, family, church leaders, and your pastors! $5 ENTRY FEE Tax-deductible donations accepted at door. SEE YOU AT THE WEDNESDAY LUNCHEON ___________  WEDNESDAY LUNCH Doors open 11:00 AM $5 entry fee Tax-deductible donations accepted at door.  Optional Lunch 11:00 AM Meeting NOON to 1:15 PM  Optional Lunch: $10 Find us at Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. TABLE of CONTENTS BOB LINN The Nature of Mankind The Nature of a Nation  TULSA PUBLIC SCHOOLS Fourteen Years of Documented Pain & Suffering LAST WEEK Dr. Lauren Schwartz Dr. Miriam Grossman | Dan Crenshaw TWO WEEKS AGO Ryan Walters Trevor Loudon  MARK YOUR CALENDER State Board of Education BOB LINN The Nature of Mankind The Nature of a Nation In Kafka’s world, a world in which God is conspicuously absent, man is a plaything; he can be turned into an ape or a giant bug in the blink of an eye … ~ Michael Walsh, The Devil’s Pleasure Palace ~ Kafka, The Trail The voice of Christianity in the affairs of mankind is the only conceptually resonant ideological thesis by which human beings may flourish economically, intellectually, physically, emotionally, and socially. At the point that the atheistic foundation of secularism is allowed to remove the concept of transcendence (our divine origin) from our public arenas, our classrooms, our government, and our social institutions, we will have, as a people, committed cultural suicide. As the great Russian novelist, Fyodor Dostoevsky, would have put it: To kill the presence of God in man, is to kill man himself. The Marxist revolution, which has swept America’s institutions, does more than merely affirm atheism. Marxism is, at its core, a concept of reality which was conceived, at every level, upon the ultimate presupposition of atheism. The Italian intellectual, Augusto Del Noce, warned that the Marxist insurgency is a revolution to replace religion (Christianity) with politics (governmental tyranny) and to move mankind to nihilism, emptiness, and life with no ultimate purpose. The final phase of humanism is the death of God in all our schools, it is the removal of God from every level of our institutions and our government, and it ends in the removal of God from man himself. The pathway of atheism empties man of the sacred which is his only tie to teleological hope. The loss of teleology means there is no map to either a present or a future of profound significance. It is an existence with absolutely no purpose. In his analysis of the essential characteristics of nations, former professor of international relations and Senior Research Fellow at Stanford University, Dr. Angelo Codevilla, observed the way atheism destroys nations and peoples: Throughout the European continent, politics has trained people to forget the soul. Communist governments everywhere put religion under ministries whose purpose was to banish it from public life first, then from private life as well. Fyodor Dostoevsky had foreseen it: The socialist movement would forcibly banish God from the Russian soul and would fill Russia with nihilists. Codevilla’s analysis made it clear to him that Christianity was the necessary element of a benevolent civilization: No issues in public life are more defining of regimes than those that deal directly with man’s relationship to God, as well as with everything that touches religion. There is not now and never has been a better predictor of prosperity, family, and civility than the faithful practice of Christianity and Judaism. The prevalence of religion, its substance, and the regime’s attitude toward it have affected the character of all nations. Perhaps his most theologically profound statement is found in his The Character of Nations, where he states: When a church is in any way subject to political authority, it loses the one claim by which it can trump politics – namely, that it speaks for the transcendent authority of God. Quoting Del Noce once more: “Communism relies on the opium of earthly happiness.” Communism's paradigm is that people are momentary flashes in a series of hedonistic but meaningless markers on history's pathway. It is a political theory based on the words of the fool, for we read in Luke 12:19, 20, that it is the fool who says, “eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.” When concluding his book, The Drama of Atheist Humanism, French Cardinal and scholar, Henri de Lubac, noted in his chapter, The Bankruptcy of Atheism that “one of Dostoevsky’s aims, indeed his chief aim, is to criticize eudaemonism.” Eudaemonism is pronounced in a variety of slightly different ways close to "YOU-DIE' monism" or "You DEMON' ism." It is a theory that the highest ethical goal is happiness. In The Devil's Pleasure Palace, Michael Walsh gave Americans a brilliant critique of American culture and the Marxist movement which is dismantling it. He writes: The goal of Critical Theory [Marxism] was to reduce human beings to the level of animals (“If it feels good, do it.”) and to deny the transcendent component that had driven creative artists for centuries. With the divine core of human identity (transcendence) removed from our schools, universities, and major institutions, man is without a compass. Left with the loneliness of a non-transcendent, one-dimensional existence, mankind can only pursue the hopeless course of hedonism which has unraveled for so many today into depression, psychosis, and a search for help in what is being discovered as the physically and psychologically impossible world of transgenderism. Having closed the door on the transcendent, we have invited in the spooks who inhabit the realm of the irrational. It is eudaemonism ("just be happy") unleashed and dangerous. The desperate search for an earthly paradise without God has become dark and chaotic. As Michael Walsh points out in the closing pages of his book, The Devils Pleasure Palace: Eden, just as it did in Milton’s Paradise Lost, gave way to chaos. As Goethe’s Satan-figure, Mephistopheles, gloats: Now we are already again at the end of our joke, where the mind goes mad for you humans. ___________ Postscript God, the Church, and Oklahoma Politics The Marxist insurgence into America’s institutions is pressing toward completion. Embedded in the American mind is the decidedly un-American mantra, “separation of church and state.” It is a concept not in the U.S. constitution, but it was front and center in Lenin’s atheistic Soviet Constitution. Vladimir Lenin mandated the separation of church and state in the Soviet Union in 1918. That mantra was repeated and falsely attributed to the U.S. Constitution by Oklahoma’s Attorney General, Gentner Drummond, in an interview with Politico last month on July 27, 2023. As Oklahoma's leftists do with regularity, Drummond made the statement as if the Communist policies separating the church from the affairs of the state had already replaced America’s God-honoring founding documents. Recently, Deborah Gist, Tulsa Public School (TPS) Superintendent, and Stacey Woolley, the President of the TPS Board reprimanded school board member, E’lena Ashley, for a brief prayer in the name of the one whose name is emblazoned upon the foundations of Western Civilization. E'lena Ashley prayed at a TPS graduation ceremony in the name of the one whose date of entry into human history (celebrated around the world as Christmas) defines the world’s calendar system. E'lena Ashley spoke the name of the one to whom the founders of Western Civilization publicly bowed their knee. TPS asked that E'lena Ashley issue an apology for naming the central figure of the most widely published and distributed book in the history of mankind. The actions of TPS administration indicate complicity in the culturally pernicious ideology of Vladimir Lenin, his Soviet Constitution, atheism, and a commitment to the principles of a nation who represents one of the America's most outspoken enemies. Those who espouse the Communist principle of the sharp separation of church and state espouse a position of sedition to the United States of America. The concept of separation of church and state represents more than the core values of America's most dangerous enemies around the world. The concept is at odds with our nation's founding documents, its historic roots in a very public devotion to Christ, and to the Christianity which is the foundation of Western literature, science, government, music, and all that is great and wonderful about civilization. American soldiers have not bled and died for the political policies of Vladimir Lenin and his atheism. It is past time for the church to escort the world’s political bullies off the playground and work to restore a civil (Christian) society where all men are honored because, as our Declaration of Independence declares: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights. So much for atheism in American Government So much for the separation of church and state. A few thousand of you read this newsletter each week. I would challenge you to connect with us through our meetings, or by email and get involved in bolstering the Christian cultural foundations of Oklahoma that we may cast a light on our nation, the last bastion of freedom in the world. Christianity is the very foundation of human thought. It is the foundation of free and prosperous societies. We are in desperate need of returning our nation and our state to Biblical foundations. Thank you for your activism. _________ This Wednesday's luncheon! 11:00 AM Doors open 11:00 AM Lunch Available NOON to 1:15 PM Meeting Oklahoma History Center 800 Nazih Zuhdi Dr., OKC, OK 73105 God bless! TULSA PUBLIC SCHOOLS FOURTEEN YEARS IN THE NEWS ADMINISTRATORS DEFLECT THREE MINUTE VIDEO Finally, a leader who will fix the problems in Tulsa Public Schools Three Minute Video here LAST WEEK DR. LAUREN SCHWARTZ DR. MIRIAM GROSSMAN (Video) U.S. Congressman DAN CRANSHAW (Video) Watch Dr. Lauren Schwartz here Trans Testimony to U.S. Congress by Chloe Cole here Watch Dr. Grossman and Congressman Crenshaw here Watch Complete Meeting here TWO WEEKS AGO RYAN WALTERS TREVOR LOUDON Watch Ryan Walters here Watch Trevor Loudon here Watch Complete Meeting here Watch Trevor Loudon at Liberty Church here MAKE YOUR CHRISTIANITY PUBLIC: MAKE PLANS TO ATTEND WITH A FRIEND August 24, 2023 Thursday 9:30 am State Superintendent of Public Instruction, Ryan Walters, and the State Department of Education, invite you to attend their August 24th public meeting. Your comments and presence are sought as the foundation of the future of Oklahoma's children is being established. The SDE offices are on the northeast lawn of the Oklahoma State Capitol. PLEASE MAKE PLANS TO ATTEND: State Department of Education Oliver Hodge Education Building 2500 N. Lincoln Blvd, OKC, OK Thursday, August 24, 2023 8:30 a.m. Gather for fellowship and prayer. 9:00 a.m. Sign in for option to speak. 9:30 a.m. SDE meeting begins. OCPAC FOUNDATION is a 501 (c) (3). Gifts are tax-deductible. Bring your checkbook this Wednesday! Make your tax-deductible donation OCPAC | P.O. Box 2021, Edmond, OK 73083 Unsubscribe [email protected] Update Profile | Constant Contact Data Notice Sent by [email protected] powered by Try email marketing for free today!