Published Monday, August 19, 2024 | |
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OKLAHOMA HISTORY CENTER
800 Nazih Zuhdi Drive, OKC, OK
THIS WEDNESDAY
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Twice Brian Cantrell was in a shattered cockpit and at death’s door. Twice medical emergency teams removed his body from within shredded remains of a demolished aircraft.
His encounter with death was a divine appointment scheduled to demonstrate to him the dependency of his earthly hopes on the God who created him.
For Brian, theology became more than theory and window dressing. It became an earthly and daily reality.
His twin Damascus Road events shifted his life perspective as Christ became the center of his life’s mission.
Wade Burleson will introduce Bryan after taking the OCPAC Foundation stage for the first time since January. Wade will first talk to us about his work within the artificial intelligence (AI) community and the ways in which AI will play a role in the November race.
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REMEMBER:
Nothing trumps the sovereignty of God in whom we trust.
He is our Shepherd and Guiding Light.
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Bring a friend!!!
Send this Newsletter to another here.
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Come and be a part of building
an informed Oklahoma!
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Bring your family and friends Wednesday
Bring your pastor and buy his lunch!
Send this Newsletter to another here.
Lunch is optional for $10
Doors Open 11 AM
Meeting Noon to 1:15 PM
OKLAHOMA HISTORY CENTER
800 Nazih Zuhdi Drive, OKC, OK
$5 ENTRY FEE
Tax-deductible donations accepted at door.
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SEE YOU AT THE WEDNESDAY LUNCHEON | |
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BOB LINN
Our Children Need God
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Ryan Walters is under assault. It is unrelenting, continuous, and disingenuous.
To bring the drama to an end, Walters called a press conference last week. He challenged Charles McCall, Speaker of the Oklahoma House of Representatives, to stop playing never-ending political power games with the Department of Education.
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Walters asked that, if his accusers are serious, they end the threats to impeach and simply initiate, on Monday (today), the actual attempt to impeach him (Walters).
Walters said the impeachment proceedings would reveal to all Oklahomans the truth and bring an end to the misdirection from the Speaker McCall's education spokesman (Mark McBride).
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Watch the news conference here.
Background
Last week, Charles McCall, Speaker of the House, issued a public statement reprimanding Ryan Walters. This was after Mark McBride renewed a call to initiate a path to impeachment (Article 8 of the Oklahoma Constitution).
McBride is McCall’s long-time friend. McCall chose McBride, an emissary of the teacher’s union, to chair the House Appropriations and Budget on Education.
The national teacher union (National Education Association aka NEA and their Oklahoma chapter, the OEA) has been at odds with Ryan Walters since he announced he was running.
The NEA agenda is counter-American.
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The OEA agenda is counter Oklahoma.
At issue is his intent to remove both pornography and atheism from our schools, to give every family a choice between a government education or a non-government education, and to restore truth in academics so that the Christian foundations of our nation’s history and the Christian foundation of world history would be restored to the curriculum in all areas.
Adding to Speaker McCall’s motivation is the fact that Ryan Walters is being discussed as a potential candidate for Governor. It is a seat Charles McCall is eyeing.
Oklahoma’s Future at Stake
In the twentieth century, America eviscerated God and the Bible from the classroom. We committed national suicide. We taught children that there are no absolutes because there is no transcendent authority. They have no God who has spoken. They have no path to a life filled with purpose.
Oklahomans elected Ryan to reverse this.
Cultural revolutionaries have taken advantage of leftist media and the surrogates of the NEA/OEA. They cast a shadow intended to conceal the unmistakable light coming from the state’s Department of Education.
University of Virginia professor James Hunter points to role played by John Dewey in our national decline. Hunter states the nation has lost its character because we have lost our God. Find his book here.
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He writes:
The heart of Dewey’s innovations was the rejection of revealed religion as the foundation of educational practice.
The progressive’s goal was . . . to redefine “religion” and “faith” so as to delete any supernatural and sectarian elements.
For Dewey, faith in a divine and fixed authority, and ideas of the soul and its eternal destiny, were no longer possible as the foundation of Western civilization, of stable institutions, or of social progress.
It was therefore necessary to reject the supernaturalism, fixed dogma, and ridged institutionalism with which Christianity has historically been associated.
Dewey stated in his “Credo” on religion that,
Experience itself is the sole ultimate authority.
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Quoting Dr. Hunter further:
Dewey was in agreement with [Horace] Mann in opposing sectarian religion in the public school, and in agreement with [William] Harris against any form of supernatural religion in the classrooms . . .
Rather, children were to be regarded as having the capacity to determine their own moral standards . . .
The locus of moral authority shifted from external, objective criteria to subjective experience mediated by social relationships . . .
Finally, at the very center of this moral universe is the individual: supreme, autonomous, rational, evolving, and basically good.
Dostoevsky, Russia’s 19th century literary voice, its voice of clarity, could not stop what came in 1917 when Lenin and the Bolsheviks established a national policy of atheism.
Dostoevsky was Russia’s greatest writer. His dominating idea:
To kill God in man is to
Kill man himself.
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In his book, The Possessed (AKA The Devils/The Demons), Dostoevsky describes the society which has suffered the ravages of a godless revolution.
Scholar and writer, Henri De Lubac writes of Dostoevsky’s portrayal:
The first phase of this work is destructive: destructive of the old society (that is what the story of the “possessed” brings before our eyes) and especially destruction of everything that owes its origin to faith in God.
Not only is heaven emptied but man is secularized; henceforth nothing about him must recall a transcendent origin and a sacred destiny.
| The Russian scholastic, Paul Evdokimov completed his Ph.D. thesis on Dostoevsky. Evdokimov stated that Dostoevsky’s novel “The Possessed”, also published as “Demons,” was meant to suggest that “social systems which have no Christian basis (the only one cable of transforming man) inevitably become systems of violence and slavery.” |  | |
In Dostoevsky’s Journal of an Author, the writer explains what would happen if God were to be eviscerated from society’s foundation. He says:
The result would be such darkness, such chaos, something so clumsy, blind and inhuman that the whole structure would collapse under the curses of mankind before the building have even been completed.
What Dostoevsky’s “The Possessed” describes is the twentieth century trajectory of America itself. Once a beacon of both Christ and freedom, it is now an ideological wasteland whose clarion voices are stifled by a new secular ruling class.
Times change. God does not. The eschatological trajectories of Heaven run through the church. We need only awaken to our God and to His divine calling on our lives.
This Wednesday, we will hear from a man who stood at death’s door twice and lived to know that God is the God of the resurrection. It is a hint of what God can do in a society who has lost its way.
I look forward to seeing you Wednesday.
God bless.
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Join us Wednesday to hear Alex Gray
Keeping China out of Oklahoma!
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The nation is in peril and is
calling to each of you for help!
See you Wednesday!
11:00 AM Doors open
11:00 AM Lunch Available
NOON to 1:15 PM Meeting
OKLAHOMA HISTORY CENTER
800 Nazih Zuhdi Drive, OKC, OK
God bless!
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Come at 8:30 AM to sign up
for the 9 AM meeting.
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WEDNESDAY SEPTEMBER 4
LEGISLATIVE
PANEL
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LAST MEETING
ALEX GRAY
CHINA THREAT
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Watch Alex present the China threat here.
Watch the entire meeting here.
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NOTE SEPTEMBER DATES
First and Third Wednesday!
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I encourage each of you to support our mission.
To get started, we are suggesting:
The Century Club
To join, mail a cancelled check to:
OCPAC FOUNDATION
P.O. Box 721212
Norman, OK 73070
Your $100 per month donation will help support the development of the Foundation’s work to widen our audience and outreach capabilities with quality meetings and enhanced educational video content.
Our beginning financial goals will allow us to secure the initial permanent staff positions necessary to the function of a foundation with ambitions to change the world.
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We are in desperate need of returning
our nation and our state to Biblical foundations.
Thank you for your activism.
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