|
Time is truth’s best friend. At time, the clock moves a century at a time. In the case of the fraudulent innuendos from the state’s Department of Education board members Becky Carson and Ryan Detherage, truth surfaced much more rapidly as indicated by the legislative report that conceded Ryan’s innocence.
The assaults on Ryan are, of course, motivated by his work to return Oklahoma’s government-controlled educational institutions to the moral and ideological foundations from which they came.
Dr. Piper’s most recent Washington Times article (below) reminded me of the writing of Edmund Burke and his influence on the trajectory of British government, British culture, and the reverence due to the past and the God who is preeminent in history's pathways.
England was saved from radicalism by the work of Edmund Burke, the man considered by many to have played the major role in preventing Britain from losing its cultural underpinnings.
Edmund Burke waxed eloquent on the point that innovation must not be allowed to move a nation forward without remembering the God from whom we receive our laws and the wisdom of our forefathers who inculcated those laws into the social structure.
Burke published his Reflections on the Revolution in France in 1790. There, he stated the idea that societies must knit together the past, the present, and the future rather than abandoning history in order to satisfy our more uncivilized and savage passions.
He said societies maintain their health through a partnership not only between those who are living, but those who are dead, those who are living, and those who are yet to be born.
Writing further in his Reflections, Burke gave a sober warning to every generation who may, by forgetting their debt to their ancestors, destroy for their pleasure the whole original fabric of society . . . leaving the coming generation a ruin instead of a habitation – and teaching their children as little respect as they themselves had for the institutions of their forefathers.
Burke specifically warned of the devastating impact of ideas disconnected from Christianity which allow society to accommodate the sudden impulses and physical appetites of the individual man.
As Russell Kirk put it in his The Conservative Mind:
Revelation, reason, and an assurance beyond the senses tell us that the Author of our being exists, and that He is omniscient; and man, and the state are creations of God’s beneficence.
This Christian orthodoxy is the kernel of Burke’s philosophy . . . And what is our purpose in this world? Not to indulge our appetites, but to render obedience to divine ordinance.
Russell Kirk went on to say that the stability of a society is found:
Where man is slow to break with the old ways that link him with his God in the infinity above and with his father in the grave at his feet.
Dr. Everett Piper, in the spirit of Burke, has addressed what has become a cancer to the future of our state and the nation with a well-reasoned article on the alarming state of the nation and the state of Oklahoma where we have severed one of our next generation's most vital link to the wisdom and the experience of the past.
| 
