Have we advanced

Sanctimonious, liberal do-gooders choose to stone smokers to death who offend them. Their feelings guide them as they choose to deny individuals - 400,000 of them each year - their free choice to take their chances of dying from tobacco-related diseases. Smokers will, of course, eventually die from ‘something,’ immortality not being a fact of life even though pursuit of happiness is a priority of living.

Sanctimonious Louis Farrakhan and Reverand Wright claim to speak for all blacks robbing them of free choice by intimidating them to non-allegiance to personal responsibility and by encouraging racism. Rev. Wright says that Farrakhan’s voice is the most important of the 20th and 21st centuries. Why Louis beat out Marx, Lenin, Hitler or Stalin, each an influential spokesman for the Devil himself? Each, unfortunately, forswears the need for a higher power of reasoning and common sense. Rather, feelings are promoted as rulers.

The same holds true on college campuses today. Sex might be a yearning of the soul, but emotional not reason sells out to peer pressure and the temporal gain of casual hookups that destroy the purity and integrity of the soul. The yearning for sex can only be fulfilled by an accompanying romance with a man, woman or God; holding back requires reasoned behavior. The greatest loss - it seems to me - results from young people thinking casual sex is ‘no big deal.’ The real deal has always been the miraculous messages capable of being produced by the human brain, literally devoid of feeling.

Thought, immaterial in its essence, only rational investigation has advanced civilization. Yet, has civilization advanced? Do feelings still rule? How high has the higher power of man risen? Socrates, Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas insisted that our rational faculty determine decisions, but today we have atheists and fundamentalists avoiding reason, championing emotional nonsense. Thought like character is laid down brick by brick over the course of a life. The character of civilization is laid down too like striations in rock built up over time. How far have we come? Farrakhan and Wright, liberal do-gooders and the sexual revolution - impede progress.