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Severe Outflow by R. Edwards

Mass Murder as Godless Societal Nihilism

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The problem of mass killings, and casual murder in general in our cities, goes much deeper than governmental regulations, weapons, or even mental-health issues and what to do with sociopaths. All are interesting but second-order in influence, and brutally overplayed flashpoints for division and discord.  There’s a greater, overarching issue to be seen!

The mass murder, as a small subset of an even more-pervasive nihilism problem, is indeed one born of a pervasive culture of moral degradation — directly paralleling incremental cultural abandonment of Biblical principles.  Yes, I’m talking about God, right at you, and not the least hesitant to do so.

Don’t believe me?  While correlation doesn’t necessarily mean causality, the massive mountain of statistical evidence leaves no other viable common thread.  I’ll leave it to the skeptical reader to self-motivate enough, to go through the effort, to find graphs of the following since the Supreme Court’s 1962 Engel v. Vitale decision (all of which I have seen):
*  Teen pregnancy
*  Abortion (teen or all)
*  Divorce rate
*  Single-mother households
*  Adultery rate
*  Unmarried and living together
*  SAT test scores
*  Teen murder rate
*  Teen suicides
*  Preteen suicides
*  Arrest rates of minors
*  Illegal drug use (teen or adult)
*  Venereal (sexually transmitted) disease
*  Rape rate in any of several pre-adult age groups
*  Homelessness rate (any age group)
*  School killings.

Any one of those trends corresponding so well with Engel can be dismissed as coincidence.  The more you examine, the less “coincidental” it becomes.

Not a single one of these mass killers (from this one back through the Murrah bombing that included a day-care center, to the perpetrator of the deadliest school massacre, in 1927, with dynamite), had the Holy Spirit in his heart. If he had, there would have been no killing.

There is the common denominator. Not race nor ancestry. Not type of weapon. Not geography. Godless thought and action. A failure of society, parents, schools and individuals to put the Lord first and follow His will, and in doing so, nourish and flourish a culture steeped in worship and reverence for someone much bigger and more important than self.

This nation can not fit a government-shaped peg into a God-shaped hole.

“No theocracy!” someone reflexively and defensively replies.

“theocracy” = red herring

I type not of a governmental solution (whether theocracy or “gun control”). Again, you’re not going to fit a government-shaped peg into a God-shaped hole. To ban guns, our Constitution will need amendment.  Good luck with that; the Founders quite deliberately made it a drawn-out, arduous process so as not to subjugate our rule of law to the whim of social fads and short-fused reactionary emotionalism.  Even in the unlikely event of Constitutional amendment, it will be no more effective than the last prohibition we attempted that way (alcoholic beverages). Did that lesson not get learned?

Instead, I’m talking about *societal mores* and the one perfect source for them.

See the forest from the trees. People are focused on the bark of the trees here, indeed on galls on the bark and worms inside. Back out of the forest and see the social disease yellowing all the trees.  What is that disease?  Individual failure to obey our Lord, multiplied my tens of millions into a collective, malignant societal cancer spreading across decades.  Hence all the trends those graphs show in societal and moral degradation.

Want a common demonstrator? I gave one, from a Christian perspective. Christians believe the Lord’s word. That includes John 14:6: “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”  That quote from Jesus Christ means exactly what it says.

No one gets to God but through Jesus — the ultimate eternal purveyor of love and justice.  You bet it is an exclusive statement, one that makes even a lot of Christians uncomfortable, because they want to go along to get along, to fit in with wordly “inclusivity”, not make waves, not be principled and courageous.  So yes, being a former God-denying heathen myself, and still a sinner as long as I’m of this world, I can imagine how it would discomfort unbelievers.  I used to resent that statement too.

But there it was, in His own words, like it or not. That’s why I specifically use Jesus and not any other gods, including government, power, money, celebrities, so-called “social justice”, or any other common objects of idolatry.  Instead I worship the God of the Trinity, not anything or anyone worldly.

That’s fundamental Christian doctrine 101, right from the Source himself. Don’t like it? Maybe you should be uncomfortable. Part of agape love includes tough love: delivering what you may not want to hear, but need to hear. Often in life, the best results arise from discomfort.

“Non-religious people can have morals too!”  Sure they can.  But whose?  His or her own, of course.  And since everybody is different, and everybody is flawed, everybody’s self-defined morals will be different and flawed too. Which one of those 7+ billion is right?  Without the oversight of a consistent, higher authority, how do you determine that?  Feelings?  Suuuure.

Only one higher authority is perfect.  It ain’t government, which is made of sin-ridden people.  It ain’t the U.N., likewise.  It ain’t even “society”, again, likewise.  It’s God the Father of Jesus Himself, who always has been and always will be.

What other objective, consistent, unambiguous moral truths are there? Feel free to stake your claim to them if they exist, and explain how they fit those three adjectives.  Hint:  Not happening.

Consider why you may be uncomfortable with shedding imperfect worldly human standards and instead adopting the objective moral truth of the Lord. Don’t answer to me; your morals are not my concern as much as God’s. So please instead bring them to Him, in prayer. You might be surprised what you hear back, whether right then, or in due time.

If the ideals of the Holy Spirit in people (who, I reiterate, don’t commit mass murders when under that influence), and of the “agape love” are troublesome, that is a manifestation of the larger cultural problem about which I type.

Love solves this.

I don’t mean the dreamy, foggy, ambiguous, new-agey, Marianne Williamson hocus pocus BS either, but the true and unchanging love of God, whose Word prescribes values and virtues wholly antithetical to premeditated violence of any sort.  Fill individuals with the Holy Spirit, and they don’t shoot nor bomb schools, nor gas subways, nor blow up day-cares with Ryder trucks full of fertilizer, nor fly planes into skyscrapers.

Love. Agape love. The kind that you find when a whole, spiritually healthy family gathers around the dinner table to pray. That’s what this society needs.

Broken families, and fatherlessness in particular, aren’t part of God’s design. Want evidence? Look all around the news and your communities at how the incomplete families, including not just the wreckages of divorce, but those where both parents are there nominally but at least one is checked out into some other world (work, addictions of some sort, partying, etc.).  Al of us know troubled and fractured families, unless we live in an Amish commune, in which case you aren’t reading this.

That familial brokenness, writ en masse, is how we get the results we see.

So before I found it out, I told Elke:  “This kid in Uvalde was from a fatherless household. Mark my words.” Then she informed me that yes, that was true. We storm forecasters get really good at pattern recognition, and not just in meteorology — especially the very few of us from the inner city, who have been there, seen that, many times over.

Most single-parent and broken homes don’t produce killers. Yet most killers arise from them.

Society must address that at the root. God offers a way. It’s up to us and our free will to choose that way, or reject it.

Yes, I stand by my claim the abiding love and reverence of the Lord, accepted and adhered, short-circuits the cultural degradations that lead to the devaluation of life underpinning mass killing of kids, both before and after birth.

Still, even if you don’t bring God into the picture, it’s clear we have a culture problem. Crime novelist Robert Bidinotto expressed it well in a recent Facebook post:

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For simplicity’s sake, let me limit my answer to citing the theme of my first thriller, “HUNTER,” where hero Dylan Hunter paraphrases Edmund Burke’s famous quotation thus:
“All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is an enabler.”

Want to know why we are experiencing an epidemic of slaughter in America’s streets and schools? Because America has become a culture led by and filled with enablers of evil — from professors to politicians to pundits to parents. Today’s plague of rampant nihilism arises from the unchecked virus of excuse-making.

The only cure is the inoculation of moral accountability: the injection of *individual self-responsibility* as a moral ideal, throughout our culture and all its institutions. However, too many of our social leaders and influencers are the ethical equivalent of anti-vaxxers.

Until we reject and banish the cult of excuse-making for bad behavior, and begin to enact and enforce self-responsibility throughout society, we will continue to enable, encourage, and empower nihilists. And we will remain their accomplices in the collapse of our civilization and the hideous slaughter of innocents, such as the babes of Newtown and Uvalde.
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For more on the secular side of the reasons for mass murder, Bidinotto offers a full-length, well-written essay here.

I happen to believe that following the will of God short-circuits the enabling of evil.

Perfection? Of course not. Everyone is a sinner. Everyone. But perfection is not the same as righteousness, nor vice versa. It’s an attitude, a worldview, most properly passed from present, attentive, loving, whole-family, functional, God-worshipful, wed, mother and father, parents to children.

When we as a society celebrate immorality, foster dysfunction on mass scales, and bust up God-ordained family structures, we get what we have: more killers. Go look up the home situations of these mass kid killers, one after another, and you shall see for yourself. Start with Uvalde.

Let’s therefore get the Holy Spirit into the picture on a mass scale. As a Christian, I am bound, with gratitude, to this ethos.

We indeed have a problem. God will be the only and ultimate solution. Come, Lord Jesus.

Scattershooting 210901

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Scattershooting while wondering why “trust the science” from the left to often abruptly ends at nuclear physics or fundamental human genetics…

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THE ONE and ONLY BEST CO2 and ENERGY-INDEPENDENCE SOLUTION: NUCLEAR: An environmentalist makes a powerful case for nuclear and against so-called “renewables” to supply energy at big scale. There’s a decades-long tradition of unscientific, mathematically ignorant, irrational fear-mongering around nuclear. Never mind that nuclear is (by orders of magnitude!) the most energy-dense fuel source, with the lowest carbon emission, the safest record of all U.S. energy sources (fewest human and wildlife casualties), the least land area used for the amount of energy generated, continual and reliable (unlike solar and wind), has the lowest lifetime total waste volume compared to all fossils/wind/solar, and so on. Truly, nuclear is the greenest of green energy. And the technology to generate more energy with still less waste on an even smaller footprint has improved hugely since currently operating plants were erected in the ’60s through ’80s. Even if the Utopia of fusion isn’t realized soon, nuclear still is the safest, most efficient steady energy source for us all. Only ignorant, petty NIMBY bullcrap, science illiteracy, anti-scientific and illogical fear-mongering, and massive bureaucratic red tape are stopping us from becoming truly energy independent, with the lowest carbon production per capita among all nations. The way there is nuclear. If it were announced tomorrow that a nuclear plant would be built right behind my property, I’d welcome it with bells on. Just tap me into the juice, nuke-man.

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PUBLIC-CRISIS MESSAGING MATTERS: Yes, as a formally published scientist, I know science matters, and changes. I also know messaging is important. As I’ve said before, consistent and clear communications matter in a crisis! Pretend for a minute you’re in a pre-pandemic time machine. SARS and MERS already have happened from remarkably similar viruses, and other RNA viruses have been studied for decades, so much already is known about such viruses in science. You’re told a coronavirus pandemic one is coming and that this will occur. Then, officially…

Let’s deny masks work, tell people not to get them, then mandate masks, then not differentiate between medical grade n95 masks & cloth rags, then say children are fine, then mask only children for a bit while telling the vaccinated to carry on as before the pandemic, officially declare vaccines as the way to end the pandemic, say the vaccines only reduce disease severity and aren’t stopping the pandemic, then reimpose mask mandates on vaccinated people, and then through all this confusing (for most folks, from their perspective) flip-flopping, express incredulous surprise that trust in institutions and expertise is being lost. Can you put yourself in another’s shoes? Do you get this point at all? Of course “the science changes”! Duh. Saying that is a straw man. The sciences of virology, epidemiology and immunology, however, existed before this pandemic, and have not changed anywhere nearly as wildly as the messaging has.

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FOLLY of CONFORMITY in LANGUAGE FADS: On a somewhat related note, I find it annoying that the “woke” politically correct feel like they have to stick their unwelcome and meddlesome noses into everybody’s business, much like the Puritanical small-town busybodies of days of yore, or over-officious homeowner’s-association pests who nitpick the most minute details of everybody else’s house and lawn in the neighborhood. Same mentality! In the pandemic, they forced spineless and overly compliant news organizations to stop saying “Wuhan” when that is factually where the virus originated, in support of an unproven, subjective perception that systemic racism was happening on massive scales against Asians because of that. Then the factually from India “Delta” variant came along, and media and citizens mindlessly comply without question. Factually, it is the Wuhan virus and the India variant, and that’s what I call them. Don’t like it? As I often say: your problem, not mine. I deal in facts, not what might offend some soft, coddled, overly sensitive, privileged, overwhelmingly white-leftist busybodies. Regurgitating the pre-scripted phrase isn’t an act of wisdom nor kindness nor tolerance, it’s instead the opposite: it’s an act of supine conformist submission to a preapproved set of opinions.

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BIG-CORPORATE SUCKING UP to CHINA:

This refusal to even acknowledge Uighur torture and genocide is craven corporate pandering to red Commie China by Coca Cola, much as we’ve seen from many other big companies and the NBA. Their “human rights” people only care about human rights when it doesn’t impact the bottom line much (if at all). Arguable and disputed sociopolitical events in the U.S.? “Woke” to the core, sucking up to the max to that bizarre conformity cult. Actual mass imprisonments, torture, and genocide of Uighurs, long-standing oppression of Tibet, a stiflingly Orwellian mass-surveillance state, and increasingly brutal oppression in Hong Kong? Cowardly silence. China has these faceless corporate suits and ties bought, paid for and leashed like obedient lap dogs. This guy from Coke even looks like a sniveling, spineless bureaucratic weasel, and is playing that part well. He should be in the movies. He wouldn’t have to act.

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RADICAL PUBLIC-SCHOOL BRAINWASHING OF MINOR CHILDREN: BUSTED! Whistleblowers, gadflies and undercover operatives are some of my very favorite and most respected people, as they are heroes of openness and justice, exposing nefarious, illegal and diabolical activity in many levels of governments and corporations. Public education is a level of government and absolutely should be subject to whistle-blowing activity and undercover reporting. Project Veritas did just that with video of a radical Marxist teacher in Natomas Unified School District near Sacramento, one Gabriel Gipes, who:

  • Placed Antifa flag and Mao poster on the wall of his classroom, and shamed a student who was uncomfortable about that
  • Like some of the Capitol insurrectionists on the opposite part of the spectrum, holds that violent overthrow of the U.S. government is a good thing
  • Assigned extra credit for students who attended extremist left-wing events
  • Promised he’s not the only teacher there inclined toward radicalizing students: “There are three other teachers in my department that I did my credential program with — and they’re rad. They’re great people. They’re definitely on the same page.”

    The superintendent confirmed this “teacher” would be fired. Why was he hired? This tells me the real agenda there is: “We’ll radicalize children to the extent we can get away with it, until the PR gets too intense.” According to freelance journalist Andy Ngo, the school-board meeting included these speakers:
  • A black mom who said her daughter was brainwashed in 13 days
  • A Hispanic dad whose daughter noted that on the first school day, Gipe told the pupils that he e would turn them into “revolutionaries.” That’s consistent with Veritas’ recording where he admitted: “I have 180 days to turn them [students] into revolutionaries … Scare the f*** out of them.”
  • A Muslim parent calling for a criminal investigation into this “teacher”.

    These left-wing “woke” cult radicals are badly overplaying their hand, causing a lot of quiet (and sometimes not so quiet) backlash among the very groups they purport to support: racial minorities (including Ngo, the black dad and Hispanic mom), Muslims, and homosexuals (including Ngo). These lunatics don’t realize this ultimately going to undermine their own cause, which will be so fun to watch. What’s not fun is the damage they do by poisoning young minds with their parasitic ideologies.

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PEOPLE I DON’T UNDERSTAND: Those who deny there’s a pandemic, or call it a “plandemic” seriously. Those who think males (that’s people with the XY chromosomes, for the biologically ignorant) should be using my wife’s or daughter’s bathrooms (and if I see a dude trying to go into a restroom with my wife or daughter, he’s not going to succeed). Those who stormed the Capitol thinking they were “making America great again,” when they were just being ignorant, herd-mentality fools. Those who think if a dude wears lipstick and a dress, he’s not a dude anymore (like putting lipstick and a pink bow on a boar makes it a sow…suuuuuure). Christians who grovel at an abject, unrepentant sinner and bombastic heathen like Donald Trump. Christians who support abortion, sexual activity of any kind outside monogamous man-woman marriage, or critical race theory (as if Jesus cared about race). Sometimes it seems so many on both sides have lost their collective and individual minds, or at least a moral compass of right, wrong and common sense.

Did I offend people on both sides with this segment? I did? Good! Outstanding! Shows I’m doing something right. Namely, thinking for myself, independently of anybody’s marching orders but God’s. And that’s OK with me. Why? Because ultimately, I will be answering to no mortal human — just God. Nobody on Twitter, nobody on Facebook, and not you either. I wasn’t put here to win popularity contests or conform to the worldly fads, but to adhere to truth. Your judgment won’t matter…only His. If you understand where I’m coming from and are cool with that, great — you get it. If not, learn and grow. Become more truly “tolerant” and “inclusive”.

Open Letter to “Christian Left” Friends

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I consider you a brother/sister in Christ, and siblings sometimes disagree. That’s cool.

I’m also honest, sometimes to a fault. And if it’s a fault, I’ll die on that, and stand before God on Judgment Day in full confession thereof. I try to proclaim truth in love, and sometimes that means tough love. Guess my street-tough inner-city background gave me the constitution to employ that as needed, and to endure so much of the BS this world flings at us.

Truly, we’re not meant to be fully comfortable in this life, in this world. That’s because it’s a cursed world. To be challenged is discomforting, as it should be, but can be liberating in the realest sense. I’m challenging you right now. Consider this tough love.

To say I’m worried about your soul and spiritual health is true! After all, I care. Still, your life and choices are yours to follow. As a philosophical libertarian, I’m not going to order you around. Your private choices are your business and God’s. I will, however, make suggestions, and challenge people, and I expect nothing less than the same treatment, per the Golden Rule.

So I’ll elaborate a little. Why do I worry about those Christian friends dipping toes in social leftism? Why do I consider “The Christian Left” to be a complete sentence?

I’ve been there and escaped its clutches, and can see right through its great lie. I wish more people could. It disguises itself as “loving thy neighbor” when it really means “use governmental coercion to steal money/freedom from some to give to others because of how I have been told to perceive them to be mass victims of an oppressive system”. It feeds on insecurities and mutual reinforcement, likes and atta-boys from sycophants, whether you realize this consciously or not.

I’m so thankful to have stepped out of that herd of anger and resentment. I realized that until we assume individual personal responsibility, we’ll be enslaved to worldly groupthink, and in the name of “social justice”, demand injustice in the name of justice.

So from the outside, here’s what I see.

Identity politics and “social justice” are dangerous ideologies, driven to idolatry of victimhood as an end of the means, and wholly antithetical to divinely granted, free-will freedoms of thought and speech. The whole subculture of “social justice”, besides being a grotesquely Orwellian, Newspeak-style misnomer, is an alluring yet diabolical worldly phenomenon. It is encouraged and fomented by none other than Satan the devil himself.

Political correctness serves as a device of censorship, suppression and oppression, a cancerous, metastasizing, gangrenous lesion on the face of open, frank and intelligent discussion. I refuse to play that game. Why? Easy. God doesn’t. That alone overrules politicians, celebrities, so-called “social justice warriors” and anybody else’s opinions.

Only His word ultimately matters, not the world’s. Nowhere in His Holy Word (Bible) are “PoC” and other such terms used, or even squarely implied. Jesus loved all the same, regardless of their color. MLK rightly followed that concept when speaking of the importance of content of character vs. the color of skin. Where has that ethos gone?

What about poverty, slavery, censorship, tyranny, other forms of destruction of freedom, based on the Bible? Absolutely worthy causes. We as individuals are called to help. That’s you and me, personally — not using government as a coercive proxy. Jesus didn’t add, “by government gunpoint” to “love thy neighbor.” [Anyone who thinks He did is welcomed to show me those words in the Bible.] Compassion is not a bureaucratic exercise!

Why would that be? Love is freely given and accepted, never coerced. Therefore, “love” thy neighbor logically cannot apply to taxation (which is involuntary) and governmental bureaucratic machinations. Love can be expressed authentically only through freely given personal action and charity, whether time or money or both. And if you somehow think bureaucracy is synonymous with love, and want more taxes, pay more taxes on your own…pay dot gov will accept donations 24/7/365.

The poor and oppressed are of all races. [Did you know the majority of poor in America are not so-called “PoC”? Some good the mythical “white privelege” has done for them! What of their plight in all this?]

My experience growing up in inner-city poverty was a blessing from the Lord. I was a decided racial minority in that environment, and as such, understand what it’s like to be in that societal framework. One message became clear, later reinforced in His Holy Word itself, as God taught me this: we’re all one race…the human race. We’re to “love thy neighbor” with zero regard to his outwardly visible melanin level.

I take that strictly literally, as it should be. I will not extend any less neighborly love to my dark-skinned neighbor as the others. As an aside, he too is a fully devoted servant of Christ, and we’re on the same page on this issue. [A “PoC” conservative? Horrors! Yes, they do exist. My neighbor is one. I follow many others on social media. And their insight on what it’s like to be who they are, I trust more than any naïve and detached “social justice warrior”.]

If you note the importance of how we live, you’re right. We set an example in our behavior. Talk is cheap; actions matter. You will not see me treat someone badly nor unequally based on immutables. Again: why? Easy. Jesus wouldn’t. It’s that simple. Anyone who tries to make it more complex than that is selling you a sucker’s bill of goods.

As a kid on the streets of downtown and East Dallas, I saw more than my share of con artists and shysters, more than most people will in an entire lifetime. Been there, seen it all…I understand their mentality and modus operandi. And worldly “social justice”, as now practiced in America, is a big, systemic social con game.

It’s sad to see people fall for it, especially fellow Christians. The “social justice” movement, as practiced on today’s Left, is of this world, not of our Lord. It disappoints me to see so many Christians dabbling or wholly slipping into that diabolical whirlpool of deceit, resentment, bitterness, and anger.

So what are you doing for “social justice”? If you answer that to me, or if you’re telling others, you’re not doing charity the right way: privately. You’re virtue signaling. Helping others is not done for the sake of bragging rights. It’s not about you. It’s about those in need. I’m not going to be touting my charitable contributions and acts on social media. That’s not why they’re done.

So there it is. If you wanted to categorize me, which really isn’t possible, the closest guess would be “fiscally and socially conservative, Biblical Christian Libertarian”. 😉 And I am fully secure in that. This place is squarely where I truly, wholly believe God has called me to live, with 100% authenticity. It’s home on Earth, until I go Home for good.

If you’re reading this far, you’re a sharp, learned, well-read person. That’s a good thing. Our brotherhood or sisterhood in Christ is why I care enough to go to this much trouble to write all this. Thank you.

As such, I have just one book to recommend for now, outside the Good Book, of course: “How Now Shall We Live” by Charles Colson. Check it out. I’ve never seen the application of the Christian worldview to the issues and temptations of the world so well-explained in a soundly Bible-rooted way. My wife recommended it to me, and it was a great learning experience, clarifying neatly some ideas and tying some ribbons up that had been irritatingly open-ended for some time.

I’d love to compare notes after you’ve read it.

As for the killings of so-called “PoC” that prompt rage and anger and virtue signaling from some of you, yes, they’re sins! Murder absolutely is a sin, whether done by civilian or cop, left or right, white or black, or anyone in between. All murder is a hate crime by default, regardless of what the perpetrator or victim look like. [What? Did you think it was a love crime?]

Horrid acts like the recent Georgia killing, or the far less-publicized but equally tragic daily murders in Chicago or Baltimore, happen with a deep root cause: because individuals and society have abandoned Biblical morals in favor of the vices of innately sinful human nature.

Quite simply, thou shalt not kill. It’s clear all the murderers are deeply lost. They don’t know our Savior. Otherwise they would not do these things. And that includes other violent criminals, even if claiming to be Christians.

We as a society have lost our way in failing to teach kids Biblical moral precepts and why to adhere to them. Not just legal law, but Godly moral law. This is why we have, for example, widespread venereal disease (extramarital sex/fornication), neighbors not knowing each other (failure to love thy neighbor), and obvious violations of any of the Ten Commandments (most crimes, including this).

People infused with the Holy Spirit don’t do these crimes and immoral acts, nor condone them! That’s not judgment, but straight-talk Biblical truth. Truth needs to be heard. Who will listen and heed?

We as a society have lost our way and will keep paying the price (including the loss of innocents) until we repent—individually and collectively—and sincerely seek forgiveness from the Lord. That applies to each and all of us.

The undeniable fact is that these murderers (and rapists, child molesters, those who beat their wives and girlfriends up, terrorists, “religious” killers, and any others foisting violence on innocents) don’t commit the crime if they are truly God-fearing, obedient servants, instead of hate-filled mercenaries. Had they come to Jesus beforehand, and stayed there, this simply doesn’t happen. They either never were, or have gotten lost.

Come, Lord Jesus. We need you.