Time For Change (And I Ain't Talkin' Obama)

Today's story out of WORLD magazine has an article by Cal Thomas titled, "The other deficit" which challenged me. I think it confirms what I have come to know not only about life today in the United States of America but with the Christian roots of our nation. The more and more Lydia and I dig into American history (that which has real truth in it and has not been significantly revised by the liberal educational establishment), the more we realize what has been hidden from us.

Here are some quotes from Cal's article:

"For the third straight year, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) has found that a large number of Americans cannot pass a basic 33-question civic literacy test on their country's history and institutions."

"The random sample of 2,508 American adults, ranging from those without high school diplomas, to people with advanced degrees, revealed a minimal difference in civic literacy between the uneducated and the highly educated."

"Ignorance of America's history and heritage is a setup for politicians and others who want to manipulate us into a way of thinking that allows them to make decisions that are unconstitutional and unwise. More than repeating phrases and figures, knowledge of the past prepares us for a future based on unchanging principles. That's why knowledge matters and ignorance endangers our government and threatens our way of life even more than terrorism."

"ISI calls on everyone involved in education, including parents, to re-evaluate curricula and standards of accountability and to emphasize to students the fundamentals about our country. It notes Thomas Jefferson's admonition: "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free ... it expects what never was and never will be.""

Do people really understand how far we've fallen? Do you? Probably not; because we have little true history to see where we've came from and why our Founding Fathers created the civil government and educational system in the ways that they did.

I recently scanned through a DVD from WallBuilders which is most excellent (in what I did happen to see) for those who want to understand how our Founding Fathers used the Bible to form the foundation of our government and educational institutions. I hope to have a full review of it sometime in the near future (which will likely consist of nothing more than "Go buy this DVD immediately and watch it ten times within the next month" or something like that).

I've recently started reading a book by Cornelius Plantinga (Engaging God's World: A Christian Vision of Faith, Learning, and Living) in which he starts the book by detailing the original mission statements of our nation's original colleges, including Harvard, Yale, etc. which desired above all else to bring glory to God by providing a biblically-based higher education that taught their students how to live ALL of life using the Bible as a gauge for everything. It's making me quite sick when I compare the founding intent to what they are teaching today. Anyways, I'm only through the introduction and first chapter and I've already highlighted more text than not!

Interesting side note: I just spell-checked the preceding paragraph and "biblically" was marked as being incorrect. I just went to the Merriam-Webster site and they seem to know what this word is. But blogger/Google does not? Should I be suspicious? Nah...

What follows are the links for Cal's article, the ISI report, the civics quiz and DVD info:

The Other Deficit

Our Fading Heritage

Civics quiz

The Influence of the Bible on America

UPDATE: I totally forgot about this FOX News video I posted in yesterday's headlines. Fits in perfectly:

God expelled?