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What
if we don’t feel happy all of the time and what if we don’t want
to spend money? Should we feel guilty about that, like we are not helping
our country? If we all prayed instead of spending money and being happy all
of the time, what would happen to the country then?
 ou ask a question that can be answered
through reference to the psychological experience of child sexual abuse.
Just as a child, during the course of the abuse, can be “brainwashed”
to feel guilty for not desiring the sexual acts
by which the abuser maintains his (or her) identity, so we all are
“brainwashed” by society at large in
this country to feel guilty if we don’t desire the materialism that
maintains the country in its heathen identity: the
pursuit of happiness. And so, just as the
child feels sorry for the adult who will “suffer in loneliness”
if the child doesn’t satisfy him (or her), so we can end up feeling
sorry for the country that will “suffer” if we don’t spend
our “happiness” money.
The point here is that in Christian
teaching both materialism (when it degenerates into any of the
seven deadly sins: pride, wrath, envy, lust,
greed, gluttony, and sloth) and child abuse are grave sins; so it’s
odd, isn’t it, that the society around us can essentially make us feel
guilty if we don’t want to sin. And it does
this precisely by selfishly playing upon our fear that our existence
depends on its happy existence, thereby leading us, like a wolf in
sheep’s clothing, away from any trust in God.
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Many are those
who say the words, “Jesus, I trust in You!” Yet often these persons
do not really trust in God, they merely enjoy the idea of trusting
in God. |
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Nevertheless, at least some
Christians today continue to venerate the martyrs, who remind us that remaining
faithful to a life in Christ is more valuable than anything of
this world which defiles
Christ. I’m just not sure whether it was more painful for the martyrs in their
own times to have had to watch pagans defiling Christ, or for the true faithful now
to see so-called Christians defiling Christ today in the name of “Christian”
acceptance of anything.
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