Independence Day 2021 ~ BENEATH THE SURFACE with PAUL MURANO

By: Paul Murano – July, 2021

Now that America is officially 245 years old, many are wondering how many more years she has left. Her cancer is metastasizing very quickly in the form of Leftist ideology, and many prognosticators are predicting she won’t make it past this century, or even this decade.
How has this stubborn cancer of progressivism progressed so rapidly despite it being neither rational nor popular? It’s the elites, who for their own benefit, have been pushing the ideology. They know a people exercising their God-given rights of freedom of speech, conscience, and religion cannot be controlled.

Yeonmi Park, the young female North Korean defector who authored the book “In Order to Live,” recently mentioned the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution as what separates America from all the other nations and attracts so many to want to live here. She’s the girl who attended Columbia University and was shocked to find out today’s typical college culture in America is even more oppressive than her brutal North Korea.

In North Korea, she said, you don’t know you’re oppressed. And that’s the real meaning of oppression. If you think you’re oppressed you’re not, she added. Being from North Korea, she’s more able to see the cleverly crafted lies of the American Left and the foolishness of Americans claiming oppression. Those like her from oppressed nations can easily see how the elites attempt to brainwash the people through tampering with the language and culture, to use them as pawns for their power-hungry ends. It took 245 years for the U.S. to be vulnerable.

It’s no coincidence that in the Western world the Age of Enlightenment would be followed by the Age of Insanity, with the Modern Age in-between. It doesn’t take too long, relatively speaking, for human reason to go off the rails when not accompanied by supernatural faith. The marriage of faith and reason is what enables liberty and justice to thrive, and is upon which this nation was founded. So, when one of the wings fails, the other is soon to follow.

In short, the further we move from the writing of the Declaration of Independence, the less independent we seem to be getting. This is a direct result of modern philosophy’s distorted definitions of liberty and equality.

Liberty used to mean the freedom to do the good. Now it means the freedom to do what one desires. The first corresponds to a natural law ethic, the second to a utilitarian ethic. Hence, what used to be considered license, is now thought of as liberty.

Secondly, the word ‘equality’ has also been changed since the time our Constitution was written. Equality of dignity has been replaced with a false idea of sameness. Making distinctions – not only with recognizing different gifts in different people, but also between right and wrong – are being met now with a derogatory word construct with an -ist or a –phobia at the end.

Further, once challenge with living in America rather than some socialist totalitarian nation is that we have enough freedom to make the perfect the enemy of the good. Striving for perfection is one thing, but destroying what is good because it isn’t perfect – because it isn’t a utopia that can never happen between Eden and Heaven – is utterly irrational. Such an attempt always ends in tyranny.

Human rights can never be respected with the new definitions of liberty and equality. On this point, those on the Left either don’t get it or don’t care. Martin Luther King, Jr., who would be considered a right wing conservative today, understood this. In his letter from Birmingham jail, he wrote of his concurrence with Augustine and Aquinas that natural law is the intrinsic moral law of God, upon which civil rights must be based – and when civil law contradicts natural law it must be changed.

Human rights are based on something higher than opinion, desire, or government allowance.

The problem lies, therefore, in that true freedom depends on a moral, virtuous people who are able to govern themselves and their disordered selfish desires for the greater common good. In other words, since morality and virtue are lived at the intersection of faith and reason, there can be no freedom when a people decide to ignore God.

On July 4th 2021, we found ourselves living in an increasingly divided nation, and with a government ready pounce on the problem it created by unleashing its power. We saw a taste of this by the countless people who pathetically died alone in hospitals due to unreasonable Covid restrictions. Only when we rediscover that independence from Britain does not mean independence from God, will we stop the decline of what was once the envy of the world.

Paul is producer and host of Beneath the Surface video and radio podcasts, taught college philosophy & theology, and is a staff writer/producer for St. Michael’s Media. Check out his website at Paulmurano.com, and e-mail Paul at PJDM@aol.com.