Memorial Day

I wonder why the ACLU hasn't sued to abolish Memorial Day yet. It's loaded with religious messages. If you believe that each human life is a flash in the pan, just an organism like a tube worm, what significance to we have? Why remember those who dies to make our lifes better? It's all just a con, and they fell for it.

If I really believed that there is no God, no afterlife, why should I care how I treat other people. My feelings for my wife and children is just a chemical reaction, why should I take them seriously? Why even have kids? Why care about society, history, politics or anything else? Why have cemeteries and head stones and flowers around them, when there are plenty of landfills around? The whole thing is just short, nasty and bruitish, so why not spend it on alcohol and sex and when it gets painful, sick or lonely at the end, have somebody withhold water and nutrients, or just give yourself a large overdose of insulin.

Memorial Day maintains a belief that the dead matter, that we matter and how we behave matters, and not just for the short run. It tells us to be thankful to those who went before and made the world we live in. Thankful that they sacrificed, built and built and invented.

I just watched an interview with Stephen Mansfield, author of The Faith of the American Soldier who talked about his conviction that our the vast majority of our troops believe that they are engaged in a good cause and see this enterprise as humanitarian. You'd never hear that from the MSM. What interested me more, though, was his discussion of the need for a Warrior Code like that written by Teddy Roosevelt for the New York Bible Society to include with copies of the New Testament which it provided to American soldiers heading for Europe in World War I:

“The teaching of the New Testament is foreshadowed in Micah's verse, ‘He has shown you, O man, what is good and what the Lord requires of you: but to do justice and to love mercy, and walk humbly with your God.’ (Micah 6:8)

Do justice; and therefore fight valiantly against those who stand for the reign of Molech and Beelzebub on this earth.

Love mercy; treat your enemies well, suffer the afflicted, treat every woman as though she were your sister, care for the little children, rescue the perishing, and be tender with the old and helpless.

Walk humbly; you will do so if you study the life and teaching of the Savior, walking in His steps.

Remember, the most perfect machinery of government will not keep us as a nation if there is not within us a soul, no abounding of material prosperity shall avail us if our spiritual sense is atrophied. The foes of our own household will surely prevail against us unless there be in our people an inner life which finds its outward expression in a morality like unto that preached by the seers and the prophets of God when the grandeur that was Greece and the glory that was Rome still lay in the future.”

It reminds me that despite all the hatred for religion being spewed by the left these days, religious faith is still that most effective influence that gives our troops a sense of duty, honor and good conduct. The soldiers who commit atrocities, humiliate and abuse prisoners or otherwise behave dishonorably are those without a moral compass. Religion makes men believe that if they die, life does not end and that there is a higher law than the mortal law of survivaal. Those who think that death leads to non-existence have no reason to think beyond it.

I like this line and so repeat it: Remember, the most perfect machinery of government will not keep us as a nation if there is not within us a soul, no abounding of material prosperity shall avail us if our spiritual sense is atrophied. That's why I'm not a libertarian. There is no real liberty, only license, without faith and a code of conduct.