Why is the United States of America an excellent, unique country? What is it about this country that is so different? In this blog post, I undertake to answer that question in part--just one part, but exhaustively and thoroughly. I will hold nothing back. My answer will include theology, but even an atheist or secularist will find that he agrees with the substance thereof.
Everything you're about to read is my opinion. I wrote this with no consultation or collaboration with any actual religious official.
We are here on this earth because God, our Heavenly Father, sent us here. He wanted to give us a chance to learn and grow and to become more like Him. This mortal life was carefully planned, crafted, and executed by Him, in conjunction with Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit, and indeed, it is with the help of these Three that we can successfully navigate this life, no matter what. I testify to you that there is no problem too complex and no sin too crimson for God to unravel or erase. No mountain dropped on your unprepared shoulders is too heavy for Him too lift, and no bones are too crushed for Him to reset and heal.
I cannot overstate the importance of this mortal probation in which we now find ourselves. It is a result of an eternity of preparation; its results will determine the rest of your eternal existence.
There are three essential ingredients that make this life what it is: Information, Recourse, and Freedom.
We left God to come down here so that we could grow in ways which we could not if we had stayed with him. Our ultimate goal is to get back to Him. One does not simply stumble into God's kingdom by fortuitous happenstance. The way back to Him is simple, but narrow, straight, and impossible to walk entirely alone. We need Information to know which is the path we must walk. We need Recourse because we will NEVER succeed in walking that path alone perfectly. This Recourse comes in the form of the atoning sacrifice of the savior Jesus Christ. Thanks to the Information that is the Gospel and the Recourse that is the Atonement, it is possible for us to walk that path.
But...
We cannot get to the path if we are shackled. Interestingly, we still cannot take the path if it is the only path in front of us We must choose to take it of our own free will over opposing choice. God's reward is such that it can only be received by those who seek it willingly and sincerely. He will never use one iota of force to push or squeeze us onto His path. It's not in the program. Sadly, being free to choose the right path means we must perforce be free to walk down worse paths.
You may think that this is a given and no big deal, but it is as critical and overlooked as the foundation of a skyscraper as a tourist gapes at its peak. (In this analogy, you are the skyscraper). If you remain unconvinced, let me remind/inform you (whatever the case may be) that the very first manifestation of Satan's pride, back when he was still known as Lucifer, was an attempt to take away the moral agency of mankind--our freedom. Satan thought that it would be so much better if mankind was forced to do what was right (read: what he thought was right). That way, mankind would all collectively be saved. Not one soul would be lost, for all would be forced to bend to the greater wisdom of a higher power.
In exchange for being the one who orchestrated and put in place this massive brainwave, Satan asked for God's power and glory.
God, obviously, rejected the plan. Satan was so bitter at the rejection that he and a whole third of God's other children rebelled and were ejected from God's presence. The rest of us came down to earth, having forgotten, out of necessity, the events of this premortal state.
Satan wants to prevent us from getting back to God, to stop us from reaching our ultimate, infinite potential to which we were born. He accomplishes this by corrupting our characters and attacking the three necessary ingredients, which are, again, Information, Recourse, and Freedom. He can corrupt us with relative ease. He can try also to corrupt the passage of Information, namely the Gospel, and has succeeded in doing so many times throughout earth's history, though it has always been subsequently restored in its perfection and entirety. He can do nothing to affect the Recourse--the Atonement is a fait accompli, up high on a shelf where Satan's grubbing paws can't touch it. Freedom is something he can attack, though. If he can limit man's freedom, he can therefore limit man's ability to find and walk the straight and narrow path.
He attacks freedom through us--by manipulating us into limiting freedom. He has been very successful on this front. For much of man's history, Freedom was on the back burner of society's priorities, if it was on any burner at all. The vast majority of people on Earth's history--a staggering, tragic, sad majority--have had to live under non-democratic governments (I include republics under the umbrella-like term "democracy").
For the longest time, namely all of recorded secular history, there was no nation on the face of the planet that "got" freedom. Most people had no philosophical sense of the term. There were a few small sputterings of something close, such as in ancient Greece or the early Roman empire, but it wasn't until a loose group of colonies came along in the eighteenth century that various correct ideas that had slowly spread largely from the Enlightenment coalesced into something solid and tangible: something like a foundation upon which one could build an ambitious, unprecedented tower.
America was exceptional as a nation in that it was founded on principle. Other nations of the world had come together largely by happenstance--geographic determinism, for example--or reaction. America was the result of citizens of the colonies getting together and saying, "We have moral obligation to make ourselves into a country. We are not being found out of fear of a neighbor, or some kind of dispute or even more convenient trading. We are banding together based on ideas." This idea was that there are certain inalienable rights, namely the right to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness (which was a euphemism for property). Exceptionally, America understood from where these rights originated. We "got" freedom--rights come from God. They were inalienable. They were not given us by governments or each other, but were irreversibly born into us by God. The government's job is to facilitate and magnify these rights in the lives of average citizens. This was the first recorded case of a society understanding this and basing itself on this principle. America is exceptional because we were the first country to line itself up with what God wanted a country to be.
America is exceptional in many other ways as well, but this is the core of American exceptionalism. I'll have to apologize to President Obama, but these exceptional things are unique; Greece can come nowhere close to such bragging rights.
This is what makes American an exceptional country at the core. There are many other things about America that are exceptional, such as its astoundingly quick rise to power, prosperity, justice, national integrity, its stubbornness in refusing to join in the post-World-War-II castration of westernness that quickly and rabidly swept Europe, just to name a few.
Don't underestimate the importance of freedom. Any attempt to curb freedom will come back to bite all. Freedom is essential for strength, prosperity, and spirituality in the individual. In closing, I ask God to bless America--as He already has, and, I hope, always will!
No comments:
Post a Comment