Religion

Religion. The word by itself conjures up images in one's head based on one's background. When I wrote that word, religion, I had a mental picture of the black bible given to me as a child by the pastor at the 1st United Methodist Church. Other people may picture Christ on the cross, or the Virgin Mary, or the nun who hit their knuckles with a ruler in grade school. Other people think about religion and see only zealots and snake charmers. Still others see a waste of time, a black hole that conjures up no imagery whatsoever.

Liberal loons hate religion. They hate the fact that people have something to feel good about. As a certain progressive presidential candidate patronized, people "cling to" their religion. He said it like about people in depressed areas of Pennsylvania, I think in an attempt to show empathy for their plight, but he came off as an elitist. He made it sound like people are all drowning and will grab anything to survive. The subtext is that he views it as unnecessary - vote for him and you can quit clinging to religion. But a Harris Interactive Poll shows that 90% of people believe in God, so either there's a lot of bitter people in dire straights out there or not as many people are "clinging" to religion as some would have us believe. In times of trouble, people do turn to prayer for solace and comfort, and it's hard to find that a negative - unless you don't want people to have comfort, or don't want them to get it from God, but instead from some nanny-state entitlement.

The Founders established in this country freedom OF religion, not freedom FROM religion. There is no separation of church and state in the constitution, only a provision that the state can't mandate the religion people will follow. Henry VIII created the Church of England out of personal desperation; there would be no Church of America. America has survived on faith based capitalism for 232 years. Godless Soviet Communism died in less than 70. The monstrous Nazi regime lasted less than a decade. In the Ardennes in 1944, do you think God was in the foxholes with our men? I'll put a sawbuck down that they would tell you yes (Dick Winters of Band of Brothers fame was a deeply religious man. His book Beyond Band Of Brothers goes into some detail about his beliefs.).

I'll close with a tale of divine intervention. In 1996 I was driving south out of Ft. Collins, Colorado in my 1984 Ford Tempo. I wasn't wearing my seat belt, and at the last red light at the edge of town, I was struck with a very powerful, specific sense of vulnerability. I've not felt anything like this before or since that afternoon, but on this day I had a vision of just how unprotected I was without my seat belt. I literally had chills run up and down my spine, I got goosebumps and I shivered. Almost compulsively, I fastened the seat belt and immediately the feeling went away. 20 minutes later I was in a head on collision with a small pickup truck that turned in front of me. The crash totalled both vehicles and sent the other driver to the hospital with multiple serious injuries. I walked away virtually unscathed, with only bruises on my hips and neck from the seat belt. The accident investigation unit, or AIU officer said that I most likely would have been killed had it not been for that seat belt. She was actually amazed that I was even able to stand under my own power.

Did God tell me to put the seat belt on? Was it Divine Intervention? I can offer no proof other than my own testimony. I believe without question that the urge to put on that seat belt came from outside of myself. The forcefulness of that feeling has never been duplicated in any situation since then, and I can't chalk it up to anything I can explain; nor can I believe, as skeptics will surely say, that it was a coincidence. Someone was looking out for me that day, and that's all I really need to know.

I will have upcoming blogs looking at the new religion the progressives have embraced, and why it has the capability to doom us all.

Question - have you experienced divine intervention in your life?