Church of God, New World Ministries

Permissiveness - The Curse of Western Society

Do you realize the price we are paying for following permissive social and educational theories? It is time we looked at results, and the wretchedness which is sure to come if drastic changes are not made.

When bandleader Lawrence Welk was alive he made this statement: “Permissiveness and immorality in the United States are very dangerous. You see it in the crime rate. We’ve got to get back to Christian principles and a decent moral standard. The trend must be reversed if we are going to save ourselves.”

The United States of America is sick. Unless basic changes are made in our national policies and individual lives, we are, unquestionably, “sick to death.”

Alarmist, you say? No, we are dealing with facts. We are dealing with national and historical trends of ominous proportions. Student rioting in the 1960”s across the country was but a symptom of our sickness.

Who taught students to rebel? What basic social and educational philosophy is behind the disruption and disarray now so clearly evident in America’s educational system?

And why are marriages sick? In spite of more “freedom” and permissiveness, why are college students and other young people more miserable and unhappy than ever before?

Most of the permissive parents, professors and psychologists are, of course, sincere. They have seen the evils of cruelty toward children in the home and in the school. They tell tales of child beating, of little babies and grade school children with welts all over their bodies, or even broken bones. They have heard or read of young people whose whole personality and approach to life has been warped and stunted by harsh, rigid, unfeeling discipline in the home or school.

Then the permissives see the cruel and inhuman way that criminals have often treaded: forced to “confess” under physical and mental duress, sometimes kept in jail for weeks or months (in the past) without proper legal counsel and often without even knowing the charges against them.

The sympathetic permissive sees that often the criminal who has no money or who comes from an ethnic minority group is bullied, manhandled, and spends far more time in jail than the suave, affluent “city slicker” type criminal who can hire the best lawyers, get out immediately on bail and often evade punishment entirely through legal technicalities and interminable appeals to higher courts.

Needless to say, all of the above does happen, and does need to be changed. But how? The problem is that human beings nearly always tend to “overreact.” We tend to go to one extreme or the other. However, we could seek the safe, sound balanced “middle-road” solution if we would think our problem through.

When Ronald Reagan was the governor of California, he made this statement: “In our humanitarian society we have safe-guarded the rights of the accused. Nothing horrifies us so much as the possibility of punishing the non-guilty. But now we have carried this to an excessive concern for the guilty. We do not call the criminal a criminal; he is a patient made ill by the failure of society. And since society cannot be tried for its crimes, why should he take the blame?

Permissiveness from cradle to crime is our philosophy and what were once considered privileges are now recognized as rights and first and foremost is the right to adjust any grievance by the nearest means at hand, be it rock, club or the fire bomb.

Our Constitution has been eroded by court decisions pretending to extend freedom to all when in reality they gave license to a few. Guilt or innocence is of less importance than the legal niceties. The confessed killer of wife and four children walks free because of his confession, not in spite of it. His lawyer was not present to hear it. Another confessed murderer walks our streets a free man because the police held him too long, a matter of hours before formally charging him with the crime he had voluntarily confessed.

No one can deny that the English-speaking peoples of the world are facing a moral toboggan slide. Crime is up, and the lawless elements are bolder than ever before. Riots and rebellion are now commonplace.

The statistics for forcible rape and all sexual crimes are up. And the purveyors of filth and pornography are having a heyday.

Former sports-writer Jim Murray once commented that we are “a country that finds ways for punishing its criminals, disciplining its children and locking up its mad.” He likened it to a lamb defending the lion’s right to eat it and said, “The Constitution was never conceived as a shield for degeneracy. You start out burning the flag and you end up burning some city, such as Detroit. A young, vigorous country is immobilized by bumper stickers, slogans, neurotic students with their feet on desks they couldn’t make, pulling down universities they wouldn’t know how to rebuild.”

Some of the results of our permissiveness and lawless society are the following:

  1. Because of illegal aliens, motorcycle gangs such as Hells Angels, The Outlaws, The Mongols, street gangs across this land and people who could care less about authority; crime is increasing nearly nine times as fast as population.

  2. More than one third of our firstborn children in the America are conceived out of wedlock.

  3. In 2008 there were 1,726,566 illegitimate births in the United States

  4. Today, venereal disease is out of control in America. Sexually transmitted disease remains a major public health challenge. The CDC estimates that there are approximately 19 million new STD infections each year, which cost the U.S. healthcare system $16.4 billion annually and cost individuals even more in terms of acute and long-term health consequences.

  5. In America from 1973-2008 50 million babies were aborted, that comes to 1.42 million each year. One percent claims they had an abortion because of rape or incest. Six percent claims health problems with mother or child. Ninety three percent just because of social reason (child unwanted or inconvenient).

  6. Suicide is the leading cause of death among teenagers and young adults under 35 years of age. Ten to twenty million tried to kill themselves but failed.

For decades we have followed the urgings of the self-appointed “do-gooders” and ultra liberals. And we have bred a whole generation of malcontents. These undisciplined products of permissive homes, schools and colleges are beginning to disrupt and destroy the very institutions which gave them license to practice anarchy.

We now have with us a vast segment of society which is delinquent in its responsibility to provide for itself. Other vast numbers have found it impossible to provide for themselves, due to our upside down society. We all must pay and pay and pay in an attempt to rectify the omissions of others. So the national economy is being sapped to feed the products of permissive teachings and doings.

We trust our enemies because modern theorists teach that human nature is basically good and that human reason is the key to solving all problems. We support foreign revolutionary “reformers” because do-gooders expound that faulty social or environmental conditions must be eradicated and that the will of the majority is the truth. We allow complete freedom of expression, including smut and filth because these theorists insist that absolute truth does not exist.

We can’t punish anyone from rebellious children to psychotic criminals, because permissive psychology stipulates that only ignorance and bad social (environmental) institutions can be blamed, not people.

As the permissive thinker views his narrow little world, he is sure of only one thing, that he can never be certain that he knows the truth about anything. “Truth,” as defined by these modern thinkers must necessarily be changing, always in a state of flux. When applied to human actions, this concept is known as “moral relativism.”

This is an age-old ploy of man’s deceitful mind desperately striving to justify his own nasty, secret activities.

Absolute truth of a religious nature is the ingredient most likely to boil blood. All supernatural superstitions, all ingrained religious prejudices, all moral taboos must be expunged from a position of any consequence in human affairs in order to create an “enlightened” world.

Since permissive psychology teaches that there is no eternal truth, there can be no fixed standards by which we can judge any issue, no way of knowing what is right or wrong, and certainly no God to look to for guidance. For all practical purposes, truth – to the permissive -- is simply the present scientific consensus within any given field, and political and racial truth is whatever is voted by the majority. Yet, the permissive radical activists are, in fact, not a majority at all! They are a loud, often violent minority, attempting to make their voices heard by any convenient method.

Thus, ultra-liberal students at Berkeley, Columbia, Kent and elsewhere feel they have every right to riot, bomb, and burn and pillage their campus and community, perhaps even imprisoning for a time some of their permissive professors who taught them this truth. And if students get shot by the National Guard or police, why aren’t these professors who advocated and supported this student rebellion held at least partially responsible?

Many of these self-appointed guardians of truth, rejecting God, and the laws of the land, and often decency itself are busy teaching our young a strange and contradicting set of doctrines. But they piously avoid responsibility for the end results of following their philosophy, their “New Morality.”

They pity (quite rightly) the individual criminal. They want to be kind to him. But they are not worried that their brand of kindness, by spreading the gospel of “Do What Thou Wilt,” appears to be creating thousands of new criminals.

They pity the individual homosexual. But they do not consider for a moment whether they are being kind to thousands who might never have considered homosexuality except in the permissive climate created by ultra-liberal teachings.

They pity the plight of an unmarried mother and her problems of rearing a child without a father. And (despite their much-vaunted regard for the sanctity of human life when the execution of murderers is involved) they denounce the supposedly callous abortion laws which prevent the child being put out of its misery by execution before birth! They do not seem aware that they may possibly have been responsible for the misery themselves.

There is only one sort of ignoramus who can count on no kindness whatever from these ardent new revolutionaries: the ordinary man who, though he may not be perfect himself, feels in his heart that certain things, whether drug taking or abortion-for-convenience, are wrong. Against him the revolutionary army brings us all its most shattering weapons. A bombardment of TV plays represents him as a hard-faced moron. He is sprayed with half-facts and cracked logic.

Permissive teachers need to be made to look squarely at the results of their teachings. They need to comprehend that the very foundations of our English-speaking world are crumbling, at least partly due to their ideologies.

The stark lesson is that national weakness in the face of threat only invites more aggression. Socialist experiments and welfare-stateism breed a lack of character and purpose that wrecks the fiber of a people, and drains the national resources to the point of pity.

The lesson should be clear to those that advocate “freedom” for filth, smut, rebellion and a general climate for permissiveness. All these are direct stepping stones to the youthful riots and rebellion, the spiraling rise of crime and drug addiction, the destruction of millions of dollars in properties and possessions, and the literal deaths of many of the youthful dissenters and police, plus increasing numbers of innocent bystanders.

These freedoms also lead to pathetic little orphans destined never to know their real parents, future generations of even more violent juvenile delinquents who were rejected by their parents before birth, uncounted thousands of babies born blind or mentally damaged because of venereal disease in the mother, even higher suicide rates among the youth who finally discover that the freedoms found in illicit sex and drugs made them miserable.

What should you do about this ominous trend? For one thing, educate yourself about it even further. Understand not just the promises, but the end results of it. Make sure that your children or loved ones are not misled by empty platitudes or perverted psychology. Make sure that your young are trained and disciplined in a firm yet loving manner to respect you, their parents, to respect law and order and the rights and privileges of others. Teach them to respect the authority of schools, teachers, government officials, their nation and their flag.

Then, be willing to ask yourself about the biggest “key” to solving the problem of permissiveness and immorality: “Doe a real God exist?” What does that have to do with it? Everything. Because if there is no God, then each man’s opinion is just that, an opinion. All the writings of the great theologians, philosophers, psychologists and thinkers are reduced to the same common denominator, human opinion.

And the opinions of fallible human beings have always tended to contradict, criticize or refute one another. Without a real God, everyone is free to think or say: “Here’s the way I look at it!” And no one can be sure otherwise, can truly speak with authority, or refer to recognized basis of truth. For without a living God, there is no basis, there is no certain truth.

If you haven’t yet proved whether God is, then you need to read our article, “Does God Really Exist?”

Be willing to prove for yourself whether or not a God exists. Men have lost all deep respect for law and decent principles, because they are confused about the very source of all law and authority! Yet, your Bible claims “There is one lawgiver, who is able to save and to destroy” (James 4:12). Who is that lawgiver?

One of the world’s foremost educators, before his death, warned a group of military leaders of this very problem. His name was Dr. Rufus Von KleinSmid, former Chancellor of the University of Southern California. He stated: “I have no quarrel with the present emphasis placed on science, but today we are paying for support of schools which act from September 1 to June 30 as if there were no God.” Dr. Von KleinSmid noted the absence of moral values in our youth resulting from this attitude.

King Solomon advised: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge” (Prov. 1:7). This fear didn’t mean a persona dread, but a deep respect and reverence for the great office and authority of God, for His divine power, wisdom and love.

In nearly all present-day religious denominations, the tendency is to try to “modernize” and “democratize” God, to do away with the idea that a divine Authority Rules the creation, and us, His creatures. There are very few today truly “God-fearing men” left on earth today!

Solomon also concluded this without faith in such a great and real God, man is incomplete. Cut off from this true God of law and order, man is purposeless, empty, frustrated, confused.

Summarizing the way to achieve fulfillment of man’s desire for a happy, abundant and purposeful life, Solomon wrote these words as the end of the book of Ecclesiastes: “The end of the matter, all having been heard: fear God, and keep His commandments, for this is the whole man” (Eccl. 12:13).

Solomon knew that a living God ruled the universe with active dynamic, beneficial laws. And that without this divine law, there is no absolute standard of behavior. The result is moral chaos. It is lawlessness and wretchedness in the human heart, the “permissive society” we all see about us in Britain and America today.

The way of life revealed in this basic law is simply the way of giving. It is outgoing concern to our Creator and our fellow man, yet with stated safeguards to prevent even this principle from being misapplied through faulty human reasoning. (Send for our FREE DVD “Two Ways of Life).

The great law teaches young people to honor and obey their parents. It teaches us all not to kill, not to commit adultery or even to lust, thus forbidding pornography in all forms. It teaches us not to steal, bear false witness or covet. If understood and obeyed, this law would end permissiveness and it would end crime, war, broken homes and a host of other ills. Nationally, it would stop the deterioration of the American people as world powers.

We must not assume that we can continue to breed rebellious youngsters, coddle criminals, wallow in sex in every perverted form, become a nation of weirdoes, pill poppers and drug addicts, and yet somehow our enemies will “go away,” that hungry nations more disciplined than ourselves, will not bring us down as surely as they did ancient Rome! Permissiveness even has to do with our national survival.

The Bible makes it very clear, a generation is soon coming which will be taught to appreciate law, order, harmony and peace. War, rebellion, immorality and permissiveness are on the way out. Our task is to prepare to be leaders in that New World to come and a better tomorrow.

 
Want to know more?
  1. Enroll in our correspondence course Request the FREE correspondence by clicking here
  2. Sign up for our monthly DVD Sermon program Request the FREE monthly sermon DVD's by clicking here
  3. Subscribe to our mailing list Request to be added to the mailing list by clicking here
They are all free, there are NO strings attached and we DO NOT solicit for money.
 
  Web Site Artwork Credits
© 2024 Church of God, New World Ministries
P.O. Box 770 New Tazewell, TN 37824       (423) 626-0553