Dear Friends,
It seems to me, Christmas is a time for joyous thankfulness, for everything God in his infinite generosity and love, has granted us. From the beggar to the Autocrat we all have many things to be thankful for… our health, families, friends, access to food, our stuff and even our very lives. Thankfulness is a quality of not just culture but of the civilized. To be thankless is to be a barbarian, a thoughtless brute, less than an animal. Because even a wild dog is thankful for a scrap of meat, how much less then is a person, who has the reason to understand why they should be thankful, yet use that reason to be rationalize ingratitude. Christmas is the perfect time to celebrate all the multitude of gifts God has bestowed upon us, show that we are thankful and appreciate them all. We should even thank God for our burdens, since without them we wouldn’t be the people we are. Those who live without burdens never grow up and never become wise, instead languishing in adolescence the entirety of their lives, which if you think of it, is a tragedy if ever there was one. So, thank God today, Here are some ideas what to thank him for after the biggies…
Where free enterprise has flourished, the lot of even the most destitute is far better than those in the middle class in countries it hasn’t, yet even the most poor in the most backward third world country, is better off that capitalism existed, which demands the human hearted be thankful for the free market. Even though the free market only exists in small pockets on the planet today, we are still reaping the benefits of it’s widespread acceptance a century ago. That few hundred years in which the free market ran mostly free, created such momentum that even the concerted efforts of generations of Marxists, national socialists and progressives, hasn’t been able to stop it! Free enterprise has lifted the lot of mankind from barbarism, to the point where even the people have never tasted the free market, they get the benefits in the form of vaccines for deadly diseases, food supplements, access to the means of production, cars, trucks, vans, entertainment, etc… even the most poor on our planet get some benefit from capitalism and so we should thank God for the free market.
The enlightenment was a watershed moment in human philosophy opening the way to many of the benefits of the modern age. It was that turning away from authority to logic and rational thinking that allowed free enterprise to take hold and modern science to flourish. The Enlightenment allowed our understanding of God’s creation to advance so much further, in only a few centuries, than in all the millenia preceding. Even though our intellectuals have turned their backs on logic and reality, instead embracing emotion and theory. Nevertheless we benefit greatly from Europe’s spark of enlightenment, the enlightenment, and we should thank God for it. One way to thank God would be to embrace the values of the enlightenment as they were originally intended. Throwing away the advancement of the Enlightenment however, to appease barbarians or for any other reason, is spitting in God’s face, and shows those who do, to be worse than animals who at least have instinct to be thankful.
The most important gift of all, is that God sent his only son to live as one of us, and die ignominiously on a cross as atonement for our sins. Jesus gave us the gift of redemption, all we need do is accept it, and be thankful to Jesus for so munificent a gift, as forgiveness for the unforgivable. Because of Jesus, we need not suffer the just punishments for our sins, because he has. In a more earthly way, it was Christianity, with Jesus’ teachings, love thy neighbor as thyself, do unto others, let he who is without sin cast the first stone, look to the plank in your own eye before the mote in another’s, judge not lest ye shall be judged, etc… that allowed the enlightenment to take place and free enterprise to flourish. Even such important inventions such as the printing press was necessitated by the need to print Bibles. Regardless if people purporting to represent Jesus, who didn’t live up to any of Jesus’ teachings, did bad things in “Jesus” name, their transgressions were against Jesus himself as much their victims. To know this and not thank God and Jesus is to be a barbarian, instead… gleefully thank Jesus!
So celebrate all the gifts God and Jesus Christ have given you and us, thank God and Jesus for our lives, our families, our friends, our freedom, our prosperity, our stuff and even our burdens. Thank God and Jesus for our salvation as it is the gift that begot the enlightenment and free enterprise, two temporal gifts, that without… we would be wiping our derrieres with leaves outside and huddling in the cold shivering by a meager fireplace, toiling from sun up to sunset for a few grains of corn, that some king could take from us at any moment. Rationally understand the magnitude of these gifts, Jesus’s birth, which led to our prosperity, health and science… and joyously thank God. Demonstrate to God that we are indeed above the animals, in that we are grateful because we understand why we should be grateful, rather than it being mere instinct.
Merry Christmas and Blessed Holidays to you and yours!!!
Sincerely,
John Pepin
