Dave Hawkins

King Saul ... http://www.apologeticspress.org/articles/116 ... of course we cannot prove this case ... I would not claim that we could, but we can say that this is a very plausible explanation.

AiG's point in mentioning 5 myo mountains was to show what a drastic change has taken place in the supposed ages of these mountains. The point, of course, is that if geologists revise their estimate from 50 myo to 5 myo, (40 myo to 1 myo in the case of part of the Grand Canyon) this is a drastic reduction. Why should we trust the 5 myo figure any more than the 50 myo figure?

Of course Britain is not what it once was. My view is that this is because they have repudiated the Biblical principles that once made them great. America will suffer the same fate if she follows the same course.

SAWells

Yeah, it's ages since we conquered and enslaved other nations and started a war to maintain our illegal drugs trade.

spamandham

The US was founded as a secular nation. It doesn't seem to have served us too poorly.

Calilasseia

So according to you, my country has declined because it decided not to adhere strictly to the tenets of a 3,000 year old book?

Losing nearly one and a half million people in two World Wars had nothing to do with this?

Let me educate you a moment Dave.

About 15 to 20 miles from where I live is a village called Accrington. In 1916, a recruitment drive for the next 'big push' across the trenches started, during which the so-called "Pals' Brigades" were recruited. The idea behind this was that people who lived and worked alongside each other in civilian life, who were friends and neighbours in civilian life, would be more motivated to fight as soldiers because they would be fighting to protect their own. Virtually every fit, healthy adult male between the ages of 16 and 50 in Accrington signed up. Similar scenes were to be found in other villages, towns and cities.

And thus, they shipped out, singing happily as they boarded the trains to head south to Dover, and thence to board the ships that were to carry them to France.

Then they arrived.

The date - July 1st, 1916. The location - the lines of battle straddling the Albert-Bapaumé road, not far from a modest sized river flowing through the French countryside, with Belgium less than a hundred miles to the north-west. The name of that river is now seared as a firebrand upon the soul of my country, as a result of what happened that day.

The river in question - the Somme.

At 7:30 am, the artillery barrages ceased, and the order to mount a charge from the trenches was issued. At Serre, the Accrington Pals fixed bayonets and followed the orders given. Not that far away, the 5,000 men of the 34th division at La Boisselle did likewise, having sheltered from the earlier detonation of a giant mine planted by engineers under the German trenches, the crater from which - known as Lochnagar Crater - is STILL a feature of the French countryside, a crater 90 feet deep resulting from the detonation of 54,000 pounds of explosives that was heard back in England when it went off.

Thus the men rose from their trenches, and made their way to the German lines.

Where they were cut to pieces by machine gun fire.

Of the 720 men of the Accrington Pals, 584 were dead or wounded by lunchtime. Of the 5,000 men of the 34th division at La Boisselle, just twelve came back. By the end of the day, Britain had lost nearly 60,000 men. In other words, Dave, we lost more men in one day of fighting than America lost in ten years of the Vietnam War.

By the time the Armistice was signed in 1918, Britain had lost 910,000 men confirmed killed. Thousands more returned, shattered in mind and body - we had whole battalions consisting of amputees. The full horror of mechanised warfare came home in devastating fashion to great metropolis and tiny hamlet alike - in the case of Accrington, the only males left were children under the age of 16, invalids, and the elderly.

Every family in this country has at least one relative listed as killed in the monumental records compiled by the Imperial War Museum. We can find them on cenotaphs wherever we look. The men of the 34th division - the Tyneside Irish - were all from the Newcastle area, and that city's cenotaph is a colossal affair, because it needed to be to list nearly 5,000 dead.

Among those records are also to be found some of the most tragic losses of all. The earnest young girls of the Voluntary Aid Detachment, who went to the trenches to act as nurses for the wounded - many of them sheltered, well-mannered and somewhat cosseted middle-class girls from good Christian families who thought that they were doing their duty not just to King and Country, but to God as well. Their names on the Roll of Honour are an echo of a lost world of lace tea dresses, buttered scones and Sunday Best, who were immolated in the flames of total war. Names such as Miss Wilhelmina Baily, Miss Daisy Coles, Miss Alice Violet Hallam, who went from lace bonnets and chats with the vicar to howitzer shellfire and men with their internal organs strewn across the floor.

Now let us wind the clock forward to World War II. Another 385,000 of our people died in that war, including 60,000 civilian air raid victims, blasted to smithereens during the Blitzkrieg bombing raids on London, Nottingham, Coventry, Derby, Birmingham and a dozen other cities - Coventry was firebombed twice, and as a consequence, practically no building now standing there is older than Sophia Loren. We endured round the clock bombing, the 'terror raids' that Goering thought would break our spirit: we proved him wrong, proved to be stronger than he thought us, and sent him back to his vainglorious pleasures with his tail between his legs, then returned to give him a taste of his own medicine. In the Far East campaign, our men, fighting alongside Americans, endured the hell of jungle warfare, some enduring the even worse hell of captivity at the hands of the Imperial Japanese Army, including the notorious 'Death Railway' of the River Kwai. In that campaign, a member of my own family died, earning a Victoria Cross for his valour under enemy fire in the process. As we finally turned the tide against Hitler in Europe, we discovered the nature of the beast we were fighting - a camera crew from Manchester, again only 22 miles from my home, was among the soldiers travelling along a road in the soon-to-be-conquered Nazi Germany, when they emerged from the picturesque woodland and found themselves beholding a scene that even the most tortured imaginings could not have dreamt at that time ... those men met shattering images of tens of thousands of their fellow human beings dying of starvation and typhus, a manufactured carnage in a place called Bergen-Belsen. Those cameramen from Manchester recorded for posterity what ruthless enforcement of doctrine really meant for some.

What has dealt a blow to my country, Dave, has been the exhaustion of fighting two World Wars, wars fought precisely so that we would not have to live under the yoke of slavery and dictatorship. Vast numbers of those who fought and died did so believing that they were upholding Christian decency in the face of depravity. Your trite little comment shows how little you know Dave - I come from a nation baptised in fire. You think the decline of my country is because we no longer engage in fetishistic adherence to a 3,000 year old book? You think the best part of one and a half million dead, two World Wars, round the clock bombing of cities and the carnage of trench warfare had nothing to do with this?

You make me vomit.

LEARN SOME BASIC HISTORY.

You can start here ... The Accrington Pals.

Roland Anderson

Good work, Cal. I don't normally feel especially patriotic, but Dave's offhand and ignorant remarks about Britain made me feel sick as well. What a revolting person.

mung bean

That was an awesome post, Cal.
Dave should be ashamed of himself.

Dave Hawkins

Yes. That's my opinion.I don't think this was the root cause of the decline, no.

Calilasseia

How eloquently this speaks, ladies and gentlemen.

What it speaks eloquently of, however, should be a chastening reminder of why we are here.

Dave Hawkins

I strongly disagree. The US was founded squarely upon the principles of general Christianity and adopted much from Mosaic law. The only sense in which it was secular was at the federal level. The US Congress was not to prefer any particular sect of Christianity over another. All this is made clear from the excellent original research done by David Barton in Original Intent.

Please see my blog articles here ...
http://afdave.wordpress.com/2006/11/...istian-nation/

and here ...
http://afdave.wordpress.com/2006/09/...house-chamber/

deadman_932

Good thing your nasty little opinion has as much value as your pseudoscience