Matthew Claybrook's Blog

Sixteen years ago I was called a “n*****- lover” for having a black girlfriend, and I was in the minority to have a problem with it. This was living in the buckle of the Bible belt. I also got called a “Fa**ot” for just having a friend that was homosexual. This was the cool kids saying this to me. I wasn’t proud of that.

I look at what is going on in the news today, and for a moment think this country is in some serious trouble. But then I look back and remember how very different life is now, that if you say something like that people will rally against you rather than for you, now.

I know, and it is painful to think of, how very very far we have to go, and that becomes more evident to me every day, but for just a moment, can we take a step back, and take a look at how far we’ve come?

For many reasons I could be ashamed to call myself an American. But the truth is, I’ve been around enough to know we only have these problems because we allow our citizens the right to speak out. These things are seemingly a problem here where in other places they are not, because nowhere else on EARTH is there such an array of culture, of belief, of diversity, and through that, such an array of versatility and strength.

It takes me some time sometimes, but I almost always come to the conclusion at the end of the day, that we are stronger now than we were; that we have endured far more to come together than to break apart, and I have good reason to believe that America will move on the truth just as it always has.

Civil liberties, freedoms, human rights…they will always be threatened. But it is the American people who take up the steady strain of ensuring that they are preserved for another generation, and in the heart of every crisis people’s hearts shine through.

That’s the beauty of it. That’s the beauty of freedom, when the powers that be give the power to the people to decide whether to live in a better world than now or a world full of sin and hate, people almost always vote for a better one. That has happened consistently for over two centenniae. That is why other nations hate us, but still want our business and still emulate us and our values.

I’m simply proud to be an American, because America stands for freedom, and freedom just wins. What you see on the news is that freedom in action, people in the process of making each other better.

Because we live in a country that has this written on its gates:

The New Colossus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,

With conquering limbs astride from land to land;

Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame

Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name

Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand

Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command

The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

“Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she

With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

These days we live in a country full of people that say it is okay to be proud of being ANYTHING….except for being American. When the truth is, it is America that stands up against the world, and sometimes even itself, to provide the right for its own people to be like that. And that is something no other nation has yet to dare… to be just that different, to win, and to be proud even when it seems like we failed, because of what we stood for.

And we do consistently what no other nation has done before as radically as we have done it. They can copy and paste but America is still the nation that sets the gold standard for that. We stand for each other.

Every tragedy, there are people waiting to donate. Every world crisis, who sends their army and private money to aid? America. Problems with cops? Let’s tour the country having a cookout with local police. It’s beautiful. It wasn’t always like that, but it has always been getting better. We have a long way to go, but that’s the beauty of it: we realize that, when most places poke fun at us, and don’t.

That, my friends, is America; that is the process of freedom, and that is why I’m still simply proud.

(http://www.libertystatepark.com/emma.htm)

Fun fact of the day: A baby has a functioning brain, nervous system and closed circulatory system, and is therefore cognitively independent, that’s pain-feeling and spatially aware at 5-6 weeks, about the time most women find out they are pregnant. See here. Because of Roe v. Wade, even government websites will play that fact down for political reasons, but it is ultimately impossible to deny the basic truth.

Is that hard to swallow? Does that make you flustered in your political views?

Bonus fun fact: The facts stated herein will get far less attention than Candace Payne’s Chewbacca Mask.

Try this: As opposed to other countries that do not have access to modern birth control and populations in the BILLIONS of people (that means countries with real population and wealth problems), the US with only a few hundred million people is currently number four in therapeutic abortions. Ironically, India, one of the poorest and most densely populated areas of the world has one of the lowest. Wonder why that is?

Last year 16000 people died as a result of violence, and one million people died in medically unnecessary abortions. That means in America, right now, the person most likely to murder you is your own mother. And by the way that’s by a ratio of 35:1. You should congratulate yourself right now, for you have already survived the deadliest time in any person’s life; before you were even born, and barring any medical complications factoring in, you were 50 percent likely unwanted, and 20 percent likely to be killed as a result of just not being wanted by your own parents.

We don’t want to think about the consequences. Of course, that’s why we do it. We don’t want to think about the consequences on our society as a whole either, much less that that part could even matter, or that it really even affects us.

So let’s apply the stats. Here are the facts on abortion; you’re not going to like it. These numbers mean, to you and me, that for any of us growing up in a household of four, our parents almost certainly murdered one of our would-be siblings. That’s the statistics. That is the prevalence of the abortion industry. The prevalence of their lies is such that if you have siblings, you likely have a dead one.

Is that a tough truth? Not sorry. We should be sorry, but not for saying something.

Here it is again. Let’s hope it sinks in some more; If you are alive, right now, and living in America, then there is an all to high likelihood that your parents murdered your brother or sister. 20%, to be exact.

Yes. You should be offended. If you’re angry at me, then at least reflect on the fact that you never let it affect you until now, did you?

The numbers are ridiculously easy to find. You probably just didn’t know, or care, enough to want to know.

Does that affect you? Does that affect your sense of things? Your view of society and those around you, close to you even?

We don’t want to think about the consequences, but we should.

More than all disease and war put together, the deadliest thing in the world today is the simple, common lie that the baby doesn’t deserve protection from harm because, “it’s only tissue.” That means that in the last century an estimated 900 million are missing from our world’s history and it is because people simply want to have sex and not think about the consequences. Not because of rape, but because we use the technology of birth control, not to enable ourselves to be more responsible with life, but less so.

That’s right. Hate me but it’s true. Since the advent of birth control, and since Roe v. Wade, people have not more sexually responsible, but less, so much so, that this single aspect of the moral state of our society, the U.S. impending inability to outpace the death rate is singlehandedly accounted for. Right now, medicine advances have allowed for more healthy births, and longer lives than ever. Despite that it is the best time to be alive, non-medical abortions hit an all time high of 1,000,000 last year. We are aborting more than ever. The wealthiest poor in the world, the best quality of life in history, and we are right now so irresponsible with life that we despite all this are not facing a population boom, but a population crash.

The fact is, our supposed “modern” values are more barbaric in their complacency and willful, even consecrated ignorance, than Hitler ever had the time to be. Hitler systematically murdered six million Jews over the course of a half-decade. Last year alone, therapeutic abortions, that is, abortions committed for the ‘financial or social health and well being of the mother,’ are responsible for 100,000,000 deaths worldwide. That’s more people in one year, every year, murdered for convenience than the entire course of Word War 2.

Well, what about women who are raped and get pregnant as a result? That’s less than one percent of the argument, by proportion a non-issue. By a massive, massive majority, most of us just want to have unprotected sex, and would rather do away with the unintended ‘consequences.’

My body, my choice. That’s the supposed iron-fortress defense. Well. If 99 percent of women were actually concerned about their bodies, they wouldn’t be having unprotected sex, as a result of valuing themselves and their bodies in the first place. And if the overwhelming majority of abortionists were truly concerned about the preservation of their personal liberties, then they would immediately be confronted with the cognitive dissonance of taking away the liberties, indeed, the life of another in order to do it. Roe v Wade increased the number of abortions by over 100 percent overall, it didn’t just correct for the number of unsafe abortions occurring at the time. If it were about well-being, why did we start having, and that means spending not just more but WAY more, on abortions, despite the lack of change in price? It’s because now people  an get away from consequence. The most expensive option no matter what, after all, is actually preserving the life we create.

Instead, abortionists, play up the necessity of medically-unnecessary abortions. Instead, we treat the process of conception as if it were this crazy, whackadoodle thing that no one sees coming, and that they never imagine happening all the while we allow for a culture of increasing ‘sexual freedom,’ almost as if we as a generation, categorically forgot to ask our parents where babies come from when we were little. We don’t want to think about the responsibility that comes with having a ‘choice.’ We have forgotten that liberty necessarily means the assumption of the responsibility for the consequences of said choices. We have forgotten that there even are consequences. Why wouldn’t we, when we could pretend it’s not real people dying, and just throw it away?

A wise person once said something to me that has stuck with me ever since; “History has shown, if you can convince a society that a person or group of people is even just a little bit less than, or other than, human, you can justify doing just about whatever you want to them.” That was what Hitler told the Germany about Jews. That they weren’t really totally human. They were lower life-forms. More like rats. Google the term ‘Jew-rat.’ That’s what it meant. Portraying a sector of population as inferior so as to do away with them. That rational self-interest was how Hitler did it, and it’s the same thing we tell ourselves about the baby in the dumpster, well, it was a lie just as it is a lie now. That person lying dead in the trash can in the abortion clinic right now was a person, no less no more, believe it or not.

It is medieval logic that babies are not alive until they pass beyond the vaginal wall, as if it were some magic spell that is cast by the doctor that somehow transubstantiates the ‘fetus’ from a ribeye into a person, like some kind of World of Warcraft spellpack, like it’s some kind of mysterious Frankensteinian defiance of the laws of physics and biology that makes life happen, rather than as a result of them.

And even if it were true, to end life for the sake of the financial well being of someone who had their chance, and decided they wanted to make poor decisions in life instead, is an insult to both. To even imply that such a thing is the responsible thing to do is a travesty.

Furthermore, the act of it cheapens the human race. To say that one should rather take life away from another than preserve it if doing so should ‘save a little money’ shows the most damningly where the heart of this generation really is about the value of human life. The truth is, we only value it as far as we can throw it, literally. That means for all our liberal sensibilities, we very often only care about our own children as far as we are forced. We claim to be the most socially aware generation. But we are really the generation with the most technology and opportunity to promote the value of human life, and instead we say that all things being equal, given the choice to assume either that A. a child’s life, even if only in the future, is worth more than the money I would otherwise have for not having to raise it, or B. a child’s life is worth less than the money I would have, and I will choose b, out of some sick sense of ‘social conscience.’ Bull. Abortion is an affront to humanity as a whole to even have the mind debased enough to ask it.

Not that I would ever condone such a thing, but the rate of back-alley abortions performed before Roe v. Wade is far dwarfed by the number of abortions per-capita afterward. Proponents and websites, like the Guttmacher Institute paint pro-abortion laws as the lesser of two evils, while conveniently forgetting to list or comment on any current statistics. Quite simply, the number of abortions per pregnancy pro-RvW was less than 1 out of 10. It is now outpacing 2 out of 10. Since RvW, abortions have doubled.

The new antibiotics available to women  was the cause for the near total elimination of mother-deaths in abortions, and this happened before RvW, not after, or as a result of. So the idea that RvW protects women is taking advantage of historical serendipity.

It may seem harsh to put things in such plain terms, but I think it is more harsh that we have used these developments to have more abortions, not less. So, according to RvW the only thing that is really substantial to say is that we simply believe a clean, cheap death is better than a dirty one. And that we value it so much more, that we buy it at twice the rate, at actually about the same price.

Quite simply, before Roe v Wade, we were dirty humans, and after Roe v Wade, we have become clean animals.

We actually take it further. We look at the science and say, “It’s probably 99.99 percent fact that the thing in my stomach will turn into a slightly different version of me, and is probably 98-99 percent chance of factuality that it was alive from the moment I began to actually sense it inside of me. But in the spirit of ‘social awareness,’ I’m going to go off the one percent, and assume it’s not just in case, and opt to do the most barbaric thing I can to it, if the opposite of my deliberate and willful assumptions. Barring absolute and total knowledge, and against actual sense and probability,  I shall opt to assume the least decent thing, and commit to kill it for my convenience, never-mind that I am here as a result of my own actions. I shall punish another.’

But abortion helps with population control…right? Wrong. In America there is literally no population problem. There is nothing to control. And we are the world leaders. It’s not even an argument. 90 percent of Planned Parenthoods are still in other than white neighborhoods, so that might be true if you are a racist, or a social darwinist like Margaret Sanger. That’s the reason she put them there, and it’s the reason they are still there. Indeed, population control.

We could control the population problem by being a responsible generation and bringing children into the world when it is possible to do so for us financially, and treating sex and family like the beautiful and sacred thing that they are, but instead we kill. And it is those in our society who most claim to cherish peace, love, unity, and life, that preach maiming and murder innocent children at a pace that the Assyrian army could not keep up with. We have not advanced as a society. We have not become more socially responsible. We have only directed our medieval barbarism toward those we can keep the most quiet. We have found something that is helpless and innocent enough that we can truly silence. Nevermind that it is our own children.

Proponents of abortion care nothing for decency, for human life, for social reform, and nothing for freedom. Proponents simply think it saves money; that is what it is really about, for the abortion industry as well as the individuals it serves. It’s got nothing to do with morality or ethics. The last defense, and actually the first defense that abortionists often employ is that it saves money. Well, I’ll give that murder often does.  

That’s true.

But we are murdering our children. If we can’t see the cost in that, it is a result of the loss of our own moral fiber. Inability to see the worth of a human life, a soul over a savings account is actually the most telling clue to the depravity and inhumanity of the abortionist position.

What is right, what is responsible, however is just about always inconvenient.

The facts are such, that proabortion law had nothing to do, and will continue to have nothing to do with women’s health.  Concurrent medical advancements and social programs outside of the provisions of RvW are what made pregnancies safer for women and child rearing in poor areas more possible, and that would not change if we opted to erase this obsolete law and tell the world that we will no longer stand for the illusion that we must, as a race, choose any more between the lesser of two evils. RvW is obsolete, and it has become an anachronistic excuse for people to be selfish and inhuman.

Roe v Wade could be said on some level to have been a damage control law, meant to give women a safer and healthier option. That’s a half-truth, and that’s why it only half succeeded. What it succeeds in now is facilitating on an individual level, a pathetic excuse for consecrated murder, and at a national level, aid the U.S. in the same moral population spiral and economic, social, and moral crisis that the rest of the political west is currently facing, because those countries corrupted the family concept a few years before we did, and we followed suit like the blind leading the blind.

India, by comparison, has almost no medical care, no money, yet they have just about the lowest divorce rate and lowest abortion rate in the world.

They are a poor, disadvantaged, and overpopulated society, and they are still clean humans.

The supposed medical dangers to women are really no longer present in our society and it is not because of pro-abortion law. Nor are economic dangers, population dangers, or concern for the poor even an argument. That’s just political rhetoric.

Personal financial convenience, the only supposed argument left, is no excuse to kill.

We can do better, we need to do better. We need to take responsibility for our humanity.

We need to wake up.

The conversation usually goes something like this:

“I think religion is a backwards idea, and it poisons the mind and society.”

“Well, how do you define religion?”

“It’s just, like, predefined set of rituals designed to make people feel better about themselves.”

“That’s nice.” I say, and usually leave or drop into silence, out of politeness.

And how the conversation goes on in my head is…

“So, what do you believe in?”

“Science. Facts, evidence, logic.”

“So, where did you get that definition of religion?”

“Um…”

“Because I can’t think of a single religion in which its followers would not be completely offended if you were to say that to them. As a matter of fact, I don’t think any religion that could be said to fit that definition is by any means the major religions of which you are obviously lumping together. So, by your own standard of evaluation, I would have to reject your definition of religion. The evidence is overwhelmingly against it.”

“Um…oh.”

“And further more, what you yourself have said is by definition of what religion REALLY is, a religious statement. It is a belief, from which your draw moral conclusions. Those things that you do as a result of those moral conclusions? Those are what the ancient philosophers would refer to as your “true religion. So either the whole religious world and all its theological history is fundamentally wrong about itself, or you just have an ignorant, and actually offensive, view of most people and their beliefs which you simply don’t like, much less understand. It sounds to me like the only person going around here doing and believing things in order to make themselves feel better is you, and I would hazard a guess you probably owe someone very close to you an apology.”

Person looks down.

“That’s repentance. Something religious people believe in. My friend, you stake your claim on a philosophy, like everyone else, only the difference is, you have used your supposedly perfect philosophy to deligitimize, and disrespect, and disinform yourself of others’. Of course, to you, it seems like knowledge. It’s not.”

There may be some offense to certain people in the truth, but the offense of ignorance is much greater, and willful ignorance the greatest. When religious people are openly insulted, as if it is okay to be hateful to them but no other group of people, as if we were even the minority, most are quiet about it. It’s not because the opposition is right, though; it’s because we take responsibility for ourselves. It’s because we know that we need to do that.

Because we know that while there have been people who make religion look bad, the real historical truth is that it works. It has a tendency to create communities, while the ignorance of rationalism has slowly torn us as a nation apart. There might be a populace in our media who like to denigrate the constructive and ongoing process of religious development, but we know what the truth is.

The truth is that when man makes himself out to be God, and starts determining truth to satisfy his own limited perspective, that is when mankind most greatly suffers.

It’s kind of like American economics. Most Americans will gladly pay for a lower priced product even if it comes from another country. Why? Because when all you see is two stickers, one that says “Made in America,” and the other says,”50% percent off,” the logical American will help themselves out, and not worry about consequences off somewhere in some country they’ve never heard of. But if companies were to have written a little more of the truth on their labels, it might have a different outcome: “Made in America, because we have found a way to walk all over employees here while saving on the logistics, because we don’t have the same buying power to move.” OR, “50% off, because we built a factory in a country deeply enslaved in debt to America, so they let us pay them pennies for their labor, and say nothing.” When people know a little bit more of the truth, companies out to make money tend to lose, because they weren’t being honest in the first place. Likewise, some people have a rational self-interest in  trying to escape from the sometimes negative consequences of taking a harder look at what they believe, by holding to a sticker with less content; “No philosophy or religion here, just science.”  They don’t know, nor want to know, that even some of their hardest doctrines do not hold up to the rigors with which they reject other views. They take the cheap sticker, because it presents an easy, supposedly consequence-free conclusion.

We have done with philosophy and faith, the same thing that we have done with our economy, we take the cheap sticker, the short answer, in whatever we want to hear, no matter how insensitive it is to those whom we turn a blind eye. We have thought for a long time that we can just keep exporting reality, and never have to pay.

Well, the short story will be what is already happening. American rationalism has so silenced all dissenting voice, and has become so illiterate, that it can hardly even operate any more under its own presumptions without extreme, highly violent, and highly IRrational reaction from the public. That’s what ignorance does, and the best way to make people ignorant is to give them a short list of facts and tell them they cannot dispute them.  It’s not that logic is not logical, that facts are not factual, it’s that the short list is NEVER all the facts, not in America. Because our brand of rationalism is not about finding the truth. It’s about power.

There is an establishment that tells us that if we are really being “rational, modern” people then we will reject all but the facts of science. But which facts of science? The facts that gravity is yet to bee empirically proven to exist, the facts that Jesus is the most historically corroborated individual bar none? The facts that the Big Bang theory keeps looking more and more like what it really is, a view concurrent to the Christian view of creation? Or how about the fact that Information Theory has shown traditional, multiverse view of many particle physicists to be overcomplicated, easily explains the observability breakdown problem, in support of a single-universe view using a rudimentary formula that has existed for years?  That there are more simple models, given all the facts, of the absolute mess that is the secular geological timescale? That many foundational  questions about the nature of our universe has really only been a problem of lack of diversity in the sciences, due to what? You guessed it, the silencing of opinion. Because modern science is not about truth or accountability or experimentation anymore. It’s about conformity, and it’s about power, just like postmodern American religion.

Obviously there’s a yin to every yang, as it were. There’s no shortage of churches in our country that believe themselves to be the only group of people going to Heaven. And you won’t find those denominations rejecting other ideas, that would be impolite. You just won’t find them engaging either. It’s usually on the grounds that “people shouldn’t talk about religion or politics,” because people can’t handle it. But no one in those areas of Christianity will ever really admit that it’s them that are theologically holding to traditions that are up against the wall in dealing with the scathing and often necessary skepticism of our culture and our youth. They won’t talk about it, really, because it’s them that don’t want to change; so they silence not only some opinion, but even more extreme. They silence ALL opinion, just like your traditional hard-line scientific rationalist. The effect? Both sides are now so disinformed, so disillusioned, that they no longer will take ownership of their losses. Christianity, the organization founded by the most morally good, consistent, passionate, real, and honest person who ever lived, who said, “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free,” and, “I will not lose one,” is now the organization that considers itself so rational, that it will no longer stoop from its supposed moral high road, and actually defend itself if it might save a soul. It considers itself so rational, so good, that it will no longer engage in society; and so truthful that it no longer does anything about the lost world that we are drowning in, by just saying something.

Both sides believe that if we are being real, rational people, then we will eventually all come to the same conclusion, because everyone has at some level a sense of what is true about the universe. So, they go about silencing all other opinions, oppressing all other beliefs except their own, but the only thing they really accomplish is silencing themselves, and disinforming themselves into obsolescence and eventually, a certain inability to be consistent with their own views.

As a Christian, I believe that there are some absolute realities that we have to deal with, and it is pretty easy to argue that, on the grounds that it is literally impossible to argue the opposite. I think, no, I know, that by an overwhelming majority, people believe at some level that reality cannot exist without something being true, but I think people give up. They give up on finding the truth because of the slushpile of mostly dishonest opinion, and they give up on even the very idea of truth itself, so that they can justify just making up something up for themselves, if anything so they don’t have to feel so completely lost, as anyone would in the former kind of world. We take the cheap sticker again, because who on earth would want to deal with that? Who would want to sort through all of this? Only someone who absolutely believes in absoluteness. That person can often seem like the most troubled, or the most dishonest and insensitive of all. Better just to say, “I know my own truth.” And be done with it all.

But what we are really saying is, “I know my own hope.” We make our own sticker, and embrace as a society everything that truth ultimately stands against, and even go about ethically destructive, and morally bankrupt behaviors on the justification that even that would be better than the cheap stickers anyone else has to offer. It’s obvious sophistry, and only a true fool would commit to it fully, but that is just the state people are in, where they will take the cheapest sticker of all, the handwritten philosophy, constructed of unnaccountable populism, for that is all that the individual is capable of. Anything is better than the Establishment. Both sides of faith and politics demonize one another, but what they don’t realize is that the general public views BOTH sides as the corrupt and dishonest Establishment. And, despite the mountain of foolishness in the opinions of the general, miseducated public, about that one thing they are right.

But where do we go from here? If what I am saying is true, then how can we even hope to move forward? This is what I hope to cover in my next few essays. I hope you can stay tuned, and I thank you for being willing to stick with me thus far.

Calling bull. Gun control is a useless sham for democratic votes. controlhttps://www.facebook.com/matthew.clay...

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