Gallup: "Very Satisfied" is a Married, Religious Republican
David Eidensohn
The December 17 Gallup Poll "America's Mood: Has Sept. 11 Made a Difference?" is about happiness. What makes people happy? Marriage is a prime factor in happiness. Sixty-six percent of those "very satisfied" with their personal lives were married versus only 43% of "very satisfied" people who were unmarried. I'm sure that Gloria Steinem is happy to hear that. For decades she said "a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bike," but this year at the age of 67 she married. Of course, the women who listened to Gloria and gave their lives to vibrators or other naive women may be bitter. Yes, with all of the problems of being married in a country where marriage succeeds about half of the time, 2/3 of those people "very satisfied" with their lives were married and less than half of those "very satisfied" with their lives were unmarried.
Republicans are more satisfied with their lives than Democrats. 61% of Republicans are "very satisfied," compared to 48% "very satisfied" for Democrats. (Probably many Democrats have not gotten over the Florida primaries.) Conservatives are happier than Liberals by a margin of 14%, 59-45. (Liberals are so pained by the misery in the world they cannot enjoy their lives.) Sixty percent of those who go to church weekly are "very satisfied" as opposed to 49% of those who rarely or never attend church. (The 11% margin of attenders over non-attenders may include the masochists who like to hear about hell-fire. Maybe they like to hear about the lives of those who don't worship.)
The survey was taken on December 6-9, and found that people are getting back to normal after September 11. If people are normal, what will the secular pundits say? Of course, they will attack traditional marriage, Republicans and religion.
This survey explains why the New York Times and Time Magazine dedicated the month of December to belching about religion. On December 9, Gary Rosenblatt in Time Magazine declared the belief in a personal G-d to be "a pathological view of faith." Pathological means related to disease, or an uncontrollable impulse. Gary, on the other hand, has the answers without a personal G-d. Gary is "fanatically uncertain about what G-d is thinking." What foaming-at-the mouth religion hater is not a fanatic? "So indefinite is my idea of G-d that I do not even connect it to morality." Not only does G-d not exist, He is amoral. That should put those of us who believe in the bible in our places. We are not in Time Magazine; that is for sure.
Just when we thought that Gary had hit bottom, he tells it as he sees it: "Hitler asked, "Who says that I am not under the special protection of G-d?" In other words, Gary's G-d doesn't care if Hitler does his thing, but one who believes that G-d does care about hideous evil is a Nazi. You heard it Time Magazine, so it must be true. This magazine wrestled long with the idea of putting Bin Laden on its cover as the "person of the year." He belongs there, along with Gary. Both of them use their influence to make people hate.
The New York Times, the publication that refused to print anything about a homosexual website that threatened the life of a past-president, could not remain aloof from the fray. So it published Anthony Lewis. Anthony did not participate in the website, which was obviously written by a woo-woo, but if there are haters who follow the idea to its logical end, Anthony is their inspiration. Anthony, on December 15, blames biblical religion for the problems of the world. He says, "the phenomenon of religious fundamentalism is not to be found in Islam alone. Fundamentalist Christians in America, believing that the Bible's story of creation is the literal truth, question not only Darwin but the scientific method that has made contemporary civilization possible." In other words, civilization cannot survive if the bible is not destroyed. Tell that to those "very happy" religious people.
Time Magazine and the New York Times attack religious people because secular values are in retreat, and people realize the need for religion and family. Time Magazine and the New York Times are elitist and have to tell others how to live. However, they don't know how to find happiness, so they hate and denounce. Humanistic secularism revealed by science is a superstition long gone.
For five centuries, the modern world has struggled with values and science. The Age of Reason sought clear truth without religion and ended up with Napoleon who supported the Pope for political reasons. Hume then destroyed Empiricism, arguing that experiment only shows the succession of matters without perfectly proving why. He postulated that we couldn't know why. Kant accepted the end of Empiricism, and proposed Idealism, which states that human ideas impose their reality on facts of nature. This is an admission that science without subjective ideas is not truth. Hegel then came along and suggested that there are the Ideal, the spiritual and the Real, the material. Thus, a person is a body and a soul. Hegel thus confirmed an idea going back to Plato and Aristotle, that there is a spiritual and material dimension to everything, and that all material is rooted in a higher spiritual dimension. Gary and Anthony ignore this and without anything positive to say concentrate on hating religion.
Plato taught that all material things have a reality, or Form. Thus Plato, perhaps the most influential of the ancient philosophers, not only accepted a trans-scientific reality, he felt that anything that we could see and experience was the imperfect imitation of the Form, and thus of little value to Truth. Because Plato accepted the primacy of spiritual over material, he saw in nature a pathway to Truth in a mystical manifestation. In recent times, Einstein taught that "As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality." Modern mathematics and physics are so abstract that they cannot be reality. Quantum physics are the weirdest ideas ever proposed in human history. Einstein said, "We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality." The pundits in the atheist publications speak in the name of science as reductionists, to reduce all things to crass and lowly material things. That science is depressing. However, the great scientists and philosophers felt that Science is attached to a Higher Reality and reveals it.
Albert Einstein said, "The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mystical. It is the power of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms—this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of true religiousness." This knowledge, this feeling, is what makes religious and married people "very satisfied" even in a world filled with unsatisfying things.
T.S. Eliot said, "We know too much, are convinced of too little. Our literature is a substitute for religion, and so is our religion." If there is a fault with religion, it is what Eliot said. Our religion with its "presentable" trappings does not seek mystery, but the accolades of Anthony and Roger. Ultimately, such secular-facade religions cannot provide for the infinite spiritual hunger, and people reject the modern religions and turn to fanaticism, such as Mr. Walker, who found spirituality fighting Americans in Afghanistan. Others are so turned off by the public religion's paucity of true spirituality that they become, like Anthony and Roger, fiery humanists and haters. Until our civilization is not ashamed of G-d, it is in danger. G-d revealed His Law at Sinai, and science and nature continue to reveal the highest lights. Those who refuse Revelation and create, in the name of religion, monstrosities both irrational and cruel, are the greatest blasphemy and farthest from the art of order in Nature.
The Gallup Poll asked, "Has Sept. 11 Made a Difference?" Things are returning to normal, fortunately, but as they do, marriage and religion, conservative politics and belief will stand in stark relief to the withering world of the secular haters. Has September 11 made a difference? Yes, it has made a difference. It has shown that the old money-American dream can vanish in a day, and that there is more to happiness than material matters. September 11 accelerates a process begun and powered by modern science where society needs religion to thrive, and the family regains its primacy.
Modern science points the way to G-d. Einstein's Theory of Relativity proved that a Big Bang produced the universe. Big Bang is Creation, creatio ex nihilo, as time, space, energy and matter suddenly appeared in a universe that never existed before the Big Bang. Biology reveals the process of life and DNA, a miracle rivaling the Creation. Each human cell has billions of genes, but only one is activated. This one activated gene must act in perfect concert with billions of other cells that, too, only activate one gene of the billions in the cell. Activated genes work together to produce the fantastic wonder of the human body. Such synergism and symbiosis is Miracle and point to Intelligent Design. G-d obviously created the world and its life processes. Why? Logic tells us that only G-d can tell us what He wants. This is the story of the Giving of the Law at Sinai, when millions of Jews saw G-d speak and give the Ten Commandments. There is no other claim to such, in any myth. Nobody could invent such a history if it was not true. The covenant with Israel from Sinai tells the future of the Jewish people, and their survival is also a mighty Miracle. Frederick the Great asked a Lutheran minister for proof of G-d. The clergyman replied, "The Jews."
If we could just get past the Guardians of Humanism and Hate, we could find in science what Plato only dreamed about. That is the lesson of September 11.
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