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Get Aboard the ARC!

 

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"A decline in courage may be the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days."

"Socialism of any type and shade leads to a total destruction of the human spirit and to a leveling of mankind into death."

"Only morality can help the West against communism's well planned world strategy. There is no other way."

"All the glorified technological achievements of Progress, including the conquest of outer space, do not redeem the 20th century's moral poverty which no one could imagine even as late as in the 19th Century."

"Liberalism was inevitably displaced by radicalism; radicalism had to surrender to socialism; and socialism could never resist communism."

"Human beings are born with different capacities. If they are free, they are not equal. And if they are equal, they are not free."

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn became a Christian while undergoing the beastly treatment he endured in Soviet concentration camps. Millions of people in the West who had read his books championed him as a leader of resistance to communism, and advocated and petitioned for his release, including myself. But when the Soviet regime exiled him to the U.S. and he began giving speeches about the decline of the West, American elite universities and mainstream media reacted by dropping him like a hot potato.

The prolific journalist and author Rod Dreher's recent column on Substack "Should We Climb Aboard The ARC?" summarizes the three-day conference of the world's thought leaders brought together by the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC).

Dreher wrote – "politics are necessary to civilizational renewal, but not sufficient... ultimately, our civilizational crisis is a crisis of meaning, and that means, at bottom, a religious crisis... nearly every good thing about our civilization came down to us because our ancestors were Christians. God knows they were flawed, as all of us are, but the moral code that guided them, and by which they measured their success or failure, was that of the Bible."

The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) website contains a rich, read-worthy series of written articles and videos. A simply wonderful article, "Soul Trader: Identity in a Digital Age", explains the difference between machine-computed information and human comprehension, and between humans as mere thinking animals and souls who happen to have a human body. You do not have a soul: you are a soul who happens to have a body.

Another excellent article on their website is "Family Matters: Why Our Choices Determine Our Economic Prosperity" that tells us how family breakdown is directly linked to spiralling government budgets and population collapse. For example, "An analysis of European fertility has revealed that marital fertility rates are at least 2.6 children per woman, and up to 6 times higher than non-marital fertility rates – a stark reminder that the family is the key to population growth." In other words, fornication and the resulting abortions are a direct cause of population collapse.

The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) "is an international movement with a vision for a better world where empowered citizens take responsibility and work together to bring flourishing and prosperity to their families, communities, and nations" that aims to reconstruct out crumbling western society that has sold its Christian heritage birthright for a mess of relativistic pottage. It actively posts on social media, including on LinkedIn:

"The 'twin unrelenting drive [of] individualism and secularism' has marched through our institutions. But what has it left behind? It turns out that freedom from all higher authority also means the loss of a higher purpose. Freedom from all human obligation also means the loss of meaningful relationship. With nothing greater to believe in, no place to belong to, and no community to walk with, our young people are facing a bleak future. It appears a civilisational twilight is on the horizon for the West. Yet we have hidden within our inheritance the values upon which our civilisation was once built: human dignity, truth, justice, peace."

As you can see, the above "ARC" concept ties in very well with our ARC program we've been developing over several decades for "Building the ARC" – the Agape Restoration Community concept. At this link you'll read the "why" for our ARC, and on our "Brief Overview of the ARC" page you can get a one-sheet brief overview on "how" to do it, and a second document: "Biblical Basis for the Agape Restoration Society," a 10-page paper including four full-page sketches of our plans (just updated this week!) for "Agape Restoration Communities."

We must do more than simply articulate the current malaise in western society and voice some vague generalities about recovering our Christian heritage with a few references to some Deity upstairs in the heavens: "politics are necessary to civilizational renewal, but not sufficient." We must return to the true, original Chrisitian faith as spelled out in the Nicene Creed and preached and practiced by the Early Church. As the Apostle Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 15:32-33, if God did not become incarnate in Jesus Christ, if Jesus Christ did not die for our sins and rise again, "If the dead are not raised, then" (we might as well) "eat and drink, for tomorrow we die. Don't be deceived! Evil companionships corrupt good morals." Christ is the Only Way to overcome western society's post-Christian moral malaise!

Get the full article on our ARC-News blog at blogspot.com.

You can read the rest of our newsletter at https://agape-restoration-society.org/ARC-News/a-n_2025-02-22.htm, and share it!

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'POPULATION COLLAPSE' IS ALREADY HERE

 

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(Click the photo.) The world's population collapse isn't "going to happen"... it's already here. The article "You can’t stare down reality: population collapse has begun" explains that many people dismiss warnings about the world running out of people. They attack the messengers as sensationalist gloom-and-doomers or pronatalist fanatics who care nothing for the environment and would force procreation by religious edict.

But by 2100, populations in some major economies will fall by 20 to 50 percent, based on UN projections. This includes Europe, North America, Latin America, the Caribbean, India, the Middle East and North Africa. The global support ratio of working-age people to senior citizens was 9.7 in 1997. Today it's 6.5, projected to be 3.9 by 2050. In "Global North" countries it is 3.9, projected to be 2.0 by 2050. Seniors will account for a quarter of global consumption by 2050. While we should continue combating the birth dearth, let’s face it: our reality is a decreasing fertility and a youth deficit that will sharply reduce the working-age component of societies across the globe. This is not sustainable for modern society: it is collapsing.

What accounts for this birth dearth? Our ARC-News lead articles in the Nov. 30 and Dec. 14 issues of last year provided several reasons: The first is the "Age of Reason" in the West that exalted human rationality and its ability to analyze and control the natural, material world. Some call this the "Age of Enlightenment" but it should more aptly be named the "Age of Endarkenment" because, as St. Paul wrote – "although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, nor were thankful, but became futile in their thoughts, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools" (Romans 1:21-22).

Second is the industrial age, which ushered in the ability via steam engines, electricity, and oil products to vastly expand mankind's ability to produce material goods. This caused us to further change our focus from the world as God's creation to a world that is just waiting to be exploited for mankind's material gain and comfort. Education became completely secularized. We now have homes with central heating and cooling, kitchens full of modern appliances to make life easier, cars and smoothly paved roads to drive on, and unprecedented wealth per capita. But we've also polluted our air with petrochemical exhausts, our waters with microplastics that cause infertility, and our land with radioactive and poisonous chemical waste.

Thirdly, this ushered in the idea that we no longer needed traditional morality to have "the good life" as people accumulated more stuff and money. The pursuit of pleasure and possessions replaced the pursuit of holiness and glorifying God. By the latter half of the 20th century, the idea that the "Great Society" welfare state would provide for our every need means we don't need to bother with having children to take care of us in our old age, "the Pill" and abortion broke the link between sex and reproduction, schools began handing out condoms and the Pill to high school students without parents' knowledge or consent, and college campuses became places of rampant bed-hopping.

The first article quoted above mentioned the study “Dependency and depopulation? Confronting the consequences of a new demographic reality” from the prestigious McKinsey Global Institute (MGI), It tells that modern society has made us dependent on the secular state for education, healthcare, and retirement so that we don't need to take care of ourselves, struggle and study to learn a profession, earn our own way, raise a family, and provide for our old age: the government will provide for us.

We have become fat and lazy: most people spend the majority of their waking hours in front of a screen, either with their noses glued to their smartphones, staring at a computer, or watching TV – usually over the Internet. This has resulted in about 50% of young men not meeting the physical or intellectual standards for military service, "a population that does not want to serve, and that is too fat and dumb to serve effectively."

The "all-powerful, all-wise social welfare state" has run out of gas, money and people. It can no longer collect enough taxes to provide all of the services and benefits that it has promised and that the people have voted for. Creating "fiat money" out of thin air by simply issuing more bonds has resulted in cheapening the value of currencies in nearly all developed economies: I remember that when I was a child a first-class stamp cost two cents and a candy bar cost five cents. Now they cost about 30 times as much! This inflation is the result of financing the social welfare state by issuing "funny money" and thus devaluing our currency.

Inflation is not a law of nature, it is a man-made, government-made way of deceiving people into believing that they're earning more money so they and the future generations can pay more taxes. Even the laws of nature are not the final word: Information Science is the transformation of meaningless bits of raw data into "data structures" of meaningful information. The universe is not merely raw matter, it requires structure and information to exist; astrophysicists now know that there's something beyond human ability to comprehend, even with the best scientific instruments: they call it "Dark Matter" or "Dark Energy" that makes up over 95% of the universe and without which the universe cannot exist or hold together.

We cannot continue deceiving ourselves into thinking that life will always go on as usual, that the secular state is able to solve all social and economic problems. It is high time – even past time – for us to repent of our overweening pride, our greed and laziness, to turn away from this postmodern mentality that everything will continue getting better and better. We need to return to faith in the real, supernatural God who has revealed Himself in the Living Word, the Logos – the true Logic and Meaning of life – "Who is the icon of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by Him (the Logos) were all things created, in the heavens and on the earth, things visible and things invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers; all things have been created through Him, and for Him. He is before all things, and in Him all things are held together" (Colossians 1:15-17).

You can read the rest of our newsletter at https://agape-restoration-society.org/ARC-News/a-n_2025-02-08.htm, and share it!