ORTHODOX CHRISTIAN WITNESS (USPS 412-260) is published biweekly except the first two weeks of August by St. Nectarios American Orthodox Church, 10300 Ashworth Avenue North, Seattle, Washington. Periodical postage paid at Seattle, Washington. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to. ORTHODOX CHRISTIAN WITNESS, 10300 Ashworth Avenue North, Seattle, Washington 98133-9410.

27th Sunday after Pentecost. Sunday of the Holy Forefathers. St. Daniel the Stylite of Constantinople; Martyr Myrax of Egypt; St. Luke the New Stylite of Chalcedon; St. Nicon the Dry of the Kiev Caves; Martyrs Acepsius and Aeithalas at Arbelus; St. Leontius, monk of Monembasia in the Peloponnesus; Martyr Barsabas in Persia; New-hieromartyr Theophan of Solikamsk (1918); Martyrs Terentius, Vincent, Emilian and Bebaia.

TO OUR READERS:We apologize for the recent delays in publishing. This issue, dated December 11/24, actually was produced and distributed in April. We hope to be caught up soon. Pray for us.

Editors’ Note: As Orthodox Christians, we feel it is our obligation to publish the following item; first, as a memorial and loving testimony to the tens of millions of Orthodox Christians who died in Russia under Marxism’s barbarous yoke; and second, as a warning and admonition to the rest of us who live in the “free” (for now) world. Our freedom is ultimately dependent on how much we and our governments fear God. If the majority of us (and hence, those who govern us) come to believe that God does not exist, as this article explains, our freedoms will turn into “a recipe for disaster.”

    I have some concern that I overwork the following quotation from Edmund Burke, but I hope you will indulge me. I believe it offers an extraordinary insight: “Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.”

    It is a point also made by [another writer who explains] that “democracy is more than a political experiment; it is a spiritual and moral enterprise. And its success depends upon the virtue of the people who undertake it. Men who would be politically free must discipline themselves.” And, he continues, “Political freedom is endangered in its foundations as soon as the universal moral values, upon whose shared possession the self-discipline of a free society depends, are no longer vigorous enough to restrain the passions and shatter the selfish inertia of men.”

    Burke and others focus on the great paradox of modern liberalism. The political left has been arguing since the days of the French Revolution that a) there is no God, no afterlife, no objective code of human behavior, and b) majority opinion should determine public policy. In doing so, they undermine both Burke’s checks “from within” (religious belief) and “from without” (traditional authorities). It is a recipe for disaster.

    To see why, imagine yourself and some neighbors shipwrecked on a desert isle with 50 convicted murderers and rapists. You and your friends somehow have taken control of a cache of guns from the ship’s storeroom, but the felons inform you that they have voted to take them away from you and put them under the direction of a village council. The convicts are the majority on the island.

    Power to the people? You’ll forge some fetters instead, I bet.

    The current deterioration of life in the former Soviet Union makes the same point. During their time in power, the Soviets strove to undermine the religious beliefs of the Russian people, pushing the Russian Orthodox Church into isolated pockets of the nation’s life. Hence when the Soviet dictatorship fell, Russia found itself living Burke’s nightmare, with no “controlling power upon will or appetite,” either from within or without. No fear of God, no fear of the KGB.

    It seems as if every week there is another story in the newspapers about some Russian gangster, with a lacquered blonde waiting for him in his Mercedes, who has found a way to make a fortune by tapping into the billions of dollars in foreign aid we have pumped into the country. “The Russian Mafia” has become a familiar term on the nightly newscasts and television police dramas. Meanwhile, the Russian masses proceed on a descent into a heartbreaking dreariness. If the reports are right, the once great nation that gave us Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn and pioneered space exploration has become a near-basket case. The New York Times ran a series of articles last December chronicling its plight.

    The Times discovered that Russian life expectancy has fallen in 6 of the last 10 years, “to an average of 65.9 years for both men and women — about 10 years less than in the United States, and on a par with levels in Guatemala,” with “government statistics through last August” pointing “to a further drop in 2000.” It is now a country where “tuberculosis, hepatitis, syphilis, and AIDS are skyrocketing,” where countless men on street corners, out of work, impoverished and without hope, try to forget by spending their days in a drunken haze.

    On top of that, “the death rate has risen almost one-third, to the highest of any major nation, and the birthrate has dropped almost 40%, making it among the very lowest. Mortality from circulatory diseases has jumped by a fifth; from suicides, a third; from alcohol-related causes, almost 60%; from infectious and parasitic diseases, nearly 100%.” Russians are dying younger, with fewer births to replace them. “By a United Nations estimate, Russia’s population of 145.6 million could shrink to 121 million by 2050.”

    The Times continues: In “a report early this year, the Central Intelligence Agency forecast that by 2002, 1 in 70 Russians will carry HIV, the virus that causes AIDS ... shortages of money and medicine are creating the context for a large increase in infectious diseases.” The forecast from a Russian expert in the Clinton administration is for “an ever-poorer, more miserable land, running down slowly like a clock unwound,” with life “outside the big cities,” a “wreck of despair, deep insecurity, poverty, and even shame.” Russia is becoming a Third World country.

    Lincoln Steffens, the American Marxist who traveled to the Soviet Union in the early days of the Bolshevik revolution, wrote back that he had “been over into the future, and it works.” Some future. But he was not the only one who was wrong. Countless intellectuals and academic and media hangers-on willingly spread Soviet propaganda throughout the last half of the 20th century. One wonders who was worse: the Bolshevik thugs who destroyed traditional Russia and built the Gulags, or the fellow travelers in the West who made excuses for them. The dreadful mess in Russia is their legacy. It is hard to believe that the leftist academics are still in place in our universities, still posing as experts, displaying no shame over the role they played in this sad drama of the last fifty years.

    Now our children are supposed to be the latest oppressed minority in dire need of liberation.

    Since the ‘60s, children along with women are considered to be victims of patriarchy and an “ideology of control.”

    Popular authors like John Holt, and famous like Hillary Clinton, say the government should free children from the “captivity” of parents and schools.

    Today’s child development experts and family life counselors agree: Parents are to be bystanders in the lives of their children.

    It’s the old philosophy of Jean Rousseau, widely hailed as a pioneer in the areas of human rights and child development.

    Rousseau said the children are inherently good, and society is evil.

    This explains why only 7 percent of education professors think teachers should impact knowledge, while 92 percent believe “students should learn on their own.”

    This is also a whole lot easier than teaching English grammar, square roots and the location of Montana on a map.

    And you see traces of this theory in the phony curriculum offerings, such as, “discovery learning” and “thinking strategies.”

    Moses would probably be cited today for a “hate crime because he said “the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth.”

    And charges of child abuse filed against the one who said: “He that spareth the rod hateth his son, but he that loveth him chasteneth him.”

    “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it”?!?
Such an attempt to mold the character of a child, or transmit values, is considered a misuse of power by the strong against the weak.

    Most sane people know the difference between a spanking and a beating; between discipline and child abuse.

    Rousseau, by the way, drew income from one woman and his connections from another.

    That, while living unmarried with “a dull and unattractive servant girl” who bore him five children.

    Then he crept through the streets of Paris by night to abandon his offspring, one by one, on the doorsteps of a foundling hospital.

    If that qualifies a man as a “pioneer” in child development, well, you can have it.

    Give me any day the humbling, and yet ennobling and inspiring teachings of the Bible.
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