Saw an overheated argument last night about Santorum's Satan
Comments and went to look to see what he said...
Following is the Text of the Speech at Ave Maria University
in 2008. Santorum does more than say Satan, The Father of Lies as he calls him
has his eyes on US. Apparently the ole boy is a cause for what every Republican
alive claims is a liberal academia. Not that surprising, as Academia is a not
unusual right wing target. But Santorum pivots from there an remarks that have
not gotten enough attention he calls the state of mainstream Protestantism a
"shambles". This deserves way more interest than it has generated.
Bush was a religious nut, but generally he did not pick sides and he advanced
religious causes across the board -- specifically through his Faith Based
Initiative. Santorum is a whole other kettle of fish, and truly believes his
side, not just Christians, but specifically Catholic Christians have it all
figured out.
If he was to run for President let it be the town board in
Branson. Other than that he needs to just go away.
"This is not a political war at all. This is not a
cultural war. This is a spiritual war. And the Father of Lies has his sights on
what you would think the Father of Lies would have his sights on: a good,
decent, powerful, influential country – the United States of America. If you
were Satan, who would you attack in this day and age? There is no one else to
go after other than the United States and that has been the case now for almost
two hundred years, once America’s preeminence was sown by our great Founding
Fathers.
"He didn’t have
much success in the early days. Our foundation was very strong, in fact, is
very strong. But over time, that great, acidic quality of time corrodes even
the strongest foundations. And Satan has done so by attacking the great
institutions of America, using those great vices of pride, vanity, and
sensuality as the root to attack all of the strong plants that have so deeply
rooted in the American tradition.
"He was
successful. He attacks all of us and he attacks all of our institutions. The
place where he was, in my mind, the most successful and first successful was in
academia. He understood pride of smart people. He attacked them at their
weakest, that they were, in fact, smarter than everybody else and could come up
with something new and different. Pursue new truths, deny the existence of truth,
play with it because they’re smart. And so academia, a long time ago, fell.
"And you say
“what could be the impact of academia falling?” Well, I would have the argument
that the other structures that I’m going to talk about here had root of their
destruction because of academia. Because what academia does is educate the
elites in our society, educates the leaders in our society, particularly at the
college level. And they were the first to fall.
"And so what we
saw this domino effect, once the colleges fell and those who were being
education in our institutions, the next was the church. Now you’d say, ‘wait,
the Catholic Church’? No. We all know that this country was founded on a
Judeo-Christian ethic but the Judeo-Christian ethic was a Protestant Judeo-Christian
ethic, sure the Catholics had some influence, but this was a Protestant country
and the Protestant ethic, mainstream, mainline Protestantism, and of course we
look at the shape of mainline Protestantism in this country and it is in
shambles, it is gone from the world of Christianity as I see it. So they
attacked mainline Protestantism, they attacked the Church, and what better way
to go after smart people who also believe they’re pious to use both vanity and
pride to also go after the Church.
"After that, you
start destroying the Church and you start destroying academia, the culture is
where their next success was and I need not even go into the state of the
popular culture today. Whether its sensuality of vanity of the famous in
America, they are peacocks on display and they have taken their poor behavior
and made it fashionable. The corruption of culture, the corruption of manners,
the corruption of decency is now on display whether it’s the NBA or whether
it’s a rock concert or whether it’s on a movie set.
"The fourth, and
this was harder, now I know you’re going to challenge me on this one, but
politics and government was the next to fall. You say, ‘you would think they
would be the first to fall, as fallible as we are in politics,’ but people in
political life get elected by ordinary folks from lots of places all over the
country where the foundations of this country are still strong. So while we may
certainly have had examples, the body politic held up fairly well up until the
last couple of decades, but it is falling too."
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