Increments

We must remember that change is inevitable, dictated by many factors important to life related more to the ever-changing flow of water over the same terrain.  It is more forceful than the hardness of metal in the many contexts where hardness of metal is vital to meaning where it is found.  We need to choose our life parables and keep them consistent.  We study the context for analogies, and study parables to understand contexts. This understanding is vital to a proper interpretation of Scripture and other literature significant to our understanding of life and meaning.  The stream of serious literature informs us about life and has within it the implications of life, even when change has directed the stream to a more vigorous (or less vigorous) context.  Meaning is not lost in the literature even when newness takes us.  We go back to Moses, to Plato, to philosophers, both sacred and secular – to thinkers reaching higher than naturalism. Christians rightly turn to the Apostle Paul and his colleagues, to Augustine, Luther and serious men and women dealing with life, ethics and thought – to human belief and conduct.  For example, water and life flow along, sometimes in slow eddies, sometimes in a sparkling brook, sometimes in rapids of a river, and sometimes in overpowering events as a Niagara or Victoria Falls.  Mostly, It flows slowly, but inevitably.

This flow of human experience may serve us well when we control it, when we are gratified with it, when it isn’t dammed up, muddied, contaminated, polluted, stagnate, unsupportive of the dynamics of change, even losing factors that are unchanging.  The movement is the change, not the basic chemistry of hydrogen and oxygen.  The basic elements forming the pure elements are not to change even when they find new environments.  The pure substances in changing environments are beautiful, meaningful and useful. 

The American government was founded in a pattern that included a religious context dominated by Christian theology.  Some of this found its way into the documents of a constitution – a contract with the people about the duties and limits of government with implications related to the electorate in both duty and privilege – all to guarantee freedom.  In a book entitled Original Intent, with the observation of the title related to: The Courts, the Constitution, & Religion, the Author, David Barton, presses for the long-time view that Americans want to maintain the vision of democracy as perceived by the founding fathers.  To guarantee the practical application of that vision a contract of government with the people was written and attested in the Constitution of the United States.  Barton believes that contract is to be held in perpetuity unless legally modified in a defined way by the agreement of the majority of the states.  The book is largely made up of the documentation of that concept.  According to the cover quotations the changes, not the flow of the contract have violated the original and ongoing understanding, especially as it relates to religion.  The following appears on the back cover of the book accounting for judicial mismanagement leading to a virtual rewriting of the liberties enumerated in the Constitution: a Lemon Test absurdly requiring religious expression to be secular, an Endorsement Test pursuing and impossible neutrality between religion and secularism, and a Psychological Coercion Test allowing a single dissenter to silence an entire community’s religious expression.  The cover material further expands on the changes perceived by the author and a large segment of the citizenry related to the issues of American Democracy.  These issues have divided the country and remain to be played out.  It was assumed by the founding fathers that constitutional government was the response to autocratic government that resisted change from century to century until rebellion by the people brought in constitutional government to protect freedom and promised to manage change in contractual openness and limitations.  This has been diluted in the growth of pluralism; in the loss of commitment to contractual government; in the modernization processes that accent secular values; in limited knowledge of the contract and how to make it function well in growing political forces based on current promises/negations – and other forces such as sectional/racial accents unrelated to the benefit of the whole society.  The greatest loss, in the above assumption, appears to be in the values that must invariably include some religious meaning, and the paucity of values based on currency of feelings.