I am feeling the need to write a blog.  We’re still up at the hospital after Isaac’s surgery.  Isaac is doing GREAT.  He has not been able to eat anything yet (his surgery was yesterday morning and he is still healing), but he is happy and spunky.  He is currently playing with bubbles and watching a video.  I’ve had to relax my strict “no video” rule I’ve been enforcing lately, because he is stuck in a crib, laying down, and has nothing to do!  He is so bored…so I am being cautious about what he is watching, but I am allowing him to watch videos off and on.

Videos are exactly what I wanted to talk about today.  Up here at the hospital (Doernbecher), they have several different kids’ videos (mostly Disney, some Blues Clues, Bob the Builder, Sesame Street, Barney, etc.).  Karry and I noticed the last time we were here (this is our fourth stay here) that they did not have any Christian videos for the kids.  We put it in our minds that we were going to donate some Veggie Tales videos.

Today I asked the woman from “Child Life Services” if they had any Veggie Tales videos up here, because Isaac was begging for one.  Her reply caught me off guard—“no, but we’ve got lots of Disney videos.”  Disney?  That’s not even close to Veggie Tales!  So I asked the woman how we might go about donating some videos.  She told me that they are not allowed to take Veggie Tales shows because they do not have videos for every other religion.  WOW….

I ended up talking to the same woman earlier in the day, after she had rounded up one Veggie Tales show from a different floor in the hospital.  I asked her how it came to be that they won’t allow such videos, and she told me that she herself had made the decision.  She explained that she came from a hospital in California where they were even stricter about religion, and that they weren’t even allowed to put up Christmas trees there.  She kept emphasizing that “it isn’t a big deal,” which bothered me—it IS a big deal!

This whole “separation of church and state” has been blown completely out of proportion and it is driving me crazy.  First of all, the phrase is not anywhere in our constitution or other major national documents.  The original intent of the statement was to protect the churches from the state, not to protect the state from the churches!!

Ok, I am going to use an analogy here, and I hope this works…When you work in fast food (haven’t you all, at one time or another? I did for three months when I was in college. J), you have to wear gloves when you are preparing the food.  The purpose of the gloves is not to protect your hands, but to protect the food from any germs that might be on your hands.  Most people start thinking that they are wearing the gloves to protect their hands (which is why I think many places are refraining from using gloves now), and they then touch different kinds of raw meat, then the buns, then their pants or apron, then the meat again, not really thinking about it because their hands are protected.  Imagine the awful contamination that is going on! 

Let’s think of the church as the food and the state as the hands.  This issue of “separation of church and state” is the gloves.  Are you with me?  The hands have to mingle together with the food in some way, it’s just a part of life, so we have to deal with it.  We put gloves on so that the food (the church) will not get contaminated by the germs on the hands.  Well the state has it all backwards, and they think that the gloves are on to protect themselves.  So they’re digging their dirty hands into the church, contaminating it, and forgetting about the original intent of the gloves.  Got it?

Here’s another thought I just had—when wearing gloves, a person feels at liberty to touch things that they wouldn’t normally touch with their bare hands.  A doctor performs a surgery, grabbing internal organs and moving them around, but only with the protection of the gloves (which, again, were originally created to protect those internal organs, not the doctor).  How much internal grabbing of organs has the state done since they had the glove of “separation of church and state” on?  So much more than I think many of us realize…

Just like we have to remember the original intent of the gloves if we do not want foods (or people) to be contaminated with awful bacteria, we have to remember the original intent of the statement “separation of church and state” as well.  If we do not take heed the original intent, we contaminate the food (the church) and through that, a lot of people are hurt.

Ok, now back to the video situation.  I told the woman I was talking to that I think it is almost impossible to find a video that has no religion in it.  I pointed out that Blues Clues, for example, teaches Secular Humanism (which is why all of our Blues Clues Videos are in a box in the garage now!).  Anything that teaches we can use our mind and that we don’t need a higher power is teaching Secular Humanism.  She didn’t argue with me, but she said “yes, but Veggie Tales is the only video that is blatantly religious.  Maybe you don’t realize it because you’ve seen it so much, but it is VERY religious.”  Yes, I know that Veggie Tales teaches about God—but frankly, it is QUITE watered down compared to some of the shows that are out there….She said that if there were cute little videos like that about all of the different religions (ok, so how many thousand would that be?), then everything would be ok.  And, again, “it’s not really a big deal.”  The point, she said, was to make everybody who stays at the hospital feel comfortable.

Well I’ll tell you what—we’re not comfortable with Godlessness.  Actually, come to think of it, there is no such thing as Godlessness.  Everybody has a god, even atheists.  Everybody has that God-shaped hole (like the mathematician Pascal said), and they fill it with something.  You might worship material possessions, yourself, some made up god, or the God who created the Universe.  And you know what?  I don’t think it’s possible to create something (a book, a movie, whatever you might create) without having your god shine through.  Life without religion is impossible.  Life without the state, unfortunately, is impossible too, at least in our country.  So this is what the glove was created for—to protect the religion from the state.  Not to protect the state and the hospitals and the schools and every other public institution from the church!!

As a side note, it would be interesting to see what the death and fatal error statistics are in “secular” hospitals like this one vs. the hospitals where they are set up for prayer and thanksgiving.  Hmmm…looks like an interesting journalistic topic to research…

I think it is SO sad that as the glove of protection has been totally misused, people have begun to hate Christians and Christianity.  You know what the word “tolerance” means, don’t you?  It means “embrace every religion and every god except for Christianity and the Christian God.”  Really, in this “tolerant” society Christians have become the most intolerable group, and unfortunately, we are being marginalized. 

At the very same hospital today, we went to the playroom to participate in a Bingo game.  It was fun, and our son enjoyed it, but I noticed two things that really bugged me (especially in light of the earlier incident).  The woman who was leading the show (and who was shown on the TV screens of all of the kids who couldn’t make it to the playroom) was wearing an inappropriate shirt—low cut, and if she bent over I’m sure that she would have revealed her chest.  (Side note-isn’t it interesting that immodesty and, as one author calls it “The Public Undressing of America” is completely acceptable to most people, and yet GOD is not?   Hmmm…).  So I didn’t appreciate her shirt, and if I were bold enough (which I should have been) I would have taken my son out of that room.  Little boys who are exposed to too much skin become pornography addicts later in life.  If you don’t believe me, read Every Man’s Battle and/or The Sexual Man.  It is a huge, widespread (99.9% of men deal with it) issue that is never addressed.  Ask your husband.  Ok, so her shirt was inappropriate (and yet, to these people God is inappropriate…hmmm…), and THEN (this is the part that bothered me the most) she kept joking with the kids that she had “psychic powers.”  WOW.  Ok “secular” hospital, let’s say no to God and yes to psychic powers and immodesty.  Woo hoo, that’s a great way to raise up kids who are healthy in every way!

WHAT ARE WE COMING TO???

The worst kind of religion and indoctrination is that which hides itself in such a way that it is not even noticed for what it is.  Shows that come to my mind are Disney movies, Sesame Street, Blues Clues, etc.  Disney has so much evil in it (my kids spent so much of their time at Disney World being scared!), and because most kids in our society are raised on it we are numb to evil.  God doesn’t want that!  He doesn’t want us to be numb to what is dark and disgusting and wrong.  Sesame Street claims to embrace “what is right.”  Ok, so you mean homosexuality?  Did you really think Bert and Ernie were just FRIENDS?  And one time I saw a section of Elmo’s World when they advertised a pretend TV show called “Socks in the City,” referencing a show I refuse to watch, “Sex in the City.”  You know, I bet they didn’t get any complaints about that (I should have sent one in), and yet, if they had mentioned God, some ACLU advocate would step in and sue them or something.

We Christians don’t tend to sue over things like that.  That’s good, the Bible instructs us not to.  We don’t get angry when people have different political views.  There were hardly any Kerry supporters’ cars damaged, and yet SEVERAL Bush supporters’ cars were hurt.  It is good that Christian understand what is right and wrong.  But at the same time, I don’t think it is necessary or right for us to be passive.  We CANNOT sit back and let our nation become a Godless one…or even one of many gods.  Our country has been blessed by God in so many ways, and it is because our country was created for and dedicated to Him from the beginning.  If you look at other countries who have no god or who pray to some made up god or to things or ancestors, their history does not show the same kind of blessings our country has had.  In fact, they have faced incredible turmoil compared to our nation.  If we continue on this road of “secularizing” everything in our country, our country just may face the same turmoil.