30th November

This is what the Lord says: "Cursed is the one who trusts in man ... but blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord ... The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it? I, the Lord search the heart." Jeremiah 17, 5, 7, 9 - 10

Humanism

In the last decades political and social beliefs communly widespread have almost deleted the idea of personal failure from our conscience. Poverty, racial oppression, slums, hunger are the real guilty: in reality the criminal is the victim. The minister of justice under the president Johnson summarized this by saying that the reason for the crime is poverty. After the electrical failure of New York and the looting at that occasion the president Jimmy Carter made following remark: "It is clear that the first factor for criminality is the high rate of unemployment among the young people."

This indulgence for the disadvantaged of life has something sympathetic. However, if this indulgence is pushed to the extreme it destroys personal responsibility and encourages criminality.

As for Ronald Reagan, he expressed time and time again his conviction that the character of man is "basically good". He ended this remark with a citation from the diary of Anne Frank: "Nevertheless, I continue to think that people have a good heart."

Richard Nixon liked to quote Tocqueville: "If one day America stops to be good it will stop to be big."

These are propagated illusions made by important persons of our time. However, they are contrary to what God's word declares.