"If I Were the Devil: Warning for a Nation"

This video is prophetic.  The audio was recorded in 1965, yet it sadly depicts our society today.


This message is loud and clear.  I'm posting this as part of my plea to fellow Americans and parents:  Please, our voices need to be heard - we must stand-up against the moral anarchy we live in today, and try to make change for the sake of our children's lives and future generations.  I don't want to sit-back passively any longer.  God wants better for us!  Who will join me in this crusade?

Text from the audio clip:

This speech was broadcast by legendary ABC Radio commentator Paul Harvey on April 3, 1965:

If I were the Devil . . . I mean, if I were the Prince of Darkness, I would of course, want to engulf the whole earth in darkness. I would have a third of its real estate and four-fifths of its population, but I would not be happy until I had seized the ripest apple on the tree, so I should set about however necessary to take over the United States. I would begin with a campaign of whispers. With the wisdom of a serpent, I would whisper to you as I whispered to Eve: “Do as you please.” “Do as you please.” To the young, I would whisper, “The Bible is a myth.” I would convince them that man created God instead of the other way around. I would confide that what is bad is good, and what is good is “square”. In the ears of the young marrieds, I would whisper that work is debasing, that cocktail parties are good for you. I would caution them not to be extreme in religion, in patriotism, in moral conduct. And the old, I would teach to pray. I would teach them to say after me: “Our Father, which art in Washington” . . .

If I were the devil, I’d educate authors in how to make lurid literature exciting so that anything else would appear dull an uninteresting. I’d threaten T.V. with dirtier movies and vice versa. And then, if I were the devil, I’d get organized. I’d infiltrate unions and urge more loafing and less work, because idle hands usually work for me. I’d peddle narcotics to whom I could. I’d sell alcohol to ladies and gentlemen of distinction. And I’d tranquilize the rest with pills. If I were the devil, I would encourage schools to refine young intellects but neglect to discipline emotions . . . let those run wild. I would designate an atheist to front for me before the highest courts in the land and I would get preachers to say “she’s right.” With flattery and promises of power, I could get the courts to rule what I construe as against God and in favor of pornography, and thus, I would evict God from the courthouse, and then from the school house, and then from the houses of Congress and then, in His own churches I would substitute psychology for religion, and I would deify science because that way men would become smart enough to create super weapons but not wise enough to control them.

If I were Satan, I’d make the symbol of Easter an egg, and the symbol of Christmas, a bottle. If I were the devil, I would take from those who have and I would give to those who wanted, until I had killed the incentive of the ambitious. And then, my police state would force everybody back to work. Then, I could separate families, putting children in uniform, women in coal mines, and objectors in slave camps. In other words, if I were Satan, I’d just keep on doing what he’s doing.

Paul Harvey, Good Day.

"We paid the price for free love: The flip side of the sexual revolution"

A precursor to my future posts regarding moral anarchy.  This is a GREAT article written by a woman who came of-age in the 60's during the sexual revolution.  It depicts the dismal side to "sexual freedom" from a gal who was a participant in it.  The article is posted on Mail Online at www.dailymail.co.uk .


"The sexual revolution of the swinging 60's – kick-started by the arrival of the pill – seems glamorous, exciting and seductive when depicted in hit TV shows such as Mad Men. But, argues Virginia Ironside, there was a bleaker side to such freedom.

Virginia aged 17, in 1961, the year when the contraceptive pill was first licensed in Britain

Whenever I reveal I was young in the 1960s, people’s eyes grow round with envy. ‘Lucky you!’ they say. Then they add, saucily: ‘But of course they say that if you can remember the 60s you weren’t there!’ Well, I was there and I can, unfortunately, remember the 60s all too well. And although I’ve no doubt it was a fantastic – or ‘fab’ as we used to say – time for men, for women (or young girls as we were then) it was absolutely grisly.


Because when it came to sex, we were, of course, the trailblazers for a completely new attitude, and blazing trails is always horribly uncomfortable. We were the ones with the hacksaws and dust masks, clearing our way through the sexual undergrowth, getting covered with scratches and gashes and slipping into invisible swamps. It’s the people who follow afterwards who have the easier time, sauntering along the trodden path, picking roses along the way. Young people today.


It’s difficult to understand sex in the 60s without understanding what life was like before the 60s. In the 50s, sex was completely taboo. At Woman magazine, where I worked a decade later, the journalists weren’t ever allowed to use the word ‘bottom’ – not even in ‘bottom of the garden’ or ‘bottom of the saucepan’. They couldn’t print the word ‘menstruation’, and if a reader wanted to know anything about sex she had to write in to the agony aunt who might suggest she write in again enclosing a stamped addressed plain brown envelope into which, but only if you were married of course, she would insert a leaflet explaining the Facts of Life.


My parents, who presumably had sex in order to have me, were totally reticent about sex. They rarely, if ever, hugged in front of me, and if ever the subject did come up they zipped their mouths. It’s true, my mother did thrust a booklet into my hands when I was about 12 which started: ‘The body is built of little bricks, called cells.’ There was a brief page on reproduction which referred to seeds – which I’d only ever seen in small paper packets named Carters – and that was about it.

If you can imagine emerging from this repressed background into the swinging 60s, equipped with a contraceptive pill that had only recently become the hugely popular and completely reliable form of birth control, you can also imagine how ill-prepared we all were for what was to follow.

It often seemed more polite to sleep with a man than
to chuck him out of your flat

True, we’d been brought up to say ‘no’ to sex, but the only reason for that was because we might get pregnant. And if we got pregnant then of course we might have been thrown out of our parents’ home, or forced to give the baby up for adoption. Before the law changed in 1967 there were abortionists around, but they were illegal, and you couldn’t go to one without paying a lot of money in used notes to a dodgy doctor off Harley Street.


But now, armed with the pill, and with every man knowing you were armed with the pill, pregnancy was no longer a reason to say ‘no’ to sex. And men exploited this mercilessly. Now, for them, ‘no’ always meant ‘yes’.


It’s worth remembering, too, that feminists at that time were not even a glimmer in their father’s eyes. We had been brought up to kowtow to men, to defer to their wishes, to listen wide-eyed to their views. We hadn’t been brought up to insist on paying our way, or getting home on our own, or taking control of our own evenings and sleeping where and with whom we wished.

Virginia age 20

To be honest, I mainly remember the 60s as an endless round of miserable promiscuity, a time when often it seemed easier and, believe it or not, more polite, to sleep with a man than to chuck him out of your flat. I recall a complete stranger once slipping into bed beside me when I was staying in an all-male household in Oxford, and feeling so baffled about what the right thing was to do that I let him have sex with me; I remember being got drunk by a grossly fat tabloid newspaper journalist and taken back to a flat belonging to a friend of his to which he had a key, being subjected to what would now be described as rape, and still thinking it was my fault for accepting so much wine. I remember going out to dinner with a young lawyer who inveigled me back to his flat saying he’d got to pick something up before he could take me home, and then suggested we have sex. ‘Oh no,’ I said feebly. ‘I’m too tired.’ ‘Oh, go on,’ he replied. ‘It’ll only take a couple of minutes.’ So I did.


In my teens, I lived with my father – my mother had left home by then. He did his best to be a good dad, but he, like most parents, had no experience of bringing up a young girl emerging into a social revolution. A woman friend of his had advised him to suggest that I go to a doctor to get ‘fixed up’ and to always let him know by phone if I wasn’t going to be home for breakfast. I took his advice. But there were no limits set, no mention of sex and love being remotely connected.


To make things worse, there were two added factors that made promiscuity so difficult to avoid. Firstly, there was very little awareness of sexually transmitted diseases – HIV wasn’t yet an issue – and very few men, now that the pill was on the scene, had any clue about how to put on a condom. Again, there was even less reason to say ‘no’ to sex, and the result was that lots of us girls spent the entire 60s in tears, because however one tried to separate sex from love, we’d been brought up to associate the two; so every time we went to bed with someone, we’d hope it would lead to something more permanent…and each time it never did.

The other reason that sex was so grim was that now it was so easy, the art of seduction had flown out of the window. I’m sure this was partly why working-class men became so much more attractive to everyone in the 60s. They’d always found, with less birth control available among the working classes and expensive abortion not an option, that in order to get a girl into bed they had to work really hard at the chat-up lines. But as for men considering women’s feelings – why should they?  They continued to satisfy their own needs and never for a moment considered whether the women they were having sex with found it pleasurable or satisfying. Most of us girls, at least those on the London rock scene as I was, didn’t have a clue as to what sex could be like when it was good. When we weren’t crying, we’d giggle, like the schoolgirls we were, about our exploits, without realising how damaging our sexual behaviour was both to our self-esteem and our souls.


Not every girl behaved quite as I did, but most came under the same kinds of pressures and few missed out on the occasional bleak and ghastly ‘one-night stand’, a phrase that simply didn’t exist for my parents’ generation.


After a decade of sleeping around pretty indiscriminately, girls of the 60s eventually became fairly jaded about sex. It took me years to discover that continual sex with different partners is, with very few exceptions, joyless, uncomfortable and humiliating, and it’s only now I’m older that I’ve discovered that one of the ingredients of a good sex life is, at the very least, a grain of affection between the two partners involved.


Would I go back to the swinging 60s? Never!"


Read the entire article at:   http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/you/article-1346813/The-flip-1960s-sexual-revolution-We-paid-price-free-love.html

Stand Up For Our First Amendment Rights to Freedom

This is what's going on, in a nutshell, with regards to our First Amendment rights to Freedom of Religion, and it's not too late to help make a change.  Friends of ALL faiths - Catholic and Non-Catholic - this is very important.  PLEASE, stand up for religious freedom.


"On January 20, 2012 the United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), unveiled a new policy which has come to be known at the “HHS Mandate.”  The new Mandate would require nearly all private health insurance plans to include coverage for all FDA-approved prescription contraceptive drugs and devices, surgical sterilizations and abortion-inducing drugs—drugs that interfere with implantation in the womb and therefore destroy the life of a human being in the earliest stage of development." - Excerpt from www.standupforreligiousfreedom.com  Religious employers are exempt from the mandate if they employ and serve ONLY people of their own faith. The exemption is so narrow that it excludes thousands of religious institutions.

Yes, I'm Catholic, and it's no secret that the Catholic Church teaches that contraception is against our religious beliefs.  Therefore, this mandate goes against our Constitutional Rights to Freedom of Religion.  If you're a person of Faith, even if you don't agree with our beliefs about contraception, you still need to stand up against this mandate.... it's NOT just a "Catholic" thing.  All people of faith should be worried about this because of the PRINCIPLE.  If this is allowed, what will be next?!  What if the issue was something you DID believe in?  What if our government said you can only go to church on the second Tuesday of every month?  Wouldn't that go against many faiths that believe one day a week is the Sabbath and should be kept Holy, which includes going to worship services?  There's no difference in principle.


In the Jewish and Muslim faiths, they view eating pork products as wrong according to their religious beliefs.  What if our government somehow dictated that all restaurants in our country MUST provide pork products and that includes restaurants owned by Jewish and Muslim people of faith?   Yes, the Jewish and Muslims can choose not to eat the pork products themselves, but making them provide it when it's against their religious beliefs is wrong and violates their religious liberties.  Ok, this isn't an apple-to-apple comparison either, but again it's the same principle.


Even if you're not a person of faith, you can't deny that this mandate is unconstitutional.  If you're one who believes in freedom for ALL Americans, doesn't that include race, gender, sexual orientation, economic status, AND religion?  Friends, PLEASE, whether you're a person of faith or not, please stand up for every American's First Amendment rights.  On Monday, March 26, 2012, Congress will decide if this HHS Mandate is constitutional or not.  It's not too late to let our government hear our concerns.  Here are a few ways you can do just that:

• Pass out the HHS Mandate Fact Sheet
• Sign the Petition
• Call Your US Congressmen
• Get the Word Out

I Want To Be Challenged

I don't want to be a "Pewsitter", and I pray my children and their children won't be Pewsitters.     
I WANT TO BE CHALLENGED. 


Regardless of your religion, if you're a church-goer, this video is something to think about.

I saw a car sticker recently which read:  "Sin Kills.  Friends Don't Let Friends Go To Hell."

You have my permission to hold-me-to-it regarding trying to live a Holy life.   In fact, I ask you to PLEASE do so, I welcome it and I need it!  ;)

The Beginning of My Journey

Pivotal moments.  We never forget pivotal moments in our lives.  I'll never forget the emotional awakening and eye-opening conversion from my liberal, pro-choice self, to now being pro-life.  Those moments sparked the burning desire within me to journey into the Catholic faith.  The beginning of my journey home.


Looking back, I can see now the little seeds that were planted inside of me even in my childhood and adolescence, and today I can only explain it as the Holy Spirit.  I use to believe in coincidences, but not anymore.  My first introduction to what a "Catholic" was, was from a family friend from my childhood.  She was a cradle-Catholic, and she often shared stories about her childhood growing up Catholic.  I was intrigued, and from those early years, always had an interest in the Church but didn't really think too much of it.  I thought it was something you had to be born or married into, so I never actually thought it was something I'd ever be a part of.  I use to think I was drawn to things of the Church because I didn't know much about it and therefore it was mysterious to me.  It was mysterious, but it was also something I recognized as beautiful and peaceful yet as a youngster I couldn't explain why.  Now I know why, it was the Holy Spirit gently whispering to my soul... tiny seeds where being planted.


The ideals and beliefs instilled in me during my teens and early adulthood were acquired not by wise, faith-filled adults or good moral role models, but rather from Hollywood, the secular music industry, fashion magazines, TV, and non-Christian peers from high school and the liberal college I attended.  I was in my mid-twenties and dating a guy I had know since I was 17.  He was a cradle-Catholic, and I was really serious about wanting to possibly marry this guy.  I hadn't been going to church since I was about 13 or 14 years old, when my single mother gave in to me and my brother's whines about not wanting to attend church anymore because "we didn't like" it.  She had pretty much always taken us regularly since a very young age.  I thought since I had the roots and had been baptized, that with "my own relationship" with Christ, I didn't need church.  After over a decade of trying to make my own way, I was starting to wise up to the fact that I did need Christ and church, and was hungry for Him and wondering what His purpose for my life might be.  Because I didn't have a church home, I told my boyfriend that I wanted to learn more about the Catholic Church. 


My cradle-Catholic boyfriend, who attended Catholic schools until college but was also not attending church regularly, didn't have a lot of answers to the questions I had about the faith.  In his effort to help me learn, we would listen to Catholic talk radio in his truck when we were together.  One Sunday morning, on the way to his parents house for Sunday breakfast - not church - the Catholic radio station was discussing the Church's teachings on the sanctity of life and on abortion.  I couldn't believe what I was hearing!  I had NEVER heard these topics talked about in such a way, and it brought me to tears.  At that moment, many blinders were lifted.  I knew that I could no longer be pro-choice.  This pivotal moment had such an impact on me that I HAD to learn more.  I had to learn more about THIS faith and it's teachings, thus the beginning of my journey into the Catholic Church.

Why I Started a Blog

I'm a Christian, more specifically, a Catholic.  I was raised as a non-denominational Protestant.  I converted to Catholicism soon after my cradle-Catholic husband and I were married.  I'm NOT a radical... I'm not one to make waves.  I've been holding back sharing important stuff that I feel I can't be quiet about any longer.


There are so many misconceptions about the Catholic Church and our faith.  Many of my friends and family, even many Catholics, don't understand or know a lot of our doctrine (not that I know everything!).  I'm hoping I can help others better understand Catholicism (and in some cases, general Christianity) and the truth about what the Church teaches and believes, and why.  I'm not looking to convert anyone, I just want to share important truths.  I want this blog to be a journal to my children as well.  It's everything I want them to understand and know, from their momma's point of view, and what I hope for them and their lives and future generations.


I use to consider myself liberal.  I see things much differently now, yet I'm not ultra-conservative either.  I'm the type of person that is accepting of all types of people.  I've always been one with a heart for the underdog.  Just because I agree with the teachings of my faith, doesn't make me close-minded.  I'm sceptical and question MANY things... and believe me, it's not usually fun to be that way, but I feel every side deserves a chance.  It's really unusual for me to totally agree, whole-heartedly, with one doctrine.  However, when it comes to Catholic doctrine, it's so pure and beautiful if you get down to the root of why it is the Church teaches what it does.  It really stirs something in me that I've never felt before!


I've dabbled slightly with expressing my thoughts and beliefs, only to be judged, ridiculed, rejected, and dismissed.  Perhaps it was the way I was going about sharing those things?  I've never been very good at verbalizing my thoughts so I used emails and Facebook to share excerpts from things here and there which reflected my thoughts.


People are getting away from emailing, and using primarily social media. Some use Facebook to keep up with old friends, out-of-town family, and share photos of their kiddos.  Others use Facebook to share a plethora of thoughts, interests, and information.  I think for the most part, people see social media as a light-hearted medium to keep up with what's going on with family and friends, and to share what's going on in your own life.  I don't think, in general, most people like reading deep, thought provoking, or controversial topics (unless it's something they agree with) on Facebook, however I don't mind it myself.  I'm choosing to use my Facebook account for light-hearted topics.  I'll occasionally post a link on my FB page directing people to this blog in case they're interested.  If you and I are FB friends and you have no interest in my blog, I hope you'll just skip over the post and still stay connected with me on social media. ;)


In the past when I've tried to voice what's in my heart, I NEVER intended to offend people... I'm not like that. I'm the type of person that really cares about other's feelings and what they think. I only shared because, naively, I thought maybe people would think what I was saying and sharing was valid too. I've learned differently!  Not that my blog posts will be much different, but at least it's less "in your face" and not using media that may not be a way people enjoy seeing such topics.


I've come to the above conclusion painfully after losing friendships and acquaintances by posting on Facebook about such deep, thought provoking, or controversial topics.  In life I want to make friends, not enemies.  I really didn't think what I was posting was that offensive because it all made sense to ME.  I've learned a hard lesson.  This painful experience of losing friendships silenced me for a long time.


I don't want to be silent any longer, so I'm starting a blog.  I agree that email and Facebook probably weren't the best ways to share my beliefs and feelings about things, for not everyone wants to hear/see things that they don't agree with.  So, with a blog, I feel I can freely write my thoughts and share them more subtly.  If someone is curious about what I have to say, they can visit me here, and hopefully it will help keep my friendships (on and off Facebook) intact. =)


If you choose to check out some of my posts, thank you, and please know that I'm not doing this blog to demean or judge any groups or types of people.  My main objectives are... 1.) to dispel myths and misunderstanding or mysteries about my faith, 2.) to share why I love my faith and feel it's teachings are "right-on" with the way we are meant to live our lives by our Creator, 3.) to hopefully help others who are curious or misunderstand the Church or Christianity, and 4.) to document for my children what my beliefs are and what I hope for them.


If you're someone who is an acquaintance of mine, after reading some of my posts, I pray you won't feel all weird around me and not want to talk to me. ;)  Like I mentioned earlier, I'm not some radical, in-your-face type who will talk about any of this (unless someone brings it up with me), nor do I hound people to think and believe the way I do.  I'm a typical, all-American wife and mother.  I'm definitely NO saint, and I'm NOT a prude either.  I enjoy sex (with my husband!), a good joke, cold beer, fun parties, horror movies, and adventure. I just so happen to love the Holy Trinity too!  =)
God bless!