Common Sense

Good practical judgment based upon experience and knowledge gleaned presently as well as from the ages. Common sense has always contained an element of virtue. For centuries, Christians based personal decisions upon God’s word and the collective reports of valid reporters. Thus, the information that the king was pursuing a certain path led one to deduce that the King, or those who influenced him, were possessed with personal ambition or human appetites and not common sense. That information made provision for survival during oppressive times. Our founders were founts of common sense and their manifold quotes and deeds attest the same. The practice of common sense has always been a fair barometer of what is right or just in society. However, after the destruction of the Republic, we find a marked decline of common sense voiced within the majority. We find common sense within the steadily declining minority until the late-twentieth century. Granted many public persons have spoken common sense words when addressing their constituency but it is necessary to look beyond their statements to their deeds. The deeds of many public men since 1865 have revealed rather a selfish or purchased sense, the sense of demagoguery. Wicked men and demagogues know well how to use pious words and astute sounding phrases, even Satan can quote Scripture (Matthew 4:1-11). For example, our founders had an analogy for democracy that proceeds thus: democracy is two wolves and a sheep about to vote on what’s for supper. It is understood that the wolves will not have one of their members for supper. Democracy cannot restrain human appetite. Another analogy proceeds: when you lay with dogs you get fleas. No person can willfully involve himself with pride, lust, greed, wickedness and evil and not have it infest his life, bringing the consequences to his life. These are examples of common sense, and are as old as our Nation. What passes for common sense in 21st Century American culture is simply not even sense. The phrases, “just do it”, “have it your way” or “you deserve” are simply advertising slogans repeated so frequently through systematic repetition and trivial preoccupation that a mal-educated public has become ignorant enough to believe the slogan as fact. Common sense tells some folk not to give children a book of matches and can of gasoline, yet that is what others have done by elevating liars, tax cheats, sexual deviants, drunkards, adulterers, and Marxists to high national office. Common sense should tell you that it is impossible to borrow and spend yourself out of debt, yet this Nation is pursuing that course with the apparent approval of a majority of folk. It would appear that humanist yankee Marxism has defeated common sense. Is it any wonder that Scripture repeatedly refers to God’s people as sheep (Mark 7:15, 10:16, Acts 20:29)? The faculty of common sense is a function of independent thought and its demise is a signal of the success of tyranny’s propaganda.