2 Peter 1 – The Growth of True Knowledge & Six Ways America Is Like A Third-World Country

Finger Pointing UpAs long as we continue to have non-believers running our country it can only get worse.  The United States was built by God.

If I ever win the lottery I may move, depending on who is president.  I would rather live in a Third World Country that thrives to build then a First World Country that is crumbling.

When I was in Junior High School we learned about the history of the United States.  Remember Paul Revere?  He rode his horse and shouted, “The British is Coming!  The British is Coming!”

The words are different, but…tomorrow we will look at…

2  Peter 1
The Growth of True Knowledge

11 Simon Peter, a servant and an apostle of Jesus Christ, to them that have obtained like precious faith with us through the righteousness of God and our Savior Jesus Christ:

“Have obtained” – God in His justice (“righteousness”) imparts to people the ability to believe.

2 Grace and peace be multiplied unto you through the knowledge of God, and of Jesus our Lord,

3 According as his divine power hath given unto us all things that pertain unto life and godliness, through the knowledge of him that hath called us to glory and virtue:

“All things that pertain unto life and godliness” – God has made available all that we need spiritually through our knowledge of Him.

Without knowledge of Jesus Christ your spirituality is not actually real, it’s just a fairy tale.

4 Whereby are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises: that by these ye might be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust.

“Partakers of the divine nature’ – does not indicate that Christians become divine in any sense, but only that we are indwelt by God through His Holy Spirit (see Jn 14:16-17).

2Our humanity and His deity, as well as the human personality and the divine, remain distinct and separate.

5 And beside this, giving all diligence, add to your faith virtue; and to virtue knowledge;

“Faith” – the root of the Christian life.

6 And to knowledge temperance; and to temperance patience; and to patience godliness;

“Temperance” – according to many of the false teachers, knowledge made self-control unnecessary; according to Peter, Christian knowledge leads to self-control.

“Godliness” – a genuine reverence toward God that governs one’s attitude toward every aspect of life.

7 And to godliness brotherly kindness; and to brotherly kindness charity.

“Charity” – if you don’t understand charity observe the billionaires of this country and you will know they are doing just the opposite.  For example, Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Larry Ellison, Charles Koch, Oprah Winfrey, etc., they gain more money than they give out.

38 For if these things be in you, and abound, they make you that ye shall neither be barren nor unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.

9 But he that lacketh these things is blind, and cannot see afar off, and hath forgotten that he was purged from his old sins.

10 Wherefore the rather, brethren, give diligence to make your calling and election sure: for if ye do these things, ye shall never fall:

“Never fall” – those who obey God will never cease to persevere.

11 For so an entrance shall be ministered unto you abundantly into the everlasting kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

12 Wherefore I will not be negligent to put you always in remembrance of these things, though ye know them, and be established in the present truth.

413 Yea, I think it meet, as long as I am in this tabernacle, to stir you up by putting you in remembrance;

14 Knowing that shortly I must put off this my tabernacle, even as our Lord Jesus Christ hath shewed me.

15 Moreover I will endeavor that ye may be able after my decease to have these things always in remembrance.

16 For we have not followed cunningly devised fables, when we made known unto you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but were eyewitnesses of his majesty.

“Cunningly devised fables” – Peter’s message was based on his eyewitness account of the supernatural events that marked the life of Jesus.  It was not made up of myths and imaginative stories as was the message of the heretics of 2:3).

“Coming of our Lord Jesus Christ” – in Christ’s transfiguration the disciples received a foretaste of what His coming will be like when He returns to establish His eternal kingdom (Matt 16:28).

17 For he received from God the Father honor and glory, when there came such a voice to him from the excellent glory, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.

18 And this voice which came from heaven we heard, when we were with him in the holy mount.

19 We have also a more sure word of prophecy; whereunto ye do well that ye take heed, as unto a light that shineth in a dark place, until the day dawn, and the day star arise in your hearts:5

1:19-21 – Peter’s message rests on two solid foundations: (1) the voice from God at the transfiguration (vv. 16-18) and (2) the still more significant testimony of Scripture (vv. 19-21).

All alternative, but less probable, view is that the apostles’ testimony to the transfiguration fulfills and thus confirms the Scriptures that predicted such things.

20 Knowing this first that no prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation.

All true prophecies came only from God.

21 For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.

Six Ways America Is Like
A Third-World Country

6When Reagan was president the United States was going good and strong.  When Old Man Bush took office it started going downhill and it has continued at its downward spiral and each year it seems to be disintegrating faster and faster.

What’s sad is that no country conquered us, we have allowed this to happen.  America is doing the same thing that Adam and Eve did.  Adam and Eve gave the world to Satan and America gave our country to non-believers, which is the same as giving it to the devil.

I had posted one of Mark Twain’s quotes before, and I’ll post it again because it is fitting:

Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.

We don’t even have Republicans and Democrats anymore, they have become members of the Socialist Part or candy coated Marxism.  They complain and whine about this and that, but we they are told to shut up they say, “Okay, Daddy Obama.”

Our society lags behind the rest of the developed world in education, health care, violence and more.

7
The future toilet of America

The United States imprisons a higher percentage of our population than countries like Russia, China and Iran.

Although America is one of the richest societies in history, it still lags behind other developed nations in many important indicators of human development – key factors like how we educate our children, how we treat our prisoners, how we take care of the sick and more.

In some instances, the performance of this country is downright abysmal, far below foreign countries that are snidely looked-down-upon as “third world.” Here are six of the most egregious examples that show how far we still have to go:

8 Election
Election poster for Eugene V. Debs, Socialist Party of America candidate for President, 1904, now the 21st century.

1. Criminal Justice

We all know the U.S. criminal justice system is flawed, but few are likely aware of just how bad it is compared to the rest of the world.

The International Center for Prison Studies estimates that America imprisons 716 people per 100,000 citizens (of any age). That’s significantly worse than Russia (484 prisoners per 100,000 citizens), China (121) and Iran (284). The only country that incarcerates a higher percentage of its population than we do is North Korea.

The U.S. is also the only developed country that executes prisoners.

Over two and a half million American children have a parent behind bars. A whopping 60 percent of those incarcerated in U.S. prisons are non-violent offenders, many of them in prison for drug charges.

Even while our crime rate has fallen, our incarcerated population has climbed.

9As of 2011, an estimated 217,000 American prisoners were raped each year ­– that’s 600 new victims every day, a truly horrifying number.

In 2010, the Department of Justice released a report about abuse in juvenile detention centers. The report found that 12.1 percent of all youth held in juvenile detention reported sexual violence; youth held for between seven and 12 months had a victimization rate of 14.2 percent.

What do you expect when sex is what is being taught in schools now.

10 The United
The United States has different gun laws by State.
The common purpose of the gun laws by State is to regulate the distribution, trade, possession and use of firearms and ammunition.
These gun laws by State vary in scope and restrictions with that of existing federal laws including the regulations enforced by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF).
Go here to check your state gun laws.

2. Gun Violence

The U.S. leads the developed world in firearm-related murders, and the difference isn’t a slight gap – more like a chasm. According to United Nations data, the U.S. has 20 times more murders than the developed world average.

Our murder rate also dwarfs many developing nations, like Iraq, which has a murder rate less than half ours. More than half of the most deadly mass shootings documented in the past 50 years around the world occurred in the United States, and 73 percent of the killers in the U.S. obtained their weapons legally.

Another study finds that the U.S. has one of the highest proportions of suicides committed with a gun. Gun violence varies across the U.S., but some cities like New Orleans and Detroit rival the most violent Latin American countries, where gun violence is highest in the world.

Because of this Obama is pushing to take away guns, saying it will reduce the murders, but it won’t.  All it will do is make it so only the criminals are armed, which includes our government.

Obama knows it what would happen if he manages to take away our guns.  He may not be that bright, but he’s also not that dense.  He pushing for absolute control.

11 Obamacare
Obamacare is “the worst thing that has happened in this nation since slavery.”
Dr. Carson made the declaration about President Obama’s sweeping health care mandate Friday during a speech at the Values Voter Summit.

Angry Americans flouted shutdown rules

“It is slavery because it aims to make all of us subservient to the government,” he said.

“It was never about health care. It was about control.”

Dr. Carson further compared the new health care reform to policies envisioned by Vladimir Lenin, one of the fathers of socialism and communism.

“Socialized medicine is the keystone in the establishment of a socialist state,” Dr. Carson told the audience of some 2,000 supporters of traditional values.

Such a comment may seem paranoid to some, he said, “but I would say if you know anything about history, how could you not bring it up?”

When people in the executive and legislative branch don’t have to participate, but everybody else has to, “that’s not America, that’s Russia,” he added.

3. Healthcare

A study last year found that in many American counties, especially in the deep South, life expectancy is lower than in Algeria, Nicaragua or Bangladesh.

The U.S. is the only developed country that does not guarantee health care to its citizens; even after the Affordable Care Act, millions of poor Americans will remain uninsured because governors, mainly Republicans, have refused to expand Medicaid, which provides health insurance for low-income Americans.

Although the federal government will pay for the expansion, many governors cited cost, even though the expansion would actually save money.

America is unique among developed countries in that tens of thousands of poor Americans die because they lack health insurance, even while we spend more than twice as much of our GDP on healthcare than the average for the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a collection of rich world countries.

The U.S. has an infant mortality rate that dwarfs comparable nations, as well as the highest teenage-pregnancy rate in the developed world, largely because of the politically-motivated unavailability of contraception in many areas.

Why are there so many people in our country that are poverty stricken when the amount of millionaires here is over 9 million and the amount of billionaires is 462?

Why?  Because most of them, if not all of them, are greedy, non-believers.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

12
It’s long been known that America’s school kids haven’t measured well compared with international peers.

Now, there’s a new twist: Adults don’t either.

In math, reading and problem-solving using technology – all skills considered critical for global competitiveness and economic strength – American adults scored below the international average on a global test.

Adults in Japan, Canada, Australia, Finland and multiple other countries scored significantly higher than the United States in all three areas on the test.

Beyond basic reading and math, respondents were tested on activities such as calculating mileage reimbursement due to a salesman, sorting email and comparing food expiration dates on grocery store tags.

4. Education

The U.S. is among only three nations in the world that does not guarantee paid maternal leave (the other two are Papua New Guinea and Swaziland).

This means many poor American mothers must choose between raising their children and keeping their jobs.

The U.S. education system is plagued with structural racial biases, like the fact that schools are funded at the local, rather than national level.

That means that schools attended by poor black people get far less funding than the schools attended by wealthier students. The Department of Education has confirmed that schools with high concentrations of poor students have lower levels of funding.

It’s no wonder America has one of the highest achievement gaps between high income and low income students, as measured by the OECD.  

Schools today are actually more racially segregated than they were in the 1970s.

Our higher education system is unique among developed nations in that is funded almost entirely privately, by debt.

Students in the average OECD country can expect about 70 percent of their college tuition to be publicly funded; in the United States, only about 40 percent of the cost of education is publicly-funded.

That’s one reason the U.S. has the highest tuition costs of any OECD country.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

135. Inequality

By almost every measure, the U.S. tops out OECD countries in terms of income inequality, largely because America has the stingiest welfare state of any developed country. This inequality has deep and profound effects on American society.

For instance, although the U.S. justifies its rampant inequality on the premise of upward mobility, many parts of the United States have abysmal levels of social mobility, where children born in the poorest quintile have a less than 3% chance of reaching the top quintile.

Inequality harms our democracy, because the wealthy exert is an outsized political influence.

Sheldon Adelson, for instance, spent more to influence the 2012 election than the residents of 12 states combined.

Inequality also tears at the social fabric, with a large body of research showing that inequality correlates with low levels of social trust.

In their book “The Spirit Level”, Richard Pickett and Kate Wilkinson show that a wide variety of social indicators, including health and well-being are intimately tied to inequality.

14
Our justice system Has been turned into a business.
Its no longer about Justice. Its about the creation (even if fraud) of legal fees.

Lawyers all over the US charge from $200-$700 an hour.

They’ve changed our legal system to increase profit by forcing us to use their services.

Our prisons are big business and are paid by how many people they house.

They offer kick backs to lawyers and judges when victims are sent to prison. same as the judge who sent children to jail for profit.

However judges are doing this to innocent fathers (legal extortion to make them pay huge fees they can’t). The concept we must understand is innocent people are being sent to prison because once in the system, those involved profit.

Prisons are run by big corporations, they bill Tax payers by each person put in prison (not based on innocence or guilt). Lawyers (Public Defenders) profit more when sending their clients to prison.

Even if innocent people can’t afford a trial when innocent. WAKE UP!

6. Infrastructure

The United States infrastructure is slowly crumbling apart and is in desperate need for repair.

One study estimates that our infrastructure system needs a $3.6 trillion investment over the next six years.

In New York City, the development of Second Avenue subway line was first delayed by the outbreak of World War II; it’s still not finished.

In South Dakota, Alaska and Pennsylvania, water is still transported via century-old wooden pipes.

Some 45 percent of Americans lack access to public transit. Large portions of U.S. wastewater capacity are more than half a century old and in Detroit, some of the sewer lines date back to the mid-19th century.

One in nine U.S. bridges (or 66,405 bridges) are considered “structurally deficient,” according to the National Bridge Inventory. All of this means that the U.S. has fallen rapidly in international rankings of infrastructure.

Nearly 6 million Americans, or 2.5 percent of the voting-age population, cannot vote because they have a felony on record means that politicians can lock up more and more citizens without fear of losing their seat.

Our ideas of meritocracy and upward mobility blind us to the realities of class and inequality.

Our healthcare system provides good care to some, but it comes at a cost – millions of people without health insurance.

If we don’t critically examine these flaws, how can we ever hope to progress as a society?

…”The Muslims Are Coming!  The Muslims Are Coming!”

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