THYME Magazine

Citizen Journalism with a Better Flavor


Volume IV, Issue XXX

The 'other' weekly news magazine this week features the cover: "How Guns Won." Joe Klein concludes that the debate over gun control has gotten out of control. Indeed, the rush of some journalists to blame Second Amendment advocates and talk radio hosts was ill-timed. A nation needs time to simply mourn and process the unthinkable when it happens.

Unfortunately, unthinkable events have been the recurring nightmare of history. Genocides and enslavements are nothing new. Sadly there has been no evolution out of such horror. In fact, the great reengineered societys such as Socialist Russia, built on the promise of eliminating the horror, created their own unspeakable horrors. While the National Socialists in Germany were killing millions, Stalin's Russia was killing millions as well. Because Hitler lost, we saw the horrible pictures of his atrocities. Stalin's often went unreported, but for millions of Ukranians, were they any less real?

Yet, in the face of every horror, heroes emerged. The 'Righteous Gentiles' who hid their neighbors in Holland during the occupation remain part of our history as well. Now we see the faces of the men who died shielding their wives and girlfriends in Aurora. We think of a time forty years ago when a brave weightlifter blocked a door as he tried in vain to keep terrorists out of the Israeli Olympic quarters.

On Monda, April 16, 2007, Holocaust survivor Dr. Liviu Librescu was teaching his students at Virginia Tech. As a gunman tried to break into the room, Dr. Librescu blocked the door and told his students to jump out of the windows. Dr. Librescu sucessfully held the door shut as bullets ripped through his body. His quick thinking saved many lives, but he died in the process.

Into every period of history, those who answered man's basest instincts were opposed by those who answered to a higher authority... aspired to a loftier mountaintop. This issue of THYME is dedicated to their memory.

'Volition'

Short Film Captures the Personal Implications of Imagio Dei



Here is a Film that you must see! It is just fifteen minutes in length but I saw it at Randy Alcorn's Blog and it was pretty powerful. Recently an editor at one of our local weeklies editorialized that Abortion is Not Murder because kids from 'religious' homes are having them and abortion foes are not resisting as they would if someone were gunning down a busload of elementary school children. His argument fails to see that throughout history other great evils have been accepted by even good people in a society.

Just because a course of action is popularly accepted and most follow it does not make it less of an evil. Many Christians owned slaves and I'm sure there were fine principled people serving in the German government. Can we legitimately argue that the holocaust was not murder because church members were working in the camps? Volition does a great job of showing how the right choice has often been the road less travelled in historical perspective.

Every Generation is Tested by Great Evil

Dennis Prager Gives a Historical Perspective

This Piece by Dennis Prager caught my attention. We seem to be reticent to identify evil these days and modern philosophies seem so unable to aid us. In fact, what has for generations been seen as 'good' is now questioned in a post-modern environment.

But Mr. Prager points out the recurring nature of this phenomenom. Some people once thought Nazi Germany was a good thing. Prager goes on to say:

"It would appear that every generation confronts a major moral test. A great evil presents itself as a good, and the world that is not victimized by that evil is tested: Can it recognize the evil and confront it?
The pattern is eerily and depressingly repetitive.

1. The evil takes hold.
2. The evil has myriad defenders even among otherwise decent people.
3. The evil is vanquished after destroying an uncountable number of lives.
4. After the evil is vanquished, there is virtually unanimous agreement that it was indeed evil."

So it seems we are able to recognize Good and Evil after all.


The aftermath of the Holocaust.