Chicago is a perpetual crime scene. There are more Americans killed in the city of Chicago than are killed in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. Liberals blame it on guns. The thing of it is, a hundred million or more people have guns and the vast majority of them don’t shoot anyone.

Rahm Emanuel, the mayor of Chicago, “held a press conference to talk about the weekend of gun violence there, resulting in at least 71 people being shot and at least 11 killed.” Who can imagine such a situation? Here’s some of what Mayor Emanuel said:

We have a heavy heart. Our souls are burdened. What happened this weekend did not happen in every neighborhood in Chicago, but it is unacceptable to happen in any neighborhood of Chicago. There are too many guns on the street, too many people with criminal records on the street, and there is a shortage of values about what is right, what is wrong, what is acceptable, what is condoned and what is condemned. And we as a city in every corner have an accountability and a responsibility. If you know who did this, be a neighbor. Speak up.

“Values”? When’s the last time you heard a Leftist talk about values? Yes, I know, if you want to kill your unborn child or mutilate yourself to turn yourself into the opposite sex, you are expressing your “values.”

Emanuel and his fellow “Progressives” have no basis to talk about values. Chicago is corrupt. It’s been that way for a long time. It’s not that everyone in Chicago is corrupt, but there’s enough political corruption that people notice it and talk about it.

Then there’s the corrupt political structure of tax and spend liberalism at the state level. If it’s OK for the government to steal, then why not the guy on the street? You know it’s bad when the Chicago Tribune weighs in on the subject by letting a Republican comment on the issue:

The Land of Lincoln is on the precipice of a financial disaster, and the window to repair our damaged state is shrinking every single day. Instead of reforming public employee pensions and Medicaid, some people are promoting a progressive income tax constitutional amendment — a code phrase for another massive tax increase. The adoption of a progressive income tax would be the final nail in the coffin of our great state. We need to cut spending, not raise taxes.

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As the late Rep. Jack Kemp once observed, the positive impact of lower tax rates on economic activity is not a matter of opinion — it is a matter of fact. Thanks to tax cuts and deregulation at the national level, the economy is booming with 3.8 percent unemployment. We need a similar resurgence in Illinois, but this will never happen if we enact bad policies such as the graduated income tax.

Illinois cannot afford more tax increases.

Illinois’ tax-and-spend policies affect the poor and the disenfranchised. It’s not that they’re paying the taxes; it’s that the job creators are getting squeezed. At a certain point, the entrepreneurs will pack their bags and move to a more tax-friendly state.

But back to Emanuel’s “values” comment. What is the basis of values today? Whose values? Given what young people are taught in schools, there are no objective values. “You can’t impose your morality on me!”

Try posting the Ten Commandments in a public school and actually teach them. That would mean that God would have to be discussed, as well as guilt, justice, and judgment. Secularism has dehumanized humans. By secularism’s worldview, we are meat machines; evolved DNA replicators. Such thinking over time has its cultural consequences. If people are dehumanized enough, then life as we know it loses its value.

There was a time that young people were taught that they were created in the image of God. Today, they are told that their closest living evolutionary relative is the chimpanzee.

Viktor Frankl was a Holocaust survivor. He saw the dehumanization process up close and personal. He “commented on the way that modern European thought had helped prepare the way for Nazi atrocities (and his own misery)”:

If we present a man with a concept of man which is not true, we may well corrupt him. When we present man as an automaton of reflexes, as a mind-machine, as a bundle of instincts, as a pawn of drives and reactions, as a mere product of instinct, heredity and environment, we feed the nihilism to which modern man is, in any case, prone.
I became acquainted with the last stage of that corruption in my second concentration camp, Auschwitz. The gas chambers of Auschwitz were the ultimate consequence of the theory that man is nothing but the product of heredity and environment; or as the Nazi liked to say, “of Blood and Soil.” I am absolutely convinced that the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek were ultimately prepared not in some Ministry or other in Berlin, but rather at the desks and lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers.1

Rahm Emanuel wants what he and his kind have disparaged for so long.

While our nation clamors for rights, it rejects the standard by which those rights are defined. Our schools are officially atheistic. Schools teach the theory of evolution, a belief system that claims to explain the origin of human beings without a reference to the Creator. The effects have been devastating. Barbara Reynolds, a former columnist for USA Today, has made the connection between dehumanization and violence:

Don’t be surprised if our little darlings go ape or get up to monkeyshines when they return to class.

Misbehavior tops the list of what parents and teachers worry about.

And that’s exactly where such concerns belong, considering what kids are not being taught in school.

In most schools, Johnetta and Johnny are being taught evolution, that humankind evolved from apes.2

The issue came to the forefront recently because a school district near San Diego had the good sense to adopt a policy of teaching creationism — much to the dismay of critics, including USA TODAY’s editorial page.

It is amazing that media institutions that virtually worship the First Amendment are the first to toss it when it comes to religious free speech. When both creationism and evolution are taught side by side, you don’t have the establishment of a religion, which the Constitution prohibits, but an opportunity to be protected from one-sided, narrow thinking, which the Constitution encourages.

Prohibiting the teaching of creationism in favor of evolution creates an atheistic, belligerent tone that might explain why our kids sometimesperform like Godzilla instead of children made in the image of God.

While evolution teaches that we are accidents or freaks of nature, creationism shows humankind as the offspring of a divine Creator. There are rules to follow which govern not only our time on Earth, but also our afterlife.

One philosophy preaches happenstance with mayhem as a conclusion; the other, divine order. One suggests the survival of the fittest; the other, a commitment to serve the weakest and sickest among us. To me, there is no contest. Teaching evolution makes about as much sense as teaching our kids that humankind was grown in a cabbage patch or raised by wolves. Even in the dullest mind, a light bulb should go off: Who created the cabbage, and who made the wolves?

Under the rules of evolution, teachers are forced to answer to King Kong rather than to the King of Kings.

We are not human animals. We have written speech andhigher intellect, but more important, we have souls fueled by a spirit of right or wrong.

Human action is determined by core beliefs. Creationism teaches that humans are wonderfully made with the promise of high expectations.

If evolution is forced on our kids, we shouldn’t be perplexed when they beat on their chests or, worse yet, beat on each other and their teachers.3

1. Viktor E. Frankl, The Doctor and the Soul: From Psychotherapy to Logotherapy (New York: Vintagae Books, 1986), xxvii. Quoted in Richard Weikart, The Death of Humanity and the Case For Life  (Washington, DC: Regnery Faith, 2016), 11-12. [↩]
2. Actually, evolutionists teach that humans and apes evolved from a distant common ancestor. [↩]
3. This article originally appeared in USA TODAY (August 27, 1993), 11A. [↩]