An invitation to speak to a Cobb County Tea Party group set the stage for this column. My assignment: to review a book titled "Betrayed by the Bench," by John A. Stormer, and encourage their members to read and deeply ponder this book.

After rereading this book, I fully recommend its reading by those Cobb County Tea Party members as well as by all Americans concerned today about their freedoms and liberties, and about the direction Presidents Barack Obama's "Fundamental Changes" are taking our country.

This book provides the clearest picture I have ever read on how the progressive movement has used the "Bench," beginning in the mid 1800s, to nearly achieve its goal of replacing America's constitutional republican form of government, a government of "we the people," with a socialistic form of government controlled by their own self-proclaimed elitists, those who believe the American people are not smart enough to self-govern themselves.

Chapter V of Stormer's book is titled "Two Academic Theories Changed America's Law and Culture." It goes into detail on the theories advanced in the mid 1800s, by George Wilhelm Hegel, a German philosopher and Englishman Charles Darwin, creator of the evolution theory. Hegel, the German philosopher, developed a format for applying "dialectics" to almost everything in society, especially in the political arena. Hegel's dialectic philosophy placed "reason above facts and revelation in seeking truth and becomes a forum for 'moving people away from absolute truth or values toward a group consensus in order to accomplish 'group goals.'" Both Hegel's and Darwin's' theories reject the "Biblical absolutes" advocated by the founding fathers in America's foundational documents.

Hegel's philosophy, along with Darwin's "constant change" theory laid the foundation for those socialistic and communistic governments that were responsible for the death of millions of people, and for the loss of unalienable rights for additional millions. Hegel's philosophy, first advanced by Plato in his book "The Republic," was adopted by such dictators as Lenin, Stalin, Hitler and Mao.

A lesser-known student of Hegel, Christopher Columbus Langdell, a stealth student, would later become Dean of the Harvard Law School and initiate the "fundamental changes" in American law that led to what is now known as "sociological jurisprudence," better known as "judicial legislation," or case law.

Langdell, in rejecting the Constitution as the source of America's law, began teaching case law - that is, the use of judicial decisions decreed by other judges. Two federal judges, one in Arizona, one in California, are recent examples of using case-law "precedence." Judges are "fundamentally changing" the founders' intent from the bench.

Hegel's and Darwin's theories, along with Langdell's "sociological jurisprudence' are now accepted as the norm in America's current culture. They have, in America's educational system, replaced the Biblical foundational beliefs that America's freedoms and liberties were built on. And they are, as Americans wake up to the potential loss of their freedoms, the cause of the serious divide dividing America today over the source of America's political philosophy - individual freedom versus bondage.

This growing divide in America illustrates the natural law of opposition, a law that some refer as the law of "good and evil," with good associated with God and evil associated with Satan. Progressives discount both God and Satan as myths. I don't! I believe God is real and I believe Satan is real.

My God is that same God to whom the Israelites prayed for deliverance, and is, using Jefferson's words, the Creator and Supreme Judge of the World, He who uplifts, encourages and strengthens, He to whom Washington prayed to to win an unwinnable war, and He who inspired America's 56 founding fathers to sign a document that would have sealed their death had they lost the Revolutionary War.

The Satan associated with evil is that being, I believe, that John the Revelator said was cast out of heaven (Rev 12), that Moses said "sought to destroy the agency of man" and called the, "father of all lies, to deceive and to blind men, and to lead them captive at his will," and he whose purpose is to enslave all mankind.

America's war today over ideology continues that war John described in Revelations. Americans today must, as did the Colonists of 1776, choose liberty or choose enslavement, being enslaved by the progressive's elite, so prevalent before God raised up "wise men" to establish America, and cleansed America by "the shedding of much blood."

Choose well America - this great divide, or war over ideology, is real.

Donald Conkey, a retired agricultural economist, lives in Woodstock.