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This was done by ordinary people – Part II

Posted by :webmaster On : June 6, 2014
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Category: Archives, Christianity, Government, Humanism

Many years ago I read a book about Adolf Hitler and the rise of Nazism in Germany during the early 1930s. Although I don’t remember the details of what I read, the book contained a photograph that disturbed me to such an extent that I still vividly remember it after all these years. It was a picture of a beautiful, well-dressed young woman perhaps in her thirties. She was attending a rally at which Hitler spoke during the time he was gaining political power over the German people. As she gazed at the Fuhrer, there was a smile on the young woman’s face which glowed with admiration if not absolute idolization. Her rapt attention made her appear as though hypnotized by Hitler and his words. The reason I was so disturbed was because I knew the end of the story. How could this young woman and the crowd around her be so naïve and susceptible to the Nazi message? She and the others were just ordinary people! But these ordinary people, in their gullibility and rejection of their Christian heritage, allowed themselves to be deceived and as a result made possible the greatest conflagration of death and destruction in the history of mankind.

The Germans had lost the First World War in 1918, and the fierce German pride was dealt a succession of body blows. The 50-year-old monarchy ended with Kaiser Wilhelm’s forced abdication. Communists and Social Democrats warred for control as the nation was near anarchy. The Weimer Republic was the victor but a deeply flawed democratic regime. Germany was forced to eviscerate its armed forces, give up much of its European territories, abandon Asian and African colonies, and pay huge reparations to the Allied nations.[1] Germany sank into years of hyperinflation and depression (both economically and psychologically).

Because of the consequences of the First World War, the German people and especially the younger Germans were disillusioned and lost all confidence in the traditional authority of the monarchy and the church. They wanted a fuhrer, and for the German people salvation would come from Adolf Hitler who promised that he would restore order, resurrect the economy, and return the nation to its rightful place on the world’s stage.[2] But their desire for a fuhrer required a loss of rights and freedom which led to totalitarianism and eventual destruction of Germany.

Hitler’s message was not a new one. Eve succumbed to its seductions in the third chapter of Genesis…Ye shall be as gods. In the eleventh century BC, King David wrote, “The fool hath said in his heart: there is no god.” [Psalms 14:1. KJV] Humanism is man’s second oldest faith—the great alternative faith of mankind—man without God. But it was the Greeks of the fourth through sixth centuries BC that gave form and body to the man-made philosophy of humanism that would impact the world second only to Jesus Christ.[3] Seventeenth century Enlightenment thought gave new life to Greek humanism and the doctrines of progress, rationality, secularism, and political reform. Values did not arise from fixed notions of right and wrong prescribed by a non-existent transcendent God but were a product of moral relativism in which man is merely a bundle of instincts and urges.[4]

Dietrich Bonhoeffer called “…’the Greek spirit or ‘humanism’ as ‘the most severe enemy’ that Christianity ever had.”[5] And in twenty-first century America, Christianity is once again at war with humanism. From this battle we can see alarming parallels between the political and cultural changes that occurred in Germany during the early 1930s and those of the United States since 2009.

• April 1, 1933 – Boycott of Jewish stores across Germany. The reason given was to stop the international press supposedly controlled by the Jews from printing lies about the Nazis.[6]

July 26, 2012 – The Christian owner of Chic-Fil-A was urged to back out of his expansion plans in Boston and Chicago because his company gave money to nonprofits that support limiting marriage to unions between a man and a woman. Because of his biblical beliefs, he had run afoul of Chicago mayor Rohm Emanuel, former White House Chief of Staff for President Obama. Emanuel said, “Chick-Fil-A’s values are not Chicago values. They’re not respectful of our residents, our neighbors and our family members. And if you’re gonna be part of the Chicago community, you should reflect Chicago values…” Chicago Alderman Joe Moreno said he will seek to block a permit for Chick-Fil-A to expand into a Chicago neighborhood. “To have those discriminatory policies from the top down is just not something that we’re open to,” Moreno said.[7]

• April 22, 1933 – Jews were not allowed to serve as patent lawyers. Jewish doctors were prohibited from working in hospitals with state-run insurance.[8]

March 2009 – An Eastern Michigan University student was expelled because she would not counsel clients regarding sexual relationships outside of marriage which she viewed as immoral because of her Christian beliefs. Julea Ward was in her last year of her completing work for her master’s degree in counseling at EMU. While in a practicum in which she counseled clients, she asked that a prospective client wanting advice on a homosexual relationship be referred to another counselor. A faculty panel of three professors and one student ruled that Ward had violated the American Counseling Association’s code of ethics. However, the Association’s code of ethics “…broadly allows for referrals anytime a counselor determines an ‘inability to be of professional assistance’.”[9] The university and Ms. Ward settled the matter out of court in December 2012.

• May 6, 1933 – Anti-Jewish laws expanded to include all honorary university professors, lecturers, and notaries.[10]

April 2007 – Dr. Mike Adams, a criminology professor at the University of North Carolina–Wilmington was denied promotions because of his religious beliefs following his conversion from atheism to Christianity in 2000. “Subsequently, the university subjected Adams to a campaign of academic persecution that culminated in his denial of promotion to full professor, despite an award-winning record of teaching, research, and service.” In April 2014, almost seven years after Adams filed suit, a federal court found in his favor and ordered the university to promote Dr. Adams with back pay.[11]

• June 1933 – Jewish dentists and dental technicians were prohibited from working with state-run insurance institutions.[12]

May 15, 2014 – Pasadena City Health Director Dr. Eric Walsh resigned after being suspended for two weeks pending investigation by city officials after their discovery of videos of sermons by Lay Pastor Walsh “…criticizing homosexuality, calling the founder of Islam a Satanist, and calling evolution a ‘religion of Satan’.” There was no evidence of bias or misconduct while serving in his capacity as the city’s health director, but the city’s Human Relations Commission Chairman Nat Nehdar strongly criticized Walsh for his beliefs. “We don’t tolerate this type of behavior, this type of thought.” Following his resignation in Pasadena, the Georgia Department of Public Health announced Walsh would be hired to manage a six-county health district. Strong pressure from the gay-activist community in Georgia resulted in an investigation of Walsh’s background including the video sermons and led the department to withdraw its offer.[13] (emphasis added)

• September 29, 1933 – Jews banned from all entertainment and cultural activities including literature, the arts, theater, and film.[14]

May 7, 2014 – Home and Garden TV canceled a home-flipping program planned for October by former major league baseball brothers David and Jason Bentham because of their Christian beliefs regarding homosexuality and abortion. Background reports from a left-wing organization given to HGTV labeled the brothers as “anti-gay, anti-choice extremists.”[15]

• October 1933 – Jews expelled from journalism when all newspapers were placed under Nazi control.[16]

September 6, 2013 – A college football commentator was fired by Fox Sports Southwest because of his Christian beliefs regarding same-sex marriage. A committed Christian, Craig James said, “…gay civil unions are wrong, homosexuality is ‘a choice,’ and gays will ‘have to answer to the Lord for their actions’.” He made the statements during his 2012 campaign for the Texas GOP nomination for the U.S. Senate. Fox Sports Southwest fired him one week after being hired. A spokesman said, “We just asked ourselves how Craig’s statements would play in our human resources department. He couldn’t say those things here.”[17] (emphasis added)

Change was the banner under which the Nazis marched. It would be accomplished by Gleichschaltung (synchronization) in which the country would be reordered along National Socialist lines “…which meant that everything must fall in line with the Nazi worldview.”[18]

The American Gleichschaltung of 2009 would also be a reordering of the nation to reflect the humanistic worldview whose default setting for organizing society is socialism. A Barak Obama campaign speech on February 5, 2008 captured both the message of change and the worldview behind it. “Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.”[19] President Obama’s words resonate with the clarion call of the humanists whose God is self as opposed to He who created the universe.

Larry G. Johnson

Sources:

[1] Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer, (Nashville, Tennessee: Thomas Nelson, 2010), pp. 33-34.
[2] Ibid., p. 141.
[3] Larry G. Johnson, Ye shall be as gods-Humanism and Christianity-The Battle for Supremacy in the American Cultural Vision, (Owasso, Oklahoma: Anvil House Publishers, 2011), p. 139.
[4] Ibid., pp. 92-93, 287.
[5] Metaxas, p. 85.
[6] Ibid., p. 156.
[7] Michael Scherer, “Chic-Fil-A meets a First Amendment buzz saw in Chicago,” Time, July 26, 2012. http://swampland.time.com/2012/07/26/chick-fil-a-meets-a-first-amendment-buzzsaw-in-chicago/ (accessed May 21, 2014).
[8] Metaxas, p. 160.
[9] Jeremy Tedesco, “The Julea Ward Settlement: A Win for Religious Liberty,” Townhall.com, January 4, 2013. http://townhall.com/columnists/jeremytedesco/2013/01/04/the-julea-ward-settlement–a-win-for-religious-liberty-n1478423 (accessed May 22, 2014).
[10] Metaxas, p. 160.
[11] “Court orders UNC–Wilmington to pay, promote professor after retaliating against him” Alliance Defending Freedom, April 9, 2014. http://www.alliancedefendingfreedom.org/News/PRDetail/3901 (accessed May 22, 2014).
[12] Metaxas, p. 160.
[13] Mark A. Kellner, “Pasadena’s medical director on leave after his Protestant sermons surface.” NewsOK, May 9, 2014. http://newsok.com/pasadenas-medical-director-on-leave-after-his-protestant-sermons-surface/article/4747892 (accessed May 24, 2014).
[14] Metaxas, p. 160.
[15] Ann Oldenburg, “Bentham brothers: If faith cost us TV show, so be it,” USA Today, May 8, 2014. http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/tv/2014/05/07/hgtv-nixes-benham-brothers-series-anti-gay-extremist-abortion/8810393/ (accessed May 22, 2014).
[16] Metaxas, p. 160.
[17] Barry Horn, “Craig James’ anti-gay stance during political campaign reason for quick exit from FOX Sports SW,” SportsDayDFW, September 6, 2013. http://collegesportsblog.dallasnews.com/2013/09/craig-james-anti-gay-stance-during-political-campaign-reason-for-his-quick-exit-from-fssw-college-football-duties.html/(accessed May 22,
2014).
[18] Metaxas, p. 166.
[19] “Barak Obama Quotes,” Notable Quotes.
http://www.notable-quotes.com/o/obama_barack.html (accessed May 28, 2014).

This was done by ordinary people – Part I

Posted by :webmaster On : May 30, 2014
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Category: Archives, Christianity, God's Law v. Man's Law, Government

The end-product of the Holocaust lay in the gas chambers and ashes of the crematoria within the German death camps spread across Europe in 1945. But the beginning of the Holocaust was much more subtle and seemingly innocuous except to the Jew and others on the wrong side of the German cultural and political wars of the 1930s. In his biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian and spy, Eric Metaxas described the events that led to the Holocaust.

On January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler became the democratically elected chancellor of Germany. On February 27, the Nazis set afire the building that housed the democratically elected Reichstag and blamed it on the Communists. That same day Hitler pressured the highly respected Field Marshall Hindenburg to sign the Reichstag Fire Edict which suspended certain sections of the German constitution and allowed restrictions on personal liberty, free expressions of opinion, rights of assembly and association; violations of privacy of communications (postal, telegraphic, and telephonic); warrants for searches of homes; and confiscations of and restrictions on private property. [1]

Following the Reichstag Fire Edict, Nazi storm troopers began immediately to arrest, imprison, torture, and kill their opponents. On March 23rd the Reichstag bowed to Nazi pressure and approved the Enabling Act which placed the whole power of the government under Hitler’s control.

With the tools of democracy, democracy was murdered and lawlessness made “legal.” Raw power ruled, and its only real goal was to destroy all other powers besides itself…
In the First months of Nazi rule, the speed and scope of what the Nazis intended and had begun executing throughout German society were staggering. Under what was called the Gleichschaltung (synchronization), the country would be thoroughly reordered along National Socialist lines. (emphasis added) No one dreamed how quickly and dramatically things would change. [2]

Hermann Goring described this reordering of society as mainly an “administrative” change. An understanding of what this “reordering” meant for the Jews would come swiftly.

• April 1 – Boycott of Jewish stores across Germany. The reason given was to stop the international press supposedly controlled by the Jews from printing lies about the Nazis.
• April 7 – Removal and prohibition of anyone of Jewish descent from holding civil service jobs. Government employees must be of Aryan stock. (Enabling Act – Aryan Paragraph.)
• April 22 – Jews were not allowed to serve as patent lawyers. Jewish doctors were prohibited from working in hospitals with state-run insurance.
• April 25 – Strict limits on the number of Jewish children that could attend public schools.
• May 6 – Laws expanded to include all honorary university professors, lecturers, and notaries.
• June – Jewish dentists and dental technicians were prohibited from working with state-run insurance institutions.
• Fall – Laws restricting non-Aryans expanded to include spouses of non-Aryans.
• September 29 – Jews banned from all entertainment and cultural activities including literature, the arts, theater, and film.
• October – Jews expelled from journalism when all newspapers were placed under Nazi control. [3]

It was another spring twelve years later that World War II ended in Europe and the gates of the death camps would swing open to reveal to the world the real meaning of Goring’s “administrative” change. The pogroms of medieval Europe and Tsarist Russia had been reincarnated and perfected in one of the most advanced societies of the early twentieth century. Germany’s organized destruction of helpless people has few equals in the history of mankind. With scientific precision coupled with administrative order, the Nazis murdered eleven million people including between five and six million Jews in the gas-chambers and crematoria of the death camps, through shootings in other parts of Europe, and by overwork and starvation. In 1901, 75% of the world’s Jews lived in Eastern Europe. A century later one-half of all Jews live in English speaking countries and 30% live in Israel. Germany’s “final solution” to the Jewish problem changed forever the map of Jewish life in Europe. [4]

The momentary euphoria, goodwill, and hopes for a more cooperative order at the end of World War II quickly melted away as the realities of the war exposed the heart of mankind and his capacity for evil. J. N. Roberts summarized the post-war search for answers as to the “why” of Nazi Germany.

In many ways, Germany had been one of the most progressive countries in Europe; the embodiment of much that was best in its civilization. That Germany should fall prey to collective derangement on this scale suggested that something had been wrong at the root of that civilization itself. The crimes of the Nazis had been carried out not in a fit of barbaric intoxication with conquest, but in a systematic, scientific controlled, bureaucratic (though often inefficient) way, about which there was little that was irrational except the appalling end which it sought. [5] (emphasis added)

The post-war world remained puzzled at Germany’s “collective derangement” given its veneer of rationality and scientific and cultural progress. But along with Germany, much of the world also worshiped the same gods of rationalism, science, materialism, secularism, and progress. Man was assumed to be basically good, but the realities of the war removed humanism’s mask of goodness to reveal the face of evil. The answer to the “why” of Nazi Germany was evil, that something that had been wrong at the root of civilization itself and which Roberts sought to identify. Evil was the source of the collective derangement, and it also resides in the heart of every man.

With few exceptions, the Nazis and their collaborators were not mere madmen as one would suppose. Rather, the whole story of the Holocaust can be summed up in one sentence. “This was done by ordinary people.” [6] Those words by Ravi Zacharias cut to the heart of the source of evil for it reveals the inescapable conclusion that there is an indelible stain upon the soul of man. In his Gospel account, Mark described the diseased heart of man.

For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, fornication, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, foolishness. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a man. [Mark 7:21-23. RSV]

Christians call the root of this evil original sin. It is the evil that is found within the soul of every human being that ever lived. But in the great meta-narrative of the Bible, we learn of the way for fallen man to be cleansed of that evil and mend his broken relationship with God. We find the answer in John’s Gospel: “For God so loved the world that he gave His only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” [John 3:16. RSV]

Larry G. Johnson

Sources:

[1] Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer, (Nashville, Tennessee: Thomas Nelson, 2010), pp. 145, 148-149.
[2] Ibid., pp. 149-150
[3] Ibid., pp. 150-151, 156-157, 160.
[4] J. M. Roberts, The New History of the World, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 954, 1150.
[5] Ibid., p. 964.
[6] Ravi Zacharias, “God, Evil, and Suffering,” Foundations of Apologetics, Vol. 10, DVD Video, (Norcross, Georgia: Ravi Zacharias Ministries International, 2007).

Conservatism explained

Posted by :webmaster On : May 9, 2014
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Category: Archives, Christianity, Government

In “Liberalism explained,”[1] we said that liberalism is a philosophy that attempts to explain and direct the affairs of men based on the belief that “…critical and autonomous human reason held the power to discover the truth about life and the world, and to progressively liberate humanity from the ignorance and injustices of the past.[2] Liberals attempt to define the tenets of conservatism as opposites of the concepts and ideologies upon which liberalism rests. But unlike liberalism, conservatism is not an ideology encompassing a sociopolitical program of continuously changing claims, theories, and aims—a thing invented by the mind of man. Rather, conservatism declares the existence of a transcendent moral order in which man attempts to order his soul and society. Therefore, the concepts and tenets of conservatism are not a product of man’s design but recognition of transcendent, unchanging, and everlasting truth.[3]

Without question, the source of that truth was biblical Christianity in Western civilization and especially in the American experience since the arrival of the first colonists. It is in this central concept we see the ultimate distinction between conservatism’s reverence for divine truth and that of liberalism’s changing truth and its inherent relativism. And it is in man’s deference to and defense of this divine truth and order from whence flows the spirit of conservatism. And from conservatism’s spirit is birthed conservative thought and action. In this light we see conservatism as a defense of truth, not truth as a defense of conservatism.

If we are serious in our belief of conservatism’s reverence for transcendent, objective, unchanging truth, we must be careful in describing the “principles” of conservatism when talking of conservative politics because a nation’s politics is a product of its dominant religion, historic experience, and ancient customs. In examining political and social order, Russell Kirk lists six concepts or principles that are reflective of the conservative mindset.[4] Rather than “principles,” perhaps a better word is “attitude” or even “inclination” that is reflective of conservative thought and action. The reader should note that none of the concepts are created by conservatism but rather observed.

Transcendent Moral Order – Meaning, value, purpose, and moral authority flow from a transcendent God who created the laws of nature and laws of human nature. We can know this moral order because universal truths are evident in His creation and through the revelation to the ancient Hebrews and first century Christians. Being created in His image, man bears the divine imprint of the Creator from which he derives his value and purpose.

Social Continuity – Social continuity produced order, justice, and freedom over many centuries of long and painful social experience. However, rightly defined and applied, these concepts are seen as not of human construction but man’s expressions of the transcendent moral order over time. Social continuity is not anti-change nor does it mean inflexibility of society. It does mean that interruption or disturbance of social continuity must be gradual, discriminating, and careful.

Prescription – Conservatism relies on the principle of prescription—adherence to things established by immemorial usage including rights and morals. Habits, customs, and conventions of past generations stand tested and true and therefore are prescriptive as opposed to baseless innovations and tinkering of humanistic man regarding his morals, politics, and tastes.

Prudence – By prudence is meant someone that is judicious, farsighted, and careful. It is the chief virtue of a statesman, and any public measure or consideration must be concerned with long-term consequences. Having weighed the consequences, the conservative tends toward caution, restraint, and reflection. Chronic reformers, liberals tend toward the quick fix for temporary advantage or popularity. Ignoring the prescriptive past and nature of man, liberals become casualties of the law of unintended consequences.

Variety – Social institutions and modes of life long established are preferred over the “…narrowing uniformity and deadening egalitarianism” of liberalism. Conservatives recognize that healthy societies require hierarchy which implies orders and classes that reflect differences of skill, ability, possessions, and status. The variety valued by the conservative is not that of the liberal oxymoron of diversity and forced equality.

Imperfectability – Conservatism recognizes the imperfectability of man and therefore the impossibility of creating a perfect social order. Evil, maladjustments, and suffering will be present in every society due to man’s fallen nature. However, the conservative sees that these afflictions can be reduced in a rightly ordered, just, and free society if care is given to maintenance of established and time-tested institutional and moral safeguards and the observance of prudent reforms.

Another means to contrast humanism’s contemporary liberalism with conservatism is to look at truth and time. For the conservative, truth is absolute and therefore timeless, that is, things of the highest value are not affected by the passage of time.[5] Liberals often decry conservatives for being antiquarian, wanting to live in the past, or wishing to turn back the clock to a time from which mankind really wanted to escape. The liberal mantra is progress. Progress, being oriented to time, fails to apprehend those timeless truths that bring order to the soul and society. Conservatives search for those permanent things, those moorings to which one may cling as the river of time sweeps by toward an unattainable infinity.[6]

Men crave “…systematic and harmonious arrangements…” which we call order. There are two spheres of order necessary for any culture to survive in the long term. One is order of the soul by which we govern ourselves and is of first importance. The second is social order by which we organize how we live in relation to others.[7] In the political and other institutions of public life, liberals and conservatives present different avenues for civil social order and vie for preference. Faced with an increasingly humanistic worldview in a society that is ignorant of the nation’s founding principles, some in American conservative circles question the necessity of an order of the soul in achieving a conservative order of society. In their hunger for victory at the ballot box, some conservatives wish to maximize certain conservative positions such as limited government, lower taxes, private property, and a market economy while at the same time minimizing or abandoning altogether the moral aspects of the conservative cause (e.g., opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage). However, without moral order of the soul, self-absorption looses passion and impulse which fragments any nation’s unifying central cultural vision and disorders society. In its end, a disordered society inevitably leads to either anarchy or totalitarianism, a truth that is universally validated by an examination of the historical record.

Abandonment of the order of the soul is an abandonment of the conservative spirit—man’s deference to and defense of divine truth and order. Those that abandon the conservative spirit in favor of selected conservative positions perhaps more palpable to the prevailing humanistic worldview are merely pseudo conservatives. In the words of C. S. Lewis, we see their end and possibly the end of conservatism in America.

We continue to clamour for those very qualities we are rendering impossible…In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.[8]

Larry G. Johnson

Sources:

[1] Larry G. Johnson, “Liberalism explained,” culturewarrior.net, May 2, 2014.

[2] Christian Smith, The Secular Revolution, (Berkeley, California: The University of California Press, 2003), pp. 53-54.

[3] Larry G. Johnson, Ye shall be as gods – Humanism and Christianity – The Battle for Supremacy in the American Cultural Vision, (Owasso, Oklahoma: Anvil House Publishers, 2011), pp. 216-217.

[4] Russell Kirk, The Essential Russell Kirk-Selected Essays, ed, George A. Panichas, (Wilmington, Delaware: ISI Books, 2007), pp. 7-9.

[5] Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences, (Chicago, Illinois: The University of Chicago Press, 1948), p. 52.

[6] Johnson, Ye shall be as gods, pp. 216-217.

[7] Russell Kirk, The Roots of American Order, (Washington, D. C.,: Regnery Gateway, 1991), pp. 5-6.

[8] C. S. Lewis, “The Abolition of Man,” The Complete C. S. Lewis Signature Classics, (New York: Harper One, 2002), p. 704.

Liberalism explained

Posted by :webmaster On : May 2, 2014
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Category: Archives, Government, Progressivism, Socialism

To understand the origins of the pervasive humanism and secularization that blankets modern America, particularly as it affects government, we must examine the rise of liberalism. Liberalism is the political legacy of the Enlightenment, a skeptical and revolutionary cultural tradition that emanated from eighteenth century Western Europe and “…promoted the belief that critical and autonomous human reason held the power to discover the truth about life and the world, and to progressively liberate humanity from the ignorance and injustices of the past.” [1]

This new understanding of what freedom meant and how it was to be achieved was more practical than idealistic and resulted in a major paradigm shift. The new freedom proposed that man should be happy on this earth, a new concept invented in the eighteenth century. However, the emphasis on this new freedom unhooked from tradition became an attack on the Church and then religion itself. [2] The fundamental difference between liberalism spawned by the Enlightenment and the Judeo-Christian ethic revolves around a disagreement on the end purpose of man. The Enlightenment’s humanism says, “The end of all being is the happiness of man.” But Christianity says, ‘The end of all being is the glory of God.” [3]

Before we proceed, we must distinguish between what Robert George calls “old-fashioned liberalism” of the American Founding and the Constitution as opposed to “contemporary liberalism.” Liberalism of the Founding era was one “…of religious freedom, political equality, constitutional democracy, the rule of law, limited government, private property, the market economy, and human rights.” [4] Contemporary liberalism and liberals are of a wholly opposite variety which

…defend large-scale government-run health, education, and welfare programs. They support redistributive taxation policies. They favor affirmative action programs for women and minorities and call for the revision of civil rights laws to prohibit discrimination based on “sexual orientation.” They may support the legal redefinition of marriage to include same-sex relationships. They certainly support legalized abortion and the government funding of abortions for indigent women. They oppose the death penalty. [5]

Professor George’s “old-fashioned liberalism” is one and the same as F. A. Hayek’s “true liberalism” in the original nineteenth century sense and the opposite of the contemporary liberalism in which “…liberal has come to mean the advocacy of almost every kind of government control.” As a result, many old-fashioned liberals began describing themselves as conservatives. [6] Conservatism will be examined in the next article. For our purposes, when we speak of liberalism we refer to a contemporary understanding of liberalism which emphasizes extensive state control in all aspects of society.

As the powerful forces of Enlightenment liberalism rolled across the Atlantic from Western Europe during the nineteenth century, the Protestant establishment and the nation experienced significant inroads of secularization between 1870 and 1930. Out of that struggle a tenuous compromise occurred between evangelical Protestant Christianity and Enlightenment liberalism. The American Christian church, already divided by denomination, region, race, ethnicity, and class, would split again into fundamentalists and modernists between the late nineteenth century and the mid-1920s. Amid the rising skepticism, positivism, and Darwinism emanating from Enlightenment liberalism, the new liberal and modernists Protestant leaders chose survival through accommodation with the adversary and their doctrines of Science, Progress, Reason, and Liberation. But this compromise would only forestall the approaching “…final dominance of Enlightenment moral order in the public square and the relegation of Christian and other religious concerns to private life” that has gained increasing momentum since the 1930s. [7]

By the 1930s, liberalism’s eventual domination of the moral order was assured. As the nation wallowed in the depths of the Great Depression, liberalism used the economic crisis to advance its political agenda. Beginning in 1936, the Supreme Court’s liberal interpretations of the “general welfare” clause of the Constitution have dramatically enlarged the powers of the federal government, diminished the rights of states, and encroached on fundamental property rights through its welfare programs. [8] This liberal interpretation significantly expanded what the legislature could do with regard to providing for the “general welfare” of the United States. The results of the liberal interpretation of the “general welfare” clause is an unprecedented assault on right of private property through imminent domain laws, a diminution of the right of contract and obligations thereunder, an oppressive income tax system, and the onerous limitations on the possession and use of property through regulation. [9]

To give a clearer understanding of liberalism’s secular political ideology, we must examine its signature postulates.

Progress – The liberal mantra is progress, ever onward and upward to a better society, perhaps even a utopia. Man is not fallen but basically good and therefore perfectible. Progress also implies movement, change, and challenge to the status quo. Yet, as the liberal marches boldly into the future, he has become a prisoner of time, perhaps more precisely a prisoner of the moment. Truth becomes relative. Search for an enduring order fails as one’s worldview constantly changes bringing disquiet to the soul and society. Progress, being oriented to time, fails to apprehend those timeless truths that bring order to the soul. [10]

Change – The liberal’s chant for change is a matter of principle and reflects a doctrinaire hatred for permanence. But what is the liberal’s answer as change upon change only compounds the lack of rootedness? Change requires movement, but movement doesn’t always mean progression. The promises of progress ring hollow in light of rising social disorder. [11]

Individual – Liberalism exalts the individual with a resulting self-centeredness; hence, selfishness becomes virtue. For the liberal, community is secondary to a pervasive individualism where individual, personal rights are supreme. Duty and obligation to clan and community are consigned to the dustbin of a foolish and irrelevant past. Yet, there appears a fundamental conflict in the statements of humanists with regard to the individual and the larger society, and such conflict cannot be hidden by fuzzy and euphemistic definitions extolling the dignity of the man and the cherishing of the individual. Under the humanist philosophy it is evident that the individual must be subordinate to the good of all humanity, and it is the leaders of the state that determine the definition of what is good. This subordination of the individual is confirmed by terms such as “greater good of all humanity”, “obligation to humanity as a whole”, and “contribute to the welfare of the community.” Ultimately the designated elite of society rule as they see fit and do so without regard to the individual. [12]

Liberty – Liberalism’s new freedom centers on the individual and is superior to the other two requirements of a civil society—Justice and Order. As to the individual, humanists promise a freedom from the mores, norms, tradition, and distant voices of the past by which humanity has achieved a measure of civilization. The freedom espoused by the humanist is a freedom that gives unbridled control to the self and senses and ultimately leads to bondage. However, for all of man’s time on this earth this personal license has been the path toward disaster. To believe that such personal freedom will lead to the greater good of mankind is folly for man is a fallen creature, and he cannot lift himself by pulling at his own bootstraps. [13]

Liberalism is the child of humanism, and the inevitable destination of liberalism is socialism. Socialism breeds disharmony and erodes the foundations of a civil society. Socialism leads to a leveling of society with resulting declines in quality of life, standards of living, a loss of trust in government and its institutions, and ultimately a loss of freedom.

Larry G. Johnson

Sources:

[1] Christian Smith, The Secular Revolution, (Berkeley, California: The University of California Press, 2003), pp. 53-54.

[2] J. M. Roberts, The New History of the World, (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 693.

[3] Paris Reidhead, “Ten Shekels and a Shirt,” Remnant Resource Network. http://remnantradio.org/Archives/articles/Ten%20Shekels/tenshekels.htm (accessed December 18, 2010).

[4] Robert P. George, The Clash of Orthodoxies, (Wilmington, Delaware: ISI Books, 2001), p. 232.

[5] Ibid.

[6] F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom – Text and Documents, ed. Bruce Caldwell, (Chicago, Illinois: The University of Chicago Press, 1944, 2007), p. 45.

[7] Smith, pp. 52-55, 58, 66-67; Larry G. Johnson, Ye shall be as gods-Humanism and Christianity-The Battle for Supremacy in the American Cultural Vision, (Owasso, Oklahoma: Anvil House Publishers, 2011), pp. 213-214.

[8] W. Cleon Skousen, The 5000 Year Leap, (www.nccs.net: National Center for Constitutional Studies, 1981), p. 175; Johnson, Ye shall be as gods, p. 249.

[9] Johnson, Ye shall be as gods, p. 249.

[10] Russell Kirk, The Essential Russell Kirk – Selected Essays, ed. George A. Panichas, (Wilmington, Delaware: ISI Books, p. 26; Johnson, Ye shall be as gods, pp. 215-216.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid.

March Madness: Nanny State 1 – Freedom 0

Posted by :webmaster On : March 28, 2014
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Category: Archives, Government, Humanism, Socialism

Jeanne Mandeville is the School of St. Mary’s health-room director for kindergarten-through-eighth-grade. Loved by parents and children alike, Ms. Mandeville has been known as the school’s Tooth-Fairy for many years because she helped students in the final stages of a tooth falling out. For the children, going to the school’s Tooth Fairy was a rite-of-passage; a badge of honor in a child’s growing up years. But not all liked Ms. Mandeville’s role as Tooth Fairy. A complaint was emailed to Susan Rogers, Executive Director of the State Board of Dentistry. [Tulsa World] In response to the complaint, Ms. Rogers warned that,

Maybe a kid avoids a dentist because they know she’ll (Mandeville) do it and it will be cheaper. She may not be able to evaluate things that need to be evaluated…There are so many diseases in your mouth that can happen…There’s biological waste there. Someone needs to ask where it’s going…A general citizen is not allowed to go pull several kids’ teeth in a row; that is illegal practice of dentistry. It’s technically a felony. [Tulsa World]

Ms. Rogers stated that the complaint will be investigated because “…the dentistry board has authority over anyone determined to be practicing dentistry, whether they know they are technically ‘practicing dentistry’ or not.” [Tulsa World]

The State of Oklahoma has approximately 175 agencies, boards, commissions, and offices charged with varying degrees of oversight ranging from abstracts and boll weevils to wheat, wildlife, and women. Although not all have the authority to have someone charged with a felony for violating its rules, many have the ability to interject their regulatory noses into the lives of citizens and their businesses. [Oklahoma Department of Libraries] Most have worthy and important roles to play in governing and providing for the wishes of the people, but something has gone wrong with the regulatory process.

As government involves itself with an ever expanding array of concerns for its citizens’ welfare, various occupations and professions are swept into the net of regulation. Few complaints are heard from these regulated professions and occupations whose prestige and bank balances are elevated as competition is restricted by limiting ease of entry and prohibition of competing services.

Government intrusion and over-regulation in the lives of its citizens have grown exponentially since the New Deal and beginning in 1936 with the court’s exceptionally expansive interpretation of the Constitution’s general welfare clause. Laws and regulations have become repressive tools of a nanny-state government interfering in the lives of a free people capable of making rational decisions without government interference.

But in the larger picture of government interference in the lives of a free people, over-regulation of businesses, occupations, and professions is only one facet of the general trend toward organizing a socialistic society. This trend is the direct result of the rapid abandonment over the last three-quarters of a century of the Christian worldview upon which the nation was founded. In its place has risen the humanistic worldview which has been embraced by the institutions of American life and most of its leadership. Christianity leads to truth and freedom. Humanism leads to relativism and socialism whose ultimate end is totalitarianism.

Writing about America 180 years ago, Alexis de Tocqueville described this new type of despotism that would eventually threaten democracies.

I see an innumerable crowd of men, all alike and equal, turned in upon themselves in a restless search for those petty, vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls…Above these men stands an immense and protective power which alone is responsible for looking after their enjoyments and watching over their destiny. It is absolute, meticulous, ordered, provident, and kindly disposed. It would be like a fatherly authority, if, father-like, its aim were to prepare men for manhood, but it seeks only to keep them in perpetual childhood; it prefers its citizens to enjoy themselves provided they have only enjoyment in mind. It works readily for their happiness but it wishes to be the only provider and judge of it. It provides their security, anticipates and guarantees their needs, supplies their pleasures, directs their principal concerns, manages their industry, regulates their estates, divides their inheritances. Why can it not remove from them entirely the bother of thinking and the troubles of life?…

Thus, the ruling power, having taken each citizen one by one into its powerful grasp and having molded him to its own liking, spreads it arms over the whole of society, covering the surface of social life with a network of petty, complicated, detailed, and uniform rules through which even the most original minds and the most energetic of spirits cannot reach the light in order to rise above the crowd. [Tocqueville]

Tocqueville did not have a name for this new despotism, but today we know it as socialism. Socialism is humanism’s template for organizing society and is inherently domineering, restrictive, and restraining in the details of life and ultimately leads to loss of freedom.

The political/intellectual/bureaucratic class will deny they are socialists or that their actions are socialistic by nature. However, their denials appear similar to those of the small boy who denies he ate the chocolate chip cookies even though his face and hands are smeared with chocolate and cookie crumbs. Hmmm. Children, teeth, chocolate…cavities? I’m sure the Oklahoma Board of Dentistry will have something to say about this.

Larry G. Johnson

Sources:

Dylan Goforth, “Tooth Fairy to be extracted,” Tulsa World, March 22, 2014, A-1.

“Oklahoma State Agencies, Boards, and Commissions,” Oklahoma Department of Libraries, September 2, 2013. http://www.odl.state.ok.us/sginfo/abc/index.htm (accessed March 24, 2014).

Alexis De Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Gerald E. Bevan, Trans., (London, England: Penguin Books, 2003), pp. 805-806.

The Fragility of Free Speech in America

Posted by :webmaster On : March 21, 2014
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Category: Constitution, Government, Socialism, Truth

The First Amendment of the Constitution reads as follows: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for redress of grievances.” The free exercise of religion has been under assault by the liberalism for a number of years and the assault has accelerated significantly in the last two or three years. Attacks on free speech are increasing but of more recent occurrence.

Attacks on free speech increased significantly with efforts to classify certain opinions as hate speech. The problem with prohibiting hate speech is one of determining what is and what is not hate speech. Most often, the efforts at eliminating hate speech are aimed at the “content” of the speech rather than the intolerable mode of expressing the speech (e.g., violence). Here we are not talking about profanity or obscene language that offends the common decency of a civil society. Speech that is bad or hurtful may not be obscene or profane, and slander and libel laws are available where necessary. Also, enforced tolerance through limitations on the content of hate speech may have the opposite effect—that of promoting even more hateful speech or worse. Most importantly, any limit on free speech, however hateful or hurtful, is a slippery slope at whose base is an abyss in which free speech is not only lost but other liberties as well.

As America races toward a monolithic, all-powerful, all-knowing government, free speech is under attack in a variety of ways.

Government approved speech

We recently wrote of the federal government’s first steps at limiting freedom of the press through proposed Federal Communications Commission’s monitoring of newsrooms to determine bias in the provision of critical information needs as determined by the government. [See: “The New Ministry of Truth 2014”]

Government limits on speech through regulation

But government reach goes beyond the newsroom and into cyberspace. Health-wise, Steve Cooksey was a walking time bomb. He was obese, lethargic, asthmatic, chronically ill, and a pre-diabetic. Ignoring the advice of medical personnel and others, he chose to eat a high-carbohydrate, low-fat diet (beef, pork, chicken, leafy vegetables). He lost seventy-five pounds and no longer needed medications. He began sharing his dietary opinions on his Internet blog and interacting with his readers. When asked he would give his opinion, but the North Carolina Board of Dietetics/Nutrition got wind of his treachery and following a three-month investigation ordered him stop as he was “counseling” and needed a license to do so. The Institute for Justice defended Cooksey’s First Amendment right of free speech citing the fact that Cooksey’s speech “…involves no sensitive relationships (as in psychological counseling, no uniquely vulnerable listeners (as in potential legal clients forced to make snap decisions), and no plausible presumption that the listeners are unable to exercise independent judgment.” Cooksey’s advice was unpaid, freely sought, involved no professional-client relationships. [Will]

Regulatory oversight is a necessary and proper function of government. However, under the expansive interpretation of the Constitution’s general welfare clause beginning 1936, much of regulatory oversight has become an autocratic function of a nanny-state bureaucracy intruding into the lives of a free people capable of making rational decisions without government interference.

Limiting when and where free speech may occur

Free speech is under attack on many of the nation’s colleges and universities. Robert Van Tuinen, a student at Modesto Junior College, was stopped by campus police from distributing copies of the Constitution on the 226th anniversary of its signing. College officials told Van Tuinen that he could get permission to distribute the Constitution if he pre-registered for time in the “free speech zone” which reportedly was small slab of concrete just big enough for two people. However, once registered, Van Tuinen would have to wait for an available opening. Effectively, administration officials used campus police to enforce an unconstitutional rule, declared the campus to be off limits for free speech except for a small “free speech” area, and limited when and how many could use so-called free speech area, all in violation of the First Amendment. [Haynes]

Criminalizing free speech

Want to go to jail for your views—spoken or written? Lawrence Torcello, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Rochester Institute of Technology, suggests that some scientists and their financial backers may be both morally and criminally negligent if their views contradict a set of facts that the majority of scientists agree upon. As an example, Torcello believes that, “We have good reason to consider the funding of climate denial to be criminally and morally negligent. The charge of criminal and moral negligence ought to extend to all activities of the climate deniers who receive funding as part of a sustained campaign to undermine the public’s understanding of scientific consensus.” [Torcello]

Torcello brushes aside free speech concerns by distinguishing between the protected voicing of one’s unpopular beliefs and the funding of a strategically organized campaign to undermine the public’s ability to develop and voice informed opinions. Torcello states that, “Protecting the latter as a form of free speech stretches the definition of free speech to a degree that undermines the very concept.” But Torcello should read the First Amendment again. There is no limit on free speech because it is strategically organized and well-financed. [Torcello] The Left questions the public’s ability to develop and voice informed opinions without help from the liberal intellectual elites. The problem for the Left is that the public is getting wise to the liberal, radical environmentalist agenda and other pseudo-scientific pronouncements, and the Left’s only recourse is silence their critics.

Writing seventy years ago in his seminal Road to Serfdom, F. A. Hayek identified the liberal necessity of group-think for the masses to achieve their ends.

The most effective way of making everybody serve the single system of ends toward which the social plan is directed is to make everybody believe in those ends…Although the beliefs must be chosen for the people and imposed upon them, they must become their beliefs, a generally accepted creed which makes the individuals as far as possible act spontaneously in the way the planner wants. [emphasis added][Hayek, p. 171.]

For liberals, any public criticism or even expressions of doubt tend to weaken public support for the official doctrine, creed, values, or views of the regime. The acts of government must be sacrosanct and exempt from criticism. Even though the great majority may have surrendered independent thought, the minority’s doubt, discontent, and criticisms must be suppressed or silenced. [Hayek, pp. 175-176.]

The suppression of free speech in America ranks high on the liberal agenda because the end of liberalism is socialism, and the end of socialism is totalitarianism. That is why those pesky three little words of “freedom of speech” in the First Amendment are so troubling to the liberal establishment.

Larry G. Johnson

Sources:

Larry G. Johnson, “The Ministry of Truth 2014,” culturewarrior.net, March 7, 2014. http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/on-college-campuses-zoning-out-free-speech (accessed 3-19-14)

Charles C. Haynes, “On college campuses, zoning out free speech,” First Amendment Center, October 14, 2013. www.firstamendmentcenter.org/on-college-campuses-zoning-out-free-speech#tab-section (accessed 3-19-14).

Lawrence Torcello, “Is misinformation about the climate criminally negligent?” The Conversation, March 13, 2014. https://theconversation.com/is-misinformation-about-the-climate-criminally-negligent-23111##comment_333276 (accessed March 19, 2014).

F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom – Text and Documents, ed. Bruce Caldwell, (Chicago, Illinois: The University of Chicago Press, 1944, 2007), pp. 171, 175-176.

George Will, “An attack on free speech in North Carolina,” Tulsa World, September 27, 2012, A-16.

Newspeak 2014: The Language of Socialism

Posted by :webmaster On : March 14, 2014
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Category: Archives, Government, Humanism, Socialism, Truth

Truth is the foundation of all morals, and the meaning of truth is obscured in direct proportion to the elasticity allowed in defining the meaning of words within a language. For 1,500 years the source of truth for much of Western civilization has been the Bible. The meaning of words such as truth, freedom, good and evil were relatively inelastic within the Christian worldview. Their meanings were based on absolutes called by various names: permanent things, universals, first principles, eternal truths, and norms. [Johnson, p. 392.] These absolutes were revealed to man by God through His creation and His revelation to the ancient Hebrews and first century Christians.

Socialism requires an elastic language. For humanists, truth is defined in terms of cultural relativism which requires a suspension of judgment since all belief systems contain some truth within while no one belief system has all the truth. Therefore, all social constructions are culturally relative as they are shaped by class, gender, and ethnicity. Thus, there can be no universal truths because all viewpoints, lifestyles, and beliefs are equally valid. As a result, no man or group can claim to be infallible with regard to truth and virtue. Rather, truth is produced by the free give and take of competing claims and opinions—i.e., truth can be manufactured. [Johnson, pp. 392-393.]

Words are the means by which order is achieved in society. The dominant worldview of the members of a society determines the elasticity allowed in defining the meaning of words within the language and ultimately the meaning of truth and the freedom of the individual. The principal worldviews contending for dominance in Western civilization are Christianity and humanism. Christianity leads to truth and freedom. Humanism leads to relativism and socialism whose ultimate end is totalitarianism. Three modern prophets from the mid-twentieth century foresaw the effects of an elastic language with regard to the meaning of words.

George Orwell (1903-1950)

Orwell’s prophetic novel 1984 paints a graphic and unsettling picture of life under a vast, insidious socialistic regime called Ingsoc (acronym for English Socialism) that covers a large part of the globe. (See previous article: The New Ministry of Truth 2014.”) Control of the population is guided by Ingsoc’s Inner Party and its leader, Big Brother, and the Ministry of Truth. The ministry of Truth controls the news media, entertainment, the arts, and publishing and is responsible for propaganda and revision of the historical record to conform them to the government-approved version of events.

The regime invented Newspeak in which speech and writing use words in a way that changes their meaning, especially to persuade people to think a certain way or diminish the range of thought. [Merriam-Webster]

The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the worldview and mental habits proper to Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought—that is a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc—should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words…This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meanings whatever. To give an example, the word free still existed in Newspeak, but it could only be used in such statements as “This dog is free from lice” or “This field is free from weeds. It could not be used in its old sense of “politically free” or intellectually free” since political freedom and intellectual freedom no longer existed even as concepts… [Orwell, pp. 299-300.]

Once immersed in Newspeak, it becomes relatively easy to doublethink which is the acceptance of two contradictory ideas or beliefs at the same time.

F. A. Hayek (1899-1992)

In his Road to Serfdom, Hayek has much to say about the language of socialism which he considers synonymous with totalitarianism. Whether it is the socialism of extensive redistribution of incomes through taxation and the institutions of the welfare state or socialism through the nationalization of the means of production and central planning, Hayek rightly believed that the outcome is essentially the same for both systems—totalitarianism. [Hayek, pp. 54-55.] And it is socialism’s perversion of the language (words and their meaning) that is of particular concern. Once the sources of all information are under the control of a totalitarian regime, it has the power to mold the minds of the people. The minds of the people will then be indoctrinated with the precepts of the regime and no others will be tolerated. The moral consequences of totalitarian propaganda are destructive to the one of the essential foundation of all morals, that is, “…the sense of and respect for truth.” [Hayek, pp. 171-172.]

Hayek described the means whereby language is perverted by socialism’s propaganda.

The most effective way of making people accept the validity of the values they are to serve is to persuade them that they are really the same as those which they, or at least the best among them, have always held, but which were not properly understood or recognized before…And the most efficient technique to the end is to use the old words but change their meaning. Few traits of totalitarian regimes are at the same time so confusing to the superficial observer and yet so characteristic of the whole intellectual climate as the complete perversion of language, the change of meaning of the words by which the ideals of the new regimes are expressed. The worst sufferer in this respect is, of course, the word “liberty.” It is a world used as freely in totalitarian states as elsewhere. [Hayek, p. 174.]

The quest for equality in socialistic society becomes an officially enforced inequality. Enforced inequality is labeled the new freedom or “collective freedom” which is not the freedom of the individual “…but the unlimited freedom of the planner to do with society what he pleases.” [Hayek, pp. 174-175.]

Richard M. Weaver (1910-1963)

Weaver wrote of the power of the word in Ideas Have Consequences. Weaver accepted the ancient belief that there was “…a divine element present in language. The feeling that to have power of language is to have control over things is deeply imbedded in the human mind.” Weaver believed that the heightened interest in semantics is the most notable development of our time with regard to the study of language. Semanticists question how the fixities of language can account for a changing reality through time. They desire that words not represent truth but a range of perceptions and reflect the circumstances of the user. [Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences, pp. 150-151.]

In our world of progressive education, scientism, and mass media, the semanticists have captured the linguistic high ground through redefinition of key concepts. Regarding the consequences thereof, Weaver cut to the heart of the matter in a 1952 essay.

Just as soon as men begin to point out that the word is one entity and the object it represents is another, there set in a temptation to do one thing with the word and another different thing with the object it is supposed to represent; and here begins that relativism which by now is visibly affecting those institutions which depend for their very existence upon our ability to use language as a permanent binder. [Weaver, The Southern Essays of Richard M. Weaver, pp. 195-196.]

The prophecies of Orwell, Hayek, and Weaver were published between 1944 and 1950. The fulfillment of their prophecies with regard to the perversion of the meaning of words is abundantly evident in twenty-first century America. The ascending humanistic worldview requires that society be organized upon socialistic principles. During the last half of the twentieth century, the redefinition of the meanings of certain words has become the feedstock of socialism’s propaganda machine: multiculturalism, diversity, freedom, tolerance, good, evil, right, wrong, justice, freedom, and equality to name just a few. The new meanings are being used to mold the thinking of society in support of a humanistic worldview and its socialistic agenda.

The enemy of truth and morality is relativism. Relativism is the child of the false and destructive worldview of humanism that is tied to time and therefore temporal. Humanism and other false religions may ascend and dominate for a time, but the seeds of destruction lie in their own falseness. Truth is eternal and therefore a permanent binder that transcends time. Truth rests in the unadulterated word. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us…For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.” [John 1:1, 14a, 17. RSV] In response to Pontius Pilate’s question regarding Jesus’ kingship, Jesus answered, “You say that I am a King. For this I was born, and for this I have come into the world, to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth hears my voice.” [John 18:37. RSV]

Truth is reality, and it is the nature of man to seek and know truth. To know God is to know truth.

Larry G. Johnson

Sources:

Larry G. Johnson, Ye shall be as gods-Humanism and Christianity-The Battle for Supremacy in the American Cultural Vision, (Owasso, Oklahoma: Anvil House Publishers, 2011), pp. 392-393.

George Orwell, 1984, (New York: Signet Classics, 1949, 1950), pp. 299-300.

Merriam-Webster, “newspeak,” w-m.com. http://www.merriam-webster.com/ dictionary/ newspeak (accessed March 3, 2014).

F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom – Text and Documents, Ed. Bruce Caldwell, (Chicago, Illinois: The University of Chicago Press, 1944, 2007), pp. 54-55, 171-172, 174-175.

Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences, (Chicago, Illinois: The University of Chicago Press, 1948, 1984), pp. 150-151.

Richard M. Weaver, The Southern Essays of Richard M. Weaver, Eds. George M. Curtis, III and James J. Thompson, Jr., (Indianapolis, Indiana: Liberty Fund, 1987), pp. 195-196.

The New Ministry of Truth 2014

Posted by :webmaster On : March 7, 2014
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Category: America, Archives, Government, Socialism, Truth

In 1949, George Orwell wrote 1984, a grim novel about an omnipresent government set in Airstrip One, formerly Great Britain but now merely a province of Oceania, a superstate ruled by a political system called English Socialism. Oceania’s leaders are the Inner Party, a privileged elite headed by Big Brother, the pseudo-divine party leader who uses mass media, propaganda, and a cult-like following to create his idealized, heroic, and god-like public image. Oceania is a land of constant war, omnipresent government surveillance, and public mind control. However, the oppressive nature of the regime is justified by Big Brother and the Party in the name of the supposed greater good.

Control of the public’s mind is achieved with the assistance of the Ministry of Truth which is responsible for propaganda and historical revisionism and controls the news media, entertainment, the arts, and publishing. The Ministry falsifies the historical record where necessary to conform it to the government-approved version of events. To assist in its propaganda and revisionist efforts, the government invented Newspeak, a language used to limit freedom of thought and other expressions of individualism and independent thinking which are considered thought crimes.

In 2014,it appears that America’s current version of Big Brother is attempting to develop his own Ministry of Truth. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) hired Social Solutions International, Inc. in 2012 to develop a study and data gathering procedures which were scheduled for testing this spring in South Carolina. The study is designed to:

Identify and understand the critical information needs (CINs) of the American public (with special emphasis on vulnerable/disadvantaged populations).

To provide a comprehensive analysis of access/barriers to CINs in diverse American communities.

To determine what barriers to entry exist in FCC regulated market and to what extent these barriers have a negative impact. [Social Solutions International, Inc., pp. 2-3.]

To put FCC’s Newspeak into layman’s language, the purpose of the FCC study is to uncover information from the daily operations of television and radio broadcasters, newspapers, and the Internet that will reveal the process used to select news stories for presentation, frequency of coverage of critical information needs, media bias, and media responsiveness to underserved populations as perceived by FCC. [Perkins]

The FCC has already identified certain information that it considers as critical information needs of all Americans: health and welfare, education, transportation, economic opportunities, environment, civic information, political information, and emergencies. [Social Solutions International, Inc., p. 61.] Effectively, the FCC will control news content through imposition of content standards consistent with its own definition of CINs. Deviation from the FCC’s CIN standards will be judged as broadcaster/print media bias and therefore subject to FCC regulatory oversight, censure, punishment, and correction.

Although the study has been labeled as voluntary, the Multi-Market Study is merely the door-opener for federal control of the content of broadcast and print news media. Broadcasters must obtain periodic license renewals, and once FCC-defined CIN standards are established, what is to prevent the FCC’s power over broadcaster license renewals from being the hammer used to force broadcasters to accept FCC CIN content requirements? This is somewhat akin to a state or a local school district’s “voluntary” acceptance of Common Core standards. If Common Core standards that are acceptable to the U.S. Department of Education are not chosen, funds will not be forthcoming. [Johnson] Also, the FCC does not have regulatory authority over print media and the Internet at present. However, if FCC-defined bias is found by the study to exist in print media, such perceived bias will be justification for the federal government to expand the FCC’s regulatory reach into newspapers, magazines, other print media, and the Internet.

For those that haven’t been paying attention, this is the liberal formula for controlling American society: create a victim, elevate victim status to being deprived of an imaginary “right” and thus tantamount to discrimination, and finally impose a government solution to fix the discrimination. The perception by the FCC (a perception perhaps encouraged by the FCC’s superiors) is that some Americans are being victimized, particularly the vulnerable and disadvantaged, by not getting the critical information they need from a “biased” media. All Americans have a “right” to critical information to which some are being deprived and therefore are discriminated against. The government’s solution is to eliminate the perceived discrimination found by the FCC study by (1) requiring existing media to disseminate whatever the government determines to be critical information and (2) providing government licensing, support, special privileges, and sources of financing for new media outlets that will supply the critical information needs of the diverse but marginalized-vulnerable-disadvantaged communities presently unserved or under-served by the existing biased media.

Since the FCC’s proposed insertion of monitors into newsrooms caught the attention of many Americans, there has been a firestorm of controversy surrounding the intrusion of big government into the newsrooms of America. Because of the massive negative publicity, the study has been shelved although not rejected at the present time.

Opposition to the FCC study has come from both within and without the media. Opponents have voiced a loud and long defense of First Amendment protections of a free press. But where are the First Amendment champions when religious freedom also guaranteed by the First Amendment is repeatedly trashed by the Obama administration? This administration has made it clear that wherever conflicts occur between religious freedom and its definition of equality, equality will be the victor every time. One need only look at the Affordable Care Act and the advancement of the homosexual agenda as just two of many examples of the trouncing of religious freedom in America.

The FCC’s efforts to control the message through dictating CINs mimics the tactics of the Ministry of Truth in Orwell’s fictional account of a totalitarian socialist state. However, the FCC has also become the real-life moral and de facto equivalent of Communist political commissars of the twentieth century who were assigned to military units to teach party principles and policies and to insure party loyalty. Non-military commissars were also used to attempt to control public opinion or expression. [Webster]

The FCC’s latest attempt to inject themselves into the newsroom and thereby control the message is just one example of the over-reach of American government into the minutiae of the lives of all Americans. We see the same government intrusions into doctors’ offices and hospitals, school rooms, businesses, local government, property rights and right of contract, religious organizations, and families to name just a few. Government intrusion ranges from serious violation of the Constitution through behavior and speech codes to ridiculous regulations on sugary drink sizes and light bulbs.

Massive government intrusion into the lives of its citizens began in the 1930s under new interpretations of the general welfare clause of the Constitution. Government expansion began in Roosevelt’s New Deal Years of the 1930s and accelerated with Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society of the 1960s. However, the exponential growth during the last five years into the minutest detail of the daily lives of American citizens has become suffocating. Alexis De Tocqueville, in his 1835 Democracy in America, had a prophet’s foresight into America’s 2014 slide into a totalitarian Oceania.

We forget that it is, above all, in the details that we run the risk of enslaving men…Subjection in the minor things of life is obvious every day and is experienced indiscriminately by all citizens. It does not cause them to lose hope but it constantly irks them until they give up the exercise of their will. It gradually blots out their mind and enfeebles their spirit …

The democratic nations which introduced freedom into politics at the same time that they were increasing despotism in the administrative sphere have been led into the strangest paradoxes. Faced with the need to manage small affairs where common sense can be enough, they reckon citizens are incompetent. When it comes to governing the whole state, they give these citizens immense prerogatives. They turn them by degrees into playthings of the ruler or his masters… [emphasis added] [Tocqueville]

Larry G. Johnson

Sources:

George Orwell, 1984, (New York: Signet Classics, 1950).

Social Solutions International, Inc., “Research Design for the Study of Multi-Market Critical Information Needs,” Federal Communications Commission, (Silver Springs, Maryland: Social Solutions International, Inc., April 2013). http://www.fcc.gov/encyclopedia/research-design-multi-market-study-critical-information-needs (accessed February 22, 2014)

Tony Perkins, “American Pai: FCC Chair Fights off Government Snoops,” Family Research Council, February 21, 2014. http://www.frc.org/washingtonupdate/american-pai-fcc-chair-fights-off-govt-snoops (accessed February 22, 2014);
Ajit Pai, “The FCC Wades Into the Newsroom,” The Wall Street Journal, February 10, 2014. http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304680904579366903828260732 (accessed February 22, 2014)

Larry G. Johnson, “Common Core Curriculum Standards: The devil is in the details,” culturewarrior.net, November 8, 2013. http://www.culturewarrior.net/2013/11/08/common-core-curriculum-standards-the-devil-is-in-the-details/ (accessed February 26, 2014).

“Commissar,” Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary, (Springfield, Massachusetts: G. & C. Merriam Company, Publishers, 1963), p. 166.

Alexis De Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Gerald E. Bevan, Trans., (London, England: Penguin Books, 2003), pp. 807-808.

Sickness in the Soul of the American Republic – Part II

Posted by :webmaster On : February 28, 2014
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Category: America, Archives, Christianity, Culture Wars, Government

In Part I we described the sickness in the soul of the American Republic as being caused by a loss of unity and the denigration of the truths upon which the nation was founded. At its founding, America’s unity was derived from a central cultural vision that reflected a Christian worldview whose truths rested upon biblical principles. For those that adhere to the central cultural vision of the Founders, certain actions must be taken to not only defend but reverse its decline in American society. To restore the central cultural vision of the Founders, these actions must be taken by Christians but also by non-Christians who believe in the biblical moral code as a guide for living life and governing the nation.

John Adams said that our Constitution (the framework for governing) was made only for a moral and religious people, and by morality and religion he meant Christian morality. In other words, morality in government must flow upward from the morality of its citizens. Without a moral citizenry, there is no hope for a moral and just government. Therefore, moral reformation must start with the individual, that is, morality begins with us and our families. Humanists war against the individual through exaltation of self. Exaltation of self leads to egotism and loosens the bonds of moral restraint and weakens relationships with God, spouse, family, and community. From such comes a devaluation of a society’s moral traditions, heritage, and history. For a regeneration of both private and communal morality in the American Republic, we must adhere to and teach our children and grandchildren the standards of biblical morality.

Moral degeneration has affected every sphere of American society. We have mentioned the individual and family, and here we see the attack on the traditional view of marriage and the elevation of homosexuality in society; the fragmentation of family structure through divorce and co-habitation; and the devaluation of life through abortion, assisted suicide, and in some cases calls for infanticide. Moral degeneration in other spheres includes government, politics, education, arts and entertainment, economics and business, and religion. As humanists gained dominance in these spheres, the individual can have little direct or sustained impact on these monoliths propagating the humanist worldview. However, the collective worldviews of like-minded individuals who actively stand against humanism’s onslaught can turn the tide.

In the education sphere, humanistic policies and practices in conflict with biblical standards of morality are dictated to schools and universities by an entrenched academic establishment and federal bureaucracy. If change is to come in the sphere of education, it will be a long process and must come from concerted action by our elected representatives who ultimately control the purse strings and can reign in insulated institutions and bureaucracies immune to the wishes of the people. However, in the near term there is still power to hinder if not change humanistic policies and practices at the local and state levels. To do so we must have the courage to speak out against immorality in public education, elect officials that hold the Christian worldview, and hold those elected officials accountable for their actions and inactions.

Likewise in economics and business, the individual can take a stand and hold accountable businesses for breaches of morality through public exposure and withholding one’s dollars from support of such businesses. Economic policies are typically a function of government which will be addressed as part of the discussion on government and politics. The arts and entertainment field are blatantly humanistic in worldview and offer little opportunity for influence. However, we must remember that they are businesses and sensitive to loss of patronage and revenue. We must make our positions and concerns regarding immorality known to the leadership of this sphere of American culture and withhold patronage and revenue where those concerns are not sufficiently addressed.

Religious organizations are not exempt from humanistic influence. And because religion is closely tied to biblical standards of morality, there have been significant declines in patronage, membership, and revenue in those religious and church organizations that have abandoned biblical precepts and morality in favor of a humanistic worldview in matters such as abortion and homosexuality.

We now turn our attention to government and politics for the remainder of this article. Many Christians disdain any involvement with politics and government, having bought into the erroneous liberal argument regarding separation of church and state. This is a tragedy and responsible to a large degree for the sickness that pervades our Republic. However, apart from individual morality and concerted and sustained prayer by Christians, our efforts to influence and change government and politics offers the greatest opportunity to advance a moral reformation of America.

America is a republic by which is meant that power is “…lodged in representatives elected by the people. In modern usage, it differs from a democratic state, in which the people exercise the powers of sovereignty in person.” [Webster] The American Republic is a constitutional democracy (as opposed to an absolute democracy) in which the constitution is a body of fundamental laws and customs that are just and join together various regions, classes, and interests of a country. The beauty and longevity of the American Constitution occurs because “…it is in harmony with laws, customs, habits, and popular beliefs that existed before the Constitutional Convention.” [Kirk, p. 416.] Constitutional safeguards against abuses by the majority or dictatorial officials and bureaucrats include separation of powers among the federal branches and a division of powers between the federal government and states.

In humanism’s effort to remake America in its image, the safeguards built into the Constitution must be weakened or made of no effect. Additionally, the voice of the people through its elected representatives must be muted or diminished in relation to the wishes of a regal presidency and a radicalized judiciary. For anyone with eyes and ears and who is concerned about the future, the massive attacks on the Constitution and the republican form of government in America over the last five years are abundantly clear.

The attacks become obvious when one understands President Obama’s “above-the-law” attitude and actions that include his many instances of unilateral violation of the constitutional separation of powers between the executive branch and the legislative and judicial branches; seizing powers allotted to the states; imposition of illegitimate executive orders; non-enforcement of laws passed by Congress; and vocal denigration of the judiciary and its decisions with consequent promotion of disrespect of the law. Through judicial activism of liberal judges usurping the role of the legislature in making laws, the courts have appropriated unto themselves a law-making role never intended by the Founders. Additionally, their power to decide what is right and wrong is all too frequently based on man’s law, not God’s laws. These abuses of power by the judiciary have significantly undermined the Founders’ meaning and intent with regard to the Constitution.

For Christians and those non-Christians who also adhere to the biblical worldview of morality, it is imperative that we become actively involved in electing and supporting men and women who will defend the Founders’ intent with regard to the Constitution; who will uphold biblical standards of morality, both privately and publicly; who will govern based on Christian principles; and who will tighten the reigns on humanistic bureaucracies and government-funded institutions that impose their policies, practices, and regulations that conflict with the laws and directives of the elected representatives of the citizenry.

Humanists will scream that such mixing of morality and politics is nothing more than a ruse by religious zealots attempting to impose a theocracy on the nation. But, an examination of the historical record reveals otherwise. In the founding era, politics was defined as the science of government and considered a part of ethics. This definition of politics includes “… the protection of its citizens in their rights, with the preservation and improvement of their morals.” (emphasis added) [Webster] Therefore, the active involvement of government and politics in the moral well-being of its citizenry is not of recent invention but a pattern established and followed by the Founders.

There is one other action that only Christians may take. It is more important than all of the actions listed above but not a replacement for those actions. Ultimately, the preservation of the Christian worldview as the dominant central cultural vision of America depends on her people’s reliance on the principle expressed in God’s covenant with ancient Israel: “…if my people who are called by my name humble themselves, pray and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land. [II Chronicles 7:14 RSV.] We must work and pray.

Larry G. Johnson

Sources:

Noah Webster, “Republic,” American Dictionary of the English Language, 1828, Facsimile Edition, (San Francisco, California: Foundation for American Christian Education, 1995).

Russell Kirk, The Roots of American Order, 3rd Edition, (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Gateway, 1991), p. 417.

Webster, “Politics,” American Dictionary of the English Language, 1828

Work

Posted by :webmaster On : February 14, 2014
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Category: Archives, Christianity, Government, Socialism

A few years ago before my mother passed away at age 79, we were talking about life on the family dairy farm when my brothers and I were kids. For those that don’t know, a dairy farm is a seven-day-a-week job with long hours, and as kids we thought everyone worked like that. Teasingly, I told my mother that if I knew then what I know now, I would have reported her and my father for child abuse! We both had a good laugh. While my brothers and I may not have appreciated it when we were children and teenagers, the instilled work ethic molded us, shaped our characters, and made possible the joys and blessings of life.

However, as our nation staggers toward the looming welfare state, work has become just another profane four-letter word. The denigration of work has been around for thousands of years and flourished in the classical civilizations of Greece and Rome in which physical work was considered demeaning to all except slaves and the lower classes. In ancient Athens, one-third of freemen sat daily discussing the affairs of state in the court of Comitia as slaves, who outnumbered citizens five-to-one, performed all manual labor. In the “bread and circuses” pleasure-seeking Roman culture, it was again slaves who did all of the manual labor. [Schmidt, pp. 194-195.]

But during the first century, at the eastern edge of the Mediterranean, a child was born that would give voice to God’s view of the dignity of labor. His name was Jesus, the promised Messiah. His early disciples were mostly callus-handed fishermen, tradesmen, and even a local IRS agent. And the arch-persecutor-turned-apostle of this tiny Christian sect was a brilliant theologian and evangelist but also a tent-maker by trade. And the Apostle Paul admonished the Thessalonian Christians that, “If any one will not work, let him not eat.” [2 Thessalonians 3:10. RSV] It was in the first century that Christians were driven from their homeland and made their first appearances in the Greco-Roman world. Because Christians believed in the dignity and honor of work, they were held with contempt by their Roman masters. Persecution arose, in part, because those strange Christian beliefs about work conflicted with the Romans’ view of the world and also because of suspicions and jealousies of the Christians’ prosperity due to their strong work ethic. [Schmidt, pp. 195-196.]

But the first century Christian view of work was not a new philosophy but a reflection of the image of the Creator stamped on man, the pinnacle of His creation. Biblical instruction and admonitions regarding work are abundant. The first chapter of Genesis records God’s labors in creating the universe. Not only does God work, He charged man with responsibilities and duties of being fruitful, replenishing and subduing the earth, and having dominion over all living creatures. When Adam and Eve were driven from the Garden of Eden because of their sin, God told Adam that “…cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life…In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground…” [Genesis 3: 17, 19. RSV] Notice that God did not impose work as a punishment for their sin. Rather, the curse was on the ground upon which they would toil. In other words, the curse was upon the conditions under which the work would be performed, not on work itself. But God loved man and would make possible a way for man to re-enter right relationship with Him by sending His Son Jesus in human form as a babe. Perhaps this gives us another insight into God’s view of work in that the earthly father of God’s Son was a carpenter.

With the decline and fall of the western half of the Roman Empire by the end of the fifth century, a remnant of the Christian heritage of the western portion of the Roman Empire was pushed northward into the sparse and hostile forests of France and western Germany. The inhabitants were Gauls whom the Romans had conquered and brought civilization at the beginning of the Christian era. To this group was added a smaller number of Teutonic invaders that had come from the East and hindered for a time the building of an organized social life and assimilation of the Mediterranean culture. Life was harsh in the pioneer wilds of northern Europe at the beginning of the Middle Ages around A.D. 500. However, out of this difficult and meager existence was built a cohesive and somewhat refined civilization, and the broad and general characteristics of their medieval society remained for centuries. Those characteristics and viewpoint, worldview if you will, became the ideas and ideals of Christendom which were the foundations of the American experience from the earliest colonial days to the middle of the twentieth century. [Johnson, p. 88.]

Christendom’s creedal reverence for work and the practical necessity of work amidst primitive conditions in the forests and clearings of early Europe produced the phenomenon of the middle class, unknown before the advent of Christianity and now present in all of Western civilization. With the birth of the middle class came the reduction of poverty and its attendant disease. And from the middle class arose political and economic freedom of a magnitude unknown in the history of the world to that time. [Schmidt, pp. 198-199.]

In the very earliest years of Europeans on the American continent, socialistic answers were sought to replace the Christian work ethic as the North Star for organizing society. Because of their isolation from the civilized world, Jamestown and the Plymouth Colony stand as great laboratory experiments regarding questions as to the validity and worthiness of socialistic principles. Communism of an almost pure variety, in the isolated and controlled environment of the New World, failed miserably in its initial years as laziness and inefficiency trumped thrift and industry. As the colonists abandoned their experiment in socialism, the colonies flourished. [Johnson, p. 247.] Karl Marx’s ideas regarding socialism presented in The Communist Manifesto became the twentieth century’s grand socialist experiment which led to the enslavement of a third of humanity behind the iron and bamboo curtains. For three quarters of a century, the consequences of these socialistic systems were death and misery unparalleled in the history of mankind.

But our collective memory is short and socialism’s propaganda machine is strong. As a result Christianity and its values are being rapidly abandoned in Western societies in favor of a humanistic worldview requiring socialistic solutions to society’s problems. As a result, socialism is destroying the middle class and its indispensable Christian work ethic, and America is becoming a bread and circuses culture.

The displacement of the work ethic by the actions of the American government’s social engineers since the 1960s has had a multitude of far-reaching consequences. Just one example is the humanistic welfare solutions that have fractured the concept of family by substituting governmental assistance to unwed pregnant teenage girls. Fathers are not required to work and provide for the mother and child for whom they are responsible. This welfare system perpetuates itself through ensuing generations that repeat the cycle. The direct consequences of institutionalization of illegitimacy in American life are a rise in the illegitimacy rate (6% in 1963 to 41% in 2014) and consequent increases in drug use rate, dropout rate, crime rate, and incarceration rate. [Buchanan, p. A-14.

In the mid-1990s Congressional welfare reforms required those seeking welfare to work. However, this requirement was removed by an executive order by President Obama in 2012. Additionally, governmental subsidies provided by the Affordable Care Act have now been determined to be a disincentive to work by those receiving subsidies with a consequent loss of 2.5 million jobs over the next three years according to a Congressional Budget Office report. [Carruthers]

The operation of man’s fallen human nature exposes the soft and rotten underbelly of the tenets of the socialism and humanistic faith in mankind and their commitment to the principle of the greatest-happiness-for-the-greatest-number which humanists consider to be the highest moral obligation for humanity as a whole. [Johnson, p. 247.] The operation of human nature conflicts with man-made socialistic solutions to the problems of life, and the end result is failure. People fail, families fail, and cultures ultimately fail. The socialists’ false view of man’s nature leads to poverty, starvation, and loss of freedom. The antidote is a rejection of socialism and a return to the Christian work ethic.

Larry G. Johnson

Sources:

Alvin J. Schmidt, How Christianity Changed the World,” (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, 2004), pp. 194-196, 198-199.

Larry G. Johnson, Ye shall be as gods – Humanism and Christianity – The Battle for Supremacy in the American Cultural Vision, (Owasso, Oklahoma: Anvil House Publishers, 2011), pp. 88, 247.

Patrick Buchanan, “Is this end of the line for the welfare state?” Tulsa World, February 12, 2014, A-14.

Wanda Carruthers, “Joe Scarborough: CBO Report Shows Obamacare ‘Still Red Hot Mess’,” Newsmax.com, February 6, 2014. http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/cbo-work-obamacare-disincentive/2014/02/06/id/551246#ixzz2tEpiNt4b (accessed February 13, 2014).