Tag: Communism

The One True Heaven

Posted on by Lyle Duell in Christ and Culture, Liberalism, Progressivism

The One True Heaven

Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth. “But the LORD came down to see the city and the tower that the men were building. The LORD said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them.  Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”  So the LORD scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel–because there the LORD confused the language of the whole world. Gen 11:3-9

The intellectuals of the Renaissance were made up basically of  two groups of thinkers, those which were atheists who rejected the idea of God and organized religion and those that maintain their faith in God and yet rejected the corrupted forms of religion.  The former evolved into what we call the enlightenment and the latter evolved into the Reformation movement.  Looking back on these developments, we see these two movements traveling along through time side-by-side yet with an increasingly greater gulf growing between them.

In the beginning of the Renaissance, there was an emphasis placed on a return to reason and freedom. In order to accomplish this goal the old authorities of dogma, tradition and church had to be overthrown and replaced with the concepts of reason and freedom.  However, the two different branches of the Renaissance, the enlightenment and Reformation would develop these two concepts of reason and freedom differently.  The enlightenment side would enshrine reason and human knowledge as the ultimate authority, reason and science would become God and bring heaven down to earth.  Man would be free from all authority and be self-directed.  Out of this, thinking came the later systems of  philosophies known as humanism, liberalism and communism.

The other branch of the Renaissance, the Reformation, believed that there were limits to reason and knowledge and that in order for man to be truly human he must live within those limits. They believed, without limits mans freedom would generate into chaos and the loss of freedom to his uncontrolled passions and his own finiteness.  They believe that those limits were set forth in the revelation of God in Christ.  The Reformation, therefore, believed that there were limits to the development of culture and that any attempts to bring heaven to earth would only end in misery.  They were skeptical about the enlightenment’s blind faith in progress and in human goodness.  In this, they rejected the twin myths of unlimited progress and the innate goodness of humanity; myths that still shape the vision of liberals and progressives to this very day.

After hundreds of years, we can clearly see the movement of both  groups. The reformation group has lost its hold on Europe, symbolized by the French revolution that had its slogan “No God No king” which could be interpreted as no authority other than the individual.  The failure of the Reformation in Europe could be largely contributed to its association with the ruling class and its failure to follow through on its attempt to reform organized religion and the culture.  Its failures allowed the men of the enlightenment to hold out a secular hope to the people and actually create a brand-new faith, a faith in progress (heaven on earth) and human knowledge (science).  The populace which had already lost their faith in religion were eager to accept this new faith even though there was no historical grounds or empirical evidence for it.

The question arises, How did the enlightenment thinkers believe they would  accomplish bringing heaven down to earth?  Well, it’s not a hard question, they simply had to bring God down to earth. That is exactly what the thinkers of the enlightenment did. They created the modern state.  As one of them said,” the state is God walking on the earth.”  This idea was set forth in varying degrees by a number of enlightenment thinkers and perfected in the writings of Karl Marx.  In Marx, you see the state exalted to the place of God and the animosity of the enlightenment towards religion and any moral authority other than the state (human authority).  For in the new heaven, no other authority can exist but that of the state which is nothing more than a human oligarch of authority.  Of course, that authority should be based on reason alone and science, the two demon gods of the enlightenment.  However, we also see in this system of unbelief a denial of free will and of human dignity.  Man is nothing more than an animal predetermined by biological forces; life is not scared but is expendable for the higher good. Of course, the state is the higher good.

We now know that reason is never alone, and that science is limited and controlled by many things other than reason, such as money and the ideological taint.   We also know from experience that the state never really promotes individual freedom, but rather it oppresses freedom.  Though history has shown us the failure of the secular movement; those that have placed their faith in it continually are on the same course today, just as their ancestors of the enlightenment did. How do you explain this blind faith?  I personally believe that it all comes back to their first presupposition of unbelief.  Once you get on the road of unbelief, there is nowhere to go other than statism (God walking on the earth).

It only takes a glimpse of the last century to see what this new heaven on earth looks like.  It looks like Russia and communist China.  Where 100,000,000 people have been killed, and untold numbers persecuted for not bowing down to the new God of the state.  Could it be that the materialist of the enlightenment promised one thing (heaven) and created the very opposite on earth?  If we are the heirs of the enlightenment, what do we have to look forward to?  It seems, if we continue on the same course of the enlightenment, there can only be one end; the ultimate state, a one-world government and George Orwell’s 1984.

 

Why Liberalism, Progressivism and Communism Are Surely Wrong

Posted on by Lyle Duell in Apologetics, Christ and Culture, Liberalism

Why Liberalism, Progressivism and Communism Are Surely Wrong

  You might gather from the title of this article, that it would be of some length and quite deep, not so. The reason is that what I am about to say is a self-evident truth that anyone with a lick of honesty and an ounce of  awareness already knows.

How can I say that all these movements are wrong?   I can say it because their key assumption is flawed.  Therefore, all the models built upon their false assumption are flawed.  What is the key assumption, which all these movements have in common and form the basis of their philosophy?  It is fundamentally the belief in the goodness of mankind or the neutrality of human nature.  Some refer to this as the Blank Slate theory.  Because of this basic assumption, all these philosophies believe that with the right education and the power of the state, our flawed human nature, which is not natural to us, can and will be rectified.  This assumption then progresses into a corporate view that believes, that through the force of the state (which they call public education), an utopian state will be ushered in and all the wrong will be made right.The problem with this assumption is that there is not one bit of evidence to support it. To the contrary, all evidence points to the fact that it is a total fallacy. Science, history, religion and personal experience all stand against it.

Science

In his book The Blank Slate: “The Modern Denial of Human Nature”; author and scientist Steven Pinker demonstrates the basic error of these three philosophical ‘isms’. He repeatedly demonstrates that man does have an inherent nature and by no means is a blank slate  that can be written on by the state or any other elite educators who believe that they are going to remake mankind and restore him to the garden of Eden (Noble savage). Pinker also points out the great harm, which the Blank Slate theory has done to individuals and culture. He shows how it has led to moral and cultural relativism that has undermined Western civilization.

It is interesting to read some of the reviews of Pinker’s book. It seems that many in academia have accepted his views for some time and feel that he is simply rehashing something, which has already been accepted. However, I find it strange that the majority of those which have accepted his views have not rejected the philosophies which are grounded in the theory that he refutes. It seems that the majority of academia is still deeply rooted in liberalism and progressive ideology. In this, are they admitting that their philosophy is nothing more than a dogma?

History

In late 1800s and early 1900s, the three ism of liberalism, progressivism, and Communism were all-pervasive in Europe and the United States. All three were making promises of a new world order followed by an earthly utopia, which would shortly be ushered in. All of them preached the Blank Slate doctrine and that the demons of mankind would soon be driven out by the forces of the modern state and the progressive educational system. In this country, John Dewey was the champion of this movement and he predicted that a modern educational system would usher in a brave new world. His failed predictions have proven him to be a false prophet and a false teacher[1].

The first obstacle to the liberal progressive movement came when World War One broke out with Germany. The new heaven on earth was beginning to be tarnished by the hatred and cruelty of educated men. After the war, the movement began to pick up steam again and just as it was beginning to rise once  more to respectability it received another black eye with the advent of the Great Depression.

The Great Depression, which was caused by corruption and greed, again set the movement back to square one. It was hard to convince the masses that mankind was good when they knew that they could not trust their brokers, bankers or lawyers. Then on top of this came the second great war and all of the atrocities that were committed  by the highly educated Germans. Again,  this setback made it difficult to believe that education in itself and the goodness of man was anything but a myth.  Many of the leaders in the progressive movement and the communistic movements were disillusioned with their own ideology.  When Stalin rose to power in Russia many intellectuals in the West, were hopeful that his regime marked the beginning of the Golden Age and the fulfillment of the progressive era.  In America a number of our own intellectuals like John Dewy and Roger Baldwin[2] the father of the ACLU, were sympathetic supporters of the communist movement.  Of course, it was not long before human nature again raised its ugly head and dashed the hopes of the deluded. However, the reality of history has not broken the delusion of the true believers and to the present-day progressives and liberals continue to believe the great fallacy.

Religion

One of the strange things about the rise of liberalism and progressivism is that it rose to power in cultures that were rooted in Christianity. A religion that would emphatically deny the Blake Slate theory and the doctrine of the goodness of man. The Christian religion in all of its forms, Catholicism, Calvinism, and Wesleyans all teach that the nature of mankind has been tarnished by sin and the lower nature of mankind.  With this in mind, we must ask  “where did these modern philosophies come from?”  Of course, the answer is that they were all grounded in the atheism of the enlightenment and reflect a strong anti-Christian bias.

There really was nothing new about the thinking of the enlightenment. It reflected a mixture of ancient philosophies, Christian dogma, paganism and atheistic concepts cloaked in a new paradigm. Many of the teachings of the new paradigm were knavishly softened at first, to accommodate and expedite their entrance into Christian culture.  The men of the enlightenment had to deny the taint of sin because one of their presuppositions and dogmas was, and is still believed today, that man’s reasoning can be pure and therefore, it can be trusted to lead men out of darkness.  This is also a belief, which has  been debunked by science and history.  We now know that human reason is never alone nor is it ever pure.  It is always tainted by self-interest, finiteness and ideology.

Personal Awareness

If we are honest with ourselves, we all know that we and all humans have a propensity to carry out unrighteousness. We hear the ring of truth in Scripture when we read “All have sinned and have fallen short of the glory of God ” and “there is none righteous, not even one.”  The prophet Jeremiah said, “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure”.  The truth of human nature is a self-evident truth, which no one could deny or should I say should deny.  In denying it one would only commit the greatest sin of all which is spiritual pride or self-righteousness. It is no wonder that the chief sins of liberalism and progressivism is self-righteousness, hubris’ morality and intellectualism.

Contrary to The Founders

One of the problems with any ideology that promotes the goodness of man is that it will invariably lead to a tyrannical form of communism. The reason being that these ideologies which herald the goodness of the individual will also promote the goodness and trust of the state, which from the liberal point of view is made-up of humanistic angels[3] looking out for the public good (rights). This leads to the state becoming more and more powerful.  We all know (or do we?) that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

The Founders of our nation were not all Christian, but they all share the same estimate of human nature and its corruption. They were not humanists that put their trust in the goodness of man. Therefore, they set up numerous safeguards to limit the power of government. We should thank God for their skepticism of European progressivism and liberalism.

The great fallacy of liberalism, progressivism and socialism is still with us today and is growing in its popularity. If we continue on this course we can expect to receive a wake-up call from reality in the not so far off future. The horseman of the apocalypse will soon be riding again (Rev 6:1-7).

[1] One of the demons which John Dewey wanted to drive out was what he called the superstition. The superstition was Christianity.

[2] Roger Baldwin was a communist sympathizer until he was disillusioned by Lenin and Stalin’s reign of terror. Baldwin eventually left the organization that he had founded ACLU because of their extreme leftist views, which views many in that organization still maintain. The ACLU still supports their extreme leftist views by selectively supporting some liberties and playing them against ones they dislike. Therefore, they are more about supporting ideology than liberty.

[3] Most liberals and progressives have a high opinion of themselves and view themselves as more principled and moral than other men. They tend to be modern Pharisees.