|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”
After witnessing the first detonation of the atomic bomb in New Mexico, J. Robert Oppenheimer, a brilliant Princeton University physicist who helped lead the Manhattan Project, remembered a line from the Bhagavad Gita that compared the explosion’s brilliance to a thousand suns. He even uttered these haunting words, “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” This deplorable writer has a similar sense when looking at the implosion of institutions and values in the USA. This implosion is multi-layered covering philosophical, theological, legal, and political institutions and values over a long period of time.
The most noteworthy philosophical change is the comfort level of political and non-political discourse with the philosopher Frederick Nietzsche’s “transvaluation of values.” Under Nietzsche’s rubric, philosophy was tending away from overarching Biblical values defining Western civilization in the direction of a complete renovation whereby what had been considered good would be considered evil and vice-versa. In his masterwork, Thus Spake Zarathustra, Zarathustra is coming down a mountain and encounters a wise man and is surprised that this wise man does not know that “God is dead.”
What follows from this “death” is that morality which derives from belief in God is transformed and reversed so that what was good is now bad and what was considered bad is now good. Values are being transvalued as we look forward to a new type of humans, the ubermenschen, who will exemplify the new value system.
This transformation of the moral landscape has been actively underway in the USA since the 19thcentury and can be seen in the philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson. The philosophy building on the campus of Harvard University is named after Emerson who was a professor at that university. Emerson’s mystical transcendentalism was influenced by the idea of the Oversoul from Indian philosophy and would eventually influence the theosophists such as Madame Blavatsky and Annie Besant.
According to Emerson, the Oversoul is the source of all truth and wisdom, and it is through our connection to it that we can achieve spiritual growth and enlightenment. It can be accessed through meditation and it is also the realm through which souls travel after death looking forward to successive reincarnations.
In addition, Emerson was influenced by the English romantic poets who tended to deify nature. This Emersonian view has metamorphosed and become a model for “natural thinking” even in the field of psychology. A psychoanalyst who supervised me when I was a counseling intern at a Canadian mental hospital fifty years ago said to me that our human lives mirrored the seasons of nature – spring, summer, fall, and winter. We burst into life (spring), flourished for a time (summer), began to decline (fall), and moved lastly to our stages of collapse and death (winter).
Although I was an atheist at the time of my internship, surprisingly and with no previous use of the word “salvation,” I asked him, “What about salvation? Where does that come into your metaphor?” Without hesitation, the good doctor said to me, “Salvation? There is no such thing as salvation.” Although I had never used the word salvation before in any conversation, I replied, “But there must be salvation! We not only mirror nature, but there is an important sense in which we transcend nature!” He was so annoyed by my insistence that he stood up and walked out of his office leaving me sitting in my chair alone in front of his desk.
In 1859, Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species was published. Creation of nature and humankind was debunked. This premise dovetailed nicely with that of Marx and Engels. Only eleven years earlier, Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels had co-authored and published the Communist Manifesto which would be followed later in the 19th century by Marx’s Das Kapital. Marx’s ideations were preceded and to some degree grounded in the speculations of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel who in 1807 had challenged most of the assumptions about the mind and the universe that inhered in Lutheran theology.
Although Marx’s “dialectic materialism” was different in some important ways from Hegel’s dialectic, both moved away from a linear conception of life and away from the mystery concept of Divine Providence to explain historical or natural events. Darwin’s volume challenged the Biblical account of creation and replaced it with a naturalistic explanation – evolution – to account for the species occupying planet Earth and for our human identity as homo sapiens.
For Marx and Engels, the ideas of capital, work, individual motivation, wealth creation, productivity, and leadership were all the products of a selfish individualism that was tied in with a self-serving mythology about God and morality.
In an important paper published in 2006, the author, James A. Good, building on the published PhD dissertation of the illustrious professor Morton White, sees a strong link between John Dewey, America’s leading philosopher of education, and Hegelian philosophy which, as noted above, breaks from Christianity (particularly Lutheranism) in various crucial ways. Further, although Dewey does not declare himself to be a Marxist, his affinity with Marxist ideology has been noted. One commentator wrote in this regard, “Like Marx, Dewey has a social interpretation of human nature [my italics]. He thinks that the doctrine of ‘individualism,’ as traditionally understood, creates a false image of ‘a residual individual who is not a member of any association at all.’”
The above individuals have been crucial in undermining the moral and intellectual roots of civilization. Their subversion took place in the 19th century with only John Dewey writing his obscure but ultimately destructive ideas into the 20th century.
All this happened before two world wars, before Hitler and Mussolini, before the New Deal, before Russia became the USSR, before China became a “Peoples’ Republic,” before the sexual revolution, before the banning of prayers in public schools, before the searing of conscience leading to large-scale abortions, before the erotic lullabies of the Beatles, before Mr., Miss, and Mrs. became pejorative designations for too many people, and before the shift of the Democrats to communism in the 21st century.
Jeffrey Ludwig teaches philosophy at City University of New York and was a Teaching Asst. in Philosophy to Henry David Aiken and to Frederick Olafson at Harvard University as well as Teaching Fellow in American History & Literature at Harvard. He also has been listed three times in Who’s Who Among America’s High School Teachers, and has published four books available here.
It certainly became evident in the 1800s.
Yes. I think the Enlightenment was the first evidence, evading even the notice of our Founders but seen by us lesser mortals with the benefit of hindsight.
We are now in full flower of its poisonous influence and must either suffer to reverse course or suffer full destruction of our civilizations. The first suffering would be less than the second, so the question is whether we have the heart and will to do it before the second suffering ends us. I am hopeful, and perhaps not foolish to believe we can still face the hard first suffering (which would involve a commitment to deportations, denaturalizations and return to Christian people and governance).
Even as a hard bitten Atheist I recognise that God needs to be PRAGMATICALLY invented, otherwise reality and morality is anything you want it to be, inasmuch, there is no ”true north ”on the moral compass
It was those wily wandering jews who created the foundation stones of western morality and values -and were in turn spread to the world through evangelical Christianity . It was the Jews and their Torah that imagined -created GOD ; this God needs to exist for many good reasons such as without him the state becomes the ”state almighty” .-furthermore, we humans are sinful creatures who need to fear the Law and the Lord
When God is abandoned so are conservative values and humans drift into left-tardation -and that’s surely what’s happened in the postmodern 21st C . But there’s another important reason, insomuch, we humans crave meaning and purpose so without God a religious substitute of sorts is created -anything to avoid existential despair . It’s the reason why there are columns of left-tarded young folk burning with the zeal of the converted as the search for Utopia becomes the default position . A hundred years ago these same young folk could have been doing good work for the Church instead of being so destructive as Christendom could have acted as a safe harbour for these secular crusading impulses . THIS is the reason why even an atheist should act like God exists to keep on the right track
Or as someone else has said, “Those who don’t believe in God will believe in anything.”
That was G. K. Chesterton
As one whose anchor holds firmly to Christianity, I heartily agree with your assessment. Further, I pray the hard atheistic bite releases you to discover the God who alone makes sense of it all.
As a wise Rabbi once said ”without tradition I’d be like a fiddler on the roof”
In the first century, the Apostle Paul addressed the depravity of those who worshiped the golden calf of the idolatrous state (Romans 1:22-32): “Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, And changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and four footed beasts, and creeping things. Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonour their own bodies between themselves: who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen. For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature: and likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet. And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient; being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity; whisperers, backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, without understanding, covenant breakers, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful: who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them.”
Terrifying, really. Those who want release from God’s hand will have their heart’s desire.
When I was 11 yrs old, at a church picnic, I pondered if God exists, it would be within His power give me anything I could ask for. If not, I’d have to rely on my own devises to satisfy my desires. I didn’t see any evidence of God, so I chose the latter path. I now see it as a choice that led to many regrets. To paraphrase Jesus, the path is broad leading to destruction. On a lighter note, discipline is freedom.
Academics are parasites.
Of course you are right. We are all parasites because none of us is true or can know the truth absent “feeding” upon other sources – like standing upon the shoulders of giants to use another metaphor. Atheistic academics largely feed on corpses, rather than the living Word.
What a disaster of an article.
In this time of the Iranian/Persian revolution, it is offensive indeed to associate Zoroaster with a claim that “God is dead”. Did Moses or Jesus say such things? Then why put them in the mouth of Zoroaster, a firm believer in God? I understand this is the opinion of Nietzsche, but it deserves fact-checking.
Darwin’s theory of evolution is not anti-theistic by any means. It is difficult, but not impossible, to be reconciled with a 6000-year-old universe, that is all. Evolution takes place in modern times! This does not deny God’s existence.
However, the article well serves as red meat for the scientific atheist fundamentalists and the Bible-thumping theist fundamentalists to continue their foolish war. Science and religion are more than compatible; they are interdependent. But perhaps that would not serve the author’s divisive purpose.
The fall of the West commenced a generation earlier, in the early 19th century, with the music of Beethoven, but that is a story for another time.
In 1805 a graduate student named Wilhelm De Wette declared in his thesis that the fifth book of the Torah, Deuteronomy was a forgery. This was expanded later in the century to what was called the “Documentary Hypothesis.” None of these “revelations” came with any new evidence; no archaeology, no newly discovered texts. They were just thrown out there and became popular with the school of scholarship that wanted to debunk scripture and everything else in Judeo-Christian civilization. The left has been knawing away ever since.
It must be remembered what Dostoyevsky wrote in The Brothers Karamazov; “If there is no God … all things are permitted.” All Things. Atheists need to remember this. When one removes the walls and columns from the temple, the roof will not stay up, and all shelter from chaos is unleashed.
It’s not enough to be one of Richard Dawkins’ “cultural Christians”. You have to be a real one.
Your quote, ” morality which derives from belief in God is transformed and reversed so that what was good is now bad and what was considered bad is now good. ”
Isaiah 5;20 ” Isaiah exclaims, “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter” (verse 20). Light and darkness are opposites, which adds to the gravity of the men of Judah calling evil “good.”
America has already gone far down the soul destroying path of Socialism. All of us need to work to turn it around or our posterity will suffer horribly.
Belief in God does not in any way preclude the theory of evolution. Modern science came out of Christian culture.
Charles Darwin’s work is fundamentally different from the others. Darwin used careful observation and reason to logically develop testable scientific theories. The others were making arguments about how they thought the world should be and what people should do, and particularly about how people should be governed.
Darwin does not belong on Prof. Ludwig’s list.
Man has three elements: the physical, intellectual and, spiritual. If you ignore the last, you do so at your peril.
Atheism is preposterous and should be deeply embarrassing for those who promote it. The mathematical probabilities of chance totally preclude the nonsense that mindless matter has created complex organisms and even life itself.
No one stumbles into hell: it is a willful choice.
The title of Darwin’s book is ‘On the Origin of Species.’
I have often wondered why Robert Oppenheimer quoted from a Hindu text. Why did he not quote from the Book of Revelation which is more accurate about the devastation and destruction of the world in the Last Days?
Maybe because he wasn’t Christian?! smh
I believe this article. Pastor D James Kennedy did a dvd sermon series called The Root of it All, which connected Darwin to Marx, etc.
Modern DNA research blows Origin of Species out of the water. Every cell of our body is a more complex computer than men will ever make. That could never develop gradually by accident. No one today has to be an atheist, and I was one for a decade in high school and college. No one even has to be an agnostic. But you know, we can’t figure out God, so we go into denial. Why would he create us and put us here? The know it all’s can tell you….😉