THE
END OF RELIGION, THE END OF SOCIETY
Can the United States
Supreme Court, or any court, abolish God?
Can the U.S. Supreme Court, or any court, change nature? The answer is surely No. No, not in the one
case and not in the other. But
religion? But society? That seems to be within the power of the
courts, from the lowest federal courts to the Supreme Court itself, and they
are in the process of doing it:
abolishing prayer in schools, abolishing Bible reading, abolishing
prayer in every public institution, establishing what Richard John Neuhaus
called “the naked public square” in his book of that name. The Ten Commandments can be pulled down from
every schoolroom wall. In Alabama, the
great stone table bearing them, together with the Declaration of Independence
and other crucial doctrines of our history and culture, was dragged by a
construction crew from the building housing the Alabama Supreme Court. Judge Roy Moore, who had dared to place them
there in the first place and then refused to submit to a federal court order in
the second, was summarily cast down from his elected position, the other state
justices joining in the federal condemnation in meek submission to its greater
will. Did all of the courageous sons of
Alabama perish in the War Between the States?
Presumably not, but if not, then why was courage expressed only by the
unfortunate Chief Justice?
At
the removal of the Commandments and the destitution of Judge Moore, a shudder
ran through the more conservative churches, but passed. Life goes on as before, untroubled by the
presence or absence of the Commandments, those stern reminders of the Judge of
all the world to whom all must ultimately answer. The pious believers comforted themselves with walks in the garden
alone, Jesus being excluded, and the impious did not care. Prayer commandments, those formal reminders
of religious faith and ritual expressions of reverence for God are gone,
declared intolerant, sectarian, offensive, incorrect, and as the coup de grace, unconstitutional, in a
nation that once rejoiced at the extent to which the now excluded Deity has
blessed it.
Would
Americans in their great majority want religion to be excluded from every
aspect of life in which government has a hand, in other words from every public
aspect and many private ones? Surely
not. The great majority professes faith
in God, a large majority faith in Christ, and few are those who would deny the
custom of giving thanks to God. There
is no need to ask the people, for the Courts have spoken, and their will must
prevail. We are not confronted with the
end of God, for God is immortal and eternal, but with the end of religion, for
religion is human and can be suppressed.
Ours is the nicer way to suppress religion: not with Roman persecution, or the forced closings of churches
and arrests of ministers and priests, as was the practice in the U.S.S.R. and
other Communist countries. That harsh
policy did not work, for the persecuted religion transformed the pagan Roman
Empire and in modern days survived Soviet persecution to greet the dawn of
liberty after the collapse of the Communist colossus.
The
policy of supercilious, disdainful confinement of religion to the very private
sphere is succeeding in putting away religion in the United States where the gulag
did not succeed in the Soviet Union.
Were the Russian Christians and others in the U.S.S.R. stronger, more
stubborn, and more courageous than are we Americans? Surely they were less distracted, round-the-clock entertainment
and amusement not yet having flooded their vast land. Can it be the case that we cannot see what is being done to us,
or what we are doing to ourselves?
In
the United States the soft suppression of religion is succeeding, especially
when propounded with an air of omniscience by our judges. Of course individual believers can still
pray and sing hymns and spiritual songs, always provided that they do not do it
on public property or even in public view, so as not to offend those
unbelievers or others who, although few in number, are quick to cry that they
have been offended when people express reverence for the God whom they prefer
to deny. The President and others of
unchallengeable might and position may still pray, and often do so, but even
they must be cautious about praying in any Name that anyone might find or
pretend to find offensive.
If
religion is being pushed from sight in a country that still writes “In God we
trust” on its currency and sings “God Bless America” in moments of stress, it
does not harm God, but it harms us. It
may well anger him or provoke him to withdraw the divine favor and protection
that we have enjoyed in the past and for which we used to give seriously meant
thanks. If there were no God, as only a
tiny minority of Americans assert, then to ignore him or even to mock him could
do no harm, except perhaps for the weak-minded who need him as a prop against
which to lean. But if in fact God is
there, as the vast majority of us profess to believe, it can hardly be a matter
of indifference or totally without consequences to ignore him and slight those
who honor him.
The
end of religion is before us. Perhaps
there is still time to turn back, to recover what was meant by the words “In
God we trust” and “One nation under God.”
If not, then we are at the end of religion, and with it at the end of
society.
The End of Society
Must
the end of religion as we know it spell the end of society as we know it? Perhaps it must not, but evidently it is
doing it. Human beings are social
beings, but society is not a product of nature. It is the work of humans.
Man is, as Aristotle said, a zoon politikon, a political being, and can
hardly exist much longer without society than he can exist without food and
water in the desert. It is impossible
to do away with society with one blow, because human beings need a structure
and a minimum of order. Where there is
no order, there is only the war of all against all, the bellum omnium contra
omnes. Society, like religion, can be
destroyed by degrees, or rather decomposed, and that is precisely what happens
to society when religion is suppressed, however softly and quietly it may be
done. Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote that
liberty means the abolition of all particular dependencies, such as the
family. What he did not say is that without
such alliances, his vision of the Social Contract is absurd, and society
degenerates into the bellum omnium contra omnes.
That
is what is happening in the United States.
We have not yet come to generalized warfare, but society is
decomposing. We fear the attacks of
terrorists, and rightly so. But even
more dangerous than what terrorists can do to us in the short run is what we
are doing to ourselves in the long run.
This decomposition has not yet progressed so far that it cannot be
reversed, but if it is not reversed and our society continues to deteriorate,
what remains of will crumble before the assaults of barbarians from within or
without, or from both at once.
Society,
social organization, is natural to man. Man himself belongs to nature, but
society is not a product of nature. It
is produced by man. Society involves a
structuring of human relationships. It
is developed out of an antecedent vision of structure, of a world-view,
conscious or unconscious. Generations of human beings have seen an order in
nature. Eric Voegelin speaks of “the
Order of Being;” the Chinese thinker Lao-Tse (ca. 550 B.C.) referred to it as the
Tao. As we contemplate the
order of the stars in the courses and observe the orderly course of nature on
earth, we are led, or should be led, to order our own doings to achieve a
harmonious life. Today, at least in the
Western world in what used to be called Christendom or Western civilization, we
have lost sight of the order.[1] The concept of the
Tao must be explained; most
do not sense it. In the United States today, the concept that there is an order
to nature and that we are to respect it has been effectively weakened if not
altogether abolished. Is it natural to
kill one’s own offspring? We have had
more than forty million abortions since 1973. Is it natural for males to mate
with males, for females to join with females?
Why then are we beginning to propose, and in Massachusetts to implement,
something called homosexual marriage, although it is not marriage. The simple fact that many in our society
might answer, “yes,” or perhaps, “well, not exactly, but it is still all
right,” indicates the degree to which the concept of an Order of Being is in
the process of being lost. Much of this
loss has been stimulated by the same agency that has blanked out religion from
the public square, the courts, especially the federal judiciary.
The Beginning
Absolutely
crucial to the biblical understanding of nature and of man are the concepts
first, of creation and, second, of man’s special place and purpose in it, of
what Pitirim Sorokin called his unique creative mission on earth. If we do not know that we have been created
with a purpose, then how are we to gain a purpose? Have we not become what Jean-Paul Sartre called us, “a vain
passion,” une passion inutile? If we do
not know what or who we are, we cannot know how to act or how or why to
construct a society.
Human
beings have long had confidence in their special place in creation, in the
Order of Being, but that has been worn down and virtually destroyed by the
widespread acceptance of the doctrine of evolution in its extreme materialistic
form, the form that denies all intelligent design in the origin of living
beings. It is not logically necessary
to insist that evolution excludes God, but this is the way that it affects our
contemporary view of the world and of our place in it. If God is prior to the world and independent
of it, as all monotheistic religion teaches, then the fact that we do not
discern evidence of his handiwork in the origins of life cannot mean that there
is no God. Sadly, although this is not
a necessary implication of change through evolution, it is the way it is
generally communicated and widely understood.
The
doctrine of evolution could envisage a creative process imagined and set in
motion by the Creator. In such a view,
the concept that higher beings have evolved from lower ones through long
periods of time preserves the concept of intelligent design with divine purpose
and does not destroy the principle that there is an Order of Nature. Although this is a far cry from the biblical
doctrine of God’s direct personal operation in Creation, it permits one to
preserve the idea that the human race was made for a purpose and indeed does
have a creative mission here.
From
the perspective of biblical doctrine with its clear and direct emphasis on
God’s specific role in the special creation of our human race, this concept of
“creative evolution” is less than satisfying.
According to the biblical doctrine of the Fall of Man, the whole earth,
indeed in a way the whole created order, was blighted by the Fall. This helps one to understand the disordered
nature of the world that we maintain a good and wise God created. In spite of the Fall, neither nature as a whole
nor humans taken alone have been plunged into total disorder. A harmony in nature and a human value in
being in that harmony are still discernible. They have been discerned with
surprising regularity all over the world from ancient times until our own. Nevertheless, in terms of leaving us with a
sense of purpose and dignity, creative evolution is far superior to the totally
naturalistic alternative.
Chance and Necessity
At
the opposite pole from intelligent design and purpose is the concept of totally
naturalistic creation, the product of what the late Nobel Prize winner Jacques
Monod called “chance and necessity” in his book of that name. For him,
chance and necessity are without plan or purpose, for there is no divine
being who could have planned or had a purpose.
Although the idea is much older, from the middle of the 19th century the
concept of development through change was formalized, absolutized, and given a
plausible mechanism by which it could have functioned, Charles Darwin’s natural
selection. Operating on the principle
that there is no God, evolution was soon defined and proclaimed as a totally
naturalistic phenomenon, limited to the material universe, neither requiring
nor displaying any role by a Creator, and not containing any inherent purpose
other than survival.
Although
evolution as a process could be
interpreted as God’s way of working, a great company of the biologists
who believe in evolution today believe also that by it, God is excluded from
any role. It might seem not only possible,
but also even mandatory to look into the possibility that our complex forms of
biological life reveal intelligent purpose and design. A person who finds a watch in a pile of
leaves in the forest would not speculate, but would know that it did not come about by natural processes, but had been
fashioned after the creative design of a watchmaker. He would naturally ask himself who had left it there, whether it
was lost or thrown away, and similar questions, but not whether it had evolved
from simpler mechanisms. This is a very
old argument used against the advocates of mechanistic evolution. Of course it is brushed aside by them. In order to do so, those advocates of
evolution who wish to assert that no intelligent design was needed have to
postulate some kind of a substitute, such as the idea that there is a kind of
innate upward mobility in all life forms, for example an élan vital as Henri Bergson conceived it.
Postulating
some kind of impersonal life force in living matter does not eliminate the idea
of a Creator or intelligent design. It
merely puts it back farther into time or farther out into space. Where or from whom did the impersonal
élan vital come? There is a concept called xenospermia, the
theory that life on earth may have been seeded by beings from outer space, or
somehow have drifted across space from other worlds, but this merely moves the
question of purpose and intelligence farther out of reach; it does not answer it.
Totally
naturalistic, materialistic evolution with no divine creator or intelligent
designer is itself a kind of “religious” commitment. As Karl Popper said, evolution is not a scientific theory, for it
was not observed nor can it be repeated;
it is “a metaphysical research project.” Believing it to be the explanation of all living things, its
advocates intensively search for ways to support the theory. This is certainly legitimate, provided that
they do not presuppose in advance the truth of what they are trying to prove. Unfortunately, that is precisely what many
do. What is illegitimate is the
determination of so many, such as the late Harvard biologist Stephen Jay Gould,
to shout down any and every attempt to question the scientific validity of the
theory or to propose any alternative to “chance and necessity.”
The
contention that intelligent design is a fact and that it points to a doctrine
of creation by an infinitely wise and omnipotent Creator, in other words, to
picture like that in the Bible, is at least as plausible on the face of it, or
really more plausible, than to assert that all that is, is the product of
necessity and chance acting on dead matter in ways that were not observed and
cannot be duplicated. Unfortunately,
this contention is never allowed by the militant naturalistic
evolutionists. They regularly condemn
it on the basis that it is the attempt to smuggle the reactionary concept of
divine Creation by God back into the sacred halls of natural science and, if
taught in government schools, to violate the separation of church and state. In other words, whether it is so willed or
not, the campaign for the teaching of naturalistic evolution to the exclusion
of any other view is an attack on religion and ultimately, by implication, an
attack on ordered society.
The Triumph of Mind Over Matter
Theists
can argue for the plausibility of intelligent design as necessary to explain
the world of living things, but in the world of academia, including law, their
arguments go unheard and unheeded. It
ought to be self-evident to all who are capable of thinking clearly that to
maintain that there is no God is to claim to be in full knowledge of all that
is. The late Carl Sagan, a determined
advocate of naturalistic evolution and an opponent of belief in God, began his best-selling book Cosmos thus: “The cosmos is all that is, all that ever
was, and all that ever will be.” That
is no less religious a statement than the words of the Apostles’ Creed, “I
believe in God the Father almighty, Creator of heaven and earth.” But this
truth is politically incorrect and publicly inadmissible. Public schools throughout the United States
are allowed to assign Cosmos to be read and discussed in class, but dare not so
much as mention the theory of creation by God.
This is in effect a strange kind of triumph of mind over matter. The followers and colleagues of Prof. Sagan
assert the right of their mind, their “metaphysical research program,” to
banish every suspicion that the fascinatingly complex structure of every living
being might show that there was an intelligent design — or designer — behind
it. In other words, the mind of the
evolutionists forbids them to look at matter in its irreducible
complexity. From developments in
genetics, as the late Prof. Jerôme Lejeune said, we now know that no being
comes into existence without antecedent design implanted in its cells, without
antecedent information. Prof. Lejeune
pointed to the well-known beginning of John’s Gospel: “In the beginning was the
Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God ... All things were made
by him, and without him was nothing made that was made” (1:1,3). Whatever else the Word is, it is certainly
information, and without information, we now know, no living being comes into
existence. This may not mean the divine
Word as Christians understand it, but it means something more than the
materialistic evolutionists will allow. The exclusion of John’s theological
assertions and the introduction of Sagan’s metaphysical research program is the
exaltation of mind over matter, an implicit systematic denial of the Order of
Being and the explicit end of an idea of Nature along with the idea of Nature’s
God.
The
denial of God and the denial of nature as an order that human minds must
observe and respect go together. This
denial is the reason that the majority of justices, like many in Congress — for
example Senator Joseph Biden in the hearings on the Supreme Court nomination of
Clarence Thomas — objected to that judge’s praise for natural law. If there is such a thing as natural law,
then even that most eminent of legislatures, the United States Congress, cannot
make law, but must look for the
principles by which laws should be written, in natural law, the Tao, the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s
God.
The End of Society
The
rejection of Nature as a reality to which we must look is implicit in the
packet of anti-religious court decisions.
It is explicit in the decisions in which the order of nature is
rejected. The ultimate consequence of
that rejection will be, or is already becoming, the end of human society
compatible with nature. The illusion
that man, or rather the court, is sovereign and can make whatever law it
pleases is ultimately destructive of society, as well as of nature and her
laws. This is nowhere more evident than
in two monumental decisions and their consequences: Roe v. Wade (1973) and its
successor decisions, and Lawrence v. Texas (2003) and its coming successors,
the first of which, Goodridge, was handed down by the Supreme Judicial Council
of Massachusetts early in 2004. Each of
these decisions rests on an unspoken assumption that we might call sovereign
individualism. Each individual — each
woman, in the case of Roe, each man in Lawrence — is a law unto herself or
himself. Carried to its logical
conclusion, that spells the end of society as we know it.
Roe v.
Wade and its
aftermath essentially denied what until Roe
had been taken as a self-evident fact of nature, namely, that the developing
child in the woman’s womb is a human being.
Had the Supreme Court acknowledged this fact, it would have had to agree
with the German Federal Constitutional Court decision of 1975, to the effect
that abortion is a homicidal act:
every abortion kills a developing
human being. Acknowledging this fact,
the Court could still have permitted abortion under some circumstances, perhaps
saying, as the German court did, that under some circumstances it must be left
unpunished, but it could not have called it a right to be exercised at will.
Our
own Court, unwilling to admit that it was accepting any form of homicide merely
on request as it actually was, insisted that it could not say when human life
begins. Then, on this counterintuitive
foundation, it went on to say that therefore, abortion may be permitted throughout
the entire pregnancy, for the first three months without limitation, for the
second three months with only such limitations as protect the life and health
of the mother, and during the final three months whenever it can be argued that
the life and health of the mother, including her mental health, may be
endangered — in other words, always. It
has reaffirmed this stand in successor decisions, such as Carhart, overturning a Nebraska law prohibiting late term, “partial
birth” abortions. In 2004, Congress
again passed, and the new President signed into law, a federal ban on such
abortions. Almost immediately federal
judges in three different circuits ruled the new law unconstitutional,
notwithstanding the fact that they acknowledge it to be gruesome and painful to
the aborted baby. According to the
Spanish proverb, the sleep of reason produces monsters. We cannot be sure that the judges were
sleeping — they would deny it — but they surely produced monsters. If we do not know what constitutes human
beings, how can we claim to have a society in any sense?
In
1976, on the 200th anniversary of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, the
Supreme Court handed down a decision in Planned
Parenthood v. Danforth. The State of Missouri had required the
consent of a husband or of parents, in the case of a pregnant minor child, for
an abortion. The Court overruled the
law, using among other arguments the logic that “The Court cannot attribute to
a third party [i.e. the husband or the parents] a right that it [itself] does
not possess.” The Court thus attributed
to itself not the right to protect a man’s unborn child — we do not know why it
should have had it — but the right to tell the man that he is not permitted to
protect the life of his own developing child, of the “fruit of his loins,” to
use biblical language. It implicitly
denied one of the fundamental covenants of human reality, marriage, and
attributed to one party, the wife, all of the privileges, while leaving the
other, the husband, only the responsibilities connected with reproduction. The woman’s unrestricted right to abort any
child makes a mockery of the institution of marriage for the man. If a man abandons his pregnant wife or lover
before she delivers her baby, that is a crime.
If a pregnant woman not merely abandons her unborn baby, but has it
destroyed, that is her right. Can we
not see the incompatibility of the two positions?
Why Do We Have Marriage at All?
Marriage
is not necessary for the production of children (and in the aftermath of Roe
and other such atrocities, more and more children are born outside it today),
but there is a natural law or common sense reason why human beings should not
merely copulate and procreate, but should marry and bring up children in stable
homes. Marriage ideally should protect
the woman from exploitation and abandonment;
it also protects the man from the fear that her children are not
his. A woman who has had a child always
knows that it is hers, but the only way that a man can know that the child a
woman has borne in his house is his is when he can be sure of her fidelity to
him and of her sexual congress with him only.
In
the past the institution of marriage as practiced in Western civilization has
made both parties responsible for the welfare of their children, which is quite
consistent with the order of nature, as well as with most human history. Danforth has told men that they will
indeed still be responsible for the child after it is born, but that they have
no say in whether it will be born; that
depends on the will of the would-have-been mother. Rapid succession of marriages and divorces and increasing pre-
and extra-marital sexual relations, including adultery, have already
jeopardized confidence in family stability. Danforth
and similar decisions have reduced even the most faithful and devoted husband
to a “third party.” The woman is the
first party, and apparently the State regards itself as the second. In years gone by it was the adulterous lover
who turned marriage into a “triangle.”
Now it is the faithful husband himself if he seeks to interfere in the
relationship between his willful spouse and the liberties that the State grants
her.
No Marriage, No Family, No Society
Nature
itself makes quite plain that for ordinary purposes, the conjoined activity of
a male and a female is necessary for the production of offspring. This means that male-female interaction is
necessary for the propagation and survival of every species. We may say that
such interaction is part of natural law.
The need for male-female interaction does not prescribe lifelong
marriage or monogamy, and the animal world does not present us with uniform
practices. Man is not the only being
who mates for life, or at least does so often;
among the other creatures, some do mate for life, but most probably do
not. Nevertheless, it is quite common
for the more highly developed animals to remain associated long enough for
their young to develop. Domestic animals do not mate for life; often they do not actually mate at all, but simply
breed. Their offspring belong to their
owners, who will see to it that they receive whatever care is needed, over and
above what the animal naturally gives, and then sell, butcher, or otherwise
utilize them as they see fit. Thus we
may say that domestic animals have become alienated from what might have been
the order of nature.
Human
reproduction requires male-female interaction.[2] The human baby requires more constant and longer attention and
nurture than the young of any other earthly species. Babies take years to be able to care for themselves; children
need years of teaching and guidance before reaching maturity, and by a strange
anomaly of modern American life, adolescence is now prolonged longer and longer
as the educational process is extended, sometimes indefinitely. Educational and emotional maturity often
comes long after puberty brings sexual maturity. Therefore it is according to natural law for parents to remain
together, caring for themselves and their offspring, for an extended period and
giving attention to their sexual development.
Civil and religious laws often extend this period “until death do us
part.”
The End of Marriage
Abortion
on demand and the increasingly quick and easy divorce laws that followed soon
after it in the U.S.A. have seriously weakened the institution of marriage and
sapped its strength to contribute to the stability of society. Throughout most
of the centuries of human existence and in most human cultures, sexual
expression was in principle reserved for marriage. Anticipations and variations on marriage were seen everywhere, in
some cases winked at, in others grudgingly tolerated, in some drastically
punished. The proliferation of easy and often reliable methods of contraception
has made pre- and extra-marital intercourse less dangerous and more acceptable
today. The widespread acceptance of
pre-marital concubinage — “shacking up” — has taken some of the amorous luster
from marriage, while allowing it to retain all of its burdensome aspects, such
as bill-paying. Nevertheless, lasting
monogamous marriage has remained the ideal and is still there in practice, as
well as in principle, although subject to debilitating threats.
Marriage
traditionally involves covenant promises and sexual relations. Without both it is not marriage, or not
fully consummated. Sexuality was between men and women, and for marriage. Divorce and concubinage have weakened the
covenant aspects of marriage, but until recent decades it has always been taken
for granted that marriage was the normal pattern for mature humans, not some
kind of same-sex liaison. Other forms
of genital expression have been present throughout human history, but the
thought of calling them homosexuality as another kind of “sexuality” parallel
to heterosexuality is of 19th-century origin.
Prior to that, it was customary to think of people as having
participated in homosexual actions — it is hard to avoid this word, as
“perverted” or “unnatural” is dreadfully incorrect — but not as being
homosexual. A man who had engaged in erotic involvement with another man
or boy was expected to grow out of it. When pre-Christian Greek society
encouraged or at least tolerated homosexual romances between men, it was only
for a brief period in a boy’s development and was supposed to not involve
passionate excesses, especially not the anal sexual penetration that seems
typical of homosexuality today and which constitutes one of the factors that
has contributed to the spread of AIDS.[3]
Some
societies, such as ancient Hebrew society, threatened such homosexual acts with
death (Leviticus 20:13). Nothing could
be more self-evident than that homosexual intercourse is contra naturam, contrary to nature: to put it coarsely but accurately, the insertion of the male
organ of generation into the organ of defecation. We now know that the favored practices of today’s homosexual
communities are even worse vectors of disease than heterosexual
promiscuity. The dreadful plague known
as AIDS was originally named GRID, Gay Related Immune Deficiency, since it was
first identified in male homosexuals, who still constitute its most effective
transmitters. Promiscuity promotes
disease, which is certainly an unnatural goal if recognized, and homosexual
promiscuity does so even more, which is doubly contra naturam. Millionfold
abortions are the price that society must pay for heterosexual promiscuity, and
widespread AIDS is the price that it must pay for homosexual promiscuity.
In
its 2003 decision in Lawrence, the
Supreme Court radically separated sex from nature, endorsing what Texas called sodomy
and what the Bible calls abomination as a constitutionally protected
right. Thus the Court in its imperial
arrogance drove the God of Scripture from our temple and placed the gods of
biblical Sodom in his place.
Pecunia Non Olet
Pecunia
non olet, money doesn’t stink, the Roman Emperor Vespasian told his son when
the latter objected to the Emperor’s taking money for the use of the public
latrines. It seems that for some
segments of the American business community, profit explains and excuses everything. Thus we read in The Wall Street Journal, “In
addition to principle and morality, there are sound business reasons why the
members of the House of Representatives were right to vote down the proposed
Federal Marriage Amendment... [227 in favor, 186 against, less than the
necessary two-thirds majority]. It’s
good to see that members of the House and the Senate, which rejected the
amendment in July, are gradually catching up with corporate America....” Corporate America, it seems, will accept
anything that makes money, and the nation’s leading economics journal will
approve it as a matter of principle.
Many years ago Wilhelm Roepke, a leading free-market economist wrote
that the market does not create values, but consumes them, and “it must be
constantly re-impregnated against rot.”
If the Journal is the authoritative voice of the business community on
principle and morality, then not only our judges but also our corporations are
actively demolishing society, religion having already been largely done away
with.
We
shall soon find ourselves in the land of absolute individualism, of solipsism,
of the bellum omnium contra omnes. In the United States today, we have the
choice between a constant re-impregnation against rot, using the values that
come from our religion and the Order of Being, or letting the nation continue
to slide into the “social sewer” (Sorokin), dragging what remains of religion
and social order in with it. Those who
know the truth, who have an awareness of and reverence for both Nature and
Nature’s God, must step in with words and deed before both religion and society
reach their end in our once pious and wholesome nation.
IN
ADDITION TO WHICH 
• Speech is a characteristic
feature of humans, but no human can learn to talk all alone. Language cannot exist without a certain
consensus among a group, however small, on the meaning and use of words. Indeed the word
consenus itself
implies a common sense, that is, a shared understanding, a shared meaning. The consensus or common sense necessary to
produce understandable, communicable language always exists with a certain
common sense on the right way to live, which means that meaningful speech and
society go together. Bees, ants,
chimpanzees, and baboons can have a kind of society without what we would
consider speech, but we humans cannot.
The implication: we must take
care of our languages. If we lose our
common language, then there is no room for a common sense of good and evil, of
beautiful and ugly, and eventually, nothing worth calling culture or
civilization.
• As the election campaign progressed, one
candidate accused the other of lying, a charge that in days gone by might bring
on a challenge to a duel with swords or pistols, but not today. Our charge against the candidates is not
lying, but of failing to tell us a very essential truth. The Democrats favor abortion, up to and
including late term abortions. This
means that they agree in principle with the elimination of 42 million unborn
Americans in the past 31 years. The
Republicans oppose abortion, but they do not speak out, and they certainly will
not say that. If those 42 million
babies had been born, many things would look different in the U.S. economic
picture, not least the fact that there would be enough workers in and entering
the work force to solve much of the looming problems in Social Security
funding. Why won’t the Republicans say
it? Are they half-hearted, or perhaps
half-witted, or just timid?
Endnotes:
1 According to the biblical view, God himself
created man in his own “image and likeness.”
“Male and female created he them,” and gave them the command to be
fruitful and multiply, to subdue the earth (Genesis 1:26ff). In
the next chapter God placed the man in the garden to cultivate it. In this second chapter, it is interesting to
note that for the first time God is called by his sacred covenant name, YHWH,
while in chapter one God is called Elohim, God in the general sense of the
creator of all. According to many biblical
scholars, these two different names indicate a blending of two different
ancient sources. This is not a
necessary conclusion, for we may note that the word Elohim is used when God is
dealing with creation in general, YHWH when he takes a personal interest in the
human creatures that he has made in his own image. When speaking of God in tempting Eve, the serpent cannot use the
sacred Name YHWH, but says simply Elohim, God.
2 We are not taking into account in vitro fertilization and other forms
of artificial reproductive technology, but even those, except for cloning,
require contributions from both sexes.
3 See Marjorie Rosenberg, “The Greeks Had No
Word for It” in Partisan Review,
Spring 1993, Vol. 60, No. 2, pp.248-258.
