Posted on 12/09/2010 7:56:44 AM PST by spirited irish
By the close of WW II, Richard Weaver and countless other classical liberals apprehensively discerned that the Western civilized nations were on the road to breakdown and totalitarianism. Suffering "progressive disillusionment," Weaver perceived that old cultural restraints had failed to control man's propensity for evil. This led him to ponder the fallacies of modernist ideas that had produced the holocaust of evil visited upon the world from WW I to WW II. By late 1945, Weaver published his conclusions in his book, "Ideas Have Consequences."
The subject of Weaver's book was "the dissolution of the West." Its deterioration was traced by Weaver to the late 14th century when, Weaver argued, Western man had made an "evil decision." Enticed by William of Occam's (d. c. 1349) philosophy of nominalism, Western man abandoned his belief in transcendent "universals" and thus the position that "there is a source of truth higher than, and independent of, man..." The consequences of this revolution in ideas were catastrophic, for "The denial of everything transcending experience means inevitably...the denial of truth. With the denial of objective truth there is no escape from the relativism of 'man is the measure of all things."
Things worsened as the downward spiral continued:
God would be conceptually murdered, Heaven shut-down and Nature itself elevated to the supreme reality. The doctrine of original sin was abandoned and replaced by the "goodness of man." With only the physical world of the senses held to be real, Christianity declined, rationalism arose, and materialist science became the most prestigious way to study man. With knowledge limited to the sensory realm, man's spiritual attributes, that is, the soul, mind, conscience, and free will were soon lost in an endless cycle of reductionism and determinism. Man, created in the spiritual likeness of his supernatural Creator would be lost. In his place would stand the soulless human ape, an accidental emergent product of mindless evolutionary forces.
Weaver dubbed this way of thinking the "spoiled-child psychology" of modern man, who had "not been made to see the relationship between reward and effort." This orgy of mindlessness is traceable to certain terrible-willed modernists who, no longer wanting to be created in the spiritual likeness of their Creator, had failed to achieve an integrated world picture, a "metaphysical dream," said Weaver.
Weaver concluded with an ominous warning:
"the closer man stands to ruin, the duller grows his realization (for) the annihilation of spiritual being precedes the destruction of temple walls." (The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America, George H. Nash, pp. 30-33)
What Weaver dubbed a "spoiled-child psychology" can be broken down into a legion of poisonous "isms:"
naturalism, materialism, idealism, empiricism, relativism, positivism, determinism, reductionism, scientism, biological and spiritual evolutionism, Freudianism, progressivism, liberalism, socialism, communism, utopianism, amoralism, and underlying them all....atheism and antitheism.
By 1951, insanity-producing modernism had already contaminated America's Supreme Court. In "Dennis et al. vs. U.S." Chief Justice Fred A. Vinson observed:
"Nothing is more certain in modern society than the principle that there are no absolutes ....all concepts are relative." (ibid, p. 37)
Around that same time, Anthony Harrigan noted that a process of decay was being fostered in America by a "fierce and subtle" modernist orthodoxy. "Modernists are determined," he argued,
"to force the acceptance of pornography as medical science, filth as artistic realism, and abnormality as a mere difference of opinion...Though the life of the country is basically decent, Americans are in the hands of a cultural ruling class which...is conducting us to ruin." The amoral ruling class seeks to raise up a "liberal-bred barbarian" motivated by a destructive impulse" and unchecked by "traditional values and restraints," in order to destroy America from within noted Harrigan. (ibid, pp. 39-40)
That the ruling class of Harrigan's day succeeded in their unholy quest can be seen by Dennis Prager's article, "F — You" from the Music Industry,' wherein Prager succinctly describes today's "liberal-bred barbarians:"
"the music industry, from producers to artists, is largely populated by people who regard social and cultural norms as stifling. Their professional lives are dedicated to lowering that which is elevated, destroying that which uplifts, and to profaning that which is held sacred." (http://townhall.com/columnists/DennisPrager/2010/12/07/f — _you_from_the_music_industry)
The barbarianism described by Prager is not restricted to music industry insiders. No, it is the prevailing attitude of the class of people described by Angelo M. Codevilla as the "Ruling Class..." In his book by that name, Codevilla notes that contemporary America is a kingdom divided against itself. Today there are two distinct classes and they are as different as day from night.
On the one hand there is the Country Class...the little people. Though in general the Country Class holds a disparity of beliefs, it nevertheless remains the repository of America's founding Judao-Christian philosophical worldview. Hence it is the Country Class that maintains the traditional founding belief that all men are created in the spiritual likeness of God the Father and that all men are therefore subject to His laws.
On the other hand there is the Ruling Class....the liberal-bred barbarians This class is comprised of the people we commonly think of as Leftists, that is, Socialists, Communists, Marxists, Liberals, Progressives, and anarchists. But it also includes people identified as rightwing, notes Codevilla. They are certain positivist GOP and Wall Street insiders, global corporatists, and international bankers.
The Ruling Class was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the very ideas described by early Conservatives such as Richard Weaver as evil, by Harrigan as amoral, and summarized by Whittaker Chambers as "Ye shall be as gods." Hence the key to understanding the ruling class says Codevilla, is its first principle, which is "we" are the best and brightest while the rest (the Country Class) are retrograde, racist, backwards, and dysfunctional and must be properly constrained and managed.
Whereas unscientific, unenlightened Country Class bumpkins still believe in God the Father Almighty, ruling class barbarians absolutely know by way of a "Gnostic knowing" that mankind is the emergent product of mindless evolution. Hence the ruling class "know" that they are the "naturally selected" ones possessed of superior intellect while the unevolved masses are human apes who cannot be trusted with reason or science and certainly not with guns, their own children, and private property.
To the ruling class, science is only science in the "right" hands just as consensus among the "right" people is the only standard for truth, notes Codevilla. By identifying science and reason only with themselves, ruling class barbarians have delegitimized the Country Class, thereby freeing themselves to demonize, ridicule, shame, and scorn the "lower class" as superstition-believing fundamentalists, as mentally-ill, as terrorists, haters, bigots, homophobes, and fascists. And though the ruling class has as yet been unsuccessful in destroying the Country Class' faith in God, they have managed to make it as socially unacceptable and embarrassing as smoking — to be done furtively and with a bad social conscience, said Codevilla.
It is as a whole that Ruling Class barbarians "regard social and cultural norms as stifling" and "are dedicated to lowering that which is elevated, destroying that which uplifts, and to profaning that which is held sacred." Early Conservatives knew this, and as previously stated, viewed Liberalism — by any name — as evil:
Forrest Davis, an adviser to Senator Taft asked:
"Is not the prevailing political 'liberalism'...that potpourri of indiscriminate do-goodism trending into statism and Marxism and blending so indistinguishably with treason, that is the deepest enemy of the traditional America and the West?" The Liberal, exclaimed Davis, "has looked upon the face of evil and found it half good." (ibid, p. 95)
William Rusher, publisher of the National Review in 1957 remarked:
"...the Liberal Establishment...shares Communism's materialist principles." (ibid, p. 137)
In summarizing the conservative case, Frank Meyer commented:
"...Liberalism is in agreement with Communism (it sees) the necessity and desirability of socialism...it regards all inherited value — theological, philosophical, political — as without intrinsic value or authority....therefore (there are no) irreconcilable differences...between it and Communism (thus) Liberals are unfit for the leadership of a free society, and intrinsically incapable of offering serious opposition to the Communist offensive." (ibid. p. 137) Or to today's jihadists, it should be noted.
It was Fyodor Dostoevsky's acute spiritual discernment that ultimately revealed the real source of the evil lurking at the bottom of Liberalism's so-called "enlightened" canon of isms. The evil, said Dostoevsky, is the Original Lie: "Ye can be as gods."
In absolute agreement with Dostoevsky's analysis, many years later ex-Communist-atheist-Darwinist Whittaker Chambers noted that the crisis of the 20th century was a crisis of faith. Communism is a religion, "man's second oldest faith," man's "great alternative faith," observed Chambers. Its promise is "Ye shall be as gods." Its vision is "the vision of man without God," of "man's mind displacing God as the creative intelligence of the world," of "man's liberated mind...redirecting man's destiny." Communism proclaims an inescapable choice between two irreconcilable faiths: "God or Man, Soul or Mind, Freedom or Communism." To Chambers, the "crisis of the Western world exists to the degree in which it is indifferent to God."
Chambers despaired of the West because as the death of God movement that gave rise to the poisonous "isms" broadened and deepened, in the blackness of the shadow it cast, the majority of mankind appeared to Chambers to be spiritually blind to the titanic struggle between these two "irreconcilable faiths." (ibid, p. 92)
Like Whittaker Chambers, Alexander Solzhenitsyn had been a dedicated Darwinist, Communist, and atheist, that is until he was thrown into an earthly Hell called the Gulag. After many long years of unbelievably brutal suffering he emerged one of the 20th century's most powerful Christian prophets. In a message of immense importance to us he said:
"If we surrender to corruption, we do not deserve to be called human. But let us note that the absolutely essential task is not political liberation, but the liberation of our souls from participation in the lie forced upon us...this requires no physical, or revolutionary...measures. No. It requires from each individual a moral step within his or her power....No one who voluntarily runs with hounds of falsehood will ever be able to justify himself to the living..."
Solzhenitsyn is saying that modernist "isms" have corrupted all of us in some fashion. This is because at the heart of them is the Original Lie and all men are naturally attracted to and seduced and tainted by it in some fashion.
Once the Original Lie in its many deceptive guises is institutionalized, it becomes the basis for policy decisions and legislation such as Global Warming, the transnational corridor and highway, redistributive justice, progressive taxation, population control, sustainable development, gay marriage, and Darwinism taught in schools. It likewise becomes the basis for law enforcement, for example, speech codes and hate crimes laws, separation of church and state, and no public nativity scenes. This means that many lies have already been installed as laws, covered by a shroud of other lies and enforced by law. Already in America, to oppose the lie is to be accused of a hate crime.
Solzhenitsyn is also telling us that we must liberate our souls from the power of the Lie. We must become warriors for truth. To fight for truth means defining, exposing, and attacking the lies — Darwinism for example. But isn't Darwinism empirical science? No, absolutely not. At bottom, Darwinism is a Gnostic myth notes Dr. Wolfgang Smith, physicist and mathematics professor at Oregon State University:
"...As a scientific theory, Darwinism would have been jettisoned long ago. The point, however, is that the doctrine of evolution has swept the world, not on the strength of its scientific merits, but precisely in its capacity as a Gnostic myth. It affirms, in effect, that living things created themselves, which is in essence a metaphysical claim....Thus...evolutionism is a metaphysical doctrine decked out in scientific garb....it is a scientistic myth. And the myth is Gnostic, because it implicitly denies the transcendent origin of being; for indeed, only after the living creature has been speculatively reduced to an aggregate of particles does Darwinist transformism become conceivable. Darwinism, therefore, continues the ancient Gnostic practice of deprecating "God the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and earth." It perpetuates...the venerable Gnostic tradition of "Jehovah bashing." (From Old Gnosticism to New Age I, Alan Morrison, SCP Journal Vol. 28:4-29:1, 2005, pp. 30-31)
Darwinism is the Big Lie that allows ruling class barbarians to conceptually dehumanize the Country Class, look down upon them in utter contempt and resentment, and run roughshod over them. Without their realizing it, the Country Class has been reduced to tax slaves to feed the insatiable appetites of the Ruling Class.
To destroy the power of Darwinism is to literally knock the pinnacle out from under ruling class barbarians, thereby casting them down to earth from atop their imagined lofty heights. Suddenly they will be just like the Country Class — fallible, sinful men made in the spiritual likeness of God the Father Almighty and subject to His moral laws. This is the true equality envisioned by the Founders.
However, before we can be effective warriors for truth cautions Solzhenitsyn, we must first cast out our own lies and other sins through confession and repentance. For only with a clean conscience can we be effective warriors for truth.
Resources:
The Ruling Class: How They Corrupted America and What We Can Do About It, Angelo M. Codevilla
Defeating the Totalitarian Lie: A Former Hitler Youth Warns America, Hilmar von Campe
Related Reading:
Darwinism: Devilish Gnostic Myth Dressed Up As Science
In the Shadow of Leviathan: America's Arising Fear-Based Society
Hitler used whatever he could to deceive and seduce a people because of what had taken place at the Treaty of Versailles. There is nothing 'new' under the 'sun', what hath been will be again. I even read some of pious religious affiliations attempt to made natural selection godly. Stalin was a bloody murderer and he did not much care who he slaughtered, even those that did the heavy lifting in paving the road for him to take absolute power.
The entire argument here is to conflate evolution through natural selection and atheism, make an argument that is guilt by association and the fallacy of an appeal to consequences; and to attempt to support that insipid argument with outright LIES and historic inaccuracies.
Guilt by association? Ha... I suppose only a common person would take issue to drape anything Christ like anywhere near Hitler. I suppose anything is acceptable to prop up an old notion now called 'natural selection'...
That is what the creationist is reduced to. Pitiful. Most Christian faiths have no problem at all with acceptance of science, including evolution, paleontology, plate tech-tonics, radioisotope decay, astronomy, and all the other fields that creationists cannot let stand untroubled, because they ALL conflict with what they would prefer to believe about the natural world.
Oh, without doubt the masses are more than willing to accept the 'social justice' theory of natural selection.... BUT a good number of them will project Mary as not coming from that self same primordial pot of steaming pond scum. Time is coming wherein The Creator will make known all the mysteries hidden to the so called science of the age of this earth and just why it was He place the 'soul/spirit' into that flesh vessel. Christ's tongue is said to cut both ways, to the right and to the left. Some of these high minded evolutionists are going to be dumped out of their highly state subsidized estates.
I don’t believe your “quotes”.
AMD: Appeal to consequences is a logical fallacy.
Spirited: If that is the case, then you make a liar and hypocrite of yourself everytime you point out that creationists are liars, lying being a consequence of creationist beliefs.
Ideas have consequences, for as a man believes, so he does.
AMD: Stalin rejected Darwinian evolution as being too capitalistic and embraced Lysenkoism-Lamarkianism instead.
Spirited: The underlying implication of your intellectually-truncated claim is that Lysenkoism is the cause of much evil. That is true because ideas do have consequences, hence “Appeal to consequences is a logical fallacy” is emminently irrational.
AMD: Hitler was a creationist who believed in fixed kinds and that man was directly created by God
Spirited: Wrong. Hitler was a “blood and soil” occult pagan who made a dark pact with his satanic overlord. He was a cold-blooded psychopath who epitomized the term, “moral relativist,” and a self-confessed Big Liar. His word is as truthless as Stalins and you would do well to not resort to it as proof of “truth.”
AMD: but obviously the characterization of him as being an ardent atheist/Darwinist is incorrect, that was not what he was selling his particular brand of crazy under. He said he thought he was doing the work of the Almighty Creator.
Neither was Stalin an embracer of Darwin’s theory. Teaching natural selection made you an enemy of the revolution in Stalin’s Soviet Russia
Spirited: There is a distinct lack of critical analysis in your claims, AMD.
Your reasoning is very shallow, confused and directed by willful ignorance and vanity.
Atheism is a term relative to who or what is disbelieved. Early Christians were labeled atheists because they disbelieved in pagan deities.
Evolutionary Materialists and New Age spiritists (pantheists) are both types of naturalism, which means that some aspect of creation is held to be the Supreme Reality and creator of all that is. For materialists, undivinized irrational matter and energy are the Supreme Reality; for New Agers it is divine Christ Consciousness, the Force, etc.
Hitler was an occult pagan. Even the liberal mouthpiece, NatGeo confirms this. When individuals such as Hegel and Hitler spoke of a God, like today’s New Agers, they were not speaking of the transcendant God the Father Almighty but instead of some blood and soil or pantheist conception....an immanent “one with nature” God-force conception.
The same holds true for Marx’s “historical necessity” conception-—a cleverly disguised immanent god-force notion.
Evolution, natural selection (predestination), time, chance, and determinism (fate) are also cleverly disguised immanent god-force conceptions.
The same holds true for America’s Progressives and Liberal Christians. All speak of god christ but their god and christ are immanent divinized force-conceptions.
It is your pride and ignorance that has you conflating true Christianity with naturalist conceptions. And how very strange, because by your “beliefs” you are a “blood and soil” neo-pagan.
It turns out that the Enlightenment’s “isms” have not taken their zealous followers to a new and better place but back to the past.
When Paul debated Epicurean and Stoic philosophers in the Greek aeropagus, he was in effect debating today’s evolutionary materialists and evolutionary New Agers. And like you, they scoffed, jeered, and scorned him. Doubtless they called him a liar and an atheist as well.
A very wise man once noted that there is nothing new in this world; what once was will be again. And so it is that Progressivism is really regressivism and its wings have taken you back to what once was.
I very much admire your replies. Thank you for posting.
Thank-you!!
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O listees! Even if you are too busy to read any other pinged out articles, please read Linda Kimball's newest one. There's already an interesting discussion going on. All I can say is - I agree with her 100%, and as usual, her article is sourced with quotes and references, and written with articulate passion.
Thanks for the ping. It looks like the new age religion of scientism is about to be born.
Linda Kimball’s articles are great. Haven’t had any to ping lately.
outstanding article!
The original lie.
This has been coming for centuries and centuries. You know, there are stories from the Desert Fathers which tell of holy monastics looking to the West and seeing hordes of demons descending on the Christian East. It is telling that the author of this piece cites to two outstanding Eastern Christians to make her point.
"If we surrender to corruption, we do not deserve to be called human. But let us note that the absolutely essential task is not political liberation, but the liberation of our souls from participation in the lie forced upon us...this requires no physical, or revolutionary...measures. No. It requires from each individual a moral step within his or her power....No one who voluntarily runs with hounds of falsehood will ever be able to justify himself to the living..."
This is quintessentially Orthodox. Western Christians must understand this. Here on FR, the orthodoxy of a person's Christianity is regularly measured by one's political expressions. This is a prescription for the collapse of Christianity in the West.
Here is an anthem for all Christians!:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvLzNX8MuCY
And here is the non-PC English translation:
O Lord, save thy people,
and bless thine inheritance!
Grant victory to thy people,
over the barbarians,
and by virtue of thy cross,
preserve thy habitation.
By equating Darwinism with science you give the lie to your own objectivity. The Gnostic myth of a Godless universe is the foundation of Darwinism. The very notion of evolutionary biology is incompatible with a universe created by conscious will.
You may, of course, deride creationism. By so doing you simply relegate yourself to the world of moral relativism. In that world there is no truth. Lacking truth you have nothing to offer and your science is worthless.
If, on the other hand, your science is based on a quest for the hand of God in all things you are in league with others who search for truth.
I believe my roots, and actually the roots of protestantism, to be orthodox. I get more orthodox as time passes. (With a few hold-backs, of course. :>)
Is the Pope a moral relativist?
Evolutionary biology IS science. Nothing in the theory of evolution through natural selection of genetic variation has any necessity for the universe to be Godless. That is your own hang up. Do you think the radioactive decay we observe as random is also incompatible with a universe created by conscious will?
Excellent article. Thanks for the ping!
Fellow GOP members, look at this and beware. The same sickness that has destroyed the liberals is growing in the “conservative” camp.
Remember that you are not God, and that He will be the judge.
Thanks for the ping, dear brother in Christ!
Thank you so much for sharing your insights, dear brother in Christ!
All Christians' religious roots, far enough back, are in The Church in the East.
"I get more orthodox as time passes. (With a few hold-backs, of course. :>)"
Of course you do, Padre, on both counts!:) But these matters are up to God. We pray for humility, a truly divine virtue, and to the extent our prayers are answered and we respond to God, so the eye of the soul becomes clearer and our being rises to God.
"What salt is for any food, humility is for every virtue. To acquire it, a man must always think of himself with contrition, self-belittlement and painful self-judgment. But if we acquire it, it will make us sons of God." +Isaac the Syrian." This is what Orthodoxy has always taught is "the point" of our creation. Believing as The Church teaches is a way to fulfill our created purpose. There may be others. Who knows whither the Spirit goes? Certainly we Orthodox don't.
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