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Freedom

Posted by :admin On : July 4, 2014
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Category: America, Archives, Christianity, Humanism

Fifty-six traitors to the crown signed their own death sentences and then fought to escape the hangman’s noose. So began the first steps in forming a new nation. It was a typically hot summer in Philadelphia in 1776. Day after day a group of men met to argue, pray, sweat, and wonder what would be the outcome of their deliberations. Eventually, the product of their labors was the Declaration of Independence from Great Britain. The wording of the revered document was approved on July 2nd by the Continental Congress, and on July 4th the delegates voted to accept it. What was so valuable that these men would risk their lives for it? It was freedom.

The word “freedom” is misused much as is the word “love.” Freedom’s meaning is misunderstood and has been stretched, changed, distorted, overused, cheapened, made merchandise, used to defend or promote conflicting purposes, and co-opted for support of principles and philosophies that are inherently in opposition to its real meaning.

Why is it that human beings value freedom so much? Before we can answer, we must realize that one’s worldview will ultimately define his or her understanding of the concept of freedom. If a worldview is fundamentally flawed in that it is in conflict with truth, that worldview’s concept of freedom will also be flawed and result in bondage of some type and degree. In Western civilization there are two worldviews contending for dominance—humanism and Christianity.

A Freedom that coerces

In the humanist worldview, man is encouraged to realize his own creative talents and desires and exercise maximum individual autonomy that is free from the mores, norms, tradition, and distant voices of the past. This freedom gives unbridled expression to self and senses. However, one must read the fine print in the humanists’ promises of freedom which requires individual autonomy to be consonant with social responsibility. Therefore, humanists harness an individual’s dignity, worth, and freedom to the principle of the greatest-happiness-for-the greatest-number which is hitched to the humanist belief that the highest moral obligation is to humanity as a whole. Freedom of the individual is subservient to his obligations to the larger society, and those obligations are determined and defined by the humanist intellectual elite. In other words, man replaces God as the defining authority for truth, and man’s highest moral obligation is to humanity as a whole and not to God.[1]

The source of true and lasting freedom

To understand the Christian worldview as it relates to freedom, we must examine God’s creation of man. Man was created with God’s divine image stamped upon him. Man has an insatiable thirst for freedom because God made man with freewill. It was necessary for man to have freewill in order for love to exist. God did not create man out of need. Rather, it was a will to love, an expression of the very character of God, to share the inner life of the Trinity. By creating man with a free will meant the possibility of rejection of God and His love. Being God, He knew the course and cost of His creation would be the death of His Son on the cross. In other words freewill and the potential for rejection of God was the penalty for the possibility of love. So it is on the earthly plane, to risk love is to risk rejection.[2] Love is a choice because man has freewill, and true love reflects the divine in that it focuses on relationships and not self.

Now we begin to see the fundamental differences between humanism and Christianity that shape the disparities of how those worldviews define freedom. In the Christian worldview, freedom simply means a lack of coercion but also implies self-restraint and deference to relational patterns revealed in the mores, norms, tradition, and distant voices of the past. True freedom is found only when an individual chooses a right relationship with God through the acceptance of Christ as one’s savior. In such relationship, man chooses to subordinate his own freewill to Christ, to accept Him, and to follow the road of freedom found in the revelation to the ancient Hebrews and first century Christians. From this foundation of a right relationship with God, man can find right relationships with his fellowman in family, community, and state.

In a contrary view of freedom that exalts self, humanists attempt to release the individual from the relational patterns flowing from those same mores, norms, tradition, and distant voices of the past. However, the subjugation of divinely ordered relational patterns to the god of self results in loneliness, pain, suffering, and loss in this life and eternity thereafter. In other words, true freedom is found in freely subduing one’s will to that of God’s will as opposed to the exaltation of self and the senses. Christ’s words in Luke’s gospel capture the essence of this seeming enigma.

…If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it; and whoever loses his life for my sake, he will save it. [Luke 9: 23-24. RSV]

Freedom lost

In twenty-first century America, the god of self rules the day. America’s humanist masters have taken control of the nation and its institutions. Many Americans recognize there is something amiss with the country, but they take little time to look, listen, understand, and challenge the despoiling of America’s central cultural vision upon which the nation was founded. Americans are much like Esau who sold his valuable birthright for a bowl of stew, that is, he traded what was important, godly, and honorable for temporary pleasures. America’s hard-won two-hundred-plus year birthright of freedom is being willingly and rapidly surrendered to a growing legion of humanistic overlords in exchange for a bowl of entitlements, fleeting and licentious pleasures, self-centeredness, egotism, radical egalitarianism, imaginary rights, sloth, and an obsession for life-consuming leisure activities.

Fifty-six traitors to the crown signed their own death sentences and then fought to escape the hangman’s noose. They were overwhelmingly Christian in worldview, and like God in His creation of man, the Founders knew the cost of freedom as revealed in the final words of the Declaration of Independence, “And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the Protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.”[3] (emphasis added)

The 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence paid a tremendous price for our freedom: 5 were arrested by the British as traitors, 12 had their homes looted and burned by the enemy, 17 lost their fortunes, 2 lost sons in the Continental Army, and 9 fought and died during the Revolutionary War.[4]

Edmund Burke’s famous observation of the eighteenth century still rings true today. “All that is necessary for the evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.”[5] To defend America’s birthright of freedom, good and Godly men and women must once again depend on the providence of God and pledge their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to subdue the humanistic apostles of self that are enslaving the nation.

Larry G. Johnson

Sources:

[1] Larry G. Johnson, Ye shall be as gods – Humanism and Christianity – The Battle for Supremacy in the American
Cultural Vision, (Owasso, Oklahoma: Anvil House Publishers, 2011), p. 389.
[2] Ibid, p. 158.
[3] Henry Steele Commager, Documents of American History, (New York: F. S. Crofts & Co., 1934), p. 102.
[4] William J. Federer, America’s God and Country, (Coppell, Texas: FAME Publishing, Inc., 1996), p. 144.
[5] Ibid., p. 82.

This was done by ordinary people – Part III

Posted by :admin On : June 13, 2014
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Category: Archives, Christianity, Culture Wars, Humanism

Adolf Hitler believed that “…Christianity preached ‘meekness and flabbiness,’ and this was simply not useful to the National Socialist ideology…” Hitler hated Christianity, but as a practical man, he was a pretend Christian and found the German Christian church temporarily useful in consolidating Nazi power. In time he subverted much of the church and changed its basic ideology.[1]

At the beginning of 1933, the German church stood at a crossroads. The great majority of German Lutheran churches chose the path of Hitler and the Nazis instead of the teachings of Jesus Christ.[2] All of German life was to be synchronized under Hitler’s leadership, and “…the church would lead the way.” The majority of churches called themselves “German Christians” and advocated a strong unified church seamlessly wedded to the state that would restore Germany to her former glory. The union of the state church with the Nazi regime required churches to conform to Nazi racial laws and ultimately swear allegiance to Hitler as the supreme leader of the church and by doing so “…blithely tossed two millennia of Christian orthodoxy overboard.”[3]

There was a minority of Christians and churches in Germany that opposed Hitler and the German Christians. The resistance centered within the new “Confessing Church” led by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Niemöller, and a few others. When Hitler heard of a potential church split because of objections to his policies, he summoned several dissenting church leaders including Niemöller to the Reich Chancellery. He lectured the assembled churchmen and said all he wanted was peace between Church and state and blamed them for obstructing his plans. Hitler warned them “…to confine yourself to the Church. I’ll take care of the German people.” Niemöller responded that the Church also had a responsibility toward the German people that was entrusted to them by God and that neither Hitler nor anyone else in the world had power to remove that responsibility. Hitler turned away without comment, but that same evening the Gestapo ransacked Niemöller’s rectory while searching for incriminating material. Within days a homemade bomb exploded in the hall of the rectory.[4]

As Nazi pressure was ratcheted up against the dissenting churchmen, Bonhoeffer and Niemöller were criticized by their fellow churchmen for opposing Hitler and his policies. Eventually over two thousand would choose the route of appeasement and safety and abandoned support of Bonhoeffer and Niemöller’s efforts in resisting the Nazis. “They believed that appeasement was the best strategy; they thought that if they remained silent they could live with Hitler’s intrusion into church affairs and his political policies.”[5]

However, not all Confessing Church pastors and lay leaders bowed to Hitler’s demands, but they would pay a price for their courage. In 1937, a remnant of more than eight hundred were arrested and imprisoned including Niemöller who spent the next eight years in prison, seven of which were in Dachau, one the Nazis’ most infamous concentration camps.[6]

We have identified three groups of churches in Nazi Germany of the 1930s: the apostate German Christian church, the Confessing church which became the silent church of appeasement, and a faithful remnant that became the suffering church.

In the twenty-first century, the enemy of the American church is still the one that Bonhoeffer identified as the “…the most severe enemy” that Christianity ever had—humanism.[7] We are seeing the same patterns and methods used by Hitler to marginalized and make powerless much of the American Christian church through its seduction by the humanistic spirit of the age. The god of Hitler has been replaced by the god of humanism and its lesser god of equality in all of its destructive humanistic definition and interpretation.

In America there is an apostate church that has abandoned any pretense of adherence to the gospel message. Biblical truths are twisted, mocked, or dismissed altogether. Others champion a social gospel or preach a gospel of health, wealth, happiness, harmony, and cheap grace in place of the cross and death to self. Eighty years ago, Bonhoeffer described “cheap grace.”

Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our Church…In such a Church the world finds a cheap covering for its sins; no contrition is required, still less any real desire to be delivered from sin…Cheap grace means the justification of sin without the justification of the sinner…Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.[8]

Apart from the apostate church, there is also a faithful but mostly silent church in America that is content to preach the gospel and ignore the culture. Erwin Lutzer wrote, “Whether in Nazi Germany or America, believers cannot choose to remain silent under the guise of preaching the Gospel…we must live out the implications of the cross in every area of our lives. We must be prepared to submit to the Lordship of Christ in all ‘spheres’.”[9] Yet, as we live out the implications of the cross in every area of our lives, we must understand that the culture wars in which we soldier for Christ are not about maintaining the American dream however one may define it. Rather, the culture wars are about restoring the biblical understanding of truth in all spheres of our national life. To do so one must speak the truth in the face of lies, stand on biblical principles when others compromise, and take right actions in spite of consequences. A hostile culture and an adversarial government and culpable legal system will extract a price from those that dare to oppose them. What is accomplished by such opposition when it seemingly brings only hardship, suffering, and defeat? “Suffering communicates the gospel in a new language; it authenticates the syllables that flow from our lips…It is not how loud we can shout but how well we can suffer that will convince the world of the integrity of our message.”[10]

In recent years the forces of humanism have gained sustained power and critical mass in all spheres of American life and have become openly hostile and threatening to the true church of Jesus Christ. However, there is a bold remnant of the faithful church that is listening to the voices of modern Bonhoeffers and Niemöllers who are speaking out in those spheres of American life against the evils that have spread over America and much of the church. Such boldness follows the path of costly grace, and very soon that remnant may be able to claim the cloak of the suffering church.

Most in the American church cannot comprehend the meaning of the suffering church. It is something that happens “over there,” something that is foreign to their thinking. They believe the American church somehow has been exempt from the consequences of costly grace. To suggest otherwise is almost heresy. But the Apostle Paul would disagree.

…it is the Spirit himself bearing witness with our spirit that we are the children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may be glorified with him. [Romans 8:16-17. RSV] (emphasis added)

In the dark days of World War II, Bonhoeffer wrote, “When God calls a man, he bids him come and die.” On April 9, 1945, Dietrich Bonhoeffer answered Christ’s final call. After two years in prison, he was hanged on the direct order of Adolph Hitler who ended his own life three weeks later in an underground bunker in Berlin.

Larry G. Johnson

Sources:

[1] Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer, (Nashville, Tennessee: Thomas Nelson, 2010), pp. 166, 171.
[2] Erwin W. Lutzer, When a Nation Forgets God,” (Chicago, Illinois: Moody Publishers, 2010), p. 44.
[3] Metaxas, pp. 151-152, 176.
[4] Lutzer, pp. 19-20.
[5] Ibid., p. 21.
[6] Metaxas, pp. 293, 295.
[7] Ibid., p. 85.
[8] Lutzer, pp 117-118.
[9] Ibid., p. 33.
[10] Ibid., pp. 120-121.

This was done by ordinary people – Part II

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Larry G. Johnson

Sources:

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

March Madness: Nanny State 1 – Freedom 0

Posted by :Larry G. Johnson On : March 28, 2014
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Category: Archives, Government, Humanism, Socialism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Larry G. Johnson

Sources:

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

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

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

Newspeak 2014: The Language of Socialism

Posted by :Larry G. Johnson On : March 14, 2014
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Category: Archives, Government, Humanism, Socialism, Truth

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

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

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

George Orwell (1903-1950)

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

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

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

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

F. A. Hayek (1899-1992)

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

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

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

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

Richard M. Weaver (1910-1963)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Larry G. Johnson

Sources:

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

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

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

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

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

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