Category: Culture

http://www.reformedliterature.com/machen-christianity-and-culture.php

I wept for joy over the power and beauty of Machen’s sentiments.

“The Christian cannot be satisfied so long as any human activity is either opposed to Christianity or out of all connection with Christianity. Christianity must pervade not merely all nations, but also all of human thought. The Christian, therefore, cannot be indifferent to any branch of earnest human endeavor. It must all be brought into some relation to the gospel. It must be studied either in order to be demonstrated as false, or else in order to be made useful in advancing the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom must be advanced not merely extensively, but also intensively. The Church must seek to conquer not merely every man for Christ, but also the whole of man. We are accustomed to encourage ourselves in our discouragements by the thought of the time when every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that Jesus is Lord. No less inspiring is the other aspect of that same great consummation. That will also be a time when doubts have disappeared, when every contradiction has been removed, when all of science converges to one great conviction, when all of art is devoted to one great end, when all of human thinking is permeated by the refining, ennobling influence of Jesus, when every thought has been brought into subjection to the obedience of Christ.”

“But by whom is this task of transforming the unwieldy, resisting mass of human thought until it becomes subservient to the gospel–by whom is this task to be accomplished? To some extent, no doubt, by professors in theological seminaries and universities.”

And yet many of our best and brightest theological professors at our seminaries are telling us that in the common realm there should be no expectation that human thought should be subservient to the Gospel because it is not possible for human thought to be subservient to the Gospel in the common realm.

God Help us if the one place that Machen looked to for guidance has now become the place that is telling us that there is no such thing as uniquely and distinctly Christian answers for the resisting mass of human thought in the common realm.

Two of the central fundamental beliefs of all humanistic worldviews (i.e. — socialism, progressivism, marxism, fascism, corportism, etc.) are the inherent goodness of man and the inevitability of progress. When humanists control the levers of power they trust in their own goodness to help along, through social engineering, the inevitable progress to which they are so thoroughly committed. Humanists pursue their belief that given clever social engineering, society and people can be perfected. This pursuit, through legislation is supposedly the path to progress.

All of this also explain why there is an immediate reflex, among the practitioners of humanism, to instantly blame those who resist the humanist vision of the perfectibility of man when the lack of perfection appears in a cataclysmic fashion in society. Humanists reason that the reason or cause for the lack of perfection, as seen in whatever cataclysmic event is being analyzed, must be because non-humanists get in the way of humanism (progressive) vision.

Humanism, believing that their presuppositions could never be in error, always see the explanation for social failure in their opponents, even when the social failure is clearly the consequence of pursuing their humanist social engineering dreams. And quite in keeping with this mental disease, the answer that humanists always answer for the failures of their humanism is more humanism. So, for example, when after decades of humanist social engineering in government schools we have seen disastrous results after disastrous results, the progressive concludes the failure in government schools is due to some remnant of Christianity that has not yet been cleansed from the template being used in the government schools. The new social engineering plan developed to address government school failures includes another large dose of the humanism that has created the problem to begin with.

Another tendency of Humanism is to attribute all behavior that is deemed as wicked or unacceptable to environmental causes. Since Humanism believes that all that is, is matter in motion, there can be no explanation for ill behavior except for environment. Because Humanism (i.e. — Liberals, progressives, socialists, etc.) believe this their every answer to every problem is to improve the environment that was responsible for the unacceptable behavior. We are seeing all of this coming to light in the Tuscon shootings. As one watches the news and reads the analysis one is brought face to face with the constant insistence that this shooting was caused by the negative environment. I’ve read very little analysis that is concerned with holding the shooter responsible and no analysis that attributes the cause, not to environment, but to sin. Instead what I am reading almost everywhere are explanations anchored in non Christian humanist reasoning where the view of the shooter is one where he is totally conditioned by his environment. A Christian looks at this and says, “Loughner is responsible for his sin.” A pagan looks at this and says, “Loughner’s actions have to be explained by his environment. The reasoning goes on to insist that if we change the environment, we no longer will have this kind of behavior. It is Humanism all the way down.

Aren’t you tired of being dragged around by the cultural elites like a Raggedy Ann doll between the teeth of a bit bull? The cultural elites, to change the metaphor already, are playing “Simon” says to the American electorate. Simon says, “wring your hands,” and in good Lemming like fashion the nation wrings its hands. The cultural elite says, “Simon says don’t weep for the unborn,” and like the clones we are we dehumanize the unborn and do not weep for their political assassination.

I’m tired of being told what I must care about and what I must not care about. People are grieving for this killed 9 year old that is anonymous to most of them the way a pervert is horny for an anonymous woman he doesn’t even know who is gracing the pages of his magazine centerfold. This pornography of compassion and suffering, like the pornography of lust, is not about the object upon which their feeling is being poured out upon but is rather all about people making themselves feel good because they have the good housekeeping seal of approved societal feelings.

Of course any normal person is saddened for the families involved. The loss is catastrophic to those families, but having conceded that it is still a more than legitimate observation that the cultural elites have manufactured grief, in order to advance their agenda, for unknown persons. This grief can’t be anything more than superficial because the intimacy connection between the deceased and the 99% of the population is far to distant and removed to be anything more than a superficial. And yet the cultural elites will try to use this manufactured grief in order to force their vision upon the citizenry.

The Cultural elites, creating this pornography of compassion and suffering will use this to continue to limit the liberty of the American citizenry. In selling this cheap grief they will sell with it the approved antidote to make our cheap grief go away. They will guilt the electorate into assuaging their grief at the price of accepting more tyranny, more usurpation and more control. Already, the wheels are spinning in Washington DC for more attacks on the 2nd amendment. Already preparations are being made to push legislation that will make elected official “holy personages” who, will not be allowed to be touched in an unwarranted fashion. If the cultural elites didn’t false flag the incident they certainly are making it serve the advance of their liberty killing agenda.

I can confidently speak this way, concerning the artificiality of it all, because we are currently living in a daily National tragedy of epic proportions. Every day 3000 people are brutally tortured and murdered inside their mother’s wombs. For this daily National tragedy there is no pornography of compassion because the cultural elites are not telling Americans to grieve. And yet with over 50 million dead and buried between 1973 and today the odds that we might know some of the family members of the deceased personally are astronomically higher than the odds that any of us know any of the deceased family members in Arizona.

A Congress-woman was shot in Arizona. She and many other Congressmen who are living have, by their votes, been the trigger for this National Tragedy that occurs daily. Every day the unborn are targeted. Every day there is a bulls eye on the pregnant womb. Everyday the vitriolic language of depersonalization is used upon the unborn.

You want something to go all sackcloth and ashes over? Then weep and wail for the unborn.

“The civilized world has been thoroughly saturated with Christianity for 2000 years. Any country grounded in Judeo-Christian values cannot be overthrown until those roots are cut. But to cut the roots — to change culture — a long march through the institutions is necessary. Only then will power fall into our laps like a ripened fruit.

Antonia Gramsci
Prison Notebook
Founder of what became known as Cultural Marxism

“The West is guilty of genocidal crimes against every civilization and culture it has encountered. American and Western Civilization are the world’s greatest repositories for racism, sexism, xenophobia, Antisemitism, Fascism, and Nazism. American society is oppressive, evil, and undeserving of loyalty.”

Herbert Marcuse
First Generation Cultural Marxist
Originator of Critical Theory — Tool for Deconstructing the West

(Liberalism)” Dispensed with the absurd Christian myths of sin and damnation & believed that what shortcomings man might have were to be redeemed, not by Jesus on the Cross, but by the benevolent unfolding of history. Tolerance, free inquiry, & technology operating in the framework of human perfectibility, would in the end create a heaven on earth, a goal accounted much more sensible ‎& wholesome than a heaven in heaven.”

~ Arthur Schlesinger Jr.
Fabian Socialist (Cousins to Cultural Marxists)

Notice this is a perfect quote for humanism

1.) Historicism
2.) Inevitably of progress
3.) Inherent goodness of man
4.) Kingdom of man — Utopia

Keep in mind that this is what all progressives believe today.

“Lest we forget at least an over-the-shoulder acknowledgment to the very first radical … The first Radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom — Lucifer.”

Saul Alinsky’s
Dedication of “Rule For Radicals”

“I see the revolutionary destruction of society as the one and only solution. A worldwide overturning of values can not take place without the annihilation of the old values and a creation of the new ones by the Revolution.”

George Luckacs
Cultural Marxist

(The Englishman) “may realize that (American) equality is not some tale about all men being equally tall or equally tricky; which we not only cannot believe but cannot believe in anybody believing. It is an absolute of morals by which all men have a value invariable and indestructible and a dignity as intangible as death.”

~ G. K. Chesterton
What I Saw In America

If Chesterton had lived to see what I’m seeing he would have to believe in men believing that all men are equally tall and equally tricky and equally intelligent and equally creative. The lie of egalitarianism is that all men and all peoples are equal in talent, skill and ability. It is the lie that all men, regardless of nurture, nature, and belief are the same. This lie leads to the elimination of all God given and God honoring distinctions.

The American belief in equality was never intended to be equivalent to this lie. For Pete’s sake the Declaration of Independence refers to Indians as “savages,” clearly something that would not have been said by those who were intending equality to mean a bland sameness. The American belief in equality is just what Chesterton noted combined with the belief that all men bore the imago Dei.

The equality of 21st century America is the equality of the French Revolution, the equality of the gulag, the equality of the sex change. It is the pursuit of the leveling all distinction, ability, and accomplishment. It is the pursuit of equality of both opportunity and outcome — a notion that is absurd even on its surface. If the West should ever go from flirting with this modern concept of egalitarianism to a full conjugal embrace of such a fantasy the result will be the equality of the damned.