Tag: original sin

R.J. Rushdoony: ‘The Culture War’

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Natural goodness, eh?

This little essay by Rushdoony, first published in 1999, packs a sharp punch.

https://chalcedon.edu/magazine/the-cultural-war

“Culture war” has been with us for most of my life. Rushdoony boiled it down to Original Sin vs. the “natural goodness” of man.

Let’s scratch our heads over this. The world has just finished fighting World War II, complete with the Holocaust and the atomic bomb. Then war springs up in Korea.

And the world’s intellectuals, and more than a few churchmen, want us to believe that man is naturally good? For that to be true, God’s word must be wrong. So they set themselves up as “God’s editor” and proceed to correct all the mistakes they say He made. Poor God. What would He do without us?

Original Sin vs. natural goodness: “This is the dividing line,” Rushdoony wrote. And we can forget about trying to merge good and evil. All you get out of that is good that used to be good but now is corrupted by evil.

R.J. Rushdoony: ‘Our Man-Centered Folly’

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Top 5 Most Insane Rulers In History - YouTube

Who needs God’s word when we have rulers like these?

You can sum it up, as Rushdoony did, in just a single sentence:

“Without the God of Scripture, we have the collapse of all values into totally subjective opinions.”

https://chalcedon.edu/resources/articles/our-man-centered-folly

He wrote that in 1995. I don’t think he’d be surprised, almost 30 years later, to see crazy governments and apostate, um, “churches” pushing “transgender” as if their lives depended on it. First they get rid of values; then they start tossing facts aside. The fact of male and female, for one. We now have a Supreme Court justice (!) who claims she doesn’t know what a woman is.

The problem with many of our totally subjective opinions is that they’re sinful, stupid, absurd, selfish, and half-baked. Other than that, they’re fine.

 

My Newswithviews Column, Dec. 16 (‘Hijacking Christianity’)

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For over 200 years, modern pagans have been living off the moral capital of Christianity. They want what Christianity has to offer, but they don’t want to pay for it.

Hijacking Christianity

Be it the “settled science” of Charles Darwin, or the glorified slob appeal of an antique popular song, “You Are a Child of the Universe,” they want God’s blessings without God–blessings handed down by no one in particular. Natural selection. The Universe. Ee-yi-ee-yi-oh.

(I based this column on Romans 8:28; but Romans Chapter 1 powerfully suggests itself: worshiping the creation, not the creator.)

Is He or Isn’t He the Lord?

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I’ve been doing some thinking about this. Current events and all, you know.

Either there is a supreme, sovereign authority, or there isn’t. If there isn’t–well, have fun, anything goes, whatever you can get away with.

If there is, either it’s God, the God revealed to us in the Bible, or someone or something else.

If God is supreme, we have His word and we know what He expects of us, for He has told us so. But if that authority belongs to someone or something else–then whom? Whose is it?

Well, perhaps some other god. Thor. Baal. Zeus. Ah, we’ve tried all those. They didn’t last.

Ooh-ooh, I know! It’s us! Real smart people! And all that stuff that we create–technology, laws, moral codes…and the state! Hum-baby, the state! That’s where you find the supreme and sovreign authority. Oh, yeah–in Science, too. You just can’t go wrong if it’s the State and Science.

Obviously we never learned a blessed thing from that whole lamentable and wretched 20th century. Original sin is nothing if not intractable.

If the supremacy is not God’s, then it must be someone else’s.

And if it does belong to someone else–no two people can agree on whom–then God help us.

Rushdoony: ‘The Doctrine of Original Sin’

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“You’re all racists, dammit!”

R.J. Rushdoony wrote this essay in 1993, long before Everything was Racist. I can’t help but be amazed by his prescience. He looked deeply into the past and present, and saw the future.

https://chalcedon.edu/resources/articles/the-doctrine-of-original-sin

Somewhere along the way, “thinkers” (LOL) discarded the doctrine of Original Sin, which stated a moral fact and explained why people do bad things: because they’re sinners. But that left them without an explanation, so they had to cook up a new one: we do bad things because we belong to the evil race, or the oppressor class. The one is a “genetic fact”–which precludes conversion or repentance: how are you going to repent your biology?–the other a socio-economic fact. And just lately we’ve got “the wrong gender,” too. So many ways to hate and fear each other!

Constant race-hustling must lead to rage, conflict, violence, and maybe even war if it goes unchecked for long enough.

Sin, the moral fact, has been atoned for by Jesus Christ. We are all sinners outside of Christ; inside, His righteousness is imputed to us.

But if you’re bad because you’re white or male–well, you’re out of luck.

“Everything is Racist” is a toxic ideology, fit only for angry fools.

 

‘Hawking: “Only World Government Can Save Us”‘ (2017)

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As we enter the weekend set aside to celebrate Jesus Christ, His atoning death on the cross and then His resurrection, we might want to spare a prayer for the spiritually impoverished. They may be rich and famous, basking in the glow of fawning publicity: but they are poorer than a beggar. Like, for instance, world-renowned Scientist, Stephen Hawking.

Hawking: Only World Government Can Save Us

His argument goes: we humans are bad, bad, bad and that’s our nature–we’re with you there, dude; only we call it Original Sin–so what we must have, if we’re to survive, is an all-powerful world government to rein us in.

Uh-huh. And who’s gonna be in the world government? More of them bad, bad humans! Only now they’ll be in a state of perpetual temptation by unrestrained power over others. Or as our country’s founders put it, the bigger the government, the bigger its abuses.

They’ll eat us alive, Steve-o.

‘Roadblocks to Utopia’ (2017)

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Y’know what? Even computers work better than government.

Roadblocks to Utopia

If there were no such thing as Original Sin, we’d still be dealing with Original Stupidity. The more power we give people, the more they go wrong.

Basic facts of life, as listed in the article above, are routinely denied by statists, whose only goal in life is to expand the government–with themselves in charge of it all. It is a perverse and wicked lust that proves the doctrine of Original Sin is true.

‘The Will to be as God’ (2018)

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Every evil in the world springs from this: the desire to be as God, and the delusion that you can actually do it.

The Will to be as God

Whether it’s a single disgusting murder for some forgettably trivial reason, or mass murder perpetrated by a communist government against its own people, it all goes back to “I can decide good and evil for myself! Just like the devil promised!”

This is why we need humility, and why it’s a virtue.

‘How They Take Away Our Rights’ (2017)

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What part of “endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights” do tinhorn tyrants in government not understand?

Well, all of it. Show a liberal copy of the Declaration of Independence, and he’ll shriek, levitate, and his head will spin 360 degrees.

How They Take Away Our Rights

So governments have been developing a new doctrine, claiming for themselves the authority to “balance rights” against each other, deciding winners and losers. Government will decide whose rights matter on any given day. Like, yesterday we had free speech and today we don’t, because today someone else’s rights are more important than ours.

They do not intend for us to be free and will go to almost any lengths to enslave us. Don’t ask me why. It’s one of those Original Sin things. May God deliver us out of their hands.

‘Why Humanism Leads to Statism’

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An Urgent Message from Mark Rushdoony

(Good stuff at the Chalcedon website this week; I’m happy to share it with you.)

Mark Rushdoony has hit the bullseye with this one. Humanism always leads to statism.

https://chalcedon.edu/blog/why-humanism-leads-to-statism

Humanists get rid of God, leaving the state–that is, themselves–as the highest possible authority. I know it’s hard to account for what happens next without a concept of Original Sin–but as Christians we have that concept, so we can understand humanism’s inevitable drift into tyranny. The alternative, with every fat-head parading around as his own god, can only be anarchy; but they can’t keep that going for any length of time.

Mark puts it in a nutshell: “The problem is too much power.”

Build the state down, not up!

Our liberties depend on it.