From June 25 2015
I’ve discovered a book that’s blowing my head apart–Scientific Mythologies: How Science and Science Fiction Forge New Religious Beliefs by James A. Herrick (IVP Academic, 2008). It’s a big, hefty book jam-packed with information, and it’s going to take me some time to work my way through it. But what I’ve read so far is dynamite.
Science fiction and popularized science saturate our popular culture. As a child of the 1950s, I remember science fiction as 100% fun–not something that new religions are made of. But that was a child’s perception.
On purpose, science fiction writers and movie-makers, and producers of the kind of “science” that gets into our popular culture via TV specials and other mass media, have for decades been trying to wean their readers away from Christianity and replace it with something of their own invention. Okay, that’s a big thing to say; but Professor Herrick proves it with quotes aplenty, going back to the very beginnings of science fiction.
I know a guy who once told me, in all solemnity, “Jesus was a hybrid. He was half-extraterrestrial. That’s how He was able to do the things He did.”
There are millions of people out there with that kind of garbage in their heads. And as persons consciously and purposefully engaged in what they themselves call “myth-making,” or “the creation of new myths to replace the old,” science fiction writers and science hucksters have a lot to answer for.
Meanwhile, if you “create” “a new myth,” where does truth come in? Why should anybody but a total putz believe in something you created? But then the whole business of our public education system is to crank out total putzes.
God’s word is true. Most of these days, it’s the only truth we’re likely to hear. It’s true whether anyone believes it or not. It is not the creation of a human mind, or human hands. God Himself is true, and always speaks the truth.
The inroads made into the beliefs and worldviews of tens of millions of Americans–convincing them that “Science” has all the answers, super-advanced aliens are only waiting to make contact with us so that they can save us from ourselves, Evolution will transform us into higher beings that are a big improvement over what we are now, and so on and so on–are the deliberate work of persons who wish to sit where God sits.
But those inroads could not have been made if the Church had lived up to its duty to proclaim the truth at all times–and by “Church” I don’t mean the institutional church in its innumerable divisions which becomes an end in itself, but the Church and kingdom of priests that consists of all believers, all Christ’s people.
We are the ones who have been silent. We haven’t done our duty. We are the watchmen who failed to sound the trumpet, to warn the people that the sword was coming. Our God will judge us harshly for our silence.
We’ve slept through several decades of this .
Now it’s time to wake up and proclaim the truth.
[Note: R.J. Rushdoony blazed this trail in 1967 with his The Mythology of Science, available via The Chalcedon Foundation, http://www.chalcedon.edu/store/ . It’s a fast read, and you will be amazed at the sheer poppycock being spouted by scientists back then.]
