In “Lurching from Crisis to Crisis,” Mark Rushdoony explains the pattern: “It comes from man playing god,” he says–men who “become blinded by raw power.” And yet the things they claim to be able to do–they can’t! “Our institutions, our social order itself, is a house built upon sand.”
As bad as it is, Mark writes, “It will not last.” The Holy Spirit will intervene, and bring down the curtain on this festival of apostasy.
(Thanks to my wife, Patty, and my editor, Susan, for a most stimulating conversation this morning.)
When the Emperor Caligula declared himself a god, he scared the living dickens out of all Rome for a while, until they’d had enough of it, and killed him.
But that was then, and this is now. Our age is infested with Caligulas, all professing to be gods. Not being as honestly daft as Caligula was, they use euphemisms. Experts. Scientists. Officials Who Listen To The Science. Their creed is captured in The Humanist Manifesto II: “Using technology wisely…” we can do jolly well anything. There ain’t no God, sweet-cheeks–but you’ve got us (!) to micromanage your world for you, and that’s better than Old Whatsisname!
Oh, they want their global government so bad, they can damned near taste it! They thought they had it, practically in the palm of their hands, one more election, one more little tiny bridge to cross–and then those racist-biggit-whitesupremacist-bitterclinger deplorables went and ruined the whole freakin’ thing by electing Donald Trump instead of the globalist gal, Hillary Clinton. Those wretched American people! They stole the election!
And then along comes the Gosh-I-Don’t-Know-Where-That-Came-From Virus (Dem-speak for the Chinese Wuhan Communist Death Virus from China), and that’s a challenge, don’t you know. If you’re gonna sit in God’s chair, you gotta meet God’s challenges.
Problem: Our anti-Christian ruling class, our globalist citizen-of-the-world ruling class, doesn’t much like us–well, all right: they hate us–and doesn’t much care if millions of us die (human sacrifices to Mother Gaea); still, they’ve got to put on a show. They’ve got to Do Something. So they’ll shut down our economy and try to keep it shut down until there’s no more disease.
Why didn’t they ever do this before, when there was a big pandemic raging? Why didn’t they do it in 1918?
Because, my wife said, because now they can! Now they’ve got the technology. Even more importantly, says I, they’ve got the ideology. It took a hundred years for the hubris to grow to this colossal size. A hundred years of rejecting God our Maker and our Judge. And now, Susan put in, they’ve got the religion for it. And it’s no religion you’re going to find in the Bible.
Make no mistake about it. Our globalist ruling class means not to serve us but to rule us, and to rule us hard, with a rod of iron. Once they get us down, they won’t let us up again.
We appeal to the God of the Book of Judges, who delivered Israel time and again from his enemies.
R.J. Rushdoony wrote “God’s Property and Possession” circa 1978. Chalcedon has reprinted it now, in 2020, because it’s still true, still pertinent, and has become, perhaps, a harder lesson than it was 40 years ago.
We can say “We belong to God”–but do we understand that this is meant to be taken literally? We are God’s property! Not our own, but His. What makes us God’s property? It’s not only His right as our Creator. In redeeming us with the blood of His Son, Jesus Christ, “We are bought with a price” (1 Corinthians 6:20). And so we are doubly His property.
But we not only consider ourselves to be our own property. Many of us, churchmen included, object to God’s laws and judge His word–as if there were something wrong with it that must be corrected… by us! As hard as it is to understand and accept God’s rights, to transfer His authority to fallible, sinful, foolish human beings is downright preposterous. It goes back to Satan’s con came in the Garden: “Ye shall be as gods.”
Heaven forbid. We wouldn’t last three days with Him off the throne and some worldly know-it-all on it. If history teaches us anything at all, it ought to teach us that.
And by the way: being God’s property means we cannot be the property of any other human being. Or the state. It’s why secular utopians, who are always ready to break eggs to make their omelet, hate God’s word.
I’ve been thinking about this for days. Maybe it’ll grow into a Newswithviews column. Maybe your comments will inspire me. Pitch in, everybody.
When Jeff Goldblum as Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park says “Boy, do I hate being right all the time,” he’s talking about his repeated warnings that the dinosaur park is going to fail spectacularly–and of course he’s right. Everything goes wrong.
And of course the park’s creators are totally flabbergasted because they were 100% sure they had everything, and I do mean everything, totally under control. In fact they had nothing under control.
As Christians we’re expected to know that God is in control of His creation. We’re lucky if we can control ourselves for five minutes, never mind managing the world.
But the delusion of this age is the illusion of control, the old con game Satan ran on Eve, “Ye shall be as gods.” In fact, think the fat-heads who believe this, they’d better be as gods because the real God does not exist, it’s all up to them to keep the planet spinning, etc. All up to them! And these are people who’d be hard-put to organize a game of hopscotch.
Rather than suffer the shock of coming to grips with their limitations, control freaks just think bigger and bigger. A lousy dinosaur park? Peanuts! They’re after global government. They aspire to micro-manage the climate. They’ll do all those things God should’ve done, but couldn’t–end war, end poverty, no more disease, everybody equal, free college education, blah-blah.
I wish I could remember which of you recommended this movie to us. Feel free to remind me.
The Circle is a 2017 techno-thriller starring Emma Watson (Harry Potter) and Tom Hanks (Far Left Crazy). It received an awful lot of bad reviews (somebody called it “the reason people hate Hollywood”), but I would call it a timely, worthwhile horror movie. One might even say an appalling horror movie.
Watson plays a young woman, nobody special, who lands a job with The Circle, the world’s biggest media corporation, a social media colossus reminiscent of Google, not to mention Scientology meets Amway–with the Tower of Babel and Revelation thrown in. Hanks, playing the lord high CEO of The Circle, sums up its philosophy succinctly: “Knowing things is good. But knowing everything is better!”
And so you have this hi-tech amoeba spreading out to engulf everybody, and we’re all cool with that because once the sum total of human knowledge and experience is gathered into one place and digitized, etc., “We will reach our full potential” (God forbid!) and be able to do everything and solve every single problem in the world. Indeed, there will be nothing too trivial for The Circle to sink its fangs into. There will be no more privacy: because having a personal experience not shared by everybody in the world is “selfish.”
But this is where Satan takes us, with his promise that “ye shall be as gods.” He always takes us there! A less deserving object of worship than ourselves should be, for anyone not totally off his chump, impossible to imagine.
It’s almost as hard to imagine how horrible it would be to live in a world from which privacy has literally been eradicated. The Circle has even succeeded in making membership mandatory and getting the government to require everyone to vote–a little fantasy which President *Batteries Not Included used to kick around.
The Circle abounds with babble about “democracy,” abundantly demonstrating why our country’s founders had a horror of it, and did everything in their power to give us a republic instead. Or you could read The Peloponnesian War, Thucydides’ eyewitness account of the political hysteria that led to the civic suicide of Athens.
Maybe we don’t want to be “connected” with everyone else in the world. Maybe we don’t want to know what Joe Blow in Brazzaville had for supper that night. Maybe we absolutely no way want a global government, or a global anything for that matter.
The last time we tried this, building the Tower of Babel, God came down and confounded our language. It was an act of mercy. He was protecting us from those who would devour us alive.
Remember this? Italian scientists sent to prison because they failed to predict an earthquake… Didn’t King Nebuchadnezzar used to do that? Send for the prognostickators and the astrologers and the Chaldeans and threaten to kill them if they failed to interpret his dream…
One thing you can say for Satan: he’s never left the building.
I have stumbled over a highly-touted book, Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari, said to be on every globalist big shot’s required reading list. It’s all about how “Our inheritors will be godlike” and achieve all sorts of neat stuff, like abolishing war and poverty and disease and getting eternal happiness, immortality, and lots of nookie ( https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/15/books/review-homo-deus-yuval-noah-harari.html ). Yeah, yeah… they always say that. Ever since the Serpent told Eve, “Ye shall be as gods.”
It’s full of really smart-sounding quotes like, “The free individual is just a fictional tale concocted by an assembly of biochemical algorithms.” Y’know, I’ve heard that before. Rutgers Biology, 1969. A lecture about how total government control of every aspect of our lives–the government advised by infallible scientists, of course–is necessary, inevitable, and totally great. Someone asked, “But what about our freedom and individuality?” Answered our classroom instructor (the lecture was on CCTV), “Those are obsolete concepts that must be engineered out of the system.” She was really good at sticking dissecting needles through the heads of live frogs, but seemed to have no other talents.
But! says Yuval. But we gotta be careful, ’cause just when we’re really getting into being gods, Artificial Intelligence will evolve to become smarter than we are and it will exterminate us.
Some of these guys, I don’t think they actually have to work with real computers and therefor have no idea at all of how unreliable and erratic computers are. And they seem to be getting worse instead of better. And common sense seems to be in short supply, too. The idea that a lot of sinful, wishful-thinking, sophomoric, ignorant, incompetent bullshit artists can grant us eternal life and happiness–I mean, really! Find someplace where they’re selling brain cells, and buy a few.
I’m so glad so many important people read books like this. Knowing that helps me to understand why they behave like immoral and psychotic numbskulls. Even the former occupant of the White House, President *Batteries Not Included, once recommended Homo Deus on TV. As seen on TV! It just doesn’t get more authoritative than that.
It’s Patty’s birthday this weekend, so we watched Jurassic World, aka Jurassic Park IV.
Okay, all the disastrous mistakes that plagued the original Jurassic Park have been rectified, and the new park is wide-open for business. But a whole new set of disastrous cock-ups is just waiting to erupt.
This is one of those movies that delivers exactly what you want–well, what we wanted, at least. We wanted dinosaurs, and dinosaurs we got: even a giant Mosasaurus which is not, strictly speaking, a dinosaurs, but it’s prehistoric and it eats living things.
We wanted thrills, and we got them. We wanted eye-popping special effects, and we got those. And as an added treat, there were several brief salutes to the original Jurassic Park, including a cameo appearance by Mr. DNA.
Occasionally it seemed the screenwriters were tempted to get sidetracked by penetrating insights into the characters’ personal lives, but drew back from this before any serious harm was done to the movie. I mean, you’re getting chased around by dinosaurs who are trying to eat you alive–who’s got time to worry about relationships?
This film gives us new dinosaurs–the Mosasaur, a really ugly pterodactyl (Dimorphodon), and, to top it all, a “not real” dinosaur that never existed in nature but was cooked up by the lab boys because the park’s investors demanded something bigger, meaner, and scarier than the real dinos. B.D. Wong is back as Henry Wu, the genius who ran John Hammond’s dino factory in Jurassic Park I. He’s back and he hasn’t learned a thing.
So they come up with this artificial critter they name Indominius–nasty, nasty, nasty! It’s full of genes from all sorts of animals, and on top of that, it’s been raised in isolation which has made it crazy. The thing I loved about Indominius is, it’s basically a giant Dryptosaurus–which was a distant relative of T. rex, about half the size, with long, powerful arms and long, sharp, eagle-like claws: New Jersey’s pride and joy.
Here is the heart of the movie. Here is Unintelligent Design at work. Borrowing from the genuine creation of the sovereign God, blockheads cobble together a new kind of animal. They do this to make money and earn science kudos. They have very little understanding of animals in general and no understanding whatsoever of this particular animal. Their hubris, their ignorance, and their greed all turn around and bite them in the ass.
Just like in the first Jurassic Park.
“Ye shall be as gods” was a snare and a delusion when the Serpent first whispered it to Eve in Eden, and is to this day the Devil’s most irresistible bait.
Aside from my inborn yearning for dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals, I love these movies as parables. It’s amazing how little the human race learns from its mistakes.
Therefore speak I to them in parables: because they seeing see not; and hearing they hear not, neither to they understand… For this people’s heart is waxed gross, and their ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes they have closed; lest at any time they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and should understand with their heart, and should be converted, and I should heal them. (Matthew 13:13, 15)
