Studies in Early Genesis

Sin and Insanity

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Pentateuch

Genre: Speech

Lesson: 8 of 11

Track: #53

Dictation Name: RR115D8

Date: 1960-1970’s

[Rushdoony] Almighty God our heavenly Father we come to Thee again out of a dry and thirsty land where no water is, hungering and thirsting after righteousness. Our Lord and our God minister Thou unto our hunger and our thirst. Speak to us the words that we need. Encourage and strengthen our hearts in Thee that we may go forth rejoicing and confident, knowing that because the government is upon Thy shoulders that Thou doest all things well we need not fear though the earth be moved. Though the mountains shake with the swelling there-of. For the Lord of hosts is with us, the God of Jacob is our refuge. Confirm us our Father in this state. In Jesus name, Amen.

Let us turn to Genesis four verses one through fifteen.

1And Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived, and bare Cain, and said, I have gotten a man from the Lord.

2 And she again bare his brother Abel. And Abel was a keeper of sheep, but Cain was a tiller of the ground.

3 And in process of time it came to pass, that Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto the Lord.

4 And Abel, he also brought of the firstlings of his flock and of the fat thereof. And the Lord had respect unto Abel and to his offering:

5 But unto Cain and to his offering he had not respect. And Cain was very wroth, and his countenance fell.

6 And the Lord said unto Cain, Why art thou wroth? And why is thy countenance fallen?

7 If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted? And if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door. And unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule over him.

8 And Cain talked with Abel his brother: and it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him.

9 And the Lord said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother? And he said, I know not: Am I my brother's keeper?

10 And he said, what hast thou done? The voice of thy brother's blood crieth unto me from the ground.

11 And now art thou cursed from the earth, which hath opened her mouth to receive thy brother's blood from thy hand;

12 When thou tillest the ground, it shall not henceforth yield unto thee her strength; a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth.

13 And Cain said unto the Lord, My punishment is greater than I can bear.

14 Behold, thou hast driven me out this day from the face of the earth; and from thy face shall I be hid; and I shall be a fugitive and a vagabond in the earth; and it shall come to pass, that every one that findeth me shall slay me.

15 And the Lord said unto him, therefore whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold. And the Lord set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him.

We have in this chapter a very familiar story of the first murder in history, the murder of Abel by Cain. Cain was not at peace with God, God rejected him and his offering. And we are told that Cain was very wroth, very angry, against God. He thought that God should have accepted him on his own terms and his reaction to the situation was one of considerable displeasure. But Cain, angry at God turned and killed Abel, his brother. He had know grievance against Abel. Abel had not done anything to Him, but when men are at war with God they refuse to accept responsibility for their condition and the find someone as speedily as they can to become the object of their anger and their hatred against God. They look for a vent for their rebellion, a way out for the poison in them. We’re all familiar with this aspect of central human nature.

I recall years ago when I was quiet young and we were on the farm that for a time we had a family living there helping out on various farm chores. My father found it increasingly difficult to correct the man because if he made a mistake, which he very often did, and my father corrected him he was afraid of course to talk back to my father lest he be fired. And so he would stomp over to where the family was and take off his belt and start beating his wife, and after a while my father had to let him go. It was impossible to have him work without correcting him and every time he did the poor woman was beaten. This is an aspect of life we’re all familiar with. We know how often men come home from their work out of sorts and they take it out on their wives, who of course then take out on the children, who then pull the cats tail [general laughter]

And it has been said that the army mule is very much missed these days because he had a very important function in the army. When the general made a mistake he took it out on his officers, who took it out on those below him, until it reached the private who took it out on the mule. And there’s no-one to take the place of the mule today

When men are unwilling to face honestly their guilt and their responsibility they shift the blame and when men are at war with God they shift the blame. They are helpless against God, they cannot strike at Him, but they can strike at the people of God. They can at the innocent and this they do, and so it becomes basic to their nature continually because they are perpetually at war with God. To find someone to strike at, if man is not in communion with God he will not be in communion with his neighbor. And if man is not at peace with God, is at war with God, he will be at war with his neighbor. This is a fact of life a reality of our world.

There is another aspect of it. We are told in Genesis two that Adam and Eve were in the garden before the fall and were naked and not ashamed. And the very first consequence of their fall was an overwhelming sense of shame. What was the difference? The difference was this, before their consciousness was centered on God, afterward their consciousness was centered on themselves; so that they shifted from a God consciousness to a self consciousness. Why? Because their sin had been to attempt to be as God themselves; the temptation of Satan was “ye shall be as God, knowing (that is, determining) for yourself what is good and evil. And now as God’s in their own imagination they were the center of the universe. And so their thinking revolved around themselves and there was a heightened and intensified self-consciousness. We are very much familiar with this sort of thing in the whole of the Romantic Movement and perhaps the epitome of this in poetry was the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. And for Shelley his feelings were the center of the universe, and whatever he gave value to had absolute value. If he fell in love with a girl, which he did very frequently, then because he loved her he was the most important thing in the entire universe. She was a goddess; she was a paragon of all virtues and all beauty because he loved her. When he fell out of love with her she was the absolute witch. Why? Because Shelley was the person in the universe, his self was the center of creation and it was his feelings that gave value to any object, and if he was not interested in anything then it was of no value. When he was filled with grief his grief had for him a cosmic significance. When he was happy his happiness had a cosmic significance again. His feelings were the be all and end all of existents.

He was, as were the other romantic poets, a perpetual adolescent. Because of course this is what characterizes adolescence the child grows up, and being a child of Adam and having a fallen nature, as he begins to approach maturity, suddenly begins to be aware of himself in terms of his fallen nature, as the center of the universe. The whole world revolves around them and they have this heightened self-consciousness. And so they cannot bear to go out of the house if their hair isn’t exactly right, and if they feel that the dress they have on at the moment or the dresses they have in the closet don’t do the right thing for them. Why? Because they are the center of their world and they believe all eyes are fixed upon them, they are {?} they can’t believe it doesn’t make difference to anyone whether they have a red or green dress on. Or how their hair is done up, no in their thinking they are the center of creation. And maturity comes when we realize that we are not. And we are Christians when we realize that the center of our consciousness is God and not ourselves.

Now Cain was guilty of this. He was the center of his consciousness, and his reaction when God confronted him with his crime “What hast thou done?” was first of all “am I my brother’s keeper?”. That question is an arrogant one, and there is no good answer to that, either “yes” or “no” to that question. This the essence of wicked. Cain said “why should I care for him, am I my brother’s keeper?”. In other word, I can do with him as I please, I have no responsibility towards him. But is it not again a demonic sin to say “I am my brother’s keeper”, to place yourself in a position of a God over your brother? The answer is “I am my brother’s brother, not his keeper”. And there is not too much difference between the man who says “I have the right to kill him” and the man who says “I have the man to keep him” he is taking control of his brother’s life, which he had no right to do. And then again Cain revealed that he was the be all and end all of his consciousness because when God confronted him with his crime his second answer was “My punishment Is greater than I can bear”`. God had not yet inflicted any punishment on him but God then proceeded to do so, the only instance in the Bible where God does not require capital punishment. He said “go ahead, I’ll protect you from anyone, be your own punishment”. Because Cain who had been at war with God and therefore at war with his neighbor, his brother, was also at war with himself; and before God had pronounced any judgment upon him he had already cried out “My punishment is to greater than I can bear”. And he felt every man’s hand lifted against him.

When a man is at war with God, he will be at war with his neighbor and he will be at war with himself. He cannot have communion with himself or his neighbor if he does not have communion with God. And ultimately the total breakdown of communion and of communication is what we call insanity, which when it is psychological is the end product of sin. Of total self-consciousness, of total self-absorption with one’s own consciousness; we talk about a mental breakdown, there is no breakdown in those to whom we call insane as far as their mind is concerned. There is a breakdown of communication, and that is why you can go to type of insanity or mental sickness, call it what you will that psychiatrist talk about whether its schizophrenia or paranoia or the manic depressive state, and you can find the logic of it very strictly charted out by all the psychiatry. And you can talk to any person who is in one of these states and there is a fixed logic to their system, but it’s a logic without communication with you. They have withdrawn into their own consciousness, which is the only thing that mattered. And they cannot be concerned with any other problems. And if it is at all brought upon their consciousness that something is happening to someone connected with them, it only had one meaning as it had one meaning for Cain when he was confronted with sin “my punishment it greater than I can bear” self pity. And self pity is the worst cancer under the son. There is no greater evil, no more devastating thing for any person to fall into then self pity, it destroys as nothing else destroys. And this is what characterizes these people with intensified self-consciousness. They are trapped in their own sin, trying to be their own God, living unto themselves. In some of the extreme forms of what is called mental sickness the person withdraws totally into themselves, as in the catatonic state, when they curl up in the prenatal condition and expect the world to provide for them. They’re totally conscious; they know everything that’s going around them, when they come out of it they can tell you everything that transpired from the first day to the last. But they feel no necessity to communicate with anyone; they withdraw totally into themselves and expect the world to care for them absolutely, to feed them, to die for them, to take care of them from sun-up to sun-down because they are the center of the universe.

And yet in it all their misery is intense, because when man is out of communion with God he is out of communion with his neighbor and he is out of communion with himself and there is for him no peace, absolutely none. Insanity is simply the progressive preference for self consciousness above God’s consciousness. In it man’s basic fact is himself and his will, not God and His work. And you can talk to people who are classified as mentally sick and you cannot interest them in anything except themselves. This is their entire world. Humanism is social insanity because humanism is a total societal and philosophical absorption of man with man. And in humanism all you have is a concentration on man, because man is the only standard, many is the only yardstick; and so you have an emphasis on human life, not on human responsibility, because {?} responsible if there be no God but to himself.

And thus every time in history that you have had humanism and a demand for human rights; and you had it in Greece, you had it in Rome, you had it at the end of the medieval period, you have had a breakdown of communication. The more men talk about human rights and human brotherhood the more you have a destruction of all race and of all brotherhood, and the more they began to demand that people get together and there be more communion and communication in the name of human rights the more you separate people and the more you break up every kind of fruit and destroy it. Men are driven further and further apart by humanism, and it is ironic that in this the era of what we call internationalism, there is less internationalism then there was in the last century. In the last century you could travel across any border virtually of every country in the world. You could go from England clear across China without any trouble. That was real internationalism. There were trade relations between every country with every other country in the world. Because there was an objective standard and man was not totally absorbed with himself. And today when we talk most about internationalism and world brotherhood and human rights, we have never for centuries seen men more badly separated. Harder boundaries drawn at every frontier, and men within each country more divided the one from the other. On the self replace of God in the consciousness of men you have not only what ends up in personal insanity but social insanity. And our humanism today in the politics of Washington and the politics of the UN are nothing more nor less from the Biblical perspective then social insanity. And because these organizations and the people within them have broken communion with God they are breaking communion one with another and with themselves.

The apostle James in James 4:1declared “From whence comes wars among you? Come they not hence even of your lusts at war in your members?” Is not your social disorder, your warfare a product of your personal warfare? Do not your wars arise first of all from the fact that you are at war with yourself and therefore his message was, as ours must be today, be reconciled with God. There is no hope until man is at peace with God, then and then only can he be at peace with his neighbor and with himself. And blood will be shed by man in revolt and there will be ever increasing loneliness in the soul of man and bitterness an ever growing sense of isolation in a world of many people as long as man is not in communion with God. And to overcome this fearful and growing evil around us we must believe the word of the Lord, the word of scripture, to be reconciled with God through the blood of Jesus Christ which cleanses us from all sin. This is the first step, and the Christian step to re-establishing communion with God, with man and within ourselves. Let us pray

Almighty God our heavenly Father we give thanks unto Thee that through Jesus Christ we have communion with Thee. That our Lord has spoken unto us the word of peace saying “peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you, not as the world giveth give I unto you, let not your heart be troubled neither let it be afraid in the world ye shall have much tribulation but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world” we thank You or Father for the word of peace, the word of victory. We thank Thee that the victory of Jesus Christ is our victory and that we need not be afraid in the face of all the storms that surround us and more ahead of us, for Thou Lord art our peace, our security and a very present help in time of need. Our God we thank Thee in Jesus name, Amen.

Any questions now?

[Audience member]

[Rushdoony] I have an article on the current American opinion and this is the fact that I call attention to on the subversion of American seminary. As I have indicated at other times I believe that our churches are one of the two most subverted institutions in the United States. I would rate them the most subversive, second would be the court. But the importance of understanding the subversion of the church is this, and it’s the fact that I think some of you have heard me speak before and it bears repeating. In the United States there are more people in church on any given Sunday then have ever voted in any national election. And these peoples are the property owners, the voters, the office holders, the professional people, the responsible people of the United States. And so long ago, well before the communist revolution, subversives had decided that the church must be captured and if the church can be captured then we can control the United States. So they very, very early became a target, and today of course they are predominately subverted and in the article I trace the subversion of the seminaries.

Yes?

[Audience Member] {?}

[Rushdoony] Well first of all, how are they in covenant with God ?

[Same audience member] There must be some people in the United Nations who believe in Jesus. I would never accept the fact that they {?}

[Rushdoony] Well first of all I would say possibly there are. I’ve read through a number of UN documents at the Stanford library on UN documents. I find no evidence of Christian thinking in what they do, and a great deal of evidence of anti-Christian thinking. Then the fundamental premise of the UN is this, that you can take everyone and bring them together and bring some good out of it, you can bring good and evil together. Communist nations and nations that are dedicated to are Republican form of government, and somehow by this amalgamation some good is going to follow. It’s like saying if we get the police and the criminal elements together we can have law and order. And this premise I believe is a very deadly one and destructive of anything. So that I think it’s highly questionable that any good can come out of the UN. Then basic to the UN’s philosophy is the concept of universal jurisdiction. Irrespective, this is in the charter, irrespective of whether anyone is a member or not; and irrespective of whether any nation ratifies a particular declaration of the UN. The UN claims universal jurisdiction. And this is an usurpation of tremendous dimension. They feel they have the right to interfere in any country under any circumstances; the only thing preventing them from exercising it is that they have insufficient power, as yet, to do so everywhere. So I think the UN, because it has this, first of all, mingling of good and evil without any qualification between the nation, a basically fallacious principle organization and second because it claims so universal a jurisdiction, it’s something that a Christian cannot very well accept.

[Audience member] {?}

[Rushdoony] Perhaps, but actually it hasn’t solved anything and it has complicated our world problems tremendously; and there has been never any lack of real expression on the part of the people, and more good was done in the last century by the free-flow of ideas and of trade than is being done by the UN. When you consider for example what free-enterprise did in the last century through trade in Africa and in Asia, anything that the UN could dream up by comparison is very feeble. And what the UN is doing is to destroy all these things because instead of emphasizing a grassroots growth and a national development, it’s approach is to act from the top down and it destroys everything. Now a few weeks ago when we were discussing family life I called attention to some statistics which I think are very revealing to what the UN is doing and American and Russian foreign aid also, in Africa. Since the African countries have gained independence. You have seen a tremendous breakdown of life in the rural areas. 30% of the population are in cities, and cities are few and between in Africa ten and fifteen years ago, but they have flocked to the cities. What for? Handouts, we have an international handout in the cities. In the country side what has taken place? Life has broken down, because in rural Africa, and I’m excluding the union of South Africa from the figures, in rural Africa 70% of the men are gone, they’re in the city. Living on beer and UN handouts and American and USSR handouts somewhat too; and it means that in the country side only the old men and the young boys are left. Africa is in a state of collapse because of this fact; radical social disintegration.

But what was happening in the old system? The traders would go into an area and they would, in return for say animal hides or goods grown by the natives, peanuts or whatever else it was, give them goods or money. They were stimulating the people’s development of Africa, they were civilizing it because it was an incentive to these people in order to get the traders to go out and clear a piece of land and farm it. Now we’ve destroyed all that, so that Africa today is worse off than it was a century and a half ago. And this comes from this kind of activity from the top. I believe that free enterprise is the greatest internationalizing agency the world has ever seen. And the UN, give it everything under the sun, every power under the sun, could never begin to touch a fraction of what free-enterprise has done and can do in every part of the world.

[Audience member]

[Rushdoony] A few years ago I would of agreed with you but I’ve increasingly come to doubt this exploitation idea. Exploitation can be used by the way, in both a good and bad sense.

[Audience member] {?}

[Rushdoony] Well the institution as it was introduced and came to the United States of course I think was, I think, a serious mistake for the United States. But for the Negros involved it was the best thing that ever happened to them. Because the Negro’s in the United States at their poorest are living better than most of the people of Europe and all of the people of the USSR and the people of Africa. And the riots were not caused by any evil they experienced but by their own sin. So that even where we did wrong in introducing, which we couldn’t have done without the help of the African’s, because it was African chiefs, let us never forget, who rounded up these people and sold them and they were bringing them to the corrals faster than the ships could bring them over. And that’s why they were packing them in, in such great numbers that sometimes a lot of them died and en route because the chiefs were glutting the market with them. But be that as it may, when you have a free situation, even evil are made to work for ultimate good; so that the situation that is developed now has been one of an evil that has come about in recent years because of government interference.

Now I’d like to take a little time if you’ll bear with me because I think this is important. A very important point and I am grateful to you for bringing this up because it gives me an opportunity.

Now you and I have 2000 years of Christian ancestry, approximately, behind us give or take a century or two; Because we are brought up with Western civilization. This has meant selective breeding. This has meant that certain people were regarded as unfit socially and fell to the bottom and gradually bred themselves out. Until WWI this is based on studies of birth records in Western Europe and the United States going back for centuries, this is what they found. Out of every 100 who were very devout Christians, and whose records you can find in the churches right straight through, and evidences in data concerning their faith, out of every hundred you had something like 385 children. Out of every 100 people who were good citizens but not Christians there were about 118 or 20 children. Out of every 100 who were consistently in and out of trouble with the law, the criminal element and the near criminal and vagrant element, the number of children were very low about 20-22, 23 to a hundred. Now what does this mean? It meant that in a Western Christian culture the Christians were the ones who were multiplying, the non-Christians barely so, and the worst elements were being bred out. This meant a progressive strengthening, improving, developing of Western self.

Now, you have however in Africa untold centuries where the people had been living in terms of incredible depravity. Go to Sir Samuel Baker’s two volumes on first explorations of the sources of the Nile, and as he describes, and He’s a Victorian, the conditions that he’s seen among people who have never seen a white man, had no contact with any other civilization, and it’s almost un-repeatable. These people lived in terms of the feelings that “if I don’t gorge on all the sex and all the food I can today, I may be dead tomorrow in somebody’s pot. Eaten myself, so all the sex, all the liquor, all the women I can get right now.” Now they were breeding in terms of this, this was survival.

Alright, the Negro was brought to America. Now when the slaves were freed, what happened? Immediately the selectivity of freedom began to set in. The Negro population in the United States from the Civil War to 1933 in a ration to the general population began to decline, why? Because the worst element among the Negroes were falling to the bottom, they were in and out of trouble with the law, they were not reproducing themselves. And the better elements would slowly rise to the top, so the Negro population was declining in its ration to the general population. And population experts figured that given a couple of hundred years most of the Negros would disappear from the United States just by this natural process. But those that survived would grow in ability through selectivity, through survival, and be able to merge with the general population, they would be accepted, they would meet the general standards. What happened? Well beginning with the New Deal we had a gigantic welfare program, today the worst element among the Negroes represent the most prolific element in the United States, those on welfare; so that the Negro element in our population is being destroyed today because it is no longer the better element that is growing numerically, but the worst element. And so today great harm has been done to the Negro, and it is predominately the welfare element among the Negroes that has been responsible for these social disturbances. So that government interference whether from Washington or the UN is destructive of social order. And this is what we have seen take place with respect to Negro in American light.

Yes?

[Audience member] {?}

[Rushdoony] Well our constitutions originally did far more than to represent God that is the state constitutions. They had various specific requirements that have all been dropped. The constitution did not mention God because the framers of the constitution knew it would never be ratified if it did. And the clergy men of all of the colonies felt so strongly that they insisted on the writing of the first amendment. In other words religion is not within the jurisdiction of the Federal government, it is a matter of State rights and originally Christianity was the established religion of every one of the 13 states. And 9 of the 13 had established churches, the other 3 of them had plural establishments and three had established Christianity as such as a religion of the state. But they were all, not only given mentioning God, but having various requirements of what you could believe. So that according to the constitution it is totally as it is written, within the providence of the state to say that it is going to be Christian or non-Christian, to require prayer or to require a particular kind faith for citizenship. This is of course [audio interruption] outlawed, it’s been in the papers lately for example that Maryland grand jury indictment is in process because in Maryland belief in God is necessary to serving on a grand jury. Similar actions took place last year in New Jersey. In New Jersey it was necessary, except in acts involving himself, to believe in God for his testimony to be acceptable. This was once universal in all the states.

Yes?

[Audience Member] Do you believe that Christianity is the only faith by which one can have communion with God?

[Rushdoony] Very definitely.

[Audience Member] What about the devotion and the devoutness of {?}

[Rushdoony] Well the Koran is very far away from our Bible. I have read the Quran clear through and I don’t believe there’s any comparison. Its doctrines are radically different, its morality I don’t think you would find acceptable, and the practice of the Mohammedans based on their morality I think are very speak ones. I feel that Mohammedanism represents one of the worst evils under the sun. Then if we are to follow the Bible with any kind of integrity, it makes it clear that this is the way of salvation and there is none other. Christianity is an exclusive religion. It says that truth is one, there are not several mutually contradictory things that are true, but truth cannot have a contradiction. And if we say that Christianity is true, and Mohammedanism is true we are saying that black is black but black is also white when we choose it to be so, we cannot reconcile things that are irreconcilable. And the Bible says there is none other name under heaven by which men may be saved then Jesus Christ. [Audio interruption]

[Audience Member] It is very difficult for me to reconcile my thinking that God would sacrifice 6 or 7 hundred million people who have never had the opportunity to know Him.

[Rushdoony] They all have had the opportunity to know Him, and they all do know Him, and the Bible asserts this emphatically not only in Romans 1, where this is the thesis of the Chapter, but many places else where it says that God is known to all men, and the invisible things of this world are made visible to them by their conscious, by their heart. And men has his witness crying out in them, and Paul says, and it’s translated “they hold the truth” but more accurately it can be translated “They hold down the truth, they sit on top of it, they suppress it, in unrighteousness. So that it is the sin of man that leaves this. Then we must not be guilty of the fallacy of seeing other people as ourselves. You know yourself as a person of good character and generally decent standards and tastes, but you cannot read, for example, the people in the heart of Africa in terms of that. They represent centuries of selective breeding, as I have indicated, in terms of a very different standard. You could go for example to some peoples, such as some of the people in North India; Pushtani people, I forget the names, [audience interruption] Pathans, is the more popular name for them. The Pathans for example, there’s very little in any library about them because it’s almost impossible to write a book that will pass the censors of our age. One of the commonest proverbs among the Pathans in the most merely clinical form that it can be rendered is that “a woman for children, a boy or a man for entertainment, but a goat for real pleasure.” Now, as I say this is the nearest thing, I haven’t given it literally, to being critical in their ideas and their thinking. They are a people so unspeakable that they just don’t write books about them. For one thing a traveler couldn’t get in and out of a {?} with Pathans very well.

Now this is way vast segments of the world are today. A few books are written on anthropology that tell about some of the everyday customs of vast areas of the world. And they are on the lost books section at the library in the lost book section. So first you have a suppression of the reality of most of mankind. Second we have in our background a romantic movement and the enlightenment with belief that all men are naturally, so we approach men in terms of these pre-suppositions and we believe that all these things we read are there {?} when they are not, these people know the truths, but they don’t want it.

Now I’ve spent 8.5 years among the Indians, I like them. But they’re not kind of people that are portrayed in our Romantic stories. These were Indians who lived 100 miles from any bus, town, or train. And while I was there, this was through the forties, I saw the old generation who saw white man coming across plain and fought him, who could tell me the technique of scalping and so on describe it in great detail. I saw him die and I buried, now these Indians were not the beautiful characters that were portrayed in the movies and in romantic stories. And there character was one that was pretty hard to report very readily without shocking people. And they knew there was a God, and they said “oh yes, we know there is a God” and this was the old generation as they were asked by the first men who went among them “but He’s far away and we don’t have to worry about Him”. They were suppressing knowledge, and they were guilty.

Yes?

[Audience member]

[Rushdoony] No, that’s nonsense. All races came, of course we believe if we take the Bible seriously, from Adam and Eve and I think the source perhaps of the ideas that you have referred to were in the writings of Homer Lea The Day of the Saxon and The Valor of Ignorance. Now general Lea was quiet a remarkable man, there are few people, has anyone here heard of Lea? Once in a while in Los Angeles you find someone if they’re in their 70 or 80’s who can remember Lea because he lived here, and was quiet a character. General Lea who was a general in the Chinese army said that the West was losing his faith and his character and was finished and that the time would come in not too many years when the leadership would pass to the times of Asia. That’s a very brief a description of his thesis.

Yes?

[Audience member]

[Rushdoony] All these potentialities where there in the original couple but there have been through the centuries various strains going off to an area and through selective breeding coming to have a particular strain developed as their concept of beauty. For example you can trace in the history of Western culture the changing face of man, in terms of changing standards. For example there had been times in Western history when a small nose was regarded as ugly. And for a long time there would be over a period of couple centuries, a breeding out of people with pug noses and small noses, and the fine Roman nose being the honorable, the beautiful nose, and then the nose falls into disfavor and you see it being gradually bred back. And you can trace the history of facial features in western society for say about 2500 years and see how certain things have been unpopular for a time, and then popular as girls were old maids because their nose was too long or too short. So this is a perfectly natural thing genetically. Our time is about up, but one thing more with regard to this matter of Homer Lea, a source of such thinking also is to be found in Spengler’s Decline of the West, Oswald Spengler. Now not in Spengler per sea Spengler was one who [Audio cut off]