The Satanic Alternative

The Second Temptation – Faith Versus Sight

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Doctrinal Studies

Lesson: The Second Temptation – Faith Versus Sight

Genre: Speech

Track: 59

Dictation Name: RR115G13

Location/Venue:

Year: 1960’s – 1970’s

Let us begin with prayer.

We thank thee, our Father, that we can come to thee in the confidence that thou art he dost hear and answer prayer. We thank thee, our Father, that as we face our todays and our tomorrows, we can rest in the assurance that because our times are in thy hands, we can rest and work, and wait in confidence. Teach us, our Father, to take hands off our lives and to commit them into thy keeping, to cease from fretting, to be still and to know that thou art God. Bless us now as we study thy word and grant us thy peace. In Jesus name. Amen.

Our scripture this afternoon is from the Gospel of St. Matthew 4:1-7. “Then was Jesus led up of the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil. And when he had fasted forty days and forty nights, he was afterward an hungred. And when the tempter came to him, he said, If thou be the Son of God, command that these stones be made bread. But he answered and said, It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.

Then the devil taketh him up into the holy city, and setteth him on a pinnacle of the temple, and saith unto him, If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself down: for it is written, He shall give his angels charge concerning thee: and in their hands they shall bear thee up, lest at any time thou dash thy foot against a stone. Jesus said unto him, It is written again, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.”

The temple is the focal point of the second temptation. In the first temptation, Satan said to our Lord, “If thou be a Son of God, command that these stones be made bread.” In other words, satisfy the economic wants of the people. Give them cradle-to-grave security. Make it unnecessary for them to have any kind of economic problem and prove thereby, that you are a fit Messiah for mankind, because this, said Satan, is mankind’s real problem. And so the temptation was to be a political messiah with a political program, a program of cradle-to-grave security, and our Lord rejected this temptation.

The second temptation closely allied to the first, had reference to the temple. “Then the devil taketh him up into the holy city, and setteth him on a pinnacle of the temple.” The temple has an important part in biblical history. It was preceded by the tabernacle. “And God declared,” in Exodus 25:8, “And let them make me a sanctuary that I may dwell among them.” God, as the invisible king of Israel, had his palace in the form of the tabernacle at the center of the camp, as the center of all their life. The Holy of Holies was their throne room, and from thence he ruled as the King of Israel. True, no place, neither tabernacle or temple, could ever contain God, and this thy fully knew. Indeed, in the prayer of dedication at the temple, Solomon said, “But will God in very deed dwell with men on the earth? behold, heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain thee; how much less this house which I have built!” And yet, the Holy of Holies was God’s throne room in a special sense, and a place of meeting between himself and the chosen representative of his people, and from thence the sacrifice, the proclamation of the law, the declaration of the righteousness and the purposes of God.

But the people came to trust in form rather than reality, and we find this continually round about us. Every Sunday, millions of Americans worship in countless churches where they have a form of godliness but where the power thereof is entirely lacking. They are beautiful structures, and they can say even as the people of Jerusalem said, “We have the truth priesthood, the priesthood from Levi,” or “We have Apostolic succession,” or “We have the true creed,” and so on and so forth. They have the form but not the reality, and they are content with the form, the form of the faith, the form of Americanism, the form.

People content themselves with these things, and Jeremiah, in the very years before the Fall of Jerusalem, warned the people saying, in Jeremiah 7:4, “Trust ye not in lying words saying The temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord.” This was their attitude. The temple of the Lord is with us. We are God’s people. We are the cream of all creation. How could anything happen to us? How can we suffer or undergo captivity, or our nation be overthrown in view of these things? And the warning of Jeremiah was, “Trust ye not in lying words.” The temple shall be destroyed, and Jesus, as he left the temple for the very last time, turned to his disciples in Matthew 24:2, and pointed to the temple and said, “See not all these things? verily I say unto you, There shall not be left here one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down.” And it happened. Not a stone left standing upon another.

The whole of the temple, a structure that had been years and years in construction, a huge edifice, some of the courts of which alone could seat, or contain, 5,000 and more people, was totally destroyed, every stone systematically taken down by the Romans, and the whole area sown with salt, ploughed up, because of their anger at its bitter resistance, and this, too, in terms of a fundamental principle of all of scripture. Judgment begins at the house of God. This is the word of God. Judgment begins as the House of God, and so it is, over and over and over again, God takes a people, and God takes a church that has the form but not the reality, and there begins his judgment, because they’re an offense to him. They have so much and are so little.

Satan came to our Lord, and said, “If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself down (from this, the pinnacle of the temple): for it is written, He shall give his angels charge concerning thee: and in their hands they shall bear thee up, lest at any time thou dash thy foot against a stone.” The answer of our Lord to Satan, the first time, was, “It is written.” He stood in terms of scripture, and so Satan comes back at him with scripture. If it’s scripture you want, I’ll give you scripture, but he misquotes the psalmist, because the psalmist, in a messianic psalm, declares that the Messiah, in the discharge of his duty and the proclamation of God’s word and God’s warning, should be fully protected, so that God would not suffer him to dash his foot against a stone. The scriptures indeed declare that the Messiah, in the fullness of time, would give his life a ransom for many, and we know that more than once before the appointed time, the leaders of the people purposed to take him and to kill him, but on one occasion very early in his ministry, a mob sought to take him and throw him off the edge of a cliff, but God did not suffer him to dash his foot against a stone before the appointed time, and the words of the psalmist simply said that in the discharge of his ministry, he would be under the total protection and providence of God. It did not say that he had the right to make demonstrations by throwing himself from a pinnacle of the temple and expecting the angels to catch him before he hit the ground. This is what Satan called for.

Here, in the temple, you will have crowds to witness this miracle. On almost any day, the crowds in the temple ran into the thousands upon thousands. On many an occasion, there would be crowds of several hundred thousand pouring in and out of the temple area, the many courts and grounds, because it covered many acres. What a dramatic occasion for such a miracle. These pilgrims coming from all parts of the world here to Jerusalem. Think of the impact. Cast thyself down. Why? Make it unnecessary for them to have faith. Give them scientific knowledge. Enable them to walk by sight. Prove to them that you are able to command supernatural power, and to do anything on demonstration so that it is unnecessary for them to have faith.

In the first temptation, make it unnecessary for men to face any kind of problems in this world. Give them cradle-to-grave security. In the second temptation, make it unnecessary for man to be tested and tried and put to the acid test of his faith, to be compelled to walk by faith, as seeing the invisible, but enable him to see it, and our Lord answered, “It is written again, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.” The word “tempt” has, as an important aspect of its meaning, and central here, the idea of test or trial. You shall not test, or put to a trial, the Lord your God.

Now, what Satan proposed was a complete reversal of the whole order of being. God can put man to the test, to the trial. God can say to man, “I am that I am. I am the omnipotent, all righteous, all wise God, and you must walk by faith, that because I am God, the very nature of the universe will sustain you as you walk in confidence, in obedience to me, in righteousness and holiness, and in godly knowledge.” But what Satan says is that it should be the other way around. God must have faith in man, and man has the right to say to God, “I am righteous, and holy, and perfect, and good, and every intention I have is perfectly wonderful, and you must believe in me in spite of what you see me do. You must believe no matter what I do, no matter what sin I commit, that my heart is perfect, and I’m alright within, and therefore, you must have faith, faith in me, no matter what test I put your faith to, no matter what I put you through in the course of my life. You, God, must have faith in me.” This is the implication, the plain meaning of the temptation. Satan says, “Thou shalt put the Lord thy God to trial. Thou shalt tempt him. Thou shalt test him, to purify him.”

Now, the meaning of pure is a very interesting one. Our word for pure is a different one than the Latin, so it fails to convey the accurate biblical meaning. When we talk about purity, our word comes from the Latin ‘puris’ which means “fresh, virginal, untouched,” as it were, cellophane-wrapped. But that’s the not the biblical meaning. The Latin word conveys the idea of a new-born lamb, something young and untouched, and unspotted by the world, but the biblical meaning for pure is associated with grey hairs, and with age, because the biblical word for pure is literally “refined, tested by fire,” and it refers to the same kind of process used in smelting gold, thrown into the fire so that all the impurities are burned out, and in the biblical sense, purity is not something that belongs to the child, but to the man or woman of grey hairs that is tested, and has stood the testing, and the dross is being burned out, and the gold is increasingly in evidence, and what Satan says is, “God does not have the right to try us. God does not have the right to test us, to require us to have faith in him, and to produce the gold in us, but we shall tempt the Lord our God. We shall put him to the test to see if there is any gold in him, if he believes in us. That’s the test.” And our Lord said, “It is written again, thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.”

Again, he quoted scripture. In this case, Deuteronomy 6;16-18, wherein Moses said, “Ye shall not tempt the Lord your God, as ye tempted him in Massah. Ye shall diligently keep the commandments of the Lord your God, and his testimonies, and his statutes, which he hath commanded thee. And thou shalt do that which is right and good in the sight of the Lord: that it may be well with thee, and that thou mayest go in and possess the good land which the Lord sware unto thy fathers.” And Moses, in so speaking, was referring as he stated, to Massah. “Ye shall not tempt the Lord your God, as ye tempted him in Massah.”

This has reference to the incident described in Exodus in which the children of Israel, as they journeyed through the wilderness, according to Exodus 17, found themselves faced with a stretch in their journey where there was no water. They had been delivered miraculously, repeatedly, again and again and again by God, but this was not enough for them, and so they cried out, they complained about the fact that, “Here we are. No water right here where we’re camping. It might be miles to the next point where there is water,” and so they said, “Is the Lord among us or not?” Exodus 17 said, “Is the Lord among us or not? If God is with us, then let him demonstrate himself. How dare he ask us to walk by faith. How dare he put us to the test here in the wilderness. We must have perfect security, or we want no part of him.”

Men still say, “Is the Lord among us or not?” And they try to build churches and societies which will give them what they want, signs of God’s presence, because the God they worship is a God whom they can put to the test, and they are content, therefore, with a society which gives them everything and asks nothing of them. Which says, “We will provide you with cradle-to-grave security. We will give you beautiful churches where you will be lulled into complacency by a beautiful choir, and an organ, and lovely architecture, where you will feel that this is a world without any testing, and nothing will ever trouble you. Nothing.” This is the world they want, and if they cannot find a God or a false God to give it to them, they go to politicians and ask for it, this society of Satan. A world in which they can say, “Is the Lord among us or not,” and the sign that there is a God is cradle-to-grave security. No problems, no testing, no trial for man. God alone can be put to the test.

Therefore, let the Lord show himself if he be God in healings, in numbers, in pomp and circumstance, and everything our heart desires, and if there is going to be a true social order, a godly social order, it’s got to provide us with everything also, or we deny that it is Christian, and so it is we live in a world today in which people increasingly are incapable of taking the faintest trial, because it’s not the kind of world they believe in.

Some years ago, I came very near having a serious accident in that I was driving down a highway, and the car in front of me, driven by a woman, dropped suddenly. I stopped in time to avoid anything serious. I just barely touched her rear bumper, and the truck driver in back of me barely stopped in time to avoid wiping me out, and there was quite a bit of brakes behind him. What had happened? The woman in front of me had three dogs on the front seat with her, and the one dog was having the sniffles and she was rushing him to the vet and it was a dramatic experience for her, and the dog whimpered suddenly, and it was more than she could bare, she said, and she just had to stop immediately and pick him up. This is not unusual.

Within the past week, I heard of one party not too far from here, where the guests did not see much of their host or hostess. They were in the back room all evening. Their dog was not well. This is the kind of world people want, really, in varying degrees. Some may laugh at this kind of extreme because that’s not their cup of tea, but they want a world in which there are no problems, in which all the problems have to be on God’s side, bearing with us, and believing in us in the face of all these things, a world in which, if anything goes wrong, they can say, “Is the Lord with us or not?” A world in which they reserve the right to put God to the test at any time so they can say to him, “Prove yourself to us,” but the Lord does not reveal himself to us except through his word, the scripture, and his incarnate word, his Son Jesus Christ, and he declares unto us from of old through the mouth of his prophet Zechariah, Habakkuk, and others, through the mouth of our Lord, St. Paul, and the Apostles, “The just shall live by faith.”

When St. Thomas fell at our Lord’s feet, having seen the nail prints in his hands, and the spear thrust in his side, and said, “My Lord and my God,” our Lord said, “Blessed are they who having not seen, shall believe.” The blessings upon faith.

Thus, we are called upon to walk by faith, to know that because it is we who are the creatures and not God, it is we who shall be tested and tried, but if we stand in the testing and trial, we shall be purified, become sanctified, become increasingly gold in the sight of God, and we shall be blessed, and the blessing of the Lord, it maketh rich, and he addeth no sorrow to it.

Therefore, the summons of the Gospel is not, “Come and see this scientific demonstration of the Lord, and accept it,” but “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved. Thou and thine household. Let us pray.

Our Lord and our God, we give thanks unto thee for thy word, and we thank thee that thy testing of us is not beyond that which we are able to take, that thou art mindful of our frailties, and loving in thy discipline, and unto the end that we may stand before thee, perfected in Christian manhood. Bless us, O Lord, in thy service, and in thy calling. In Jesus name. Amen.

Before we have our first question, I’d like to answer one that was raised last time with respect to debt. There are so many verses in the scripture concerning debt that I felt it would be better to have a selected few. First of all, with regard to debt, you have several passages in the law; Exodus 22:25, Deuteronomy 15:1-11, Deuteronomy 23:19-20, that is, 23:19-20, and Deuteronomy 28:12 and 44, which make it clear, as does also Leviticus 25:36-37, that between Christian and Christian, interest is not to be taken, and that the Christian is to avoid debt living. Paul summarizes this in Romans 13:8-9. “Owe no man any thing, but to love one another.”

Then, Proverbs 22:7 makes it clear that, “He that is borrower is servant to the lender,” and the word servant there means “slave,” and can be translated slave. This does not mean that interest is sinful, or illegal, or an improper business, because the Bible is realistic. It recognizes that many people are going to be slaves, and I do not believe you can have any sound social order unless you recognize that many people have a slave mentality, and unless you build your social order on that reality. This country did, and it had certain limitations upon suffrage. People who did not own property could not vote. People who received any kind of welfare could not vote, because they were not free men, legally, and the Bible recognizes that many people are going to live that way, and there is no harm in dealing with reality, honestly and fairly, and therefore, lending money to them, investing money in something which loans money to people who live according to this standard.

Now, one of the things that people fail to understand about the Bible is that it is strict in its requirements for believers, but it recognizes that unbelievers often have another standard. For example, the laws of meat in the Mosaic law are very strict, and they are basically the sanitary laws we live by today in our culture, because we have imbibed the sanitary standards given in the Mosaic law, but a Hebrew was permitted to sell meat that had died, say a cow that had died, to a Canaanite who saw nothing wrong with such meat and actually, often preferred it, as long as it was an honest business deal. In other words, here was a particular type of meat, there was no dishonesty about the representation of it. He said, “Here was a cow that died. You like this kind of meat? Alright, I’ll sell it to you for so much.” You could not impose your standard upon him. You could not say, “Because I am forbidden to eat this meat, you are forbidden.” No, that is not a part of the biblical law. So that debt living, for those who are, by nature, slaves, is fine, but we are called to freedom, and to be called to freedom means to live without debt, and so I believe the Christian has the obligation to get out of debt and to stay out of debt.

Now, do we have a question about the lesson? Yes?

[Audience] {?} are you in debt?

[Rushdoony] Yes, because you have borrowed against something you have, so that you have really surrendered ownership to a degree, in putting up the collateral. Yours is a tentative ownership, and it is a form of slavery. There is a real freedom in being debt free. I’ve been in both conditions, and I can tell you that I know, since I came to realize what the Bible said, I’ve had a real freedom, because whatever my income is, it goes for my current living, not for past sins, as it were. Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] In such an instance, you are not dealing with a Christian personally. You are dealing with an institution, and it’s up to the individual Christian who goes there, whether he wants to borrow or not, but the Christian is told, the believer, that debt is only to be for emergency purposes and not more than for a period of six years, incidentally. In other words, you cannot mortgage your future, or your country’s future, or your children’s future. Emergency debts for short terms only. That’s the biblical law. Yes?

[Audience] When a Christian becomes aware of the banking institutions as used and created in the United States are basically debt {?} structures, would he then be biblically allowed to do business with construction{?}?

[Rushdoony] Yes, because while I considered it increasingly an unsound business, as long as it’s a sound business, he cannot compel them to live by his standard. You see, this is the same point as with regard to the meat, but today, the poorest form of investment is in money, really, because consider this, supposing you have $100,000 and you put it in the bank. Now, that’s really supposing, but let’s suppose it for a moment. You get say, between four and five percent interest. Now, on top of that, you are taxed for your interest. On top of that, inflation annually now is four percent, so you’ve lost four percent right off the bat, haven’t you, of your capital? Then, you are taxed, so that your interest today is taxed and inflation takes a four percent, so that you are losing even though you are getting interest. Your capital is decreasing. So that money is a very poor investment today, strictly from the financial perspective, but that’s not a moral question. That is a commercial question.

[Audience] My question was just a little different than that. Maybe I should clarify that. Seeing as to the bank, upon the deposit of my money, then re-creates, on the basis of that money, a multiple factor thereof, in the form of bank credit {?}, and therefore, is it a fraud? And uses debt to make purchases. For instance, it purchases bonds, government bonds, stock appropriations, etc., and it keeps multiplying {?} this thing up {?} by its centralized structure, but the fact that it is a fraud, and when the Christian becomes aware of this, is he then permitted biblically to deposit his wealth dollar in this bank?

[Rushdoony] I think I answered that, by reference to the matter of meats. In other words, you cannot take a non-Christian culture and expect Christian standards of it, and just as you deal realistically with people who will eat meat from a dead cow, so people who are going to live in terms of debt and in terms of debt money, you’ve got to deal realistically with the situation, and you cannot change that kind of world by saying, “I don’t like it, I’m against it,” and so on. You can only change it as you change the people in it. As long as they are slaves to sin, they’re going to be slaves to one another, and the Bible says that slavery of this sort is not the great evil, but spiritual slavery is the key evil, and all things {?} from. So that if we are going to say, these are the things we’re going to wage war against primarily, we’re going to have to get out of the world, but we’re living in the world and we’ve got to say, sin, apostasy from God, is the key evil, and this is what we’ve got to deal with, and we’re going to take the world realistically, and we can’t start having scruples about all these facts that are faulty or wrong, or partly wrong, in the world. Then, we face an impossible situation and the Christian has to be, say, a colonists like some of these socialist colonies in the past, in the last centuries, which withdrew completely from society and tried to live unto themselves, and it was an impossibility. Yes?

[Audience] Is the problem with the Amish now, {?}

[Rushdoony] The Amish have a different problem, but of course, they are a group that have withdrawn. They do not believe in voting. They totally separate themselves, but their problem, of course, is that they are maintaining what has always been an American right, the right to educate their own children, and it’s only been in recent years that the state has claimed this right. In the first fifty years of our American history, as I pointed out before, there was no such thing as public school. They were all Christian schools, and for many, many years after the public schools started, it was commonplace for many mothers to educate their own children and then send them for the upper grades, or for high school, to a public school. That, in fact, began in the Puritan days. In the Puritan, or Colonial era, a mother didn’t send her child to school to learn to read and write. She sent him to school after he learned to read and write, and she taught him to read and write between the ages of two and four, depending on the child, and he started at five in the local school, and that’s why they didn’t start with the elementary things, and they very often learned Hebrew and Greek when they were six and seven years old. The basis skill of reading, they had mastered at home, just about the same time they learned to talk. Well, that continued in America for a long time, and the Amish, from the beginning, there was no question about it, they were people who wanted to have the entire education of their children, and the state, of course, is saying, all the children must be educated in terms of what we want.

Now, this is going to be increasingly a problem, not only with the Amish, but with all of us, because as Mrs. Melby{?} and Mrs. Becker have been aware of and are working on, they’ve attended the meetings, a group here has brought up a measure before the school board to have some values taught in schools. In other words, religion, and what is the religion they propose to teach? They’ve gotten their first statement accepted, received by the board. Not voted on pro or con, but simply received, and they’re going to go to the board again to ask that this one world religion, basically, be made compulsory as the value teaching in the schools. So that we are increasingly going to face this fact, the schools are religious institutions, but they are anti-Christian institutions.

On top of that, there is the demand, increasingly, that all schools be taken over by the state, and of course, Unesco has such a measure. It has been introduced at least once into Congress. It has not been acted on, but this would place every school in every member country under Unesco, so that the curriculum, the faculty, everything would be controlled by them. The Amish are just a first-run on this type of program, the total control of education. This is going to be harder for them to put through than anything else, because at this point, they have the liberals against them at many points also, and it’s ironic what has brought the liberals into the act, fighting mad in various parts of the country. A lot of their kids have Beetle haircuts, and the schools have said they have to have a haircut before they can come to school, so there have been committees formed in various cities by the liberals to fight this infringement of the civil rights of their children, and to start declaring that the schools are getting too big for their britches, and too authoritarian. So, there have been a lot of little crossfires like this, but the schools have stirred up a few too many hornets. This matter, for example, of compelling all the children to buy lunches, which developed in one Eastern community, is another thing. They’ve moved a little too fast and have aroused people, but they’re going to continue moving. Yes?

[Audience] If we do not, by the way, and if we do not separate ourselves from the banking situation {?} what are we going to do when the condition which you have just described comes about? Do we separate at that point or do we give in and become part of it?

[Rushdoony] Well, we have to move in terms of wisdom, and right now I would say, in terms of practical wisdom. The poorest investment you can have is money. So, I would say as soon as you can get your money out of a bank, beyond what you need for emergency reasons, and into something like land, or gold and silver, or any other form of investment which is a hedge against the total breakdown of money, you are wise. So that we have to be governed by wisdom in these things, and I do believe we are facing the breakdown of money. So money is a poor investment. That’s one I don’t have to worry about, but it is a poor investment, and virtually every conservative economist today has made that point. Money is becoming the worse investment possible, and the purchase of silver, and other things, is becoming fantastic.

Now, I was talking yesterday by long distance with a friend in the Bay Area who is quite an expert in these matters, and he was telling me that the largest coin shop, perhaps in that area and perhaps in all the West, and last week received 105,000 silver dollars. They bought them up from someone who had that huge a reserve. Within less than three days, they sold every last one of them for $1.35 a piece. Now, they didn’t even have to advertise that they had received them. As soon as the word got around, people were there converting their paper, withdrawing it out of the bank, and converting it into silver dollars, and there is a good reason for it. A gold coin from ancient Rome, or Czarist Russia, or the Kaiser’s Germany is still as good as it was then, and better. It has a greater purchasing power, but you can have some paper Rubles and paper Marks and they’re worthless. I had one somewhere for 10,000 Marks, $5,000, and it’s just a souvenir. Yes?

[Audience] Why is there so much value put on the stamps then?

[Rushdoony] Because people are going to every kind of non-monetary means of investment to protect themselves, and some people are turning to stamps. There’s a big sale of jewelry now, such as you have around your neck, because people want something that is gold or silver, as a substitute for money, and this is the reason for stamp collecting. Now, until 1960, the collecting of stamps was a far more popular hobby than the collecting of coins, but as the dollar has become worthless, the paper dollar, in 60, coin and stamp shops found that their biggest business was with coins, and now, they are a runaway thing.

This past week, I was in one California community of six hundred people, and they had a sizable coin shop. Now, that’s what’s happening. As against coins, stamps are, I would say secondary, very secondary, and the trouble with stamps is that in a time of crisis, nobody is too interested in paying you what they are worth. However, what some people are doing is, on the assumption that the United States, in some form will continue, as stamps will be worth something. So, unused sheets retain their face value as stamps, and if they are the higher priced issues, and of the commemoratives, they can increase in their value to collectors, so some people are investing in them. I wouldn’t prefer that as an investment, however. Yes?

[Audience] I have a brochure from {?} Manhattan Beach that they are forming a system of barter. They will exchange anything you have {?} whatever you want to eliminate money.

[Rushdoony] There are a number of such groups of people who have set up a barter system to avoid taxation. They are potentially subject to taxation, but this is not new. It’s being done in various areas.

[Audience] {?} British Israel. I have seen {?}

[Rushdoony] I don’t know. There are a number of groups like that. Some are connected with one or another organization. Many are just independent groups. It’s a complicated things, however, to get involved in. Yes?

[Audience] I’d like to return to this gentleman’s question. If I understood his question correctly, {?} the Amish, I wonder if he meant about the Christian taking their stand with certain things in the schools, for instance, that is in violation of Christian principles, should we or should we not do that {?} or go along with.

[Audience] This is what I meant.

[Rushdoony] Oh, I see.

[Audience] I think that’s what {?} he implied, and I wondered what about that?

[Rushdoony] I think we have to make a stand against what is going on in the public schools. First, we must make a stand against what is going on and second, we’ve got to work to create Christian schools as well. So that we try to defend the present in the schools, knowing that it’s basically statist, but begin creating another kind of institution as rapidly as we can. So that we are fighting, as it were, a rear guard action in the public schools, but we’ve got to fight it, all the way, and I believe we have a duty to do so.

I was interested, there was another question a couple weeks ago about flying saucers, and I said at the time I had been given some materials from a flying saucers convention held up north, and this is the sheath of material, and I went through it, and read it all this last week. It was very interesting because these messages they get from these flying saucers people, and by special broadcast from outer space, tell us about the same thing that the UN and other organizations tell us. That we should have one world brotherhood, and we should ban the atom bomb and everything else, and all get together and have sweetness and light, and it will be just perfect if we learn to live together. It’s quite an interesting thing. I don’t know why they, of course, they have to go to outer space to get this message. I can get it all around me any time I turn on the radio, but I was interested in one of the people who had an important part in this thing, because it was something new to me. I wasn’t aware that we had such a distinguished person in our midst, but I understand yes, she is in Los Angeles, and was in this public school conference, too, in person. It’s Maria Graciette Eliott. The Maria Creative Womanhood Foundation, the worship of the divine mother, and you get a prayer to the mother, the divine mother, and you get a picture of Maria Graciette, as well, on all of these things, and it isn’t altogether clear whether she’s the divine mother, or the divine representative of the divine mother, but you see how well protected we are for the future. We have the divine mother, or her right-hand worker right here in Los Angeles. Peace, it is wonderful.

End of tape