Studies in Political Philosophy

Scapegoats

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Political Studies

Lesson: Scapegoats

Genre: Speech

Track: 02

Dictation Name: RR124A2

Location/Venue:

Year: 1960’s-1970’s

Almighty God, our heavenly Father, we thank thee that we can come to thee as sons and heirs of the kingdom of grace. We thank thee that thou hast called us to a glorious destiny in Jesus Christ, that thou hast given us such rich promises in him concerning our life here, and concerning the world to come. Confirm us, establish us, and strengthen us in this faith unto the end that we may serve thee as we ought and ever magnify thy holy name. In Jesus name. Amen.

Our scripture this afternoon is Leviticus 16:1-22. The Service for the Day of Atonement, or Yom Kippur. “And the Lord spake unto Moses after the death of the two sons of Aaron, when they offered before the Lord, and died; and the Lord said unto Moses, Speak unto Aaron thy brother, that he come not at all times into the holy place within the vail before the mercy seat, which is upon the ark; that he die not: for I will appear in the cloud upon the mercy seat. Thus shall Aaron come into the holy place: with a young bullock for a sin offering, and a ram for a burnt offering. He shall put on the holy linen coat, and he shall have the linen breeches upon his flesh, and shall be girded with a linen girdle, and with the linen mitre shall he be attired: these are holy garments; therefore shall he wash his flesh in water, and so put them on. And he shall take of the congregation of the children of Israel two kids of the goats for a sin offering, and one ram for a burnt offering. And Aaron shall offer his bullock of the sin offering, which is for himself, and make an atonement for himself, and for his house. And he shall take the two goats, and present them before the Lord at the door of the tabernacle of the congregation. And Aaron shall cast lots upon the two goats; one lot for the Lord, and the other lot for the scapegoat. And Aaron shall bring the goat upon which the Lord's lot fell, and offer him for a sin offering.

“But the goat, on which the lot fell to be the scapegoat, shall be presented alive before the Lord, to make an atonement with him, and to let him go for a scapegoat into the wilderness. And Aaron shall bring the bullock of the sin offering, which is for himself, and shall make an atonement for himself, and for his house, and shall kill the bullock of the sin offering which is for himself: and he shall take a censer full of burning coals of fire from off the altar before the Lord, and his hands full of sweet incense beaten small, and bring it within the vail: and he shall put the incense upon the fire before the Lord, that the cloud of the incense may cover the mercy seat that is upon the testimony, that he die not: and he shall take of the blood of the bullock, and sprinkle it with his finger upon the mercy seat eastward; and before the mercy seat shall he sprinkle of the blood with his finger seven times.

“Then shall he kill the goat of the sin offering, that is for the people, and bring his blood within the vail, and do with that blood as he did with the blood of the bullock, and sprinkle it upon the mercy seat, and before the mercy seat: and he shall make an atonement for the holy place, because of the uncleanness of the children of Israel, and because of their transgressions in all their sins: and so shall he do for the tabernacle of the congregation, that remaineth among them in the midst of their uncleanness. And there shall be no man in the tabernacle of the congregation when he goeth in to make an atonement in the holy place, until he come out, and have made an atonement for himself, and for his household, and for all the congregation of Israel.

“And he shall go out unto the altar that is before the Lord, and make an atonement for it; and shall take of the blood of the bullock, and of the blood of the goat, and put it upon the horns of the altar round about. And he shall sprinkle of the blood upon it with his finger seven times, and cleanse it, and hallow it from the uncleanness of the children of Israel.

“And when he hath made an end of reconciling the holy place, and the tabernacle of the congregation, and the altar, he shall bring the live goat: and Aaron shall lay both his hands upon the head of the live goat, and confess over him all the iniquities of the children of Israel, and all their transgressions in all their sins, putting them upon the head of the goat, and shall send him away by the hand of a fit man into the wilderness: and the goat shall bear upon him all their iniquities unto a land not inhabited: and he shall let go the goat in the wilderness.”

Everywhere and in all places men are deeply burdened by sin. In every society, in every culture, this inner burden of sin is the major problem. Men do not admit to this condition. They claim outwardly to be happy and carefree but deep within, man has this tension, this unresolved conflict which is a product of his rebellion, his apostasy from God.

As a result, this inner tension, created by his apostasy, by his sin, manifests itself in shame and guilt. There is not a single society anywhere in the world that is without either shame or guilt. In fact, cultural anthropologists who are by no means Christians are actually able to and do classify cultures in terms of guilt or shame. As a result, you have cultures divided into these two main categories: guilt cultures and shame cultures.

Let us analyze, first of all, the shame culture. In the shame culture, man, deeply disturbed over this inner tension, attempts to evade it by a social lie. As he meets people, he will go through a ritual confession of his unworthiness whereby, in a sense, he acknowledges his condition, but this ritual confession actually is a pandering to a sense of pride, because social convention requires the other person immediately to assure him that he is a most honorable gentleman and it is a pleasure to be in his presence, and that he is a great man, a marvelous man, and the very like of a sun in your presence. Face, this way, is maintained. Oriental cultures, of course, are especially prominent among shame cultures, and in the Orient, it is commonplace for a man, as he introduces himself or as he meets a friend, and this is prescribed etiquette, to speak of himself as “your most unworthy servant, a most miserable man,” so highly honored that you would set foot inside his door, and then you immediately must assure him how unworthy you are and what a great privilege it is to be in the presence of so marvelous and auspicious a person. In this way, there is the ritual confession of unworthiness, and the social convention of taking all men as wonderful and honorable personages.

When this social convention is pierced, when it is broken, and the person’s face is destroyed, the consequence is a collapse, a psychological collapse and the necessity for suicide, because the person now has been openly put to shame, and the whole inner tension is broken.

I recall some years ago talking to an Assiniboine Sioux woman. The Sioux Indians were, like many an Indian tribe, shame cultures. This woman told me of an incident that had happened in her family some few years previously. Two brothers, sons of the same mother, were unhappily in differing positions in relationship to their mother, for the mother disliked the one son and preferred very openly and markedly the other in their personal, private relations. On one occasion, the son who was not favored came in from hunting, and the mother was sitting with a number of her cronies, and he remarked that his moccasin was torn and in need of mending. She turned to him angrily and said, “Can’t you see I’m talking with my friends? Why are you bothering me?” She openly put him to shame. He went a few yards away out of sight, sang his death song, and killed himself. He had lost face. He had openly been shamed. This is the shame culture, and its affect on the human personality.

In the United States, in recent years, we have been moving from a guilt culture to a shame culture. In a number of books, such a Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd, this transition has been clearly charted. The Lonely Crowd points out how we were once inner directed. Now, Americans are increasingly group directed. Once we were production-center. Now we are consumption-centered. Once we were governed by morals. Now we are governed by morale, the group, so that we are moving into a shame culture very rapidly, and the rising rate of suicide is a good evidence that a shame culture is in rapid formation around us. This then, is the characteristic of a shame culture.

In the guilt culture, man again is burdened with this tremendous tension over the fact of his sin, his apostasy from God, but instead of moving in terms of this social convention and the sense of shame, he moves in terms of another kind of social convention: guilt. In this case, however, instead of acknowledging his guilt in relationship to God, he pleads, as so many criminals do, guilty to the lesser crime to escape the more serious crime. So that, in a guilt culture, there is an endless debunking, an endless confession of all kinds of real and imagined crimes in order to evade the central crime. So that, in a guilt culture, you have an endless debunking of your history, you have an endless debunking of your relationship to other people, or to minority groups. So that, in American history we are told we are guilty in relationship to the Indians, we are guilty in relationship, some have even said, to the British, guilty in our relationship to the Negro, guilty in our relationship to the Mexicans, guilty in our relationship to the whole world in one way or another. In a guilt culture, you have this endless confession of real or imagined crimes, and of endless breast-beating and sense of guilt over these things to escape the greater crime. Plead guilty to the lesser crime in hope of escaping the judgment of the greater crime.

The guilt culture again is a haunted sin-ridden culture, and like the shame culture, leaves its members incapable of enjoying life. In both cultures, guilt and shame cultures, men are unable to resolve this tension that comes from the burden of sin, and from the burden of guilt and shame. They indulge in, as we saw last week, endless masochistic activities of self-atonement, trying to pay for their sins somehow, but this fails, but somehow, sin must be dealt with, and so they then indulge at the same time as their masochistic activities, in another kind of activity whereby they attempt to get rid of their sin. They look for scapegoats, someone on whom they can load their sin. Someone whom they can blame, on whom they can project all their inner tension, all the inner burden of sin. They want a sin-bearer, a scapegoat, so they can say, “He is responsible,” or “They are responsible, and all my tension, all my condition, all that I have committed and done is not my fault but their fault. It is he or they who is responsible for my condition.”

As a result, masochism and sadism go hand in hand. Self-punishment and the projection of guilt onto others and their punishment, and so men perpetually dream of life, and are unable to life it, and thus, men talk endlessly about what they’re going to do someday when they can really begin to live, and they’re never really alive. They are the living dead, marching through this world, dreaming endless daydreams about life but incapable of ever living. Jesus Christ said, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No man cometh unto the Father but by me.” “I am come that ye might have life, and that ye might have it more abundantly.” The Gospels all declare that his coming was hailed by John the Baptist as the day for the forgiveness and remission of sins, and man’s deliverance from the burden of guilt and shame which is attendant upon sin, and how tragic it is that the world still continues burdened by guilt and shame.

A Christian culture must begin with the atonement. It must begin with the recognition of the essence of the Christian life is a good conscience before God through the blood of Jesus Christ. We are called upon by all of the scriptures to enter into the joy of the Lord, to be guests at the wedding of the Lamb. The Old Testament had but one fast day a year. It is significant that Phariseeism, which was a guilt culture, had two fasts in a week. It was involved in endless self-punishment, and our Lord said it was not the day nor the time any longer for his disciples to fast, because the Bridegroom had come and he was the Bridegroom, and believers are guests at the wedding, and a wedding is no place for mourning, and the Christian’s life is no place nor time for mourning. He is a wedding guest, and he is given rich promises concerning this life in the face of all problems and troubles, and a glorious promise concerning the world to come.

The Day of Atonement ritual, Yom Kippur, sets forth God’s answer to the problem of what to do with guilt, made known to his people from the day of their calling as a nation. On that day, the tenth day of the seventh month, the high priest, freshly bathed, garbed in totally white raiment, offered sacrifices for the atonement of God’s people. Two goats were brought forth. One goat was sacrificed and his blood sprinkled upon the alter in atonement for the sins of the people, and also sprinkled upon the live goat. The two goats were, in essence, one sacrifice. They represented Christ, and the high priest represented Christ. The high priest then laid his hands upon the live goat upon whom the blood of the sacrificed goat had also been sprinkled, and confessed all the sins of the people, and all their transgressions and trespasses and iniquities. They were all laid upon that live goat, and the life goat was taken, as scapegoat, out of the boundaries of the land into the wilderness, and there abandoned, and thereby God declared that so, through the atoning work of his great high priest and sacrifice, Jesus Christ, sin would be separated from the land and from the people, and they would then be enabled to enjoy no longer being either a shame culture or a guilt culture, the culture of Christian liberty, the joy of salvation.

This was the meaning of the coming of Christ. Upon him all iniquities, all transgressions, all sins of his people were laid, and removed from us. No longer a part of our life, no longer a part of the land that confesses Christ. Man cannot get rid of sin by himself. God does it for him. Man either tries to pay for his sin through masochistic self-atonement, whereby he only aggravates his misery, or else he tries to make other people pay for his sins by making them his scapegoats, and thereby aggravates also the misery of the human condition. Both alternatives that man has lead only to sick lives and sick societies, but the scripture declares that God provides the payment. God removes the sin through the atoning sacrifice of his only begotten son, Jesus Christ, and when we believe on him as our Lord and Savior, we have, as it were, laid our hands upon him and placed upon him all the burden of our iniquities, our sins and our transgressions, and are delivered from them and from their guilt and shame into life and that more abundantly.

Thus, Paul, as he wrote in Romans 8:1, could declare that the great charter of Christian liberty is this: “There is therefore now no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus.” No condemnation. We do not stand condemned in the sight of God. We stand in the innocence of Jesus Christ, and we are called upon to have a good conscience before God in Christ, and so it is the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur was, in ancient times, a day of rejoicing. The trumpet sounded, and the priests were summoned to proclaim liberty throughout all the land and to all the inhabitants thereof, an end of slavery, a restoration of the land, an end of debts, liberty for man through the atonement of Jesus Christ, and it is that verse which is engraved upon the liberty bell in Philadelphia, and the people who at the founding of this country had it engraved there, knew what it had reference to. Knew that its price was the blood of Jesus Christ.

Yom Kippur ended with banqueting. It was a time for joy. It is described in the ancient documents as the greatest day of joy in all of Israel. It was also, in the evening after the ritual was ended, a time for dancing and courtship, and we have numerous records, among them that of the Talmud, concerning what took place that evening, including these lines, concerning the joy of the Day of Atonement. “Around in circle gave a Hebrew maiden see, from them are happy youths their partners choose. Remember, beauty soon its charms must lose, and seek to win a maid of fair degree. When fading grace and beauty low are laid, then praise shall hurdle{?} fear as the Lord await. God does bless her handiwork and in the gate her works do follow her, it shall be said.”

It is significant and very, very revealing that, in the modern synagogue, because the modern synagogue has bypassed the faith in Jesus Christ, has turned its back upon it and renounced it. The Day of Atonement is not nor has it been for centuries, any longer a day of joy, but it is a solemn, heavy religious day. The glory and the joy has departed from it.

And Paul summons us as he wrote in Philippians 4:4 to live in terms of the liberty that is ours in the saving power of Jesus Christ. “Rejoice in the Lord always: and again I say, Rejoice.” Therefore, the essence of the Christian ministry and the essence of the proclamation of the Gospel must be the liberty that is ours through the saving power of Jesus Christ, and any preaching to believers which tries to burden them with a sense of guilt is not Christian teaching or preaching.

I recall with horror, a sermon preached in Northern California in 1952 by a man who died just in the past two or three years, and was, for years, one of the most prominent men in the American pulpit. He stood before a vast congregation of Bible believers, and said, “You’re dumb, nothing but dumb in the sight of God.” This was blasphemy. According to the scripture, all believers are sons and daughters of God by adoption in Jesus Christ, and to call them dumb was a blasphemy, a fearful offense against the Gospel, and such an offence springs only from a lack of knowledge of the scripture, or a deliberate desire to bind the consciences of men, to enslave them, because a bound conscience is an enslaved person, and wherever you have the inculcation of guilt and shame in men, you have an attempt at their enslavement. You have, therefore, the political cultivation of guilt as a means of power, in both church and state.

Remind them continually in the church that they are sinners to enslave them. Cultivate guilt in a people politically to enslave them. Guilty men are slaves. Their conscience is in bondage and hence, they are themselves ultimately only fit for slavery. We are taught systematically in our schools, and in our television and radio, and press today that we are guilty people. We are to feel guilty about just about everything in our American history, past and present. We are told, for example, that we are guilty in our treatment of the Negro, that we took a free people out of Africa and made slaves of them in America. This is a lie. The Negro was not enslaved, and no American ever enslaved a Negro. The Negros were slaves already in Africa. The entire continent was characterized by mass slavery, and members of a tribe were slaves of their chief, and the chief himself might be an underling and over often slave of another chief. In Africa at that time, instead of gold and silver being the money, slaves were the money so that whether it was tobacco or guns, or salt, or whatever they wanted to purchase, they used men, slaves, as their medium of exchange, and the Negros moved from a vicious, degenerate slavery in Africa, to a usually benevolent slavery in American, one which increased their life expectancy and gave them the only freedom anyone in their continent or of their race had known for centuries, untold centuries.

We have no cause to feel guilty with respect to the Negro. All such teaching is a perversion of history for one purpose: the make us feel guilty because guilty men are slaves.

Again, we are told that, as Christians, we have a long, long record of guilt with respect to the Jews. Now it is true that there have been times when the Jews have been mistreated in the past twenty centuries. It is also true that there have been times when the Jews have mistreated Christians. The relationship has been that of tension between two groups with very different ideas, and more often, the Christians have been sinned against in sinning because so many, many times throughout history, they have had unbiblical ideas about prophesy which gave the Jews a favored position, and as a result, they have leaned over backwards to be more than fair towards them. So, again, it balances out in our favor, not to our discredit.

Again, we are told that we are guilty of any number of things with respect to various minority groups, groups within our society and so on, all with the same lack of evidence, and we are also made to feel guilty because, as Christians, we want to have some rights in this country for a price{?} when the only rights, of course, are for the atheists. We are asked to feel guilty on all sides, and certainly a telling instance of this was at the assassination of President Kennedy. Immediately, prominent politicians and jurists began to preach how guilty all Americans were, how they had created a climate of hate, how especially guilty conservatives were, and how we should all feel guilty because the president had been assassinated. But we didn’t assassinate him, a communist did, and Christ didn’t come to make us feel guilty, but to set us free from sin and the burden of guilt and shame, and anyone who preaches guilt and shame to a Christian people is trying to undo the works of Jesus Christ, and paradoxically, we find that sinners being told they have no sin and the Christians being told how guilty they are about their past. Can a more insane situation be described?

This is the politics of guilt, to bind the free with the burden of sin, of guilt and of shame. When Paul wrote his letter to the Galatians, he wrote a very angry letter. The Galatian churches and Christians who had been set free by the atoning blood of Jesus Christ were being entangled with various false doctrines which were binding their conscience, and Paul told them that this was anathema, this was an offense Jesus Christ, and he asked them immediately to separate themselves from all these heresies and errors, and to stand in terms of the atoning sacrifice of Jesus Christ, and the liberty thereof, and therefore, as he summed up his thesis to the Galatians, he said in Galatians 5:1, Stand fast therefore, in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and being not entangled again with the yoke of bondage.” This must be the trumpet call to our generation. “Stand fast in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage,” for men would enslave us with the politics and ecclesiology of guilt, but we are called into the glorious liberty of the sons of God. Let us pray.

Almighty God, our heavenly Father, we thank thee that Christ hath set us free, that we have been delivered from the burden of sin, and its guilt and shame, that we are free men in Jesus Christ. Make us strong and bold in this freedom, that we might stand as soldiers of Jesus Christ in the assurance that the gates of hell cannot withstand us, that we shall triumph in his name. Prepare us, therefore, our Father, by thy word and by thy Holy Spirit for victory. In Jesus name. Amen.

Before we have questions, I will get back with this bit about the glass from the Glass Bottle Blowers Association in their January 1966 magazine. Near Hipha, Israel, a 1500 year old slab of glass was discovered recently. This was quite an amazing thing in that they found this huge piece of glass while they were doing some excavating, and they were completely amazed at the size of it. This glass dated from 1500 years ago from the time of the monarchy, and it is so large a piece and involves so much engineering knowledge that they were amzed. What has surprised scientists is that ancient workers could have produced such a large slab of glass with existing technology. This is remarkable engineering and technology for that time, said Dr. Brill{?}. The 8 8/10 ton slab ranks as the third largest piece of glass ever produced. The two larger pieces of glass were manufactured during this century in the United States for use as reflectors for the world’s largest telescope at the Mount Palomar Observatory, each weighed 20 tons and was 16 ½ feet across. Now, they simply don’t know how it was done or what it was done for, but apparently this particular piece they, for some reason or other, decided was defective and did not use it, so it doesn’t tell us too much about their technology as a whole, but it does give us a glimpse into the fact that they were not stupid in ancient times and they had far more of a culture and technological advance than we recognize.

Now, are there any questions? Yes?

[Audience] I wanted to tell you something I heard on the radio, and then you weren’t able to question {?}. {?} on one of these caller programs said that in U.S. News & World Report, the February 21st, I think 60{?}, there is an {?} that says that the Congress has passed a law in which we are to pay all the Negros in the country for this guilt, for their slavery, and explained {?} billions and billions of dollars.

[Rushdoony] Yes, if someone can get me that U.S. News & World Report for February 21st, I would appreciate it very, very much. Is that copy available?

[Audience] I can get a copy.

[Rushdoony] Thank you. I would appreciate it very much. This is not a new policy. We’ve already done it to the Indians. We have been busy paying them for a long, long time, and by a long, long time, I mean in the past twenty years, approximately, we have been appropriating large sums to repay various Indians tribes. It has reached the point of absurdity in that they have actually repaid one Indian for a couple of horses the cavalry killed, which belonged to his grandfather or great grandfather some years ago when the Sioux were on the warpath. Yes?

[Audience] My question, I wanted to ask about fasting. I know there is a {?} that believes, saying definitely fasting. Now is this an area that you would find the guilt in?

[Rushdoony] I would say that any religious group today, Christian group, that prescribes fasting is in error. The Bible prescribed it for one day alone, in the Old Testament, and that was done away with, and even that day it ended with a feast, so it was only a partial fast. So that fasting is not required by the scripture. Second, the fasting that was permissible in the Old Testament was for special days. For example, if there were a national crisis, the king could call for a day of fasting and prayer, which was entirely voluntarily, so that the people might confess their apostasy and return unto the Lord. Now, in this sense, it is still legitimate, and in Colonial times, for example, there were occasionally, in times of crisis, days of fasting proclaimed. In fact, in the early period of the United States, the presidents occasionally called for a day of fasting in terms of some national crisis, and prayer, but to make it a part of the required practice of the church is ridicules. There is no biblical ground for it, and it is a form of works, masochistic works. Now, I can understand an individual fasting for other reasons. There are good hygienic reasons for it. I know a very fine Christian doctor who died about a year or so ago, close to 100 years old. He was a medical missionary in China for 47 years, quite a remarkable man, and he fasted every Saturday for health reasons, because, he said, that medically, it was an excellent means of giving the body an opportunity to rid itself of its impurities, but he ate very well the other six days, and he insisted on meat at least twice, preferably three times a day, because he said meat is the milk of old age. So, he took very good care of himself. Yes?

[Audience] Do you see any hope in the new future for the German people be relieved of the guilt of the {?} that they supposedly perpetrated in World War 2 and have had to take {?}?

[Rushdoony] I think in Germany the sense of guilt is primarily political and was imposed upon them. I would say there are countless numbers who feel guilty although they don’t know for what, because they lack any faith and they are guilt-ridden anyway, but there are a fair number who are not burdened, who are real Christians, and do have a strong sense of Christian liberty. Yes?

[Audience] Is this {?} day and one last week is the doctrine of the {?} faith, and {?} particularly?

[Rushdoony] Yes, especially Isaiah 53, but very definitely on this, in fact a good deal of the book of Leviticus deals with this, and many, many other passages. This is a constant thread throughout all of scripture.

[Audience] And it is a doctrine that cannot be denied or in any way {?}

[Rushdoony] No, it to the degree that it is at all tampered with, Christianity disappears, and wherever it is denied, you have no Christianity. You have anti-Christianity. Our faith stands in terms of the vicarious atonement of Jesus Christ. Yes?

[Audience] This is somewhat of a personal question, but in {?} remarked that only through Jesus may we come direct{?} to the Lord. However, Jesus was not in {?} technically, the time that this Leviticus was written apparently{?}, and were all the people before Jesus know that {?} do not exist after, unable to reach a conclusion of some sort?

[Rushdoony] Very good question. From the beginning, they knew that there was someone to come and every sacrifice that any Israelite performed was performed on this basis, so the knowledge that the Messiah was to come was to shed his life as a ransom for his people. So that in every instance, these people when they went to the altar and offered the sacrificed, it had to be an unblemished animal of a specified variety. They placed their hand upon it and confessed their sins, and acknowledged that this animal, the innocent lamb or whatever it was, was their sin-bearer, that he was dying in their place and his death was their release from sin and death and their life, and they recognized that this animal couldn’t deliver them from sin, that he was a type, a symbol, a stand-in as it were for one who was to come, the savior. Now, not only did every Hebrew know this, but every living person, because they were all descended from Noah, Noah knew this. All people everywhere in the world, you will find, had the two basic rites of the Old Testament. There is not a place in the world where you don’t find them. Circumcision and sacrifice.

Now, these two set forth the doctrine of salvation and the doctrine of Christ as clearly as could be. First, the doctrine of circumcision, that a man could not hope to save himself, and hope for the world was not in regeneration, but as it were, dying to one’s self, dying to one’s own hope of doing anything, but in regeneration. So the mark of the covenant was circumcision, which indicated that thereby you believed that there was no hope that men could be born for countless generations, and the world would still remain, and your children’s children would still remain under the burden of sin. So you surrendered that hope and you affirmed your hope in regeneration, and in sacrifice, you affirmed your hope that the sin-bearer, Christ, would come, and would then deliver you from the burden and the penalty of sin. They were all saved in the Old Testament era by this faith. We know that there were various peoples apart from the Hebrews who cling to this. For example, Melchizadek, king of Salem. For example, Jethro, the Midianite, Moses’ father in law. We meet many in the scripture who did believe. The eighty-seventh Psalm, for example, lists many people from various countries who are believers, and says, that of the Zion the heavenly city of our God whose springs are in the Lord, this man was born there, from Egypt, from Philistia, from Ethiopia, from Babylon. They were born from the heavenly city of Zion.

Now, what happened throughout the World? Well, progressively as the centuries past, men turned their back on this. They knew the truth, and you can find in many, many of the writings of other religions, surprising testimony to this faith, but they turned the whole thing upside down. They made a sacrifice, for example, wherever it was, throughout the world, instead of God’s gift of salvation to man, a bribe to God. So, for example, if you were a Greek or a Roman, what you did when you offered sacrifice was to buy insurance, and you went to the temple and you said to the gods, “I’m going to sail across the Mediterranean, and it’s late in the season, and it can be very, very stormy, but I want to get this load through and cash in on it because if I hit the market with this load, I’m a rich man. Now, here is a sacrifice and so much in the way of gifts. I want insurance.” So that you were bribing the gods. This is what it became, and if you didn’t get what you wanted, your insurance, you didn’t do business with him, you went to another temple. So, you see, it became completely humanistic. It became apostate, so that they all knew the truth, and you can find evidences in all these pagan religions that they knew the truth and deliberately turned their back on it because the essence of sin is for man to say, “I shall be as God myself, knowing, that is, determining for myself what is good and evil.”

So, you find the evidence everywhere. The American Indians, for example, knew that there was a great, true God, and as the old, old Indians who saw the first white man come across the plains say, “We knew all the stories of old times, that there was a, that God made man and there was a flood and all these things happened. Well, why didn’t your people worship him? Oh, that God was too far away, too far away, and lots of spirits all around us. Keep your peace with the spirits. Now, this was the Indian attitude. This was the pagan attitude, and so the Indian never worshipped God. He knew he existed, he paid no attention to him. What he was afraid of was the spirit of his dad wife, and the spirit of his dead mother in law, or brother in law, and of course, I had hundreds, and hundreds of Indian funerals, and what did they do? Well, as soon as they died, they were dying.

Of course, they never let them die in the house. If they did, they burned down the house. This caused endless trouble in the thirties when in some of the western country, FHA came in and built some nice homes for Indians, and the loan agent just about went crazy as he saw the places go up in smoke when somebody died in the house, but if they can get him out of the house, and if they had to build it out of log cabins, they took care not to let him die there, but it was when the government put up with FHA money, that’s alright, but they would take him out immediately and put him in a tent and let him die there. Then, before they buried him, they would cut branches of rose bushes and lay these wild rose branches across his body, and then put the lid down so that he couldn’t crawl out. The spirit would stay there. You see, every time he’d try to get out of the box, why there’d be all those thorns so he’d stay put, and that was a good means of identifying your believer and unbeliever, because the believer was always obvious at a funeral. He did not put rose bushes over the body of his loved ones.

But, as I got sidetracked, what I started to say is they knew, but they were afraid of the spirits rather than of God, and this is the essence of paganism. They knew, and they know.

[Audience] I wonder how many {?}

[Rushdoony] Well, for one thing, you have this reality in many of your cultures. Memory and transmission of oral records was far, far more exact and accurate in those days than it is now, and these stories would be handed down and these accounts, verbatim, from generation to generation, and their memory was developed because they didn’t use notes, or books, or records, so that, in those days, an Indian could, and the older Indians could, go through an area once and tell you exactly every landmark and chart it for you, in detail. There was nothing that they had missed, because their observation and memory were so highly trained. So that we have actually accounts whereby, for example, in the Medieval Period, travelers went into some isolated part of Asia amongst some tribes and recorded some of their stories and accounts, and recently scholars have gone in and recorded them and they’ve been identical, after centuries. Yes?

[Audience] It’s very much like the wonderful {?} and little {?} examples our great grandmothers used. {?} “My goodness, I remember my mother and hearing this all the time,” and I think we’ve lost something by just somehow having that framework out of our {?}. They were great examples.

[Rushdoony] Very true. There were hundreds and hundreds of homely proverbs that were such concise statements of tremendous wisdom and observation, and the older generation could come up with them to sum up a situation and to give them criterion of judgment in a situation, and we’ve lost those things. So that we really are, in many respects, a stupid generation. I think Disraeli, who was not always the best of men, nevertheless was very astute. When he once remarked as he saw modernity creeping into human society and this idea of being a practical man, he observed Practical men are men who practice the blunders of their predecessors, because they don’t know any better. Yes?

[Audience] Rushdoony, do you think that the religious leaders today who are inculcating this complex, this {?} complex{?}, do you think they are also aware that this is the {?} of our liberty {?} associated with?

[Rushdoony] I believe that the liberal clergy are deliberately inculcating guilt to deprive us of our liberty. I would say in some instances among some fundamentalistic clergymen, they are inculcating it in order to strengthen their control over people, and I have known clergymen who make people in the pew feel like the most miserable sinners, and milk them endlessly. With some, I would say it’s just plain ignorance of the Gospel, and the root of ignorance is always, and the root word is ignore. You’re ignorant because you ignore something.

Well, we stand dismissed now.

End of tape