Studies in Political Philosophy

Bloodguiltiness

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Political Studies

Lesson: Bloodguiltiness

Genre: Speech

Track: 05

Dictation Name: RR124C5

Location/Venue:

Year: 1960’s-1970’s

Almighty God, our heavenly Father, we come into thy presence, again grateful that thou art God, that thou hast undertaken for us, that thou hast redeemed us through Jesus Christ, hast provided for us day by day, and that all our tomorrows are in thy hands, and so, our Father, we thank thee. Teach us to rest in thee, to come into thy presence and take hands off our lives and commit them into thy keeping, to know that thy word is true, that we can cast our every care upon thee, knowing thou carest for us. Give us faith and grace, therefore, to take thee at thy word. In Jesus name. Amen.

Our scripture is Ezekiel 22:1-16. “Moreover the word of the Lord came unto me, saying, Now, thou son of man, wilt thou judge, wilt thou judge the bloody city? yea, thou shalt shew her all her abominations. Then say thou, Thus saith the Lord God, The city sheddeth blood in the midst of it, that her time may come, and maketh idols against herself to defile herself. Thou art become guilty in thy blood that thou hast shed; and hast defiled thyself in thine idols which thou hast made; and thou hast caused thy days to draw near, and art come even unto thy years: therefore have I made thee a reproach unto the heathen, and a mocking to all countries. Those that be near, and those that be far from thee, shall mock thee, which art infamous and much vexed. Behold, the princes of Israel, every one were in thee to their power to shed blood. In thee have they set light by father and mother: in the midst of thee have they dealt by oppression with the stranger: in thee have they vexed the fatherless and the widow. Thou hast despised mine holy things, and hast profaned my sabbaths.

In thee are men that carry tales to shed blood: and in thee they eat upon the mountains: in the midst of thee they commit lewdness. In thee have they discovered their fathers' nakedness: in thee have they humbled her that was set apart for pollution. And one hath committed abomination with his neighbour's wife; and another hath lewdly defiled his daughter in law; and another in thee hath humbled his sister, his father's daughter. In thee have they taken gifts to shed blood; thou hast taken usury and increase, and thou hast greedily gained of thy neighbours by extortion, and hast forgotten me, saith the Lord God. Behold, therefore I have smitten mine hand at thy dishonest gain which thou hast made, and at thy blood which hath been in the midst of thee. Can thine heart endure, or can thine hands be strong, in the days that I shall deal with thee? I the Lord have spoken it, and will do it. And I will scatter thee among the heathen, and disperse thee in the countries, and will consume thy filthiness out of thee. And thou shalt take thine inheritance in thyself in the sight of the heathen, and thou shalt know that I am the Lord.”

Our subject today is Bloodguiltiness. Now the word “bloodguiltiness” appears only once in the Bible in Psalm 51, but the concept, the doctrine of bloodguiltiness appears in all of scripture from start to finish. The word “blood” appears repeatedly, in guilty of blood, the bloody city, all these are expressions whereby the concept of bloodguiltiness is set forth, and many another expression is used.

We first encounter bloodguiltiness, of course, in the murder of Abel by Cain, when God says to Cain, “What hast thou done? The blood of thy brother Abel cries out to me from the ground, cries out for vengeance, for judgment. Because Cain had shed his brother’s blood, he had incurred bloodguiltiness. We meet with it again in Genesis 9:1-7 when God speaks to Noah after the flood. God declared to Noah, first of all, that he had permission to eat flesh, to kill animals for food, but he could not do so without thanksgiving and without offering of the blood to God, because the essence of all life is that God made it and God controls it, and nothing can be done apart from the permission of God, and man must give thanks in all things, including those things which are routine and everyday to God, because all things that we do are by God’s grace and permission.

Thus, life even in animals had to be seen and must be seen as sacred from God with no killing except by God’s permission. Second, God declared to Noah that whoso sheddeth man’s blood by man shall his blood be shed, that the penalty for murder is capital punishment. Significantly, capital punishment is required of anyone who kills man, whether it be a man or beast, and this commandment is restated in Exodus, that any animal killing a man is to be put to death, and any man killing a man, in premeditated murder, or unpremeditated but nonetheless murder, is to be put to death.

Then, in Leviticus 17:1-7, to skip over many passages, we read that unless every meat is brought before the Lord, “blood shall be imputed to that man.; he hath shed blood; and that man shall be cut off from among his people (that is, he shall be excommunicated.).” No man has the right to partake of any food which is God’s property without thanksgiving to God and without a recognition of God, without incurring bloodguiltiness.

Then, a little later in the chapter, Leviticus 17:11, we read, “the life of the flesh is in the blood: and I have given it to you upon the altar to make an atonement for your souls: for it is the blood that maketh an atonement for the soul.” The penalty for bloodguiltiness is death, and either the guilty man must die, or an atonement must be provided for him and received by him, and that atonement is provided by God, and the cross of Christ is that atonement for man’s blood guiltiness.

Now to skip over the thousands of references to bloodguiltiness, to Ezekiel 22, in Ezekiel 22, Ezekiel the prophet is ordered by God to read a bill of indictment against Jerusalem as the capitol of Judea, and this is a bill of indictment calling for the death sentence against the nation and against the people. Their country is to be taken from them. They are to be destroyed. The land is to revert to wilderness and they are to spend a long season in captivity because of their bloodguiltiness.

The bill of indictment then cites the reasons for their bloodguiltiness. They are guilty of the loss of a true conception of God. Under the name of God, they are guilty of worshipping idols, and today, in virtually every church in the United States and around the world, what prevails is idolatry in the name of God, because wherever you have a church that does anything but preach the word of God, it is guilty of idolatry. The social gospel is idolatrous worship. The humanism of the churches is idolatry, and this characterized Judea. They were guilty of blood also because of murder, and the failure of the courts to deal with it. They were guilty of blood because of the contempt of parents. They said light, Ezekiel said, by their fathers and mothers. They were guilty of blood because of their exploitation of widows and orphans, and of foreigners, because of their usury, because of their neglect of true worship, because of their extortion and their bribery, the corruption of their courts, because of their sexual immorality, and because of what God described as violence to my law, but most of all, later on in the chapter, in the 30th verse, Ezekiel said, “And I sought for a man among them, that should make up the hedge, and stand in the gap before me for the land, that I should not destroy it: but I found none.”

The most serious thing, the worst thing about Jerusalem was this: no voice was raised on the side of righteousness. No man dared to stem the tide of wickedness that swept through her streets. She was a land not watered and not rained upon in a day of indignation, according to verse 24. That is, the springs of her civic virtue were dried up and a blanket spread itself through all sections of her population, a blight of self-indulgence and unwillingness to stand up for the truth of God.

This then was bloodguiltiness, so that bloodguiltiness referred quite obviously not simply to murder, but to any and every offense against God. The essence, the meaning of bloodguiltiness is this: that God declares he has an absolute property right over all men in the entire universe. We are totally God’s property. He made us out of nothing. We owe him absolute and total allegiance, and as a result, to the extent that we deny God his property rights, we are guilty of bloodguiltiness. The meaning of the tithe, the giving of ten percent of our income to the Lord, is simply this. It is a token payment which God himself has established whereby we acknowledge God’s absolute property right over us, and God lays down this requirement for this token payment, a modest one. For today, the civil government in the United States takes better than forty-three percent of our income through taxes, direct or hidden, and shows a far greater demand upon us than does God.

God’s absolute property right is manifested through his law. The purposes of God are wholly good. The purposes of God’s law are to bring us to our fulfillment in Christ, to give us peace and joy in him, to give us life, and Moses makes it clear that this is the purpose of the law. “That ye might live,” but because man is guilty, is fallen, he is not able to keep the law and to have life, and so Christ, through his atonement whereby he pays the penalty for us, for our bloodguiltiness, and makes us new creatures in him, Christ enables us to keep the law, to live in terms of the law, and therefore, to avoid bloodguiltiness.

Now the fundamental principal of secularism is that there are vast domains of our life that are free from God, that are areas where God has no property rights. According to secularism, the state is a neutral institution. The state has no obligation to be Christian. In fact, its duty is to be neutral. This is the theory. But in the sight of God, this is to incur bloodguilt, because it is to trifle with the light, with the soul of man who must be reared under godly law. The idea that education can be separated from God, and be neutral, again is false. What it does is to deny the religion of scripture, to adopt the religion of humanism, and to declare that God has no property rights over education, and again, it incurs bloodguilt. For any man to assume that his life, day by day, is free from God, and that God has no property rights over his life except when he goes to church, is again to incur bloodguiltiness.

Thus, our modern life is under judgment, and our modern world is guilty of blood. It is guilty of destroying and damaging the life of man because of its secularism, because its denial of God’s property right, and thus, its every activity incurs bloodguilt. The Christian does not. The Christian has been freed from bloodguiltiness by the atoning work of Jesus Christ, because he is our representative and he has accepted the penalty for sin and rebellion, and has made us new creatures in himself. We are no longer now guilty of sin as Anomia. There are two words in the New Testament: Hamartia and Anomia, and these two are significantly different. Anomia comes from nomos, law, and “a” meaning anti-law, against the law, or no law, and Anomia means that one is against the law, anti-law, in all his being hostile to law, God’s law. No Christian is guilty of Anomia. A Christian is guilty of Hamartia, which is a particular sin. We can commit particular sins. We can be guilty of a violation of this or that particular law, because while we are, by virtue of our regeneration, now working our way towards perfect sanctification, but never able to attain it in this life, we stumble as we go forward very often, but because we are new creatures in Christ, in spite of all our stumbling, our direction has one purpose, one goal: Christ, and therefore, though we commit sins, Hamartia, which are all forgiven by the grace of God in Jesus Christ, we never commit Anomia, living without law, and against law.

Now, the essence of the modern world is that it is guilty of Anomia, and many a man who sometimes can say, I commit fewer sins (Hamartia) than most Christians, is nonetheless far worse than the worst of Christians because he is guilty of Anomia, lawlessness. Being a law unto himself and denying the absolute property right of God over him, and this is bloodguiltiness. These are sins that require the penalty of death, because it is a sin that is a capital offense.

The purposes of law, God’s law, as we have seen are wholly good, and thus, the purpose is to bring us to fulfillment in him. Now, the modern, secular, anti-Christian faith, with its Anomia, professes to have this same good intention, the fulfillment of man, man’s good, paradise regained, heaven on earth, and we can agree that these men who rule today in Washington, in London, Paris, Moscow and elsewhere, in their intentions, are good, the very words they use, “the welfare state,” the language they speak about concern for man’s humanity indicates, indeed, that their purposes are idealistic, but their will is totally evil, because they begin by robbing God of his property rights over them, denying God’s property rights over other men, and then they proceed to accomplish this good intention by further robbery, by robbing some to give to others, and this is their welfare. This is their goodness, and so it begins and ends in lawlessness, Anomia, and it compounds bloodguilt.

We then face a generation that is deeply guilty of blood before God, because it has denied his property rights. It has, at best, paid lip service to him and gone its way in utter contempt and forgetfulness of him, and when we stand in terms of the word of God, we stand very much as Ezekiel did when he was commissioned to declare judgment upon the bloody city. “Now, thou son of man, wilt thou judge, wilt thou judge the bloody city? yea, thou shalt shew her all her abominations,” and every church and every group, and every individual that stands in terms of the whole counsel of God immediately, by his stand, becomes an indictment to the rest of the world. By his insistence, even in his own personal life on God’s absolute property rights, he is a standing offense to all of those who deny God’s property rights, and who are guilty of blood, who sin against their own soul by their denial of the principle of life, God, for the hand of every man is raised against him, and yet we have this assurance. Although they seem so {?} modern states, modern secular men, God has pronounced judgment upon them as surely as he pronounced judgment upon Jerusalem and Judea, and though they march in all their pomp and circumstance and in their assurance that they are marching to victory, and that they will soon have total property rights over all men, they are marching to the gallows of God, and he will, in his own time, execute judgment upon them, and though we, by comparison, seem to few and weak, we have a blessed assurance that because we have been cleansed of bloodguiltiness through the atoning sacrifice of Christ upon the cross, we march to victory. For this is the victory which overcometh the world, even our faith, so declares the Apostle John, and in the face of all these things, we need to stand therefore, in the assurance that God who cannot lie, has declared in his word the certainty of judgment upon those who transgress his law, who are guilty of Anomia, lawlessness, and he shall see his judgment, and we shall see our victory. Let us pray.

Our Lord and our God, we thank thee that thou hast called us unto the glorious liberty of the sons of God, that thou has made us new creatures in Christ and established us upon the assurance of victory, has given us a free conscience under God, and hast made us sons and heirs of thy kingdom. Now, Father, make us strong in this our inheritance, that we may not {?} against the powers of darkness, but stand unto victory. In Jesus name. Amen.

Are there any questions? Yes?

[Audience] What about Christian {?}

[Rushdoony] We have no property rights over ourselves, and so suicide, again, is a sin because it is assuming that our life is our property.

[Audience] Would you put it in the same category as taking another man’s life?

[Rushdoony] It is murder, yes, because I have no right to take anyone else’s life because it is God’s life. He created it. No man can take that life except in terms of God’s law, if he is guilty of murder or of some other offense, calling for the death penalty. Similarly, we have no more title to our life than we have over our neighbor. It is God’s. He has absolute property rights, and this is the basis for the biblical prohibition of suicide. It is a sin. It is a violation of God’s property rights and of his law. Yes?

[Audience] {?} Anomia {?} for all, {?} rather than one who is anti {?}

[Rushdoony] Except that the Bible does not recognize the principle of neutrality, that all men are at enmity with God, Paul makes this emphatic, who are not new creatures in Christ, and so it’s either enmity or friendship, and so Anomia, as it is used in the scripture, definitely means lawlessness and anti-law. Yes?

[Audience] {?} Are those {?} the ones that are used in 1 John {?}

[Rushdoony] Very good question. In 1 John, we are told that any man who says he is not {?} in sin is a liar. The word that is used there is Hamartia.

[Audience] How do you spell it?

[Rushdoony] A-m-a-r-t-i-a, with the little common above it in the Greek, which indicates an “H” sound, so in English you could put an “H” in front of it. H-A-M-A-R-T-I-A. Hamartia. So that Anomia is used later on in the Gospel of John to indicate that the Christian is not a sinner in this sense. Yes?

[Audience] While many people are certain that I have neglected my obvious experiences this past year, but I do have a great deal of appreciation, which is not said. My own appreciation when I wake up in the morning and go outside {?}. Is it necessary to express yourself outside of your {?}?

[Rushdoony] I think if we will, in gratitude as we express it formally, and that’s why the formal practice of prayer is a very good thing, a regular discipline, daily, at the table and at night. Then, I think one of the finest things we can do is to cultivate the habit of sentence prayers. Just spoken inwardly, so that as you face a situation, meeting someone or a problem, just to say a sentence prayer to God asking for strength and for guidance. Then sentence prayers of gratitude, and I think this is one of the richest areas of growth, if you cultivate this habit of continual sentence prayers. Once you get into this practice, you’ll find yourself doing it, not once or twice in a day, but dozens and dozens of times, and this does produce a tremendous growth and a tremendous sense of peace and assurance as you face all your daily problems. It involves truly resting in the Lord, and very soon we will be aware of the concept of what rest really means and what worship means. This is one of the most neglected and, in some sense, the most startling aspect of what scripture has to say. Yes?

[Audience] Is there a number of doctrines {?} ?

[Rushdoony] Yes. I don’t think you can say there are so many doctrines, because you can coalesce a number of them into one, and you can refine them into a great many. For example, you can speak about the doctrine of the sovereignty of God, and make that one heading, but you can then subdivide that into the doctrine of the Father, then of the Son, and then of the Holy Ghost, so it’s all three. The doctrine of the ontological trinity and the doctrine of the economical trinity, the various aspects of the life of the trinity. Then you can go into the doctrine of predestination and so on, so that you see, you can take the general heading, the doctrine of God, and divide it into about twenty or thirty heads. You can do the same thing with regard to the doctrine of sin, the doctrine of the Christian life, the doctrine of salvation. So that a list of these basic doctrines, the more detailed you became, the more numerous the list would be.

[Audience] {?} social gospel ?

[Rushdoony] No, the social gospel people deny the validity of these doctrines because they say the only thing that matters is what you do for man. In other words, God is not important. So that they are anti-creedal, anti-doctrinal churches. To them, doctrine is unimportant because God is unimportant. Man is everything. Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] No.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] I belong to a church which believes that the church has no right to legislate in a number of matters, or any matter where the Bible does not speak, but this is a matter of individual conscience, that the Bible does not speak, for example, about smoking, or dancing, or drinking, and therefore, no one can say this is good or evil. This is a matter of Christian liberty, for the individual to decide for himself. So that I do not feel I have the right to express my opinions on these subjects because I have one obligation and that is to declare the word of God, not to go beyond that, lest my personal preferences or dislikes influence anyone. Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] The question of birth control is a little more complex. Now, in the Bible, fertility is spoken of as a blessing from God. However, God makes it clear that the fertility of the ungodly is no pleasure to him. So that God has a double law here as it were. The mandate to the believers is to increase and multiply. It’s not spelled out more specifically than that. To the ungodly, God says that nothing they do pleases him and it is listed a few times in the scripture as a matter of displeasure to him, but they have increased, I think I have a list of some such verses here. Ezekiel 5:7-8, Isaiah 49:19-20, Jeremiah 15:9, Amos 1:13, and several other verses that go into this unblessed fruitfulness of the ungodly. Other verses giving the contrary for believers; Genesis 9:1, “Be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth,” Genesis 9:7, Leviticus 26:9, Psalm 128:3-4, and other such verses. Yes?

[Audience] Well, that doesn’t mean that the {?} people {?} be instructed by God?

[Rushdoony] Right. Yes, very definitely.

[Audience] {?} How specifically is race and predestination interlinked?

[Rushdoony] That’s quite a question. How specifically are race and predestination interlinked? Well, certainly, God’s predestination covers all things so that we must say that whatever has happened has happened by the predestination of God and yet, as I have indicated before, and we will go into it a few months perhaps from now, that predestination does not destroy human responsibility. It only emphasizes it. Now, we cannot deny that the doctrine of predestination is totally anti-equalitarian. What it simply asserts is that God does make a difference between people, and this is the offense of the doctrine of predestination.

That’s why every now and then I find college students saying that, out of context seemingly, a professor in some class or other, psychology of political science, launched into an attack on predestination. They couldn’t see the connection with what he was talking about, but the connection is a very real one, because he was totally equalitarian, he had to attack this concept, because this emphatically declares that God makes a difference. So that there are differences of {?}, differences of blessing. Now, this does not mean that those who have lesser abilities are less blessed necessarily, because very often, a child may be not as talented as other children, maybe loved more, maybe more loveable than others, and God makes it clear also to Israel that, “I did not choose you because you are the most remarkable people, because you are among the least of them, but I have chose you out of my grace and my love.” So that predestination, first, indicates there is no such thing was equality in God’s sight, that this is a mythical doctrine and second, that superiority is no necessary index to blessing, because the superior God says the wise are to be confounded in their wisdom when they separate themselves from God. Any other questions?

[Audience] {?} We find in a word, that {?} how do we {?}

[Rushdoony] It’s been very easily and readily explained. Byron Nelson has written several excellent books on the Genesis account, before Abraham, the {?} stone and after its kind. He is, by the way, an uncle of someone known to some of you, James Lamb of Santa Monica. Byron Nelson, as well as others, has pointed out that in Adam and Eve, all the genetic {?}. so that they represented all the genetic {?} varieties of all the races. Now, out of that original family came all people, and through Noah after the flood. Now, in the early period, in the first few generations, there was clearly, and we are told that this was the case, marriages of brothers and sisters and this had to be. This was genetically possible without any damage because the genetic strains were so diverse that each child was almost, in modern terms, unrelated to the other child, since the genetic potentiality was so great in the parent strain. Now, as the centuries passed and people went into different areas, they began to breed in terms of certain standards, so that the different races chose certain standards as their standard of view, and this became the ideal for them.

For example, we know in China that one of the things that, over the centuries spread out the {?} from them was that they regarded a very hairy man as a barbarian. In fact, the expression for foreigners was “a hairy barbarian.” Now, with that standard, they naturally send it over several thousand years to breed such people out. We do know, for example, in the western civilization, how it’s very {?} certain ideas of beauty have come into being and for a time changed the appearance of men, and of women, too. For example, the eagle beak has been several times in Western civilization highly admired as the {?} of beauty, so that those who weren’t lucky enough to be born with a fine, {?} eagle beak, {?} worse than they {?}. Now, {?} trend on western man, so that compared, for example, with the Orientals and with others, {?} Now, it’s been selectivity, you see, of breeding. Different standards would have led to the development, genetically, of varying {?} But all these was potentially in Adam and Eve.

[Audience {?} ideal {?}

[Rushdoony] No, in that in Adam and Eve, these things were all present potentially but they represented something totally different, and they were created totally good, but the U.N. standard is one of the {?} whereas God muted the differences in the beginning so that the differences might emerge. So, this is going contrary to God’s plan.

[Audience] They want them all alike.

[Rushdoony] They want them all alike. The U.N. ideal is the bland man, but God didn’t intend that to be, and Adam and Eve were two people with very, very diverse {?} in them to fit into motion these radical differences in humanity.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes?

[Audience] {?} tells about {?} scientific {?} evolution and {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, a variety can change, but it remains basically the same. In other words, God can be the God and all kinds of {?} but they still remain {?}, and man has within him potentiality for all kinds of physical variations, but he always remains a man, and this is not evolution. Yes?

[Audience] When {?} caveman, in the early, you know {?} they do {?}

[Rushdoony] These reconstructions are highly imaginative, these drawings you see of cavemen, and they involve a tremendous amount of artistic license. For example, the pictures of Java man, one of the most important, so-called, varied over the years in the textbooks depending on what their theory required that he looked like, how far along he was on the evolutionary ladder. So artistic license is very, very great in these things. Actually, these {?} are not very different from {?} which you see on the streets now a days, and it is significant that the Java man, though remnants of the skull that they located are not publicly shown. They’re a deep, dark secret. The Piltdown man proved to be a forgery, but when I went to school he was very important on the evolutionary scale. One of the things that tickles me was that in the twenties, an important thing on this whole link was the Nebraska man. They built him up out of one tooth, and they actually have articles about his family life, and they found out it was a peccary tooth, so these people have all the prestige, because our modern world gives them the prestige, but they’re putting out a lot of nonsense. There’s a book been written now by a biochemist who is an evolutionist, Kerkut. It’s one of the theories of report{?}, and he does some plain speaking. He says most of these folks, in fact, he says virtually all these evolutionary proofs are full of holes, they talk as though they had some special revelation and knew how it all happened when there’s no evidence that it did, and so on. What he is saying is simply this: I take it on faith. This is my religion. There’s no evidence for it, but I believe it, and I hope someday we’re going to find evidence for it, but he knows that it’s there and honest. There is no evidence for evolution, whatsoever. It is a matter of faith.

It is a matter of religion, and George Bernard Shaw said that the reason why people jumped at the doctrine of evolution was to get away from the doctrine of God. That was it very clearly, and we know that’s true. The textbooks give us a myth, how the whole world raised its hands in horror when The Origin of Species came out, and everybody was so against it, and the poor man was persecuted. That’s nonsense. The first edition of The Origin of Species sold out on the day of publication, in 1859. This was the book that everybody was waiting for, and when they heard there was a book that junked God, in effect, and said man was descended from some animal ancestry, they lined up on that day to get every last copy. It was such a relief to have an opinion that disposed of God. One bishop in England stood up against it and they made it sound as though the whole church was up in arms, which is nonsense. Most of the church was quite relieved that they had a scientific excuse to dispose of the Bible. Darwin’s book came out in 1859 and there was no real protest against it apart from this lone bishop within the church until the 1890’s, when a little measure of protest began, and it’s only been in recent years that you’re getting some of these scholars and scientists who are writing against evolution. So it was not a case of this poor persecuted Charles Darwin rearing the banner of truth. He was giving the world what they wanted, and they grabbed at it even though there was no evidence for it. Yes?

[Audience] I’ve heard they’re writing a new theory about this {?}

[Rushdoony] Alright.

[Audience] {?} Possible woman, very primitive people had a mongoloid, deformed human, whom they buried in a very special place {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, that’s a very accurate statement because some of these so-called missing links, or primitive men, and so on have been demonstrated to have been deformed people, and one of the classic cases in modern times as such a man as the Neanderthal, was the wrestler who was quite prominent in the thirties, a French wrestler, the angel? Does anyone remember him? Now, he had the perfect Neanderthal skull, and for the same reason. It was a deformity. Yes?

[Audience] {?} the skeleton {?} men supposedly {?} you know, Neanderthal man, and all that. {?} right on through {?}. Were those all just {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes. Those are reconstructions. They’re not actual skulls. They’ll find a piece, maybe a tooth or a lower jaw, or the cranium, and then they will reconstruct the rest and then build the whole skeleton in terms of what they think he should have looked like. So that what you see in most museums of natural history, the ascending scale of skeletons are reconstructions, not actual findings. Yes?

[Audience] I believe the one thing that the evolutionists have never been able to get over scientifically has been the entire ability of acquired characteristics.

[Rushdoony] Yes, this is a fundamental problem. First, their science has demonstrated there is no such thing as spontaneous generation and they have to have it to start evolution, and second, there is no evidence of the inheritance of acquired characteristics, a Marcion theory, and yet they have to have that, because everything that their science tells them is that what has evolved has to be involved, which means therefore, the whole universe and everything in it, man, the sun, the moon, the stars, all arts, culture, everything, had to be involved in that first atom out of which everything came, so they’ve made that atom bigger than God, or equal to God, since everything was involved in it. So, this gets them into fantasy. As a result, what they’ve tried to do is to say, Well, there had to be spontaneous generation, and they’re going to try to sneak into acquired characteristics one way or another. Now, only a few have done it honestly. Freud said it was either God or the mark. If you did not have the inheritance of acquired characteristics, you had no evolution, so you had to have it. Lysenko{?}, in the USSR, under Stalin, of course, maintained the same thing, and he was an honest {?} because he said we cannot retain our position apart from the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Now, this was taught some years ago, you know, and those of you who hear some old folks stating that, Well, an expectant mother mustn’t go to the zoo or do certain things because the baby can be marked. They’re not representing folk superstitions. They are representing the science they got in school sixty, seventy years ago, because that was in the textbooks at that time, and about 1900, 1905, 1910, most of your biology still carry that thesis.

Well, our time is up and we stand dismissed.

End of tape