From the Easy Chair

World Religion

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 147-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161CZ189

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161CZ189, World Religion, from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[ Rushdoony ] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 299, October the sixth, 1993.

This evening Otto Scott and Mark Rushdoony and I will discuss the world congress or parliament of religions held recently. Douglas Murray was unable to be here this evening.

In 1893 at the World’s Columbian Exposition held in Chicago, the first Word’s Congress of Religions was held. Although I believe the current one ran only four days the first ran from August the 25th to October 15, 1893.

Years ago as a student I picked up a fat volume The Word’s Congress of Religions at the World’s Columbian Exposition edited by J. W. Hanson. And it is an interesting example of the effort to bring about a world religion. The first conference was attended by some of the great names of the last century. Some of the names are Lyman Abbott, Sir William Dawson, Professor Henry Drummond, Charles F. Donnelly, Professor G P Fisher—and I wonder why he was there—G S Goodspeed, the New Testament scholar, Edward Everett Hale and the list of important names goes on and on. Quite a collection of people. Some of the great scholars of the day like Philip Schaff and others. The great Max Fuller who dealt with all the religions of the world and more than I can take time to name, all in attendance, all speaking.

Every kind of group, almost, was there. The Catholics were there. Technically they were not members of the congress, but they spoke and a number of their papers are included in this volume. It would have taken a shelf or two of volumes to publish all the papers. But to give you an idea of the groups that were there, Jewish, Jewish women, Catholic, Lutheran, Lutheran women, Presbyterian, Congregational, Methodist Episcopal, Reformed Episcopal, Universalist Unitarian, African Methodist Episcopal, two kinds of Quakers, Cumberland Presbyterian, Adventists, Seventh Day Baptists, Evangelical Association, Wales and International {?}, whatever that is, Disciples of Christ, Christian Science, the Swedenborgians, Religious Unity, Evangelical Alliance, the YWCA and YMCA, a group known simply as evolutionists, United Brethren in Christ, King’s Daughters, German Evangelical Church, the {?}, Buddhists, Free Religionists, Ethical Cultures, Swedish Evangelical Mission Covenant, Reformed Church in the US, Hindus, the Zoroastrians, the Shintoists, the Confucians and more. All present at this long congress of world religions.

Now there were clear cut and strong orthodox voices, but very obviously from the beginning, despite the efforts of the orthodox among the Protestants and the Catholics, to make sure that people understood the only world religion acceptable would be Christianity, the basic thrust was a one world religion in which the term God would be inclusive of something in all faiths.

In the current one, which just ended recently, God was completely left out. The Greek Orthodox and most evangelicals boycotted it as a result. Humanism was the basic thrust of the first congress and totally the thrust of this one.

Reading the papers of the first world congress, if I may take a little longer, was very instructive because everything that we see explicit in our time was implicit then so that we have seen men working for a long time towards a one world order, towards a humanistic state, towards a one world humanistic religion and much more.

I should have added groups like the Feminists were also included and played a rather prominent part in the first world congress.

[ Scott ] What do they call themselves?

[ Rushdoony ] Feminists.

[ Scott ] Feminists.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Ok.

[ Rushdoony ] It was only with the 60s that they changed the old term to women’s lib or women’s liberation movement. Feminism, of course, began early in the last century. The Civil War side tracked it for a while which embittered the Feminists greatly and they felt that it was a terrible thing that the blacks had been freed from slavery and women were still in bondage.

The Depression ended a great deal of that, but the movement has returned.

Well, with that introduction, Otto, would you like to comment on the general subject?

[ Scott ] Well I recall reading about this particular congress from the time I was very young practically because it was such a big event. And I can only assume that it received an enormous newspaper coverage of the day.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Now on the second congress which just ended recently there was hardly any mention at all in the press. Television, of course, never got around to it, because television news is restricted to three minutes every 30 minutes. And you can’t cover too much in three minutes, only what they consider the highlights which usually begins with the people in the White House and then it descends quickly to some trivia.

But I do redeemer in this... this, I think, relative great attention in 1893 and little attention in 1993 is a sort of a ear mark of the decline of religion on the world’s stage in the century that these two meetings encompassed. And I have—and I am sure you have, too—copies of the war between science and religion. I have forgotten the exact title.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes, White, Andrew White.

[ Scott ] Yes, Andrew White’s two volumes. And in the 1890s was the ... was the decade when most of the clergy was displaced from the colleges and universities that the denominations had created. I think the only outstanding one was Princeton.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Which lasted until Woodrow Wilson took over. So there was a ... a big war going on against religion in the 1890s on the top, on the university level.

Now since then religion has been practically banished from the universities. They still have schools of divinity, but nobody pays too much attention to them. They are never quoted. Their meetings are not publicized. Religion, in other words, has been pushed off the intellectual stage.’

[ Rushdoony ] yes.

[ Scott ] In the hundred years since that first congress. And I think that is a remarkable development.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. That is a very important one and I think we ought to come back to that. Mark?

[ M Rushdoony ] Now what was the purpose of this most recent congress?

[ Rushdoony ] They wanted to commemorate the first event in 1893 and to celebrate the success of what they had begun at that time. In this 1993 meeting they issued new commandments which totally left God out. They reduced the 10 to four...

[ Scott ] Four?

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Of the... of the Decalogue?

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] They re...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. And eliminated God and gave to many the subordinate commandments, a totally environmental and humanistic interpretation. And as one commentator observed having left out God totally, they did not say who was going to enforce the morality.

[ Scott ] Well, did the Catholics attend the second one, the second meeting?

[ Rushdoony ] Probably in the same fashion they did the first.

[ Scott ] As unofficial...

[ Rushdoony ] As unofficial observers and participants.

[ Scott ] I see.

[ Rushdoony ] If the pope calls a like one, as he has twice, I believe, at Assisi, it is another matter, because he then sets the agenda. But if someone sets the agenda there is no official participation.

[ Scott ] Now many of the ones who attended this time...? I didn’t seen enough at... enough press coverage to even figure out who was at ... who was attending, but obviously the first one in 1893 was attended by an enormous and diverse body. Now the second one, I assume, was attended by many less numerous people.

[ Rushdoony ] I don’t know how great the attendance was at this one. At the first they did have a remarkable group of people, very notable scholars. And a number of Catholic dignitaries, Anglican dignitaries as well. So it was quite a prestigious affair. It did, however, very clearly enunciate the policy, for example, the paper by the reverend William R. Alger of New York titled “The Only Possible Method of Religious Unification of the Human Race.” He says, and I quote, “The first form of partial unification of the human race is the aesthetic unification.” Very interesting. “A second step is the scientific unification. A third is the essential. The fourth is the political unification by the establishment of an international code for the settlement of all disputes by reason. The fifth will be the commercial and social, the free circulation of all the component items of humanity through the whole of humanity.”

In other words, they were for open borders so that immigration could help make one world and one religion out of all things. It is interesting that this man, the reverend Mr. Alger did not list Christianity or religion in these unification steps. And he wanted international law. He called it an international code for the settlement of all disputes by reason as basic to the political unification.

Now I think that is a very interesting statement, because he uses the word code, not law, because the term law very early with the post Darwinian world was held to be too theological. So codes and statutes, these were the terms that came in because they are man made. Men create them. They don't claim that they have an eternal validity, but then they deny that anything has an eternal validity. So, for example, the theory of Soviet law was that there was no law. There were regulations. There were codes. No law that was always binding and always true.

[ Scott ] Well, of course, this was a period when the bureaucracy had overcome the monarchy.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] The ... the monarchs of Europe which were still in office at the time that this meeting was held, had already been—I am looking for a respectable term, denatured, I guess, gelded—by the bureaucracy. The bureaucrats were running Russia and Germany and Britain and all the other empires and monarchies and were in the process of beginning to take over all the universities. The clergy still in place in 1893 in most of the major universities had not yet been swept out of place, but they obviously were in that decade and shortly thereafter.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, one other very important fact is the deification of democracy that is in the background of so much that they say.

[ Scott ] But that was head of bureaucracy.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. It is no longer, thus saith the Lord. A handful of speakers made that emphasis. But the reverend William Alger said, “We must arrive at a pure, rational, universal interpretation of all the dogmas of theology. We must interpret every dogma in such a way that it will agree with all other dogmas in a free circulation of the distinctions through the unity. Then the human race can be united on that.

[ Scott ] Now this is obviously the oldest dream of humanity, that everybody should think alike. Everybody should be the same. Diversity of thought is anathema to this... these sort of approach. They don’t want any disagreements. And yet it is out of the interplay and out of disagreement that progress is achieved.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ M Rushdoony ] Sort of a theological rationalization for the tower of Babel.

[ Scott ] The same thing.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ M Rushdoony ] It is a religious tower of Babel. And what they are doing is they are... they have... they are ... have been destroying the churches that believed in something. They have been undermining the churches. I have heard from somebody just this week in frustration because they couldn’t find a church in their rural area that was close to being orthodox. They were just getting nonsense from the pulpit. And the people didn’t believe anything. The new minister didn’t believe anything. And they were just at a loss as to what to do and this is what they have done in an attempt to build the unity they have destroyed it. They have destroyed Christianity for certain.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ M Rushdoony ] I can’t judge. Incidentally, were the Muslims at this most recent conference?

[ Rushdoony ] Oh, yes. I forgot to mention them. They were very definitely in attendance. About the only thing they left out were the cannibals.

I would like to quote the reverend William Alger one more time, because this that he says is implicit in so much. And he is open about it. He said, “I don’t think it is heresy to say that we must not confine the idea of Christ to the mere historic individual Jesus of Nazareth.”

[ Scott ] To the mere...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ...historic individual?

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. But we must consider that Christ is not merely the individual. He is the completed genus incarnate. He is the absolute generic unity of the human race in manifestation.

[ Scott ] So he has abstracted Christ.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. The unified one world humanity...

[ Scott ] And turned him into a principle.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. ...is the Christ. So we must not limit, he goes on to say, our worship of Christ to the mere historical figure of Jesus, but to the perfected humanity that is on its way.

[ Scott ] {?} You might as well put it into mathematical terms.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] It takes all the blood and the passion out of the faith, all the reality.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Well, have they said in this latest one? Has there been any report so far?

[ Rushdoony ] The reports are that God was totally left out. Totally. Humanity is set the new god so that what Alger said—and that is why I quoted him—is what the most recent congress of religions has adopted. Their Christ is the human race.

[ Scott ] In the meantime Christians are being massacred in Mohammedan countries.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Of course, that sort of thing is not mentioned.

[ Scott ] The facts of... of the world were kept out of the ...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ...discussion.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] So reality doesn’t exist. Well, it is a very old thing in... In James I, you know, wanted to believe, wanted to sit down with the pope and settle all the ... the matters of dispute between the Protestants and the Catholics and at the same time all the wars of Europe he wanted to settle and he wanted to settle it face to face with the pope all the national boundaries, much like Woodrow Wilson 400 odd years later. This... this kind of nonsense keeps resurfacing all the time. The pope wasn’t interested in sitting down with James, because England at that time was not that important a country.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, to give you an idea of that first conference, the reverend S. J. Nichols of Saint Louis what his affiliation was I don’t know. He says, “If God were simply a fact of history, if he were simply a phenomenon in the past, then once found out or once discovered it would remain for all time. But since he is a person, each age must know and find him for itself. Each generation must come to know and find out the living God from the standpoint which it occupies. It is not enough for you and for me that long generations ago men found him and bowed reverently and adored him.”

In other words, each age must find and define God for themselves. So this relativistic attitude as implicit in a great many of the men at the parliament. They were ready to see a common ground in all religions. One scholar, for example, J. A. S. Grant of Harrow, Egypt who apparently was high up in the administration there because he was known as {?} bey, B E Y, meaning he was a ruler, believes that Jehovah, Elohim in the Hebrew religion would be Osiris Ra in the Egyptian mythology. And so on and on. He went through the religions and insisted on seeing them all as manifestations of a common belief and therefore a common god.

[ Scott ] Well, we run into this all the time today.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] There seems to be a ... an illusion that the God of Judaism is the same as the God of Christianity, which, argues that Christ is unimportant.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. The saddest fact of all was that the Mohammedans, the Japanese, the Chinese Buddhists and Confucisanists all insisted on the distinctiveness of their faith. But a sizable percentage of the Christians compromised. The Catholic scholars, while maintaining their Catholic orthodoxy, nonetheless in some instances, soft pedaled Christ in favor of God and a rational concept of the deity so that Christians were being gentlemanly and were backing off from anything that might sound dogmatic. There were, as I said, exceptions and one that was good was the reverent R. A. Hume of New Haven, Connecticut, who while dealing with—and this is the title of his paper—“The Contact of Christian and Hindu Thought: Points of Likeness and of Contrast”—said this. “Preeminently does the contrast between Christian and Hindu thought appear in God’s relation to sin and the sinner. According to philosophical Hinduism, there is no sin or sinner or a savior. According to popular Hinduism sin is mainly a matter of fate. According to Christianity, sin is the only evil in the universe, but it is so evil that God brings over it, suffers to put it away and will suffer till it is put away. The revelation of himself in Jesus Christ was preeminently of this character and to this end. To philosophical Hinduism salvation is passing from the ignorance and illusion of conscious existence through unconsciousness into the infinite. To popular Hinduism, salvation is getting out of trouble into some safe place through a merit somehow acquired. To Christianity salvation is present deliverance from sin and moral union with Christ begun here and to go on forever.”

This was the clearest statement on sin in the entire conference. Basically they ducked the issue because it was obviously unpopular with the others. As a result, even though they, in some instances, were ready to state a biblical doctrine of Christ, they didn’t confront these ungodly peoples who were there with the fact of sin.

I would like to quote R. A. Hume a little further because his was the truly outstanding paper of 1893. He said, “To philosophical humanism man is an emanation from the infinite, which, in the present stage of existence is the exact result of this emanation in previous stages of existence. His moral sense is an illusion for he cannot sin. To popular Hinduism man is partially what he is to philosophical Hinduism, determined by fate. Partially he is thought of as a created being, more or less sinner... more or less sinful, dependent on God for favor or disfavor.”

And he goes on to say, “In Hinduism caste is ordained of God and is the chief thing in religion.”

So Hume confronted them with a problem that you cannot deal with the fact of mankind without dealing with the fact of sin.

[ Scott ] Well...

[ Rushdoony ] ...which means a Savior is needed.

[ Scott ] Well in this... and this is where Emerson was caught.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] By reading translations from the Hindu in which Shiva is both the god of destruction and the god of creation. You can get to nirvana, nothingness or absorption into the deity, either through crime or through virtue. It makes no difference. There is no difference between evil and virtue in Hinduism. You can choose either path. So therefore there is no sin. There is no sin at all in theological terms. There is nothing to be saved from. You go through various incarnations until you finally achieve union with the godhead. And this is where beyond good and evil came from.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] You know, in western thought.

[ Rushdoony ] Nietzsche.

[ Scott ] And Nietzsche. After Emerson to Nietzsche and from Nietzsche to... to Germany and we know what it meant in Germany, because the high command disregarded all international law in World War I and, in turn, the other powers did the same.

And we cannot say... I don’t... I don’t think we can say that the German elite or ... or hierarchy was unique. The English wasted as many men as the Germans did. No group of Christian rulers should ever have sent as many men to their deaths for no good cause as happened in western Europe in 1917, 1914 and on. So we could say that Christianity was no longer the governing philosophy of Europe by World War I.

[ Rushdoony ] And, as you pointed out, there was a direct connection from Emerson to Nietzsche and the idea of the super man to Hitler.

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] And the horrifying fact to me is that so many, many people who are more or less mostly less Christian and more or less conservative, mainly less, have idealized Ralph Waldo Emerson as though he represented the greatness of American thinking.

[ Scott ] Well they don’t read him.

[ Rushdoony ] No.

[ Scott ] For one thing. They take this at second and third and fourth hand. Most of the people that ... the people accept as authorities they don't read. They don’t go into. They don't form opinions on the basis of actual study.

[ Rushdoony ] One scholar referred to him as the representative American.

[ Scott ] Well, I hope not.

The ... but the behavior of our generals in the Civil War preceded the behavior of the West in World War I and, for that matter, the behavior the English in the Boer War when they put women and children into concentration camps.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Now this... prior to that, the Spaniards put the Cubans into concentration camps, which is one of the subterranean causes or one of the moral causes, you might say of the United States’ war with Spain in 1898.

The whole system of western morality collapsed in the period from 1860 to 1900. By 1900 you had a group of men on the top, men and women, who no longer believed in anything of a spiritual nature by and large.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, I think one of the things that marks our time is that celebrities do such strange, weird, absurd, insane things constantly.

[ Scott ] For instance...

[ Rushdoony ] Oh, take any of the popular figures and follow them, such as Madonna...

[ Scott ] Well...

[ Rushdoony ] And Michael Jackson and so on.

[ Scott ] Well, you are really going down, but you could go up a bit. The ... the whole idea of making homosexuality and lesbianism a fashionable cause which is done now by our government seems to me to be worse than anything that Madonna does.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Madonna just came off the burlesque stage or out of the... out of an American style semi brothel or whatever. You couldn’t expect much more. Street... the street celebrity. But what we are talking about now is what rules Harvard and Stanford and the state department and the White House. Now what could we say?

[ Rushdoony ] Well, I think the origin of a lot of that is Ralph Waldo Emerson because while Emerson is portrayed for us as you go through school—and I don’t know whether they ever mentioned him anymore—but when I went through school, you ....

[ Scott ] Oh, he was one of the saints.

[ Rushdoony ] He was... he was... he was one of the saints. So when I read all the works of Emerson as a student what struck me was that here was a gross character.

[ Scott ] Well, here was a man who married an heiress, a sick heiress, knowing that she was going to die and went through a great court case in order to inherit from her and the immediately abandoned the clergy because he said he had lost his faith. As soon as he got the money.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ...he quit the job.

[ Rushdoony ] Oh.

[ Scott ] ...he quit the church.

[ Rushdoony ] And he was a Unitarian pastor.

[ Scott ] Yes. He became a Unitarian.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, about a year after his sick rich wife died he took so men out to the cemetery and had the coffin dug up because he couldn’t remember what she looked like.

[ Scott ] Well, he did that and I have it in the secret six that somebody called me up and asked me why he did it and I said, “You will have to ask God. I have no idea,” because, you know, it was a horrible sight. She was in a state of advanced decomposition.

But what he really brought in was Hinduism.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And Hinduism is what you are getting now in the new age movement and in all the rest of this stuff. In... who is the actress? Shirley McLain in her incarnations.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And so forth. This is so... this is all eastern religion.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Well, consider the way he left Unitarianism. They had done him nothing but good. He was very young and because of some family connections and friends he was pushed ahead.

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] And he shattered the feelings and expectations of all the people around him when at the Harvard Divinity School chapel, I believe he was to conduct the communion service. He denounced everything, created sensation which is what he wanted to create.

[ Scott ] Well, he did. He succeeded. And we see a lot of this going on now. The Mormon church is creating a series of celebrities, women who are descent with its principles.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And so forth. That would ... gosh knows we have certainly seen enough ex Catholic celebrities and ex Protestant celebrities. Every clergyman who wants to break with his faith is sure to get on the air and sure to get on TV.

[ Rushdoony ] I feel that the World Congress of Religions in 1893 owed a great deal to Emerson. In particular, Hinduism was held in such high esteem by everyone except Hume.

[ Scott ] Well, there was the... this was the Annie Bassant period.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] This was the period when Hindu spokesman were appearing in Oxford and we still have this, these gurus that appear all over the place, don’t drink anything but coca cola or whatever it is that formula... the formula of the moment. I will never get over the {?} {?} something or another who used to take 16 or 17 limousines 20 miles to get a coca cola and then come back while all these...

[ Rushdoony ] Oh, yes in Oregon.

[ Scott ] ... followers bowed down...

[ M Rushdoony ] Sri {?}

[ Scott ] Yes. Well, they sow a lot of problems. Look at the East. Look at the East. Look at the sacrifices, the filth. Look at the horrible practices which are now going back, coming back, burning the brides...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ...in order to get another bride.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, as Hume said, caste, the caste system is basic to Hinduism.

[ Scott ] And yet the believers in equality turn and worship the believers in the caste system.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And see no inconsistency.

[ Rushdoony ] That is right.

[ M Rushdoony ] There were people who followed {?} {?} who came out of it who said they were surprised that it was so much fools really fraud.

[ Scott ] They were surprised.

[ M Rushdoony ] Yes. It is... it is... it is hard to believe, sometimes, this... how... how blind people could be when they want to be.

[ Scott ] Well, we live in an age of propaganda in which attention by the press makes people who don't get attention from the press feel invisible. They feel as they don’t count as much. So if they attach themselves to something that has a presence in the press they feel better. I noticed this years ago when people who had jobs with the large company. They brought up the name of the company as though this... you didn’t dare ask them what job they had in the company, but John is with General Electric or Harry is with General Motors. And somebody else is with ITT.

[ Rushdoony ] With a push broom.

[ Scott ] Yes. They could... they could be sweeping the floor, but they.... there they were. They ... they had an identity because of the larger identity and the {?} or whatever he was, these were people who have gone into the newspapers and... and you have an identity with the group. It has been years since I have heard anybody really identify with the church. The word Christian has come back into the... into the language in the last couple of decades. It... it disappeared most of my life. No one said they were a Christian. They said they were a Catholic or a Protestant or this or that or an Episcopalian, but at least now we are back to being Christians.

But I suppose in its own way that is a sign of the decline of the churches.

[ Rushdoony ] A Japanese speaker at the conference {?} {?} I think stated the premise of many there and of a great many people since then when he translated two lines of a Japanese ode which read, “Though there are many roads a the foot of the mountains, yet if the top is reached, the same moon is seen.”

And in other words you find God through all the religions. And this type of thinking was very, very much in evidence with that congress.

[ Scott ] Well, we were taught that in school. We were taught that there were five cardinal points that all great religions shared and when I was a boy at school Christianity, Buddhism, Mohamedanism and a couple of other things were all.... we were all told that they were really basically the same and, of course, that was a lie.

[ Rushdoony ] What...

[ Scott ] There is no God in Buddhism.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. The sad part to me was reading papers by some as for example the reverend Henry H. Jessup, apparently an Englishman who saw the world at the end of the last century increasingly manifesting the English presence everywhere and saw the future in terms of the Saxon peoples leading the world. It was not too many years later that the decline began.

[ Scott ] Well, the decline was in full flower.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] In 1893 Oscar Wilde, who is not English, was parading around in London society.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And the Saxons had been killed off in England a long time before this fellow spoke.

[ Rushdoony ] There was another fact that came out and I think it was very, very clearly stated by the reverend Edward Everett Hale.

[ Scott ] And he must have been pretty elderly by then

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. One of the shining lights of New England and, to the core of his being, anti Calvinist. So that if anything comes out badly in the papers it is Calvinism. And Hale said—and I quote, “Augustinianism died with the fact of universal suffrage.”

[ Scott ] What does the vote have to do with it?

[ Rushdoony ] Because it is the voice of the people is the voice of God.

[ Scott ] Ah.

[ Rushdoony ] There... how could you have a god over them determining things? But now every man with a vote in his hand determines the destiny of nations.

[ Scott ] You wonder if he had ever met people.

[ Rushdoony ] And he went on to say, “I speak with perfect confidence in this matter, because I know there was not a pulpit in the country that brought forth on that Sunday this old doctrine which is a doctrine to be preserved in a museum, but not to be paraded at the present day.”

He is probably turning over in his grave now to know what is happening with the revival of Calvinism. But he went on to say, “As for social rights, the statement is very simple. It has been made already. The 20th century will give to every man according to his necessities. It will receive from every man according to his opportunity and that will come from the religious life of that century, a life with God for man in heaven,” and so on and so forth.

[ Scott ] Well, there you know where Woodrow Wilson got this messianic drive.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] That was the atmosphere of the time.

[ Rushdoony ] A very good observation because when you reread, as I did, these papers, you are in Wilson’s world.

[ Scott ] I would like to borrow that.

[ Rushdoony ] All right. It is horrible reading.

[ Scott ] I know. I know it is. I know it is, but that is part of the problem of doing research. You have to wade through so much nonsense and mud. Now I would think that the latest meeting of world religions compared to that would be a big subject for any seminary worthy of its name.

[ Rushdoony ] What this congress helped do and what the churches helped do was to make possible the present one with no longer the world looking at the conference because they had made themselves irrelevant by cheapening religion.

[ Scott ] Exactly. I mean, the theology, the queen of the sciences, has fallen completely out of favor, out of discussion.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Most people don’t really believe that there is such a subject. They don’t know enough to even consider it a subject.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. On the way here Mark and I were discussing the fact that so many intelligent men think stupidly.

[ Scott ] Yeah.

[ Rushdoony ] And it is because they don’t have a theological perspective. If you don’t, you have unlimited possibilities and no rhyme nor reason, no logic possible. I recall vividly. It is one of the most interesting statements I have ever heard. I used to know... he has been good a many years, this professor who had taught genetics at UCLA and later went into research entirely, won 11 international prizes in genetics and he said it was easy to do so because he had thrown his unbelief and evolution over board and had become a creationist, six day creationist. And he said, “Now I know that God created everything according to its kind and, therefore, I don’t have a world of infinite possibilities. I can think logically within a given framework. I can experiment in terms of a given framework. And so I come to conclusions when others are still floundering in a world of infinite possibilities.”

[ Scott ] Well...

[ Rushdoony ] And the interesting thing is that he told me that the head of the laboratory where he worked as a researcher told him that his position made sense. Everybody else was drying to do the impossible.

[ Scott ] Well, for one thing theology makes it very evident, very clear that there are things not only that you do not know, but that you never will know.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And that is ... that brings you down to earth.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. One of the most vitriolic attacks on Dr. Cornelius van Til which still continues, so there are people who spew venom at the mention of his name was his insistence on the incomprehensibility of God.

[ Scott ] Absolutely.

[ Rushdoony ] That God is always consistent. So we can know him truly, but never exhaustively. And so many of these people, religions humanists want a god whom they can chart totally in their papers.

[ Scott ] Well, I have a dispute with a very good friend, Martin Selbride, over Jacob. It wasn’t an argument, it was just a difference of opinion in which I said I didn’t admire Jacob. I thought he had cheated his brother and so forth and so on. And I was always puzzled over God’s favoritism. Well he took a different position. And I finally said, “Who are you to approve of God’s decisions? He doesn’t need your approval.” I am saying that it was an incomprehensible decision and I will stick with that.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. And we are among his incomprehensible decisions.

[ Scott ] I feel the same way about my conversion, absolutely. It is not ... it is not logical.

[ Rushdoony ] No. Well...

[ Scott ] And here you have these logicians who gave away their whole subject.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Look at... look at the {?} fall of the clergy in the world.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Not... not simply here, but in the world since 1893. The Hindus are not what they were. They still have... I think they still have the caste, but do they have the faith? I mean, what is China? What faith does China have?

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] What faith do the Africans have? You know that the black Africans are interesting because one of the things that cause them to rebel against the white man was World War I. When they found that the white men were killing each other in a fratricidal war they said the white men do not believe in their religion, in the religion that they taught to us. So they began to lose respect.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, one of the interesting things, not the nicest thing to mention was that African troops were really very wild, uncivilized people who were brought in and used.

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] ...in World War I.

[ Scott ] The French...

[ Rushdoony ] And...

[ Scott ] ...used them in occupation troops in Germany.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. And what they did routinely was to go through and that wounded or the dead, it didn’t make any difference to them, they would castrate them and make a necklace for themselves of human testicles to carry back to Africa with them. And the impact of that in Africa was devastating. It prepared the way for the return to barbarism because they no longer saw the white man in the same eyes. They had, after all, not only plot and killed him in great numbers, but they had the evidence to prove that they had done so. It was a frightful episode in human history.

[ Scott ] {?} Ross spoke in one of his books about Africans who were told to bring back the arms of the enemy and they did, physically.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, our time is about over. We have barely scratched the surface, but the one world religion is a concomitant of the one world order. You cannot fight the one world order without attacking the religious premises.

Thank you all for listening and God bless you.

[ Voice ] Authorized by the Chalcedon Foundation. Archived by the Mount Olive Tape Library. Digitized by ChristRules.com.