From the Easy Chair

Good & Evil

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 162-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161DG202

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161DG202, Good & Evil, from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[ Rushdoony ] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 314, May the second, 1994.

This evening Douglas Murray, Otto Scott and Mark Rushdoony and I will be discussing good and evil.

The subject is a very urgently important one because the line between good and evil is being blurred in our day. And that which is good is too often called bad and that which is evil is being exalted. An obvious example of that is abortion. Another is homosexuality. And another now, euthanasia. All of these things which have for generations been regarded as evil are now being called good.

I would like to read a poem that tells us a little bit about the temper of our time. It is by a man on our mailing list, John Thomas Harllee, H A R L L E E, But Not For Love. Mr. Harllee has been a ... been a teacher from grade school on up through college and is an accountant now. And this brief poem of about seven lines, I think is telling. He writes:

We are weary of perfection,

Craving novelty and error.

We cannot endure reflection,

We are weary of perfection.

Fearing truth and introspection,

Hating beauty to love terror.

We are wearing of perfection,

Craving novelty and error.

I think that sums it up very well. There is a love of evil in our time and we have a problem with the good because people are alien to it. They have no respect for it. They want the freedom to do what they want and they don't believe in consequences, basically. So the idea of the good is something that in every day living is no longer a focus of personal attention and lives. It is a political thing with politicians ready to call everything that they do, however evil, good.

So we not only have a confusion, but we have basically a lack of knowledge. The idea of the good is alien to our time because who is interested in learning about it or teaching it? How often is the doctrine of the good promoted in education or from the pulpit? We are collapsing as a culture because we have no idea of the good.

Throughout the Middle Ages and in the Reformation one of the basic concepts in Christendom was the sunnom bonum, the highest good so that everyone was concerned with what is the highest good, the great good that should govern every are of life so that the concept of good was a very dominant one on the personal level as well as on the social level.

The whole point of the confessional system was to keep people in line with the good. You had to go to confession, confess all your sins and your waywardness, your departure from the good. It was a standard personally, politically, religiously and every sphere of life and thought. But the idea of the consummate, the highest good no longer figures in our society, except on a political level of a world order which is going to embody goodness. And it is a totally humanistic concept and it varies from one group to another.

Well, with that general introduction, Douglas, would you like to carry on?

[ Murray ] Well, in my life time the courts have distorted this principle and they have used this phrase, the greater good principle in adjudicating legal disputes and often where they want to create a benefit for the greatest number of people the benefit is not necessarily good. The result can be evil just as well as good. The destruction of private property rights, for instance, when the government feels that it has an overriding purpose such as environmental protection agency when they put people in jail for filling in a festering swamp or some other thing they feel that the greater good principle is served by... by doing that. And so they have... they have distorted this principle.

[ Scott ] Well, they are imitating the Nazis. The Nazi’s green party was the original environmentalists and nature lovers, you might say. And the essence of the Nazi theory, the socialist theory, national socialism, the essence of the socialist theory is the greater good. The argument is that everyone owes their life to the great... to the majority, to... to what is best for the greatest number. And that is assuming that the greatest number is good. And it doesn’t... it is not necessarily true. The ... the Catholics in their... in the Middle Ages when all are forbearers were Catholic, defined the good. They had four cardinal principles of virtue: prudence, temperance, justice and fortitude. And then they had the three theological virtues which were faith, hope and charity. So they had seven cardinal virtues all told.

Now temperance has been ... was mistreated by the prohibitionists to mean to be a tea totaler when it never did. Jesus drank wine. It meant temperance meant temperance and prudence, similarly. Fortitude, justice. And then they had the seven cardinal sins which was headed by pride. Pride was the number one. And I think Jesus used that in one of his parable about the publican. Who was it who on the roof top?

[ Rushdoony ] The Pharisee...

[ Scott ] The Pharisee...

[ Rushdoony ] ... and the publican.

[ Scott ] Who I... you know, I thank God I am not as other men. And that arrested the attention of God who knows what other men and he were all about.

But in terms of goodness as a... as a word in the United States which makes people shudder, because it has been appropriated through the decades by the hypocrites.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, in the last hour when we were discussing Satanism, we all made reference to some of the films, Stephen King’s novels and other writers and their novels. I think one of the pioneers in the tales of horror was Lovecraft.

[ Scott ] Yes, he was.

[ Rushdoony ] A very popular in his day, but because he had some Nazi ideas he has just been forgotten. Although...

[ Scott ] I didn’t know that.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] I wondered.

[ Rushdoony ] Yeah. Which is not surprising. But at any rate, we have an intense fascination with horror stories, stories about the occult and Satanism, which is interesting because if you go back to the Middle Ages and to the Reformation what you have are saints tales and stories of martyrs, a great many. One of the most popular books of all time was Foxe’s Book of Martyrs which is still in print after all these years coming from the time of Elizabeth, I believe.

[ Scott ] Yes. It is a whole series of volumes.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. And the abridged volumes are still available, always have been.

[ Scott ] And they are true stories.

[ Rushdoony ] True stories, yes. And even though there is contempt expressed by scholars for the saints’ tales of the Middle Ages and you can still get Butler’s History of the Saints which is very popular and sells heavily in some circles, none of these equal the concern for the horror story.

[ Scott ] Well, the horror story was pretty rare until fairly recently.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And now, of course, there is a whole flood...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] But the stories that thrilled me as a boy were heroic people who won against great odds or, for that matter, it didn’t have to always have to win against ... against great odds. If they simply held firm.

[ Rushdoony ] The saints tales even of the desert monks, a book which was very popular for centuries and at least within the past decade was in print again.

These are ridiculed by scholars as a lot of mythology. And yet the Tales of the Desert Monks is largely an account of what they did in the austere lives they lived. Their theology was not always too good, but there was also sometimes a beautiful and a hard common sense for those saints’ tales. I like he one of the desert monk who on one occasion when a very beautiful woman went out into the desert to see these desert monks and consult them, as many people did, they all hid their faces so that they wouldn’t see her and be tempted by evil as they saw it. And this one elderly desert monk ran out and looked at her and looked at her and said, “She is beautiful, very beautiful.” When he was rebuked by some of the other monks he said, “But God made her beauty. We should rejoice in it.”

There was a lot of good sense in some of those saints tales as well as some things that are a bit absurd.

But what has happened is that we have replaced the saints’ tales with the most evil kind of literature. We have replacing them a love of horror. You have not only the Stephen King type of thing, the Lovecraft type of thing, you also have true crime stories, endless details about the gory murders committed and the hunger for this is incredible. You have many a tabloid that makes a sale with promoting horror.

[ Murray ] Well, they don’t even bother writing about it. They just show it on television. I mean they are... you are ... you are taken along for the ride in a ... in a patrol car and you are shown the body there. You are shown the blood, the gore, the... the broken lives, the ... the destroyed hopes. It is out there ... there is... there is not much point in ... in writing about it anymore. They have taken whatever glamour there was in writing about it away.

[ Scott ] Well...

[ Murray ] And it is night after night and it is incessant and it never stops its on multiple channels.

[ Scott ] But it is false even when it is factual.

[ Rushdoony ] What we want to do and John and I, John Upton and I have talked about this more than once, is to have the funding to put out a series of half hour programs on the remarkable men who are out there doing amazing things. One such man, of course, is Jose Lopez Luna whose work in Juarez we visited, Otto, as you recall.

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] There are a great many men like that who are doing amazing things. Nobody is telling their story. Jose has had some attention, but there are others who are never heard about and...

[ Scott ] Well, it...

[ Rushdoony ] ... we are hoping somebody out there might have the money to finance such a work.

[ Scott ] A book... a novel that I referred to fairly often before on these tapes was Fortitude by {?} which I read when I was about 18 or so, now maybe 19. I am not positive now. And it changed my behavior, because it convinced me by one of his characters, one of the lessons that this hero learned was that cruelty is weakness and not strength. And thereafter I put a curb on my temper until it today is second nature for me not to get too angry. I can get irritated, but I cannot afford to get angry.

Now I got a letter from Han Senholz the other day about an essay that I did on the movies in which he recalled 1930 movies when he was a boy in Germany.

[ Rushdoony ] Ah, yes.

[ Scott ] And the way the... the cowboy movies set a pattern for them which he has never forgotten. And if you remember in 1930, well, you don’t, but in 1930 the cowboy movies, the good guy always won.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. And he was a good guy.

[ Scott ] And... but he didn’t... they didn’t win easily. And the classic is that the hero loses and comes back to win. And in the beginning the villain always had all the odds. He had more men. He had more money. He had more land. He had everything. It looked as though he was invincible. And unless you get this kind of hope you cannot really function, because you are just a slave if you think that everything that is bad is always going to win. It is not true. And I remember in World War II—and I brought this up before—I only saw two men show fear out of all the me in all the critical situations involved. One actually it was a mental thing. He was a radio operator. And the other was a fellow who gave way to a momentary weakness. But the average person is brave, physically brave, morally not so brave, but physically very brave. This is not taught.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. One of the things that we have seen is that the whole of the old cowboy movie, which was very resented because it was so successful, during the 30s cowboy films made on low budgets were bringing in a great deal of money because their people could still get a clear cut distinction between good and evil. And when John Wayne’s Stagecoach blurred the line it instantly became a classic and was acceptable by the academy.

What we have seen recently is that one such cowboy hero who played a variety of roles, but basically in the cowboy tradition, even though he might be a police officer a good deal of the time, was Clint Eastwood. And he was finally acceptable, as you pointed out, Otto, when he completely blurred the line and destroyed the line between good and evil which is what our age wants.

[ Murray ] He became an anti hero.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] No, I am not so sure that our age wants it. It is what our leadership is giving us.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes, you are right there.

[ Scott ] And people ... I go to the movies now because I am writing about them. And I haven’t been to one of these cinemas over here in Sonora yet that had more than 12 people watching. I don’t know how they make a living. It is almost all empty.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, you mentioned anti hero. It is interesting that not long after the war a Latin American poet won... won international prizes before a book of poetry that he called Anti Poems. And since then, poems have no longer become sensible. They give impressions. They do not give you a sensible perspective on anything.

[ Scott ] Well, we are talking about good and evil. And I saw a recent column or an article, I guess, on Russia in which it said the only vestige of old Russia after the demolition of the Russian socialists was their music. Classical music played all the time in the Soviet Union. Now that the Soviet Union is no longer dominant and the gates are open to the rest of the world, music in Russia is being destroyed by what we are importing or exporting to Russia.

[ Rushdoony ] The same is true of painting.

[ Scott ] And we are doing the same with painting, yes. Right, so we are exporting pandemonium.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Artistic pandemonium. Now that is evil.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, when you have an evolutionary perspective you have no way of defining good and evil or drawing a line between them.

[ Scott ] It is whatever you want to see in it.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] It is a Rorschach.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, it is like, oh, Emil Durkheim in his classic work The Rules of Sociological Method in which he defines the criminal as an evolutionary pioneer so that if what today is called good is tomorrow’s evil and today’s evil is tomorrow’s good, then you destroy all possibility of having an orderly society.

[ Scott ] Well, it is interesting. When we get to that, I hear very few lectures or articles—although they do exist. I just recently got hold of a book by John Gardener, who is dead now, but he wrote a book on... he wrote a small book which he titled On Moral Fiction and I look forward to reading it because I remember it was the only book he wrote that was trashed by the reviewers. The very idea of moral fiction offended them. They thought he had lost his talent.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, it is interesting that even Tolstoy who was not by any means a Christian, he was still a moral writer and he used a Bible text as the text for his novel Anna Karenina. “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord.” That dimension was very prevalent in the novels of the last century.

[ Scott ] Well, yes. Dickens, Thackeray and here Hawthorne and the rest were... they pondered a great deal over the difference between good and evil. I understand that Walker Percy has done the same in our time, but I haven't read his books. I don’t know. I have given up on fiction.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, I think one of the most interesting examples of what we are talking about I the 18th century was Fielding, Henry Fielding. I always enjoyed Fielding. And it is interesting that Tom Jones and before that Joseph Andrews were both good comic works. They were a spoof on some of the naïve and priggish good people. They were enjoyable. They were to unkind and Fielding himself, for example, wound up liking parson Adams whom he presented as a caricature. But before it is over, both you and Fielding like parson Adams.

But what made it impossible for him any longer to write comic spoofs on the good people was that he got an appointment as a judge. And day after day he was face to face with total depravity and the humor in life was gone for him. He was horrified by what he saw evil to be.

[ Scott ] Well, I ... Doug said... told me one day that police today suffer greatly at the end of three or four years. They can hardly stand it.

But we have moved a long way away from an honest society when, for instance, we cannot discuss the gluttony of some of our big businessmen for their avarice who have scooped up millions upon millions of dollars while they are cutting back the number of people they employ. And then on the whole question of cardinal sins, anger, anger is a cardinal sin. And this is what I was referring to when I said the book Fortitude had taught me that I had to watch the business of anger. When you are really in a state of anger, you are practically in a state of madness. You are not rational. So if you allow yourself to get into an irrational state, you do things that you will always remember and regret. And ...

[ Murray ] {?}

[ Scott ] Pardon?

[ Murray ] Go ahead.

[ Scott ] No. Go.

[ Murray ] I see a lot of anger in the faces of women in the Feminist movement. You know, when ever any one of them get on TV it always strikes me that they have this rage, this countenance of rage.

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Murray ] And that their statements are statements of rage and anger.

[ Scott ] Well, they are... they have got an argument with God. God shouldn’t have made men. And certainly shouldn’t have made men the way they are.

[ Rushdoony ] And they are going to remake man.

[ Murray ] That is why they are continually turning the changes.

[ M Rushdoony ] I was thinking of just the same when you were talking about the kids earlier in our conversation, between tapings. A big... it is not just how they dress. It is not just their haircuts. It is the expressions on their face.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ M Rushdoony ] They are zombies.

[ Scott ] They don’t smile.

[ M Rushdoony ] It is obviously, there... there... there is an evil there that is pervasive over their life. They are... they are... they are headed nowhere. You can tell by the look on their face. Life is a misery to them and it is written ... it is as clear as anything. They are so unhappy.

[ Scott ] And what makes them so unhappy?

[ Rushdoony ] Look...

[ Scott ] Is it the way they are...

[ Rushdoony ] There is no meaning to life for them.

[ Scott ] Is what they are taught in school... is what they are taught in school?

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] Yeah. It is destroying them.

[ M Rushdoony ] And judging by the way they dress they are doing whatever they feel like, which obviously doesn’t bring them happiness.

[ Scott ] No.

[ Rushdoony ] Our Lord at one point made the statement to that disciples and to the assembled people that there is none good save God alone. God defines the good. God is good and whatever God decrees is good. Therefore, we have to define the good in terms of God and his Word, God’s law.

Now that seems obvious to us, but the problem is, we live in a culture that has been heavily influenced by Greek philosophy.

And for Greek philosophy the idea of good is not associated with God. For them God was only the first cause, not a person. The good was some abstract idea floating around in space that it was a... it was a part of the natural order. Therefore, the more you became in tune with the natural order or natural law, the closer you were to ultimate good. But for us there is no abstract idea of good floating around in space. Good is what God says it is and none other. And these two ideas are implicitly at war although most people are unaware of the very, very great difference between the two. So you have a great many Christians, churchmen who are ready to accept the idea of natural law, forgetting that nature is fallen, that the is no inherent good in the natural world that has evolved somehow out of nothingness and constitutes an entity in itself.

[ Scott ] Well, the list of cardinal sins and cardinal virtues that I wrote down are all involved in actions and abstractions I find difficult to grasp.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Now sloth is written down as a cardinal sin which means a terminal sin, a sin that will kill you. And what is sloth? Well, somebody who doesn't work. Whatever... somebody who sits beside his vocation, you might say, and goes go sleep, because we all have a vocation. And I think unhappy lives are lives that are based upon avoiding your vocation. I knew a man who had a very high job in a large corporation and I thought was quite successful when I interviewed him. He revealed himself to be very unhappy. And I said, “Why?”

Well, he said, “I really always wanted to be a doctor.”

And I said, “Well, why didn’t you become a doctor?”

He said, “Well, I had to get married and I had to take a short term job.” And he said, “This to meet the emergency and so forth.” And he said his wife was pregnant, I guess. And he ... he did well in the job and he stayed well with the company so he spent his entire life, his entire career doing something he didn’t enjoy. And I thought to myself, well, what is the matter with you? Lots of physicians started out without any money. I mean there was... that was crap. That was... that was sloth. He... he... he simply didn’t have any will. And because if you follow the vocation that God gave you, you will succeed. That is the reason he gave you the talent or the aptitude or whatever you want to call it.

So sin in this context comes in the area of negativity, of rejection, of a loss of faith. And every one of these are attitudes, you might say. Pride, looking down at other people because you might have what somebody called a ... be part of the knowledge monopoly, because you know something about some subject that the average person doesn’t know. I mean, so there is a thousand subjects that you don’t know that somebody else knows. It is almost impossible I this age... this era to be proud of knowledge.

[ Rushdoony ] I think you raised a very important point. The minute Christianity came on the scene it defined the cardinal virtues and the cardinal sins. And this was a great revolution. It was a major shift in the attitude of people, because if you go back to the culture of classical Greece the word virtue is there, but virtue means strength, power.

[ Scott ] Manhood.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. It is related to the word virile, vir, V I R, man, power, strength so that it had no connotation that we would call moral.

You could be a tyrant and you were a man of virtue because you were a man of strength. And Christianity introduced a moral factor and the word virtue was immediately shifted in meaning, dramatically....

[ Scott ] To the avoidance of certain types of behavior.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. And in a great many areas, Christianity redefined words in a radical way. Nobody has ever written anything on the redefinition of terminology, but it was quite definite. Words that were common in Latin and in Greek were taken and given a totally different meaning when Christianity began to emerge in the Greco-Roman world.

[ Scott ] Whoever heard I the ancient world of the idea of liberty?

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] They had no concept of liberty whatever, none. I don’t think they even had a word.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, they had the semblance of a word, but for them the free man was a ma who was under the state. You were not human if you were outside the state. A stateless man was a non being.

[ Scott ] Outlaw.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] He was an outlaw, automatically illegal.

[ Rushdoony ] So that your only freedom was to be under rule, under authority, totally.

[ Scott ] A member of the collective.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] To use the foreign ... to use the modern terminology. So there was no concept of liberty.

[ Rushdoony ] No. There would be blind rebellion

[ Scott ] That was...

[ Rushdoony ] ...against...

[ Scott ] Treason, yes.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Against those in power, but it was only to establish their same pattern if they gained power.

[ Scott ] I think this is where Christian scholars have missed the deck.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Because Christianity is invented liberty. It came into the world with the Christians.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And yet here the Christians are accused of being narrow and intolerant, being the opposite, standing for censorship and not for liberty.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, I was interested some years ago not too long ago in reading a book from, oh, I think the 1890s about life in Africa and how slavery was endemic in Africa culture and a slave would put up with any kind of abuse, torture, mistreatment because he knew if he were in power he would do the same thing. And the author cited the case of one man who did gain freedom, then became very powerful and was as abusive as his master had been to him.

[ Scott ] I have seen this in life.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And so have you.

[ Rushdoony ] And this was the pattern in the Greco-Roman world. This was the pattern in Paganism everywhere.

[ Scott ] Sure.

[ Rushdoony ] And there was no concept of anything different because virtue to them meant power, power to lord it over others.

[ Murray ] We are coming full circle now.

[ Scott ] Yes, we are. I remember at World War II there was one black merchant marine captain, got his license in Honolulu and was given a ship and turned into a regular Captain Bligh, a real nut. I mean he came down like Simon Legree and at the end of a couple of trips they had to take him off the vessel. But to cover it up, because this was the new deal that war, they sent him on a lecture tour recruiting people for the merchant marine and talking about the fact that he was the first black merchant marine captain in modern times and so forth.

Well, he had obviously thought all this life that if he was a white man he would really be strong, so he got this four stripes and he was strong. And I have more than once heard somebody—years ago, not so much recently—when you point out somebody on top who is doing the wrong thing I have had them say to me when I was younger, “Well, so would you if you had that job.” And when you say, “No, I wouldn’t,” they don’t believe you.

[ Rushdoony ] That is because we are returning to the pagan attitude, to the pagan perspective on virtue.

[ Scott ] Yeah.

[ Rushdoony ] And I think it prevails to a great extent, unconsciously, in Washington, DC.

[ Scott ] Well, there is also a rejection of liberty and a desire to have things regulated.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, I have mentioned this once before years and years ago, but it is so telling I will never forget it to my dying day. Some years ago, oh, in the early to mid 60s, I was part of a panel discussion in Palo Alto and one of the men was a scholar at the Hoover Institution. The other one I don’t remember his background. He had been in the FBI, but I didn’t know what he was at the time as I recall it. And I was the third.

And it was before a packed auditorium and I had stressed the necessity of Christian education and a return to a Christian concept of liberty. Well, there was a heated discussion afterwards and there was this one woman who turned out to be a fourth grade school teacher who was at the back and kept waving her hand trying to get attention and came charging up to me when it was over to accuse me of quackery because I had spoken about liberty.

[ Scott ] Really.

[ Rushdoony ] And her statement was a remarkable one. She was a highly intelligent woman, a Humanist to the core. And her statement was, “In the modern world freedom is obsolete. You cannot have a scientifically governed world with anything allowed to operate at random. Therefore if we are going to have a scientific future, a scientific state,” she didn’t say scientific socialist, but that was implicit. “You must not allow liberty.”

[ Scott ] My goodness.

[ Murray ] {?} is all about.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes, apparently.

[ M Rushdoony ] That is what Environmentalism is all about, the whole rationale on the Environmentalist movement is that man has become too intelligent. Man is now interfering with the evolutionary process by interfering with nature. Therefore we must totally regulate man so that we can allow evolution to be able to continue in the woods.

[ Scott ] I read recently and I think it was the state of Washington, but I am to positive, at some game preserve where people are not considered to have any more rights than the animals.

[ Rushdoony ] There is a growing movement to not only extend the national parks and forests, but to bar people totally from them.

[ Scott ] Well, then what makes them national?

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ M Rushdoony ] The latest little Sonora paper just this past week had an article about some biologist, some person from some university had stated that the trout or... that were planted in Sierra waters, a lot of these waters did not have native trout in them and they were planted in the 1870s by sportsman’s clubs and said that we have got to now eliminate these trout that have been there for 120 some odd years because they are apparently eating insects.

[ Scott ] They are illegal immigrants.

[ M Rushdoony ] And eating tadpoles of the native frogs and therefore we must restore the balance by killing the ... the... the trout.

[ Murray ] You see the kind of money? I saw a list the other day of the kind of money that the federal government is spending on some of these endangered species and it is staggering. You know, 11 billion here and eight billion there.

[ Scott ] Well, now they are convinced that they are operating virtuously. They have given virtue a new definition. And that is to favor animals over people, insects over people and so forth. So they are virtuous.

[ Murray ] Insects don’t vote. They don't pay taxes.

[ M Rushdoony ] But... but yeah, you are right. It is... it is good. There are certain things I have noticed on ballot initiatives, of course, here in California we vote on all these bonds and initiatives. And the things that always pass are anything for veterans, no matter what it is, if it has got a veteran’s name on it is going to pass. If it has a park on it, we are going to create a new park. It is going to pass. And if it has got some environmental name on it, it is probably going to pass.

[ Murray ] People vote for veteran’s stuff because of guilty conscience, I believe.

[ M Rushdoony ] Sure.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, this is, perhaps, irrelevant, but it tickled me all the same. Last week there was a former grade school teacher from Angel’s Camp currently a resident in Oregon who was arraigned in Sonora on multiple charges of possession, use and the like of drugs and apparently introducing children to them. All these are natural substances. Now this teacher holds positions or did until arraigned with nature study groups, with the park service, national park service and so on. So his idea of virtue is totally pagan and anti Christian. And it is an acceptance of things natural.

[ M Rushdoony ] Was he the fellow was showing ... teaching children about frogs and he was extracting the...

[ multiple voices ]

[ Scott ] Milking frogs.

[ Murray ] Yeah.

[ M Rushdoony ] ...freeing the secretions from them.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ M Rushdoony ] And {?}

[ Rushdoony ] That is right.

[ multiple voices ]

[ Murray ] I just about busted out laughing when they told about that on television. I thought, you know, people... people will go to any lengths...

[ Scott ] Really, milking frogs.

[ Murray ] Milking frogs.

[ Scott ] That reminds me. H G Wells said in his view the bravest man in the world was the first man to drink cow’s milk.

[ Murray ] Yeah. Yeah.

[ Rushdoony ] Well...

[ Scott ] This guy has out done him.

[ Rushdoony ] He defended himself on this frog milking thing by saying he never damaged a frog.

[ Murray ] Yeah.

[ Rushdoony ] That would have been a terrible offense.

[ M Rushdoony ] Almost a fourth far sight cartoon, so they...

[ Murray ] Yeah, they...

[ M Rushdoony ] ...extracting something...

[ multiple voices ]

[ M Rushdoony ] {?}

[ Murray ] For... for milking the frogs and drawing it and smoking it he... he and his wife only got so many hours of going to drug counseling. But now if he damaged those frogs he would have gone to prison for a long time.

[ Scott ] So the definitions of good and evil are ... are ... are altering.

[ Murray ] Well...

[ Scott ] Evil is killing the frog.

[ Murray ] Yeah.

[ Scott ] Good is milking the frog.

[ M Rushdoony ] Ah, well, look at Jack Kevorkian. Jack Kevorkian is taking ... trying to take the high moral road.

[ Scott ] Oh, yes.

[ Rushdoony ] He is trying to keep people from suffering.

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Murray ] Jack the ripper.

[ Scott ] Well, the doctors have given him an opening, because they have reduced people’s agony.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And let them stay that way. They refuse to give pain killers and the FDA has even issued a directive telling them to issue pain killers, but they won’t. They think it is good for you to suffer.

[ Murray ] Well, wasn’t there a time when there were doctors that were prosecuted because some people came up addicted?

[ Scott ] I don’t know of any. Generally speaking you can’t get addicted for... what would you become addicted to, the absence of pain?

[ Rushdoony ] Well, I was told within the past week of a doctor who really gave a nurse a very strong dressing down because she was unwilling to give the pain killers to a dying person and he was very blunt and direct about it.

[ Scott ] Craig told that story.

[ Rushdoony ] What?

[ Scott ] Craig told us that story.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Craig Flanagan did.

[ Murray ] Well, it seemed to me that quite some time ago when the... the war on drugs got into high gear that there were some over eager prosecutors that...

[ Scott ] I think that is true.

[ Murray ] ...going after some doctors.

[ Scott ] Yes. So prosecutors decide how much is too much.

[ Murray ] Yeah. They got gun shy ever since.

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Murray ] The doctors.

[ Scott ] And they are... and the whole business is pretty wild, you know, that I remember that years ago a friend of mine working for Burroughs Welcome and Company dropped a bottle of number four emperin, which is a heavy narcotic, chemical narcotic, not... it doesn't provide any euphoria, but it does kill pain. And every... every pill that dropped on the floor had to be picked up and counted and his name put on the broken bottle and all this stuff.

There seems to be on the part of our bureaucracy the sort of absence of common sense that we once associated with the Germans of carrying every regulation to insane and lunatic lengths.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, of course, Machiavelli a long time ago said that was the way to exercise power.

[ Scott ] Which it is.

[ Rushdoony ] You could gain great power over people more important than yourself by reducing everything to nonsense and compelling people to meet every jot and tittle of the regulations.

[ Scott ] This is where we are.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And that is an evil. It is an evil system.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] In times to come our bureaucrats will discover the fruits of that, because all of bad things come to an end the same as all good things.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, I don’t think good things will come to an end. They will triumph and reign forever in heaven and the evil, well, they will wind up in hell.

[ Scott ] Well, we go through stages. You know, it is summer for a while and then it is winter.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, our time is nearing an end. Would you like to make any summary statements, Douglas?

[ Murray ] Well, drawing from my own personal experience if we are going to perpetuate good in this life then we are going to have to teach our young people what good is so that they can tell the difference because the majority of kids in high school today haven’t got a clue. And it shows in their faces and the way they act and the kind of people they become. So there is only one window of opportunity for people and that is to put their kids through Christian school. Otherwise the next generation is going to be just as lost as the present generation is.

[ M Rushdoony ] That brings up an important point, because I have heard people say that, well, our public school isn’t so bad. This teacher isn't so bad. They actually encourage the Christian students to present their point of view. But what they ... what they do in these discussion groups is every view is valid and we ... and we must express all our views and come to a consensus. There is no absolute truth. Therefore we have to come to a consensus or an appreciation of everybody else’s idea. And just the fact that they welcome the Christian kids to give their... their views does not mean that Christianity is welcome or an important part of that discussion. It is... it is just thrown into the melting pot.

[ Murray ] They dilute the authority that Christian teaching should have by marginalizing in the larger group. It is the reason that government has accepted all of these other religions.

[ M Rushdoony ] And we will be tolerant of you as a Christian and you be tolerant of this person and that person.

[ Scott ] As long as you don't stand up for your faith you are ok.

[ M Rushdoony ] Right.

[ Murray ] Right.

[ Rushdoony ] We have returned to the attitude of the Roman Empire. Rome believed in the exclusive power of {?}. It regulated every aspect of life. It did not believe that there was an exclusive truth. Therefore it wanted to recognize every kind of religion and make them legitimate, provided none of them had an exclusive position. And, of course, Christianity was totally against this.

[ Scott ] So was Judaism.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. But they finally dealt with Judaism by trying to destroy it forever.

[ Scott ] They placed an extra tax on the Jews.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. However, Rome was exclusive where its power was concerned, just as the modern state wants to attack the exclusiveness of Christianity but insists on the exclusiveness of the power of the state.

[ Scott ] Well, it has placed itself above all the churches. And that is the reason that the churches have lost most of their prestige. Their ancient power and ancient Christian power to limit the state has been lost in this particular state.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Well, 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.