From the Easy Chair

Sin vs. Conspiracy

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 174-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161DN214

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161DN214, Sin vs. Conspiracy, from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[ Rushdoony ] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 326, November the second, 1994.

In this hour Douglas Murray, Mark Rushdoony and I will deal with the subject of is versus conspiracy.

I feel this is a very important subject because I continually get letters and even books from people who are trying to persuade me that everything in our world today is to be explained by some conspiracy and conspirators who are manipulating things. When I pick up and read leftist literature they have the same idea about conservatives and Christians. In fact, the are more than a few people who believe that Christian reconstruction is some kind of deep and devious conspiracy. And there is nothing you can say to change their mind because they believe that everything is a conspiracy by someone or other to overthrow the order, their order and as a result is to be damned for that reason.

Well, I believe that as Christians we can say that while there may be and are very often all kinds of conspiracies and always have been in history, the basic problem is sin. This is a problem that everybody has to deal with in their lives. And only the Christian has a victory over sin and therefore only Christians can be the movers and shakers whose work does not pass away.

We believe, in terms of Scripture, that man’s sin is his attempt to be as God, to play God and try to manipulate others and to bring about his self chosen goals. And, of course, this means that this 'will to be God' is basic to all conspiracies. Conspirators, men who plan to accomplish something are men who want to play God. but we have to say that their basic problem is their sin, and their unwillingness to come to grips with that is what leads them into the futile destructive and evil conspiracies that have littered history.

Well, with that introduction, Douglas, would you like to comment?

[ Murray ] Well, the lust for power is... baffles a lot of people. They see political candidates spending 30 million dollars for a job that pays 100,000 dollars a year. I mean if most people thought about that, that is not a very good bargain by any means, but in terms of power, lust for power, that seems to be the end game for people that want to get into politics. They want to control the lives of others. They want to play God.

And the ante has steadily risen in politics over the years to the point where it is ridiculous the amount of money that people spend for public office. And that is one of the reforms I think that should be... there should be a limit to how much people spend to run for public office. Who is that ... there was a Senator one time from Wisconsin or something that he only spent... wouldn’t spend over 100 dollars. I can’t remember the fellow’s name now. He... he used to come out with this list of ... of ...

[ Rushdoony ] Oh, yes, I know.

[ Murray ] ... of wasteful spending.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes, yes.

[ Murray ] ... of the federal government.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes, yes. I know who you mean.

[ Murray ] And nobody picked it up as a subject for reform. But the politics now in Washington has become a blood sport. It is no longer about governing. It is no longer about trying to do things for society which society cannot do on its own, infrastructure, those types of things. They have gone beyond that. And I think the ... the culmination of that was Henry Kissinger’s comment that power is the ultimate aphrodisiac. And you see well intentioned young politicians go to Washington and within two to three terms they are completely corrupted. They don’t want to leave. They have become intoxicated with the ... the elixir of power, spending other people’s money, huge sums of money. They throw billions around as if they were dollar bills and they lose all sense of proportion to what real life is all about.

[ Rushdoony ] A considerable proportion of men who are voted out of office remain in Washington to seek a job in a bureaucracy, a law firm or as a lobbyist, because they want to be close to what they regard as the center of power. They see the center of power as manipulation of peoples, not as something religious and basically God centered.

[ M Rushdoony ] Well conspiracy isn’t... isn’t a motive. Conspiracy has to have a motive behind it and if we are assuming, for instance, wealth or power is a motive, then men’s... men’s reasons for wanting power or wanting wealth may be varied. Columbus, for instance, wanted wealth. He wanted it to institute a new crusade to the holy land. Other men want wealth for power. If men get together for a particular purpose, as men do, they do conspire, their motives may very differ... very often differ. They may fall to arguing. So many do in a conspirator. So to... to... to look to the conspiracy for the source of everything and as the governing factor behind all of history, misses much of the point. It is the motives of men and motive come from men’s heart.

I was just... I happened... I am writing an article of the Chalcedon Report and I was happening... it happens to be on a passage in James. James picks a rather innocuous fault that most people commit all the time and he says... he talks about a man planning a... a... a trip to a ... a faraway city for a year to do business, to buy and sell. And he says that is foolish. He says, “You don’t know if you are going to be alive tomorrow.” Ok? But if God wills it...

So we have to take into two accounts I all of our planning assuming it even is for a good purpose, in all of our planning we have to take into account that our ... our life is in God’s hands if certainly our plans must be in terms of God’s will. Our life is in God’s hands and nothing we do is going to happen unless it is in God’s will.

So the fallacy behind conspiracy is that conspiracy says that a few select men are governing history. Evil men very often have an influence on ... on... on history. But this is an evil world and evil men are going to always have an impact. It is easier to have an evil impact on history than it... than a good impact and a moral impact on history. So they will have an impact. That is the price we pay for living in a sinful world. And they don’t control things and one day they will stand before God in judgment and their plans will fall to dust.

So there are conspiracies, certainly.

[ Murray ] Well, evil men don’t stand alone. Evil men can’t exist unless there are evil people around them to support them. And it is a numbers game.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. And they can always appeal to evil. There is a...

[ Murray ] It is the easiest sell.

[ Rushdoony ] It is the easiest sell and that is why evil is so successful on the short term, but not on the long term. It is an easy sell because it appeals to so many people.

Well, you mentioned earlier the desire for power. George Orwell talked about that in 1984 and he summed up the goal of all socialistic left wing politics as this: A boot stamping on a human face forever. The epitome of total power.

We see it in a variety of areas. Now going back to the ancient Greeks and to Plato you find that they talked about over population. It is hard for us to imagine that they were over populated then, but they thought they were. In the French Revolution the revolutionaries were trying to decide what percentage of the population should be eliminated, 10, 20, 40, 50 percent? So that they could have a workable control of the people.

Well, you have the same thing today. And the Moslems and the pope prevented Vice President Gore and our state department from turning that whole conference into a population control thing comparable to what is going on in China where everyone is limited to one birth, which, by the way, is partly financed by us.

So conspiracies work to gain control over others, a brutal evil control, whereas those who see the problem with sin, see not control, but salvation as the solution. So the two areas are worlds apart. And as long as you have the humanistic approach you are going to have problems because there are people on all sides of the political fence who are sure that the problem is conspiracies.

[ Murray ] Well, they will... they... I always... get this picture in my mind of the people who chase conspiracies are like kids going along looking under every rock for some favorite insect or lizard, you know, something that they are desirous of finding. And, you know they just keep looking in the wrong place, but it doesn’t slow them down. They keep on looking. They are absolutely convinced that that is where they are going to fid their answer.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, it is interesting that, oh, the famous journalist out of San Francisco who wrote quite a bit on politics and then went to the Soviet Union and said, “I have seen the future and it works.” Lincoln Steffans.

Lincoln Steffans once told a bishop that he felt the church’s interpretation of the Garden of Eden story was all together wrong. And he said, “You people see it as sin. For me the problem was the apple.” It was economic. It was a will to possess. And he said, “That is the problem.” So Capitalism is the evil, not sin.

[ Murray ] That is stretching the point.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. But he was very good at that, stretching a point.

[ Murray ] Well, I have, you know, in... in my younger years puzzled, you know, having grown up through World War II and puzzled about how do people like Hitler come into being and Stalin and some of these monsters that have been produced in the 20th century and it is almost as if it is inevitable that there is always somebody out there who has this visceral dislike for people, this terrible longing and lust for power and they go searching for a constituency.

I was in Germany in Munich right after World War II and met a fellow there who had watched Hitler get up on the bench, took me over to the bench, showed me where they had carved their iitials into this bench. The bench is still there on the ground floor of the hoffbrauhaus in Munich, Germany. And nobody was listening to him. Everybody in the room was drinking beer and singing and having a good time and here is Hitler and his two guys up there, yelling and screaming away like a couple of geeks and, you know, on the steps of Sproul Hall at U C Berkeley and nobody was paying any attention to him. But little by little one at a time they began to listen. And they began to gather a following. And gradually it spread and spread like a cancer. And there is these ... there is these people out there, you know, the Jerry Browns of the world whose guiding philosophy was: Find which way the crowd is going and get around in front and say, “Follow me.” And it seems like, you know, there is... there is one born every minute. There is an Adolf Eichmann being born every minute. There is another Joseph Stalin or Adolf Hitler out there looking for a constituency that he can ... where he can seize power and... and rule people’s minds. And people have to be constantly on guard for those kind of people.

[ Rushdoony ] I recall years ago reading an account by someone who knew the old Russia who visited there maybe a decade or so after the revolution and saw the horrible change, how miserable things were. And he was talking with someone. Maybe they had known each other before and therefore the man was ready to talk. And he said, “I cannot understand why with conditions so terrible nobody is making a stand against it.”

And the man looked at him. “You don’t understand,” he said, “we, when they talk to us, the Bolsheviks, were ready to go along with them out of envy for the rich and the successful. And so we help them destroy those people and we know we deserve what we have.”

Guilt creates a bad conscience and guilty men are not free. And that is why there was no successful movement against Lenin and Stalin because the people knew their guilt. They had known the truth, but they thought, well, if we do this, we will get more land. We will seize the lord’s land or we will seize his properties. And they were very ready to do that.

[ Murray ] And...

[ Rushdoony ] ... not realizing they would be next.

[ Murray ] In effect they... they fell into sin, because...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] ... of greed and avarice. They turned away from the faith. And we are following the same track in this country.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, in the last hour we were discussing Catherine the Great or I was and the disillusionment she felt. The people did not want freedom. They preferred an autocracy and what they wanted to do then was to sit back and call attention to what was wrong, to blame her and then to conspire against her. This was what they wanted. So the conspiracies against Catherine, none of them successful, were created by the fact that these people did to want freedom and they did not want responsibility.

[ Murray ] She must have been one of Bill Clinton’s professors at Oxford.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, she came to know better very quickly and found she could do nothing about it. Sadly, she was trapped in other ways, by the way. She has a terrible reputation with most people as having a whole series of lovers, which she did. But the problem was she could not marry. If she had married a Russian there would have been a revolution because of the other lords and princes of the realm would have been enraged that she had chosen anyone other than themselves. If she had chosen a foreigner, she herself being a German, they would have said, “We will have a totally foreign family,” and they would have revolted and killed her.

So she could only take lovers. And they didn’t last very long because they would become targets. So as soon as they could get what they wanted out of her, they took off and Potamkin who was the, perhaps, one she thought the most of made a point of living as far away as he could and coming in only occasionally so he could survive. And he was able to accomplish some good.

But then she had only some of the royal guards, a series of lovers there. And none of them liked being lover to an old woman even though she was the empress. So she had, really, a sad life. She wanted to bring freedom to Russia and she found they did not want it. They wanted to conspire against her who was doing everything to try to further the country. In fact, she is called Catherine the Great because she did make Russia a great country. She greatly extended its territories southward, taking over Moslem areas and was quite remarkable. But what she could do was only extend the realm. She couldn’t covert it to freedom.

[ Murray ] I have noticed on PBS and some of the network news magazine stations recently that there has been one after another hit piece against the ... what is termed the Christian right.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] There is a Christian left and there is a Christian center, but they are never mentioned. The Christian right is being demonized. Christians, in general, rather, are being demoized and all lumped together into this all inclusive Christian right. And they... the networks, particularly ABC has done hit pieces recently going after various people in the Christian community as if they are conspiratorial and trying to bring the country down, et cetera, et cetera.

And this is ... this is not a new phenomenon, is it? I mean historically this is ... this is not new.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, the Romans sent the Christians to the lions and I believe it was Tertullian who said that whenever anything goes wrong in the Roman Empire the Christians are to blame.

It is interesting that a couple of people high up in the pantheon of the left have played theologian lately. Maya Angelou has said that it is good that Marion Barry is running again for Mayor of Washington, DC, because the very fact that he is a convicted criminal and ... makes him more ready to understand the people. So her thesis is that you gain a heart and understanding by becoming a sinner.

And Clinton the other day justified his favoritism to homosexuals and lesbians on the grounds that, well, God made us to be sinners, so we have to accept sinners as they are.

[ Murray ] Well, I like the one about Marion Barry where they said that he would probably ride to his inauguration in a car with a license plates that he made himself.

[ Rushdoony ] And maybe with some drugs on his person.

[ Murray ] Sure. Well, it is a sad commentary that the capital of the country is going to be presided over by a convicted felon.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, the condition of Washington, DC was predicted by some who opposed self rule. But no attention was paid to them and nobody now looks back and says they were right. Maybe we should listen to those men.

So today Washington, DC is a national eyesore.

Well, our failure as a country to take sin seriously is an appalling fact. On television today in the news professional athletes were seen... shown going into the public schools to tell children the solution to their problem was self esteem. And if they thought more highly of themselves they would not be involved in some of the illegal activities many of them were taking part in. Self esteem.

[ M Rushdoony ] That is... that is a cliché that has even affected the ... the popular psychology now that has infiltrated...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ M Rushdoony ] ... that the... the evangelical right and its self esteem and building self esteem, well, kids who spray paint buses and put graffiti they think too highly of themselves as far as I am concerned in their own... and their own self worth. Hoodlums think too highly of themselves. They... they... they need a little humility rather than a little self esteem.

But it also is a common theme.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. They caught one man who was teaching the art of graffiti, spray painting on an apartment building. Wasn’t that in San Francisco? I forget just where it happened, but it did.

[ Murray ] Well, it is too bad they can’t put them to work painting the Golden Gate bridge, because that is a never ending job.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] They just go from one end to the other back and forth.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] You know, get some... if they were sentenced to 500 hours of community service and they spent that time painting... doing a regular paint job on some public building it might serve some useful purpose. They might get tired of it after a while.

[ Rushdoony ] One of the things that has been especially damaging to the Christian cause in this century has been the rise of psychology. Now psychology literally means the doctrine of the soul and it was once a branch of theology, but it has become totally humanistic and psychology has ridiculed the idea of sin and it has said that the family, in particular, or the environment generally, is to blame for people’s behaviors, which is a way of saying you are not guilty. Someone did this to you. And that has been extremely destructive.

[ Murray ] You could call it secular Dispensationalism.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. But we would have to say that it fits in with the whole conspiracy thesis, because when you say that someone else is to blame rather than yourself—the devil made me do it, as Flip Wilson used to say—you are saying it was a conspiracy and I am the victim, not the perpetrator. And that approach has become so endemic in our culture that very small children have picked it up.

I recall very vividly, I believe this was in 1954 when I was pastor of a church. We had a daily vacation Bible school and there was this one boy of about seven who was a terror. His mother spoiled him rotten because she felt sorry for him since the father had abandoned them. The step father didn’t want to discipline him feeling that that might be out of line and resented because he was a step father. So the kid was getting away with whatever he wanted. And he was in the daily vacation Bible school. They had this one teacher who was very soft hearted, too prone to go along with liberal ideas, although she professed to believe the Bible from cover to cover. And so she felt sorry for poor Gregory. That poor by was just reacting. And Gregory was only seven, but he knew a patsy when he saw one. And he really...

[ Murray ] He was kind ... that is called working the crowd.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. He really worked that woman, drove her crazy, but she gritted her teeth and kept on with her syrupy love bit and on Friday of that first week Gregory went too far and she lost control of herself and she went after him with blood in her eye. And there was no escape. He was off in a corner. And he saw her coming down at him and he threw up his hands and said, “Don’t you hit me. Don’t you hit me. What I need is love and affection.”

He had the lingo.

[ Murray ] Yeah, well, that is what all of the prisoners in the prison say and they want color TV sets and the exercise...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] ... paraphernalia. Well, the ... the psychology approach is circular reasoning that leads to no resolution of people’s problems and that is what... you know, they... they are not cured.

[ Rushdoony ] No.

[ Murray ] ... of anything. The problem persists. It goes on. It is transference. They transfer the guilt to somebody else, but it doesn't really solve that person’s dilemma.

[ Rushdoony ] And you cannot solve anything if you are not the guilty person. You can only solve it by killing the other person, really. And I think that is one reason why there is so much murder today perhaps, because people see the solution as getting rid of someone.

[ Murray ] Yeah. Well I think the founding fathers of this country were very aware that we would get on... go off the deep end in a hurry without Christian moorings.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] And that is the reason there are so many references in the early documents and letters between these men that they... they knew that without that anchor that we would go the way that all other cultures had gone before.

[ Rushdoony ] Well...

[ M Rushdoony ] Because that is the norm. Loss of freedom, Authoritarianism is the norm. And freedom was a product of Christianity and by creating a system based upon freedom they knew it couldn’t last unless the basis of freedom lasted.

[ Murray ] Well, when all of the people today have turned over every rock and tried every other possibility, you will think that human intelligence and human intellect would finally go back to what works out of frustration if nothing else, that they would go back to what works.

[ M Rushdoony ] So that... that is another fallacy of the conspiracy theory regarding that there is a small group of men taking away our freedom and ... and brain... brain washing us in our schools. Well, they may be doing that, but... but it is easy.

[ Murray ] But there is a very large one... a very large group letting them get away with it.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ M Rushdoony ] Because that is what they want.

[ Murray ] Yeah.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, this matter of blaming somebody else... You usually blame somebody close to you. That is why the locale of violence and murder today is so often the family or someone near and close to you. They are the problem. And if you get rid of them, supposedly then you will solve the problem.

Some years ago in the 70s this policeman told me that he had a way of handling domestic disputes. He said they are the most dangerous. And that is where you can get hurt most of all. He said when the call would come with there was violence in a family he would go there and very often the door would be open, whoever placed the call would leave the door open and he would knock and then he would walk in. He said, “I would always go over to the television and turn it on a bit on the loud side and they would be arguing around me and I would turn to them and say, ‘Will you please shut up? I can’t hear what is going on in this program.’”

And they would turn on him. Well, the nerve of you. And they would become very loving towards one another and concentrate on him and he would say, “Well, is everything ok with the two of you?”

Of course there is.

So he would leave.

[ Murray ] Yeah.

[ Rushdoony ] They had a target. And it was someone other than themselves. He provided it.

[ Murray ] Sure.

[ M Rushdoony ] Why children often blame broken homes on the parent that stays. What did you do that dad left or that mom left?

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ M Rushdoony ] That is very common.

[ Rushdoony ] Our culture encourages them, plus the fact that we are all sinners. We ... Adam and Eve started it in the Garden of Eden because when God confronted Adam he said, “The woman thou gavest to be with me, she did give me and I did eat. So it is your fault, God. You gave her to me and she led me into sin.” And the woman, her attitude was that I am a sweet, innocent thing and that sweet talking serpent, the tempter, he led me to do this thing. So on that day began conspiracy theories. Somebody else had to be blamed.

And we have been doing it ever since and it is an aspect of is. The worst part of it is that today sound biblical teaching and sound doctrine have given way in the church to pop psychology. Very early after World War II psychology books passed for psychology books replaced Bible and theology in the pulpit. I just received a couple of catalogs from two different publishers, probably in the Christian world of publishing two of the three or four biggest publishers. And I could get whatever book I wanted from the catalog to review. And I went through both and there was only one book in the two that I would have felt was worth reading and possibly reviewing, because what they are putting out is trash. It is pop psychology and if they go through the Bible they will take a book: How Daniel handled his personal problems. How the characters in Genesis handled their personal problems and so on. All of which has nothing to do with the Bible.

[ Murray ] Conflict resolution and all these other...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] ...pop psychology terms.

[ M Rushdoony ] Darlene, we went to a conference and a Christian school conference in Sacramento this last week and you never know what you are going to get when you go to these ... these talks, because they get... they get dozens and dozens of ... of speakers and some are good and some are average and some are very poor. Darlene went to one of the seminars on handling stress in the school. And she said he began. So it was like a 45 minute session. He prayed for 20 minutes and she said, “I fell asleep.” And he said, “Well, you learned how to do with your stress.”

And then she left. But... there is a lot of this in the Christian school movement and ... and to this pop psychology that... that has infiltrated in dealing and there are a lot of... a lot of schools now in the... in the metropolitan areas are quite large and they feel a real pressure to which many of them succumb of doing things like the public school does them, because they want to be viewed as being professional.

Therefore, they are very much into the psychology and how do you deal with the problem child. They are very much into, well if a child has a reading problem, you had better send him to a professional to diagnose the reading problem.

[ Murray ] Well a lot of that comes from Dobson.

[ M Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] I think the question of stress is very interesting because when I was growing up, when I went to the university nobody talked about stress. About the only time you heard the word used was in terms of engineering and construction. But it began to spread. And more and more people become concerned about stress in their work, whether it was teaching, the pastorate, the medical profession and so on. And ...

[ Murray ] Well, if you have stress then you have to have people who take care of it. You have to have professional.... health care professionals who take care of it. If you follow the money, every one of these things has been created always winds up in creating new job opportunities for people in the public school sector. You have to have people to teach it. You have to have people to administrate it. And you have to have people to explain it. And that creates a whole bunch of job openings for people and it is a continually expanding sphere that never stops.

[ Rushdoony ] I recall some years ago when the concept of stress was coming in and teachers and other professionals were being stressed out, this old teacher was amused by the whole thing because he said, “It is my job to make sure the students feel the stress.”

[ Murray ] Right.

[ M Rushdoony ] A lot of the problem with the ... the pop psychology is ... and why it is easy to infiltrate into, for instance, the Christian school movement, is that it is... it is ... pop psychology starts with a grain of truth. They don’t start from here are our presuppositions. Let’s start with Freudian psychology. They say... they will start with something like, you know, life can be difficult. There is stress now. Here is how we are going to handle it. Or they will start with: You are going to have a problem child. Where are the problems coming from? They are coming from things you can’t control.

And they start with a little grain of truth about, yeah, the child is reacting to what he sees at home. It is now how are we going to deal with that? And we start with a grain of truth and then they brig extraneous ideas into it and people, because thy are not used to thinking now what is this man’s thinking, what are his assumptions. And where is this secular psychology? Where is ... where are these anti Christian ideas now seeping into our school? Because they don't come up front and say, “We are going to approach this from a Freudian perspective. We are going to approach this from a humanistic perspective.”

They... they slip it in and they... they start with a grain of truth and then they slip it in and the schools have just kind of been suckered into it.

[ Murray ] Well, the problem with all of this stress management emphasis is that it really disables people from being able to handle the normal stresses of life. They become a hot cycle... you know, I hate to use the term, but they become hot house plants. They have... their ability to handle any kind of a situation, a stressful situation lessens. It doesn’t increase. You can only increase your ability to handle stress by handling stress. Life is stressful. It has always been stressful and it is always going to be stressful.

[ Rushdoony ] And that is what people don’t want. They don’t want the life on God’s terms.

[ Murray ] Yeah.

[ Rushdoony ] They want life in terms of their imagination as to what it should be. They want to be cushioned from life, really.

[ Murray ] Well, that is what makes...that is what disables them...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] Because over time they are to able to handle anything and we have got lots of people running around who can’t handle... handle any level of stress any longer, because they have been so protected.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. I know a man who really broke down mentally because he was constantly protecting his wife from stress. And it took next to nothing, the slightest disagreement or argument and she was in a state of near collapse or at least acted as though she were and he was entirely attuned to reacting to that sort of thing.

[ Murray ] It is the... the southern belle syndrome...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] When they just faint at the slightest provocation.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Well, this was about 1950 or thereabouts, maybe a little later. And he actually had a total mental collapse. And I don’t think he ever made a real recovery. He was a broken man after that. And she was as healthy as a horse as far as I was concerned and nothing really phased her, but she had grown up with that kind of attitude towards life and she demanded that nothing stressful occur around her.

[ M Rushdoony ] She could write a biblical perspective on stress by saying it all begins within the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ M Rushdoony ] When...

[ Murray ] Well, the Bible is the only stress manual that works where there is a ... an ... a resolution for all problems.

[ Rushdoony ] This is totally inappropriate, but that poor man really went off the deep end because of his wife and his absolutely conviction that she was a priceless jewel and he had to do everything to please her. And his collapse became apparent in peculiar things he did in order to laugh. And one of them that I recall, I had forgotten it totally and it... hadn't thought of it for 40 years or more he wore a Hamburg and he filled it with peanuts, put it on his head and when he met someone out on the street or in front of his store he took his hat and all of the peanuts came cascading out and he laughed and laughed over that and people realized something is wrong here.

To my knowledge he never felt that his wife was anything but the victim she claimed to be. And that is what destroyed him.

[ Murray ] Well I think... I find it difficult to believe that anybody with an IQ over 10 has got to know they are kidding themselves when they are going blaming somebody else for their own is or their own problems. All of the people running around today that will want to sue because of this or sue because of that. I think down deep they knew it must gnaw at them. It really must gnaw at them.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] And, you know, it is hard to believe that there are... the are people running around who are so cynical and so detached that there isn’t some tiny particle of guilt way down in their gut that tells them that they are doing the wrong thing. It has to gnaw at them.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Well, one of the sad facts today is that we have all these explanations, conspiracies, the environment, other people, one way or another, and I believe the trouble goes back to the churches. They have not been preaching the fact that man is a sinner, that our basic problem personally and in every sphere of life is sin.

Now they cannot preach Christ as a Savior unless they let people know they are sinners and that they do need a Savior. And it has been the failure of the churches in this area that has led to all this type of thinking.

Before the war there was still a fair amount of hard headed preaching on the fact of sin. Nobody talked about conspiracies then. But it has since taken over. It is the environment. It is psychological problems. It is other people. It is the context of our life, where we are and so on that is the problem.

Well, our time is nearing an end. Is there some kind of final statement or additional statement that you would like to make? Douglas, would you like to go first?

[ Murray ] Well, I think, you know, people have to look inside themselves and deal with the true nature. We all confront, have to confront the sin. We have to deal with it. Once we have dealt with it the stress goes away. The guilt goes away. And you are free. And it is such a relief. And it doesn't cost anything. You don't have to go to ... you don’t have to make an appointment. You can do it anywhere, any time. And there is no fee and it is ... it is the only free lunch.

[ M Rushdoony ] I think a lot... a lot of ... a lot of the leaders of the evangelical churches have followed the lead of ... is it Philip Schuler? Schuler I the Crystal Cathedral.

[ Rushdoony ] Oh, no, Bob Schuler.

[ M Rushdoony ] Bob Schuler, ok. They have followed his lead. He says he wont’ preach that ma is a sinner because it degrades, it is degrading to people. It demeans them.

Well, I think we have to begin with the fact that is demeans people, that men are sinners and is does demean then and they ha to deal with sin, because he assumes that men aren’t basically sinners and that the are good and that he can start with the goodness in man.

[ Rushdoony ] One of the things I have been working on, off and on, for the past few years is a small book on confession, confession of sin, confession of the faith, confession. And confession has largely gone out of the church. Catholics used to go to confessional faithfully, regularly, but since Vatican II confession is not as common and I am told that in some churches you have to hunt to find the confessional box. Episcopalians have the general confession in their service. But they no longer speak much about it in their services. The Protestant churches used to stress very heavily the fact of is and the need for salvation and the necessity for the confession of sins. But there is very little about that. The fundamentalists preach salvation but they are very vague on the doctrine of sin. They don’t go into it at any great length or specifically. And they tend to reduce the whole concept to sins, not sin. They will take up drinking and smoking and gambling and fornication and so on and so forth and therefore Christ is going to save you from these. But is something different from sins. Sin has to do with our desire to be our own god, our rebellion against the law of God, our hatred of it. And that no longer is dealt with. So it is no wonder that the world around the Church is so far astray from the truth.

I do believe that when the churches begin again to preach the whole counsel of God and to stress the fact of sin, not just sins, you will see an end of this victimization idea, of conspiratorial ideas and doctrines and a realistic view of what we are and a fuller realization of who Christ is and what salvation is.

Well, thank you all for listening and God bless you.

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