From the Easy Chair

Cosmetics, Abortion , Child Sacrifice

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 181-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161H15

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161H15, Cosmetics, Abortion , Child Sacrifice, from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[ Rushdoony ] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 63, February the third, 1984.

I am going to start off this time by reading an article in its entirety. I have never done this before, but this article, a grim and unpleasant matter, is nonetheless very important for us to consider because it tells us something as to what is happening in his country and the depth of moral insensitivity in our time.

This is from All About Issues put out by the American Life Lobby and I will tell you later, if you are interested, how you can get this article. It is by Dr. Olga Fairfax, “101 Uses for a Dead or a Live Baby.” Now to read the article.

When I saw the first ad on TV advertising collagen-enriched cosmetics I was speechless. We’ll be apologizing to Hitler, I thought; at least he didn’t kill for money!

Collagen is the gelatinous substance found in connective tissue, bone and cartilage. Nick Thimmesch’s syndicated column "Our Grisly human Fetal Industry" documents that amniotic fluid and collagen can come from fetal material, since the Food and Drug Administration does not require pre-testing or identification of cosmetic ingredients.

A glance at a local drug store revealed that the leading 12 shampoos and five hand-creams all contained collagen.

Check your beauty products and you may be shocked! Unless your beauty product specifies animal collagen or bovine collagen, the product probably contains human collagen.

The drug companies should be challenged at once. Even collagen taken from human placenta raises questions about respect of life and ownership of the placenta.

A letter from Mary Kay Cosmetics emphasizes that their collagen all comes from animals. A similar letter from Hask has also been received.

Since there are a million and a half abortions every year, there is abundant source of fetuses for commercial use. There’s a triple profit to be had. The first is from the abortion (estimated at a half billion dollars a year by Fortune magazine.) The second profit comes from the sale of the aborted babies’ bodies. The third profit is from unsuspecting customers buying cosmetics.

Babies’ bodies are sold by the bag, 25 dollars a batch or up to five thousand five hundred a pound. The sale of late-term elective abortions at D.C. General Hospital sold at 68,000 dollars between 1966 and 1976. The money was used to buy a TV set and cookies and soft drinks for visiting professors. Personally, I hope that they choked in the Kool-Aid!

Call your local abortuary and hospital and ask them some pointed questions about the disposal and possible sale of fetuses. Would an abortionist who kills a baby think twice about selling its body? One prenatal killer said, "A baby is becoming property. We kill, keep, or sell the property."

In Pittsburgh Women’s Health Service there’s a sign in the lab areas asking doctors not to carry dead fetuses without wrapping them since it disturbs the patients.

What have abortuaries done with fetuses in the past before they realized that they could make another profit out of them? Well "Richmond’s shame" marked a new low in disposal of wastes. An abortion center there filled a long bin on the rear of its property with the remains of its day’s nefarious doings its trash compactor neatly mashed 100 babies’ bodies which were then tied up in plastic bags and thrown on top of the bin.

"The hungry dogs came along and dragged the bags away. There were frequent fights and the contents of the bags would be strewn up and down the streets until the dogs separated the gauze, sponges, and pads and devoured the placenta, bones and flesh of the babies," said a mother. She went to the police, health department and city hall and felt that she got nowhere; but the bags of warm human babies’ mutilated parts disappeared from the streets even though the clinic increased its abortions from 25 to 150 a week. They’ve since moved to larger quarters.

The Jacksonville, Florida, Women’s Center for Reproductive Health, which is run and owned by the Clergy Consultation Service, advertises "celebrating a decade of service."

What they don’t advertise is that they leave aborted babies out of the trash pickup. Rev. Martin Lutz, the director, explained that the practice of leaving the remains out was perfectly legal and approved by the "good keeping good housekeeping" Judases, the National Abortion Federation and the Florida Abortion Council.

Dr. Jeronimo Dominguez of New York wrote that "on any Monday you can see about 30 garbage bags with fetal material in them along the sidewalks of several abortion clinics on New York."

In Odessa, Texas, city ordinance 69-91 forbids placing a dead animal in a dumpster. But that didn’t stop one abortionist from depositing large brown plastic bags full of sock like gauze bags into the city dumpster prior to closing every night.

A Baptist minister opened the bags and to his horror found little "perfectly formed hands and feet of a 13-week-old baby and complete body, in pieces, of a 17-week-old baby. Everything except one foot was there: The rib cage, sexual organs, head, finger nails and toe nails."

He nearly died of shock. I nearly did too, reading about it.

Babies used to be burned on the altar to Baal; now they’re burned in furnaces at the sites of their deaths. In Cincinnati, a prenatal killer allowed dense smoke to emanate from his chimney. When firemen were called they were told, "They’re burning babies," as if that was routine. One wonders how life-saving firemen could continue their dedication amid such a contradiction!

One pro-lifer overheard her children (ages 5 and 7) discussing the infamous picture of the babies in the trash can the first time they saw it.

"It’s dolls. It has to be dolls," said the kindergartner.

"No," said his pre-school sister, "it’s babies."

The older child couldn’t believe it. "It has to be dolls," he insisted. "Why would anyone throw away babies?"

When the mother explained to them that it was babies; both children grew very quiet. Silently they studied the picture and then recalled the times they had gone on trips to the city dump with the family.

"Will the rats eat the babies when they take them to the dump?" the boy asked.

A wounded American eagle was found in Maryland recently and rushed to emergency treatment but it as too late. He died. A $5,000 reward was offered for the arrest of its killer.

Similarly, the Isaac Walton League’s ethics fund has spent nearly $60,000 in the last year and a half to enhance outdoor ethics. It is illegal to ship pregnant lobsters (regardless of which trimester!) to market. There’s a $1,000 fine and a year’s jail term as a penalty.

The Massachusetts Supreme Court has ruled that goldfish cannot be awarded as prizes in games of chance. This violates the state’s anti-cruelty law to protect the "tendency to dull humanitarian feelings and corrupt the morals of those who observe them." This same court upheld mandatory state funding of abortions!

If human fetuses were an animal, its welfare might be entrusted to the Department of Agriculture or the Fish and Wildlife Service where it would be safer than at the mercy of the Health Department. The hackles of SPCA would rise at the physical treatment that it received.

Some researchers insist that the reason they must do research on human fetuses is because they are human, not animal.

In it-shouldn’t-happen-to-a-dog story, 47 senators voted in 1974 to protect dogs from experimentation with poisonous gas but then voted down Sen. Jesse Helm’s amendment to prevent federal funds from being used for abortion. One liberal, pro-abortion senator gave an emotion laden speech to protect dogs. Man’s best friend came out better than man himself!

Who is pressing for the "right" to experiment? No one less than the National Institutes of Health. A stacked national commission gave them the "right" and this experimentation is funded by you, the tax-payer!

This is another sequel to the erosion of the value of human life. Abortion, fetal experimentation, infanticide, and euthanasia are four walls of the same coffin.

Even Planned Parenthood’s anti-life lawyer Harriet Pilpel was shocked. "What mother would consent to an experiment on her fetus?" she asked.

Some of the more shocking facts that will give your heart palpitations include: The young couple who wanted to conceive a child to be aborted so the father-to-be could use the baby’s kidneys for a transplant he needed himself. In California, babies aborted at six months were submerged in jars of liquid with high oxygen content to see if they could breathe through their skin. They couldn’t. The hysterectomy-aborted fetus in the seventh, eighth and ninth months is removed intact (translation: the baby is alive.) The trade in fetal tissue is about $1 million annually. The high prices may encourage unnecessary abortions in welfare patients as the surest way of getting "salable tissue."

Dr. Robert Schwartz, chief of pediatrics at the Cleveland Metropolitan Hospital, said that, "After a baby is delivered, while it is still linked to its mother by the umbilical cord, I take a blood sample, sever the cord and then as quickly as possible remove the organs and tissues."

Magee Women’s Hospital in Pittsburgh packed aborted babies in ice for shipment to experimental labs. Newsday reported that an Ohio medical research company tested the brains and hearts of 100 fetuses as part of a 300,000 dollar pesticide contract.

Human embryos and other organs have been encased in plastic and sold as paperweight novelty items. The Diabetics Treatment Project at UCLA depends for its existence on the availability of pancreases from late-term aborted fetuses. A rabies vaccine is produced from viruses grown in the lungs of aborted children, according to FDA. A polio vaccine was also grown with cells from aborted kids. Brain cells would be "harvested" from aborted babies for transplant. Tissue cultures are obtained by dropping still-living babies into meat grinders and homogenizing them, according to the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine. The Village Voice reported estimates seven years ago that 20,000 to 100,000 fetuses are sold to drug companies each year in the U.S.

A 600,000 dollar grant from N I H enabled one baby (among many others in the experiment done in Finland) to sliced open without an anesthetic so that a liver could be obtained. The researcher in charge said that the baby was complete and "was even secreting urine." He disclaimed the need for anesthetic, saying an aborted baby is just garbage."

Don’t tell God!

A study on the severed heads of 12 babies delivered by C-section who were kept alive for months. Even the baby’s placenta is sold for 50 cents to drug companies. Ever heard of Placenta Plus shampoo?

And the atrocities go on. Will the unborn be regarded as handy little organ sources? Will pre-born brothers and sisters become a source of spare body parts? Listen to the newscasters-they are already pleading nationwide for organs. It’s enough to make you tear up your organ donor card! At least adults can consent to being inventorized like a body shop’s spare parts department but little ones cannot!

After reading that aborted babies’ fat is being used to make soap in England and fact that the former head of the Federal Centers for Disease Control abortion surveillance branch proposed that abortions should be charged for by the length of the baby’s foot, are we surprised that babies are treated this way in the Year of the Child or the Year of the Disabled?

After reading the above, if your heart is still beating, run, don’t walk, to your nearest prayer closet and start praying!

Editor’s note: Everything you have just read is quite true. Dr. Fairfax has documentation and clippings to support every point made in this article. You may obtain a copy from her. Please send a donation with your request for the 40 pages to Dr. Olga Fairfax 12105 Livingston Street, Wheaton, Maryland, 20902.

You can get this article by sending a donation to American Life Lobby, P O Box 490, Stafford, S T A F F O R D, Virginia 22554.

Write for All About Issues January 1984 and don’t write without sending a gift to them.

This tells us how far we have gone. Let no one talk about how great and marvelous our country is. We stink in the sight of God.

We can talk about evil elsewhere, but let’s look at the evil in our own midst. This kind of thing puts to shame anything that Hitler did. It is incredibly evil.

Then I would like to read from Policy Review the winter 1984 issue a few paragraphs from “For the Family” by Mitch Dechter. The subtitle: Millions of Americans Have Been Engaging in Child Sacrifice.

She writes, “Despite the wide availability of effective means of contraception, in some cities abortions outnumber live births. A new psychotherapy or mind altering chemical gets produced, as it seems, every minute. We are forced to ask ourselves a question so vast and general as: What is going on with us? How is it that a people blessed by God, or, if you will, fate with better health, longer lives, greater comfort and personal freedom and economic well being than any previous peoples in history should give so much evidence of deep trouble?

“Not so very long ago a whole generation of this country’s middle class children rose up in late adolescence and said that they could see no reason to prepare themselves to take on the burdens of adult life, to serve their country, for instance, or educate themselves or make a living. They left school. They ran away. They drugged themselves. In milder cases they just kind of hung around growing pale, unkempt, unhealthy, and truculent. And untold numbers of them committed suicide.

“Again, I do not speak metaphorically. In 10 years the suicide rate of those from 18 to 25 increased by 25 percent. How did we respond to this we elders, we parents, teachers, clergymen, journalists, civic leaders and, yes, legislators? We applauded them. We said they were the best generation ever seen. They were great idealists, far superior to ourselves. We said they had discovered a new way to life. In short, we abandoned them.

“Just as surely as if we had with our own hands bared their necks to the ritual knife, we sacrificed them on the altar of our own moral irresponsibility. Those who managed to save themselves did so with no help from any of the authorities in their lives. Neither parental, religious nor intellectual. For none of those authorities would tell them what they needed to know, that life is real and weighty and consequential, that life is good and only good when it is real and weighty and consequential, that it requires discipline and courage and the assumption of responsibility for one’s self and others and that it repays and only repays discipline and courage and the assumption of responsibility for one’s self and for others.”

Then she goes on to say that the truth is that we have lost the collective ability to make the simplest moral assertions.

Well, that is an excellent article. Policy Review is put out by the Heritage Foundation and it can be ordered from 214 Massachusetts Avenue, NE, Washington, DC 20002 for 3.50 a copy.

The reason we cannot make the simplest moral assertion as a people is that most of the people are operating without faith. And without faith you don’t have the premise to make a judgment. One of the books I read recently, which is now out of print, is Lev Copellev, To Be Preserved Forever which was published in 1977, translated from the Russian. And Lev Copellev is still in the Soviet Union. He is still a devout Marxist. And yet he suffered in the gulag. In fact, he appears in Solzhenitsyn’s stories as one of the leading characters. He got into trouble during the war when, as a top ranking officer, he took seriously the order against looting and rape and that was simply window dressing.

The order was not to be taken seriously. The men were turned loose for unrestricted looting and rape.

Moreover, as Copellev says, lest anyone think that this is a part of the Russian character, it says that in 1914 the Germans put out a book Russian Troops in East Prussia. And it was the present the horrors of the Russian invasion in the early years of the war. What does the book come up with against the Russians? Two cases of rape, several cases of robbery, beatings, one or two cases of murder. Moreover in each of these cases Russian officers stepped in, tried to stop it and handed out punishment. Moreover, the Germans in this book giving the horrors of the Russian invasion listed all the chickens killed and all the fruit trees smashed and all the faces slapped. So the book really dealt with very little. Since then, atrocities have become routine.

Well if men will not live with God, they are going to live in hell and they will turn whatever they have and wherever they are into hell.

Now to another book which is in print. It is a book published in 1983 by Random House. Andrew Cockburn, C O C K B U R N, The Threat: Inside the Soviet Military Machine published for 16.95 by Random House and well worth reading. Now Cockburn has to be taken with more than a grain of salt. He is an Englishman who ... or rather British. He lives in New York. He is vey definitely to the left. And we need to recognize that as we evaluate what he says. But his book is well documented and I do believe it is important to consider.

His point is that the Soviet military machine is vastly overrated. It is a consummate bureaucracy. As a bureaucracy it is dedicated to perpetuating the incompetent. The commander of a division must inescapably bear the blame for everything that happens in his division from those above him. As a result, if any scandal or any corruption or any incompetence occurs in his division anyone who covers it up will get his gratitude. It means, therefore, that the men who perpetrate something are not going not be punished.

For example, in at least one instance some young men hijacked a military plane in their outfit and flew to home for a visit. They were drunk and it seemed like a good idea. The whole thing was covered up. They should have been shot according to law. But they were protected.

Now everyone who helped with the cover up had the gratitude of the commander of the division. In turn, every commander when he blunders is protected by someone above him so the whole thing results in the incompetent having something on somebody else because they covered up for him and, therefore, getting promoted. And so the result is that the blunders are increasingly getting to the top.

For example, her cites an example of the incompetence that results. When November of 1980 Solidarity was moving to one success after another in Poland it was decided to make a move. And the generals were all for it. And so the invasion of Poland was ordered. Let me quote what is said.

“The trouble for the bellicose generals was that although they seemed to have won the political battle, (that is, the decision to move into Poland) they were less adept at getting ready for a military operation. The actual mobilization turned into a shambles. Reservists called up in key districts next to the Polish border promptly deserted in numbers too large to punish and coordination between different units and headquarters broke down. Military invention had been successfully touted by the generals over the apparent objections of Brezhnev, but they then had been unable to get the troops ready. It did not take long for the wily president of the Soviet Union to make them suffer the consequences.”

Now Cockburn twice goes into this matter and the evidence he produces of the farce that the attempted Polish invasion was is very telling. The idea that the Soviets can quickly mobilize, of course, is ridiculous. In fact, almost only one country has been effective in quick mobilization, Israel.

Moreover, he says that the facts and figures with regard to the vast number of men is complicated in that all kinds of civilians are included and more. Then, too, he calls attention to the fact that the Soviet technology is poor even when borrowed. It is incompetently used. As a result when Soviet arms have been used against Israel the Israelis have out gunned them every time. American weapons have proven to be superior. And the Soviet equipment has been proven to be incredibly bad.

Then there is another factor. He deals, too, with the intercontinental ballistic... ballistic missiles. How big a threat are they? And the picture he gives here is quite telling, because what he says is they don’t have much success with theme. Let me quote. “The sum of all the uncertainties, unpredictable weather patterns, the inconsistency of guidance systems even when traveling over familiar routes, the dubious reliability of missile systems leads us to one certainty, a precisely orchestrated Soviet counter force strike against American missiles as they are now deployed is absolutely impossible. No less a figure than Dr. James. R. Schlesinger, a former C I A director, secretary of defense and senior strategic analyst at the Rand Corporation tried to make this very clear in testimony presented to the Senate foreign relations committee in April, 1982. Quote ‘The precision that one encounters in in paper studies of nuclear exchanges reflects the precision of the assumptions rather than any experience, based on approximation to real life test data. Specialists in their enthusiasm tend to forget how conjectural the whole process remains. To a greater or a lesser degree we are employing speculations regarding delivery system reliability and accuracy. Reliability of the nuclear weapons and the impact of weapons’’ effects. This introduces vastly greater then normal uncertainties into such paper analyses. We must be careful, therefore, not to ignore these dominating uncertainties and thereby to ascribe high probability to the outcomes projected in these paper studies. To do so would be to fall into the error that Alfred North Whitehead had once described as a fallacy of misplaced concreteness.’”

Well, there is much more here. But in the various tests, what has happened is that the tests have proven that the Soviet military is weak and almost farcical and hardly to be qualified as the threat some would see it as.

For example, he says, “Further, according to U S intelligence analysts who have had access to the secret courts on I... Soviet I C B M test shots from operational silos, the failure rate is extremely high. According to one senior weapons engineer who has seen highly classified intelligence data on the tests it would be inconceivable for the Soviets to risk a first strike in view of their reliability problem. Their accuracy stinks and reliability is so bad you can’t believe it, he told a reporter in 1983.

“Although the defense department typically assumes that Soviet missiles are 80 to 85 percent reliable it would be closer to the mark to call them that their unreliability. Far from being ominous, the fact that the Soviets do carry out semi realistic tests of their nuclear war fighting equipment is very comforting. I means that General {?} and his staff have some idea of just how unreliable their missiles actually are. The Americans, in contrast, prefer to remain in happy ignorance.”

Then he goes on to say that some of their nuclear forces, as far as their operational ability is concerned, it may be as low as 25 percent. The exact figure, he says, is hard to pin down, but it is almost certainly no higher than 70 percent. The remaining 30 percent are stood down for overhaul at any one time, unavailable for action.

There is a great deal very important material in this book. We have to recognize Cockburn’s bias, but nonetheless, I think we have consistently overrated the enemy and underrated ourselves. Moreover I do believe the Soviets are a major threat on the international scene because of our foreign service, our state department and its incompetence. Our bungling has created the threat everywhere so that, by default, we have allowed tem them to take over.

Then I do believe that the greatest threat is from within our own country, from the creeping and growing now sometimes galloping Socialism of our people. There was an interesting article on the 23rd of December, 1983 in the Wall Street Journal. It was by Igor Berman, “Soviet Bluster Stems from Economic Decay,” just a small portion of that. I quote.’

“As Vie Kantorovich of the Foundation for Soviet Studies has demonstrated, all western forecasts of the Soviet economy for the 1970s were higher than naïve extrapolations, hence, even higher than the actual performance. Still the same kind of predictions are given to us now. Most f the experts do not like the very word collapse. And let us not waste words about words. I am simply saying that the economy is stagnating, that in a short time it will go down hill faster and faster and that something very drastic must be done.

“This fall I talked to a leading French Sovietologist who had just returned from Moscow. She also asserted that the economy will scrape by. ‘What did Soviet economists reveal to you in private?’ I inquired. ‘Oh, my Soviet friends agree with you,’ she confessed. ‘What do you think that your assessment ... why do you think that your assessment is more accurate than ours?’ I insisted. No answer. I addressed the same question to American experts with the same results,” unquote.’

Well, anyone who knows something about free market economics should have been able to say the same thing a long time ago. The Soviet economy can only go down hill. And it is going down hill. The insanity of the situation is that we are imitating them. We are moving every year into more and more controls so that we are going downhill also. It is as though we regarded them as the role model for our country and it is radically wrong.

Now to an entirely different subject very briefly. I have received a number of letters and phone calls from Nebraska about the situation there. While those parents were imprisoned because of their involvement in the Faith Christian School in Louisville, Nebraska I had a letter from one of the men in jail just recently. And he writes: “Five men and myself are in Cass County jail for not answering our question... answering questions about our involvement in the Faith Christian School in Louisville, Nebraska. Our wives and children are in Liberty, Missouri. They are staying with church families from Calvary Baptist Church pastored by Jim Teton. As of today we have been here 54 days.” This was a couple of weeks or so ago. “I very much appreciate your letters. We know exactly what your position paper number 44 is talking about. We would appreciate your prayers. I am sending gift I was going to send a year ago. Forgive me for not sharing. We are learning how to put all our trust in the Lord and learning patience. Thank you for your time. We love you. In Jesus’ name, Larry Nolte.” He sent 40 dollars. If you are not praying for him, may God forgive you.

Well, some time ago I told you about the transsexual, the man who had a sex change operation and become a woman. From Ken he became Karen. He had been talking about suicide a great deal and the airline, Eastern Airline, refused to rehire him. But recently a federal judge ordered Eastern Airlines to retire or rehire her. So she is apparently back on the job unless Eastern has decided to appeal and continue to fight it.

Then in the Wall Street Journal for Tuesday, January the third, 1984, there was an interesting little note about sexual harassment on campus. A number of universities have had problems lately with professors insisting on sex with their female students in order to get passing or good grades.

A survey published I the Journal of College Student Personnel showed that nearly a third of 226 females who were surveyed reported being harassed sexually. Now there is nothing new about this. About, well, 20, 21 years ago when I was doing research at one of the major universities of this country there was a great scandal on campus because of this sort of thing. In fact, it was the dean of women who reported it to the trustees. The trustees only covered up the thing. The student paper ridiculed the dean of women and she and six of her seven staff associates resigned in protest. Nothing was done. And you had better believe that nothing is going to be done now despite surface and cosmetic measures, because without a religious and moral change there will be no change. We live in a world that is in serious trouble.

One of the books I read recently and not a very good book, but with some very important data in it was Robert Paine’s Massacre also out of print. Its date was 1973. And it describes the massacres in Bangladesh by Pakistan. Three million were killed, three million. And they did it casually and routinely. They killed defenseless people simply to eliminate them. On top of that the Pakistani command being very much British trained, loved to parade around and survey their handiwork with a swagger stick under their arm, a British military mustache, a little brush and with comments like, “Cheerio, well done, old boy,” and that sort of comment. All the façade of civilization with mass murders.

And this is what we have, whether it is in Britain or western Europe generally or the United States, the façade of civilization. Civilization does not long endure when the faith that makes it is gone. And so there are barbarians all over the United States and they are dangerous. And crime is increasing, because of these barbarians and it will not change, because short of a theological or religious change there will be none.

Another book of a few years ago that I read just recently was about Abscam The Sting Man: Inside Abscam by Robert W. Greene, put out by Dutton in 1981, I believe out of print. A very interesting book because while Abscam revealed the immorality of some of the Congressmen, it also revealed the immorality of the men who conducted it. It was a sordid operation from start to finish. And they used the worst kind of men for a very seedy operation. There is less and less morality anywhere around us.

Now to something very different. One of the books I read recently which possibly may still be I print, I don’t know. I ... it may be reprinted is Nora Lofts, L O F T S, Anne Boleyn published by Howard, Mc Cann and {?} in New York in 1970 and reprinted in 80.

There are some interesting little bits in it. It is not an important book, but what interested me was that Anne Boleyn was an accomplished musician. When she was facing death she composed a very interesting little tune. A portion of it reads, “Oh death, rock me asleep. Bring on my quiet rest. Let pass my very guiltless ghost out of my careful breast. Wring out the doleful knell. Let it sound my death knell for I must die. There is no remedy for now I die. Defiled is my name, full sore through cruel spite and false report that I may say forever more farewell to joy, adieu comfort. For wrongfully you judge of me. Unto my fame a mortal wound. Say what you list, it may not be. Ye seek for that that shall not be found.”

In other words what she minded was not death, but the infamy that was ascribed to her.

Well, I cite that because a point I have made more than once I want to make again. Charles Lofton portrayed a good many years ago, about 40, 45 years ago, perhaps, Henry VIII and portrayed him as a slob. Most people think of him that way. What we need to recognize is this. Henry VIII was trained to be the philosopher king. The great scholars of the day, including Sir Thomas Moore regarded him as the high point of the Renaissance hope, a king who was a scholar, a thinker, an accomplished musician who was now going to be Plato’s philosopher king. They broke with him simply because he learned his lesson very well and decided to do without them. Henry VIII composed some very lovely poetry set to music.

Now I raise this point because we have to recognize that Henry VIII was not the slob Charles Laughton portrayed him to be. Laughton was the slob. Henry VIII was a cultured Renaissance monarch, but he was a moral monster.

Just as people in high places today ruling countries may and sometimes are cultured, very pleasant and affable gentlemen, but they are moral monsters. And the only thing that is going to change that fact is Jesus Christ. And so we accomplish nothing by portraying Henry VIII as a slob. We don’t realize that that is to the way to recognize evil. Evil can go to the symphony orchestra, ballet and opera just as well as to a rock and roll concert. Evil has to be seen in terms what a man does.

Well, now on to something else. I don’t recall who it was who sent this to me. One of you did about the situation in New York where New York City is giving the Salvation of Army a bad time, because they are insisting that the mayor’s executive order 50, which requires any agency doing business with the city to pledge not to discriminate against anyone in hiring because of sexual orientation and affectional preference. And the Salvation Army believes that anyone who works in their ranks or for them must be a Christian and cannot be a homosexual.

You can be anything today except a Christian it appears. Then you are discriminated against.

Now one matter briefly. One of the important points that Dr. Cornelius Van Til makes in his Philosophy of Religion writings is that if you do not begin with God the God of Scripture, you have a world of root factuality, that is of meaningless facts, unrelated facts, a universe in which every fact is unrelated to every other fact because all are products of chance.

In such a world there can be no meaning. In fact Camus said if there were one fact in all the universe, one atom that had meaning it would posit God. It would posit a world of ultimate meaning. But all facts are brute or meaningless facts.

Well, it is interesting that this concept has, of course, been very prominent in art. And I was very much interested in my reading recently to find that one Frenchman, Jean {?} who was born in 1901 developed what he called art brute, meaning rough or raw as opposed to fine art. The prototype for art brute was in the work of primitives, children and psychotics. But basically what his art brute is, because the writers of this book Techniques of Modern Art don’t call attention to the heart of it. What the artist does not only {?} but others, is to paint pictures in which you have a great deal of miscellaneous data, miscellaneous figures if it is realistic and there is no way you can give a meaning to it.

Christian art has a focus. It is saying something. It tells you something. You get an impression from it. But this art of brute factuality has no meaning. If you see a meaning in it, it is purely personal. And, therefore, it is not a meaning that the next person might get from it. Each person makes their own meaning. And so art today has lost focus. {?}’s paintings have miscellaneous figures.

Mountains, for example, one that I was just looking at and I will look at again, it has a Greek temple, ornate buildings, mountains, dark sky with a crescent moon, a lady dressed in fashion of the last century, a skeleton, two nudes. What does it mean? Nothing. Miscellaneous items to give us a picture of brute factuality, of a meaningless world in which nothing has relationship to anything else.

Well, when you have a world of brute factuality you can have abortion. You can have the gulag. You can have the kinds of evils that are prevalent in the streets of every country. But you will not have morality. You will not have men with a work ethic, efficiency. And you will have the breakdown economically and militarily which marks the Soviet Union and which marks other countries.

Cockburn, I think, overstates the case with regard to the United States in some points. But nonetheless, I think he is right when he calls attention to the kind of men who have, I recent years gone to the top in our military establishment. One person whom he cites in particular is General Haig. General Haig shot to the top and he became our secretary of state and became one of the most prominent of Americans with a minimum of ability and competence, because, after all, he represents the same type of order that you have in the Soviet Union, a kind of person who succeeds in a bureaucracy which stifles ability and talent as it grows in power.

We are not going to turn this around without Christian Reconstruction beginning with the regeneration of the individual, his obedience to the every word of God with God’s law Word and his readiness to move in terms of God’s marching orders.

Well, it has been good to be with you again. I will look forward to our next session together. Thank you and God bless you.

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