Profound Questions and Answers

Christianity is the only religion where man has communion with God.

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels, and Sermons

Lesson: 20-24

Genre: Talk

Track: 20

Dictation Name: RR200A2

Location/Venue:

Year:

Are there any questions?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, many people do this; they are non-existentialist to the extent that they go to work and sustain themselves in the every-day world, and live in terms of traffic laws and other requirements. But when they put down the work-a-day world, they go off into this existentialist kind of nonsense.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, this is very true, and one of the problems on the college campuses is this unwillingness to leave the academic world for a work-a-day world, this is a compromise. Now, in the riots in Berkeley, in the various meetings they held, one sign that they had over and over again that they were waving: “We don’t trust anyone over thirty.” Why? Because they said everyone over 30 had compromised with his faith, he was thinking in terms of a job, and he had a wife and was thinking in terms of a baby, and what kind of existentialism is this? It was compromising, and therefore the banner: “We trust no one over thirty.” Now these students of course dread the day, and that is why you have so many professional students in the academic world, people who simply will not give up; they want to remain as students, most of the time they are just there taking part in campus activities, there are thousands of them around Berkeley, and getting involved in endless politicking. They don’t want to grow up and leave their existentialist pipedream. Another question? Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] The logical existentialist is the one who commits suicide, and Nietzsche in this respect counseled suicide as the ultimate course for the logical humanist. In his case he ended up in a form of suicide in that he went stark raving mad, but this was his counsel; and in a book which was in many respects a very prophetic one, Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed, or it can also be translated The Demons, Kirillov, one of the first if not the first existentialist portrayed in literature, finally commits suicide; it is his one way of logically denying God.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, this is a satirical comment on the position of these existentialists, of the death of God school of theology- and by the way their great white father is Bishop Robinson and Paul Tillich, these two men are their source of inspiration. But they deny God, the death of God is the first premise, and of course Jesus Christ as God. Then they take the purely human Jesus, who is a social revolutionist, no relationship to the Biblical Jesus, as their goal and say: “We want a Jesus who is going to save the world, politically, socially.” So that the true Jesus of the God who is to be born, this united humanity, is the one or the institution bearing His name, which will create this perfect one world order. So this is their purely mythical Jesus. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Right, you are very right, they are all forms of existentialism, but for all of them, basically, it is their own existence that is their only law. And for Sartre for example, his position is the existence or non-existence of God is of no concern to me, the only problem is these other people, whether they exist for me or not? In other words, do I choose to recognize your existence or not? This is the only problem for Sartre, because he lives in a totally self contained world. Now his answer has been a thoroughly leftist answer to that, he has decided that he will recognize the rest of us if we come in through a totally statist order such as he had in mind. But again, for him, the only reality is that which he chooses to recognize, and logically Sartre doesn’t have to be a Marxist or anything, his basic position is such that he has admitted that some of his best pupils have committed suicide. He isn’t ashamed of that fact.

Now, I think Sartre’s book, Saint Genet is the best example of what he regards as desirable. Sartre wrote this book about Jean Genet. Genet is a French ex-convict, who has had a long life of thoroughly depraved activity as a professional male prostitute, pervert, pick-pocket, thief, quite a few things. And some few years ago, about 10-15 years ago, he was facing a long term in a French prison, and Genet decided: “Why should I be considered a criminal? If there is no God, there is no law; and if there is no law there is no crime. Therefore I am a saint of the new world, the godless world.” and so he began to write along this line, and all the philosophers rallied around him and got him pardoned and put out of prison, and Sartre wrote this book on it: Saint Genet. He is the saint of existentialism, because his principle is: “If there is no God there is no law; if there is no law there is no crime; if there is no crime, I as a criminal breaking the old laws of God am a saint.” And he is logical, he is right if his premise is right. But of course he is an exceedingly depraved person, and he is one of the heroes of existentialism today, Jean Genet. You will find on some college campus bookstores, stacks of his books like this, (?). Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, Neo Orthodoxy is a form of Existentialism. The great figure in Existentialism is also the great figure in molding Neo Orthodoxy, Kierkegaard. ‘Kierkegaard’. It looks like ‘keer-ke-gard’ but it is pronounced Keer-keh-gor. Now Kierkegaard was a Kantian, so Immanuel Kant is the real fountainhead of existentialism, and it has taken two directions; its basic influence in philosophy and in religion, and to a great extent in education, has come through Kierkegaard; its basic political influence has come through Hegel, and Marx of course was a Hegelian to the core, Dewey was also a Hegelian. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, there is a great deal of use of LSD in colleges, and there is not too much that you can put your finger on, but there seems to be evidence that it is being used in seminaries, not only in the East, but also in the West; that apparently some leaders in seminaries have gone so far as to regard it as the modern substitute for the Holy Spirit.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Well, it is exceedingly prevalent, and it is increasing with use.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, a good question, it is very strong from existentialist thinker to thinker; of course they are all Freudian in their approach in that they are going to say: “It is not a religious question, it is a scientific question and a hangover from the (primal horde?) but part of the necessity of escaping into this dream world of LSD is to escape from guilt feeling. Now this presents a problem too, because whether they take Peyote or LSD, you have to be very careful of the dosage because the wrong kind of dosage and all your guilt feelings can pour up to the surface in such a fantastic way, that it tears a person apart and can lead to suicidal impulses; but it can be a devastating experience, they can see demons, serpents, it can be a wild, wild experience if they don’t control the dosage and keep it limited, and if they are not prepared when they take it, they must take it under controlled circumstances and relax, or else it gallops away with them.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, some people do. Many people have different forms of idolatry, but when they worship money they are worshipping ultimately their self will; it is what money will do for them to enable them to gratify themselves, to give them the sense of power they want.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes of course, but the basic security they want is the fulfillment of their will. They can have externally a great-

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] No, it need not be by anything, for example, one of the richest women in the history of America, Hetty Green, was fantastically wealth; her money ran into the hundreds of millions. And yet she was so niggardly that she refused to call in a doctor for her son when he was seriously ill, and I believe he lost a leg or something as a result of it and became a cripple for life. She just didn’t want to put the money out for a doctor. And she lived all her life that way, and she enjoyed the sense of utter power; but she didn’t want to use money although she couldn’t have spent all she had in a lifetime.

Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, exactly. What people want in money when they go to it for ungodly reasons is power, and our Lord said it is not money that is the root of all evil, but the love of money. So it is the person and his feelings as he approaches it, it is his desire for total power through it, and to control people, to control man, to play God. But there is nothing wrong with wealth as such; in fact God makes it clear over and over again in scripture that this is a blessing, and He blesses His saints very often materially with monetary wealth, some He blesses in spiritual ways and some in material ways, that is in the providence of God. But there is nothing wrong, absolutely nothing morally wrong with being wealthy, if the wealth be honest wealth. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, LSD is manufactured predominately in Israel, and is brought into this country; that is the major source. There is a foundation of two Harvard professors, O’Leary and I forget the name of the other man, who have founded a foundation dedicated to the promulgation of it, and are enthusiastic champions of it. They moved to Mexico for a while when they were finally kicked out of Harvard because of some scandals there, but they are back in this country because I believe Mexico made it clear that they were not wanted. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes you are very right. It is interesting, you mentioned Brave New World, he calls the drug there Soma as you’ve said. A few years ago I was reading in a medical journal, I was sitting in a friends office with a (?) I happened to read in addition to my normal reading, and there was an article on Soma, and they had come to the conclusion that there actually once existed such a plant, a Soma plant; all the evidence points to the fact that in Northern India this plant once existed, and that by using the roots they could go up into this dream world; but they finally made it extinct because they were searching high and low throughout the mountains for it and digging it up, and finally they killed it off entirely. But Soma once existed, and we can be glad it no longer does, but we do have the artificial forms.

Now, very closely related to LSD is Peyote. I have had a great deal of experience with that in that when I was with the American Indians, they are very much addicted to its use. It came into the Indian world in the 90’s from Mexico, and the Peyote button is legal for the Indians, this was made legal by the New Deal and because they claimed it was for religious purposes, a part of their worship, and it is brewed into tea or they chew it or put it into stews and so on, and it has the same effect as LSD, but it is significant that the Indians who use it are the most incompetent and most defeated ones. They’re people who have no desire to make any progress. They live under the most abject conditions; they will be sometimes in a log cabin no larger than this inner area here, with a dirt floor, 10, 12, 14 people sleeping there, and perpetually almost during sometimes of the year, under the influence of peyote. They especially give it to sick people, and it is regarded as a great healer; the healing property is simply this, you don’t feel a thing. However, because it paralyzes the whole digestive tract, and so much of your pain is connected with the digestive tract, and it has an effect on the heart, so you don’t feel much.

However what does happen that people who take Peyote and are not in good health, it virtually stops all digestion and the food just piles up, and they look as though they have got a small basketball up their belt, and it kills them. And I’ve buried many a peyote victim, but it was significant that no government record ever put down peyote as the cause of death; no government doctor would dare to do this. Many states have passed laws against peyote, and it is valid, but not against the Indians. California in the last 3-4 years did try to prosecute some Indians I believe in the Palm Springs area, for using peyote, and they did find that a very large number of convicts in San Quentin were perpetually high on peyote, it was being smuggled in to them. It is a very common form of retreat from a world you’ve given up on, and you don’t want to do a thing about. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] I believe you are right, I don’t know particularly with respect to the Mayans, but I do know that many of the Indian peoples in Central America did use it for ritual purposes; they controlled it, because while they knew its power and liked it, they didn’t want it to be used too freely because it would destroy the society. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, the sacred mushroom of the Indian tribes was discovered, I don’t know whether the same men did the discovery, but it was discovered and some experimentation has taken place with that also.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] There are many such drugs that we are still ignorant of. I know that when I went to the reservation one of the old Indians whose grandparents had been medicine people, often pointed out to me (but never when any Indian was around) many ordinary plants in the hills which had powerful properties for inducing trances and visions, and he said it is a good thing that knowledge of this is now forgotten, because he said these things are very dangerous.

But today we are on the search for these things because we are running away from reality, that is the basic reason. And hence there is a demand for something.

Now, Aldous Huxley wrote an article in the Saturday Review about 7-8 years ago in which he expressed a hope that something would be developed, and he hoped that LSD would be the thing, which would enable man to escape from reality without any consequences. So there is this desire to escape from reality, and this governs this continual quest for a drug that will have no consequences. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] There is a great deal of experimentation, in fact there are a number of foundations that are involved in this experimentation, and some universities on the west coast. So while there isn’t too much publicly stated about this, there is far more activity than we realize. There were those who felt that- and those who knew- who said that the crowds that were picketing at the Republican National Convention included a lot of potheads and a lot of LSD people.

One more question?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, I get the gist of your question, I think it becomes (?) person. Different people go to it for different things, but basically it is the person whose life is without faith and without meaning, so he either takes it to escape something in his own life or in the world. It is also promoted I believe in part because it is destructive of people, it is destructive of character, and it does weaken a people and make them more susceptible to command. So I think there are many motives for it, but it is certainly a burning out of the individual when he goes on to these narcotics.

[New Question and Answer Period]

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, in my paperback on Freud I call attention to the fact that Freud is not primarily a philosopher of sex or a psychologist or psychiatrist dealing with sex, but with the problem of guilt; because Freud said that man could not hope ever to abolish religion- and he felt this was desirable- as long as men were guilty. And he said: “All men feel guilty, all men are guilt ridden. And you can never hope to cope with this by any treatises, scientific studies which say there is no God and proving this endlessly scientifically and philosophically.” So, Freud said, the only way you can abolish religion is by converting the problem of sin or guilt from a religious problem to a scientific problem, so that it is not a matter any longer for a minister, a Biblical minister, but for a mental health specialist. And this he did by going to anthropology to the primal horde myth, according to which, mankind having evolved out of the primal horde, a group of half human or sub human creatures who ran in a pack with the strongest man ruling them and possessing all the women and driving out all the sons, and he said that finally the sons banded together and killed the old man and ate him, and possessed the mothers and sisters. So he said, the three basic instincts of mankind are incest, parricide, and cannibalism; and the three basic counter instincts are the prohibitions of these three things. And so he said this is why man feels guilty, he has three basic instincts and three counter instincts.

Now all your modern psychologies and your modernistic churches with their mental health programs, and the whole mental health program is based on this Freudian premise. They may disagree with Freud in everything else, but they are agreed with him that guilt must be transferred from religion to science, and must be made a biological problem instead of a spiritual problem. This is the essence of Freud’s approach to this, so Freud would agree with me that of course society is geared to deal with the problem of guilt, and to make atonement for guilt; but his answer is through the mental health program and total control and mental reconditioning of men.

[New Question and Answer Period]

Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] The word religion is a noun which in a sense has no substance we commonly use it to define a faith, but you cannot speak of ‘religion’ per se, in other words there is no religion behind all the religions, so that you can use religion as a substitute for the word faith, ‘the faiths of man, the beliefs of man.’ If you speak of it as a substantive kind of noun it is invalid, because there are religions, Buddhism, Confucianism, Daoism, Mohammadenism, and so on. But there is no such thing as ‘religion’ per se. What can you define as religion? Well, you can’t say that it is a belief in God that is common to all of these, because Buddhism doesn’t believe in God, and many religions are atheistic; humanism is an atheistic religion. So that in this sense of religion as representing something common to all the word is invalid, there is no meaning there.

[Audience Member] Is man a religious creature by nature?

[Rushdoony] Yes. Adjectivally the word has very real meaning, it means that man is inescapably religious, he must worship something. He is either a covenant keeper with God or a covenant breaker, so man is inescapably religious.

[New Question and Answer Period]

Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Not quite, I think the great triumvirate of modern thinking is Darwin, Marx, and Freud. And this is not merely my opinion, but I think one commonly subscribed to by scholars. You occasionally have such opinions which give variations, I’ve seen one: Darwin, Marx, and Wagner; which seems to me a peculiar combination. Jacque (Barzoon?) made that study. But it is clearly Darwin, Marx, and Freud. And Darwin, to provide the basis for the other two, because when Darwin’s book came out, Origin of Species in 1859, Karl Marx was delighted and he said: “This has saved socialism, now we can have scientific socialism.” And Freud built on Darwin also, so the three had their fountainhead so to speak in Darwin; and the reason for this is a very simple one: Darwin by the evolutionary hypothesis made man not a creature of God by a product of evolutionary forces. Therefore- and he also gave a picture in the process of a world that was not only without God but which was a blind struggling force, so there was no law above man in the heavens, God. No law in nature, natural law; that was abolished. So where was law to come from? Man. So the only source of truth is man and the only source of control and of direction is man, so man controls his own evolution in the future.

Now, this invalidated Marx and Freud believed, religion, and therefore the way to control the future was through science and scientific socialism was therefore guaranteed, and it supplanted Utopian Socialism. Now, what does Scientific Socialism mean? Well, the essence of Science is that it is experimental. Now, a thing is truly scientific according to these people if it is experimental, and if it is experimental all factors must be controlled. Now, scientific socialism and the scientific state and scientific planners are planners and socialists who believe in the total control of all factors, so that when they visualize a scientific order in the future, they are visualizing an order in which everything is totally controlled, because it cannot be a valid experimental situation otherwise. I shall be speaking this weekend at the creation seminar of which there are some flyers here for those of you who would like one, on Man in 1984. What I shall be doing in essence is to be reviewing several publications recently by scientists, including one two volume study by American and British scientists, The World in 1984.

As they plan the world of 1984, just to give you a mild taste of some of the things in the book, there will be no longer any area of nature which is not controlled. There will be no wildernesses left, because to have a scientific state you must control not only every bit of man but every bit of the world; so the wilderness will disappear. There will be planned areas like park reserves but far more strictly controlled, with the plant life there allowed to live in terms of census and killed off when they exceed it, because it has to be absolutely scientific; so that everything including the animal life of the world is going to be strictly governed in terms of this total scientific control.

Now this idea of the scientific state, the scientific control of all things is basic, and Darwin was the foundation, Marx built upon it, and Freud kept it. Yes?

[Audience Member] Aren’t they then being inconsistent with their own beliefs, don’t they believe that (?) in nature, so …?...

[Rushdoony] Except they believe the elite will now control nature totally, and they will not only control nature but will remake nature. One British physicist has gone so far as to say that in a few million years if the sun should die they will remake the sun, build another sun and put it in the heavens. Some of the thinking in these recent studies as they visualize the future are truly fantastic. I think you had a taste of it in the four issues of Life recently in which they talked about breaking the genetic code and governing man’s heredity before he was born so that it would be possible, they said, to make men who would be able to live on the floor of the ocean, or on Jupiter. This is wild imagination. Yes?

[Audience Member] Do you think there is an answer by God about the time that Darwin was applying his theory and Marx was going after political (?) archeology was sort of put on alert and began to cover the facts the theories about (?).

[Rushdoony] Yes, Archeology has done a great deal in recent years to confirm the Biblical record, and I think it is significant that at no point, no point, although once or twice they thought they found something that would contradict the Bible, have they found anything that did. We don’t realize how much our history has been effected by the Bible, and how far afield people thought the Bible was. For example, it was once adjudged that all of the Old Testament was fantastically full of mythology because it talked about a great empire, Assyria, which everybody knew never existed. Now it seems hard for us today when you go to any library and get volume after volume on Assyria, and we have recovered Ashurbanipal’s library or a portion of the I think about a third to a half of the hundred thousand volumes he had in his library, and we thus have a great deal of information about him; but there was a time when the memory of Assyria was gone. When Alexander the Great and other conquerors marched over the ruins and didn’t know it existed. So that people treated the Bible as mythological because it talked about Assyria; and today of course Assyriology is one of the established branches of study in universities.

Or again, you still hear people talk about the book of Daniel as myth and written in the Maccabean period rather than by a person named Daniel, and yet this is what we have found in recent years; no one believed it could be possibly accurate, it talked about things that we didn’t know in history that obviously weren’t true, it speaks of Belshazzar the king on the night that Babylon fell, and nobody had ever heard of Belshazzar, it was obvious that Nabonidus was the emperor at the time; that was what all the historical records told us. Well, not too long ago they discovered in the course of excavations that actually Belshazzar the step son of Nabonidus was the vice emperor, a common thing in the empires of that day, and Nabonidus was at that time elsewhere with the armies and he had made Belshazzar the vice emperor in his absence; and so when Belshazzar offers Daniel that if he will make known the meaning of the inscription on the wall he will make him third in the empire he was saying “After me” because he was second.

Now this is one of dozens and dozens of details that recent studies and excavations have turned up with regard to the book of Daniel. And you could go on to book after book which has been confirmed in amazing detail as a result of excavations. I think one of the most amusing things in archeological studies was one in ancient Ur of the Chaldea’s a few years ago; they did some excavating and came down into this large room, I believe it was about the size of this room without this office area knocked out of it, including the whole. And they picked up some objects, and well here was one from a particular century, and here was another next to it about ten centuries before; and here was one 5 centuries before that, and they were completely befuddled until as they began to read some of the inscriptions they realized they had stumbled into an archeological museum in Ancient Ur of the Chaldea’s.

[New Question and Answer Period]

…Not to be martyrs, right. Our Lord indeed asks us to be sensible, and He councils the disciples as they went out and spoke, and He said if they will not receive you in the one city go to the next. And Paul when he found opposition arising he left, he was not called to make a fool of himself by sacrificing himself needlessly; he was unafraid when opposition confronted himself, he didn’t go out to create it. He witnessed boldly and then he passed on, if they would not hear him he shook the dust off his feet and went on.

Now, anyone can prepare themselves to live in the world of 1984, but they have got to recognize this, they are not going to get along with God. They may get along with the world of 1984, but not with God. And I think of the two God is going to be around a lot longer. I don’t think the world of 1984 is going to be with us more than 3-4 years, very briefly. So I think it is up to people to make their choice, and I am a lot more confident of God’s word then I am of 1984, and I am a lot more afraid of God then I am of the powers of 1984.

[Audience Member] So what will you tell the children?

[Rushdoony] I will tell them…

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] I believe we must stand in terms of our faith, and that is it. That we really don’t have a choice. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] That is a good illustration, all illustrations are limited because they are limited by our experience and our knowledge, and the Trinity which is the heart of our faith is in a sense beyond our imagination. We would have to have the mind of God to understand God, and we have to take Him on faith. So that we have to recognize indeed, God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit indeed represent the three persons of the Godhead, three persons one God, and the Holy Spirit indeed is the power that works in this world and among us, and God the Son is He who descended into our midst and whom we saw; but beyond that we have to say these illustrations are often- and this one is a good one- valuable, but ultimately it has to be an act of faith. We take electricity on faith, actually scientists don’t know what electricity is, it is a power that they have learned to harness and to work with.

We don’t know, for example, some of the elementary things about digestion; we give names to the process, but we really don’t know how a cow can eat green grass and make white milk, which you and I can drink to produce a brown or red or gray hair. We give names to the process but we don’t understand it, really. The world around us is full of things that are beyond our understanding.

One of the things I recall when I was still quite young, I was interested in being an astronomer; that was one of my first ambitions, and I was reading this book on astronomy and I came across this sentence on the last page or two, dealing with some of the modern astrophysics, and it said: “Space is finite yet infinite.” Well, that staggered me. That just didn’t make sense. And then as I began to read a little further I found that the more they dealt with this universe, the more it was impossible to use language and they were simply using mathematical formulae to describe what they were dealing with. Now if the world is so great, how much greater is God? And so the imagination staggers before it all, and we simply have to say: “I believe.”

And I think that is the beauty of the Creed. The Creed is personal, the Creed does not say: ‘We believe in God almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ His only begotten Son’ and so on, when we repeat the Creed, even though we do it in unison we each say: “I”. That is the only way you can believe. “I believe.” And so, ultimately we all must say that with respect to the Trinity, as well as with respect to the scripture: “I believe.”

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, I have an article on the current American opinion, this is the fact that (?) called attention to, on the subversion of American seminaries. And as I have indicated at other times, I believe that our churches are one of the two most subverted institutions in the United States. I would rate them the most subverted, second would be the courts. But the importance of understanding the subversion of the church is this, and it is a fact I think some you have hear me say before and it bears repeating: in the United States there are more people in church in any given Sunday then have ever voted in any national election, and these people are the property owners, the voters, the office holders, the professional people, the responsible people of the United States. And so, long ago, well before the Communist revolution, subversives have decided that the church must be captured and “If the church can be captured then we can control the United States.” So they very, very early became a target, and today of course they are predominately subverted. And in the article I traced the subversion of the seminaries in particular.

Yes?

[Audience Member] …?... made mention of the fact that the United Nations …?...

[Rushdoony] Well, first of all, how are they in covenant with God?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Well, first of all I would say possibly there are. I have read through a number of U.N. documents at the Stanford library of U.N. documents; I find no evidence of Christian thinking in what they do, and a great deal of evidence of anti-Christian thinking. Then the fundamental premise of the U.N. is this, that you can take everyone and bring them together, and bring some good out of it; you can bring good and evil together, Communist nations and nations that are dedicated to a Republican form of government, and somehow by the amalgamation some good is going to follow. It is like saying: “If we get the police and criminal element together, then we can have law and order.” And this premise I believe is a very deadly one, and destructive of (?). So that I think it I highly questionable that any good can come out of the U.N.

Then, basic to the U.N.’s philosophy is the concept of universal jurisdiction, irrespective- this is in the charter- irrespective of whether anyone is a member or not, and irrespective of whether any nation ratifies a particular declaration of the U.N. The U.N. claims universal jurisdiction. This is a usurpation of tremendous dimensions. They feel they have the right to interfere in any country, under any circumstances; the only thing preventing them from exercising it is that they haven’t sufficient power as yet to do so everywhere.

So, I think the U.N. because it has this- first of all, mingling of good and evil without any qualification between the nations, a basically fallacious principle of organization, and second because it claims so universal a jurisdiction it is something that a Christian cannot very well respect.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Perhaps, but actually it hasn’t solved anything, and it has complicated our world problems tremendously; and there has never been any lack of real expression on the part of the people. And more good was done in the last century by the free flow of ideas and of trade, then is being done by the U.N. When you consider for example what free enterprise did in the last century, free trade in Africa and in Asia, anything that the U.N. could dream up by comparison is very feeble, and what the U.N. is doing is to destroy all these things, because instead of emphasizing a grass roots growth and a natural development, its approach is to act from the top down, and it destroys everything.

Now a few weeks ago when we were discussing family life I called attention to some statistics that I think are very revealing as to what the U.N. is doing, and American and Russian (?) also, in Africa. Since the African countries have gained independence, you have seen a tremendous breakdown of life in the rural areas. 30% of the population now are in the cities, and cities were few and far between in Africa, 10-15 years ago. But they have flocked to the cities; what for? Handouts. We have an international hand out in the cities. In the countryside what has taken place? Life has broken down, because in rural Africa, and I am excluding the union of South Africa from these figures, in rural Africa 70% of the men are gone, they are in the cities living on beer and U.N. handouts, and American and U.S.S.R. hand outs somewhat too. And it means that in the countryside only the old men and the young boys are left. Africa is in a state of collapse because of this fact. Radical social disintegration.

But what was happening under the old system? The traders would go into an area, and they would in return for, say animal hide, for goods grown by the natives, peanuts or whatever else it was, give them goods or money. They were stimulating the peaceful development of Africa, they were civilizing it, because it was an incentive to these people, in order to get the traders goods, to go out and clear a piece of land and farm it. Now we have destroyed all that, so that Africa today is worse off than it was a century and a half ago. And this comes from this kind of activity from the top. I believe that free enterprise is the greatest internationalizing agency the world has ever seen, and the U.N., given everything under the sun, every power under the sun, could never begin to touch a fraction of what free enterprise has done and can do in every part of the world.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] A few years ago I would have agreed with you, but I have increasingly come to doubt this (exportation?) idea, and exploitation can be used by the way in both a good and a bad sense.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Well, the institution of slavery as it was introduced into the United States of course, was I think a serious mistake for the United States. But for the Negro’s involved it was the best thing that ever happened to them, because the Negro’s in the United States if they are poor are living better than most of the people of Europe and all of the people of the U.S.S.R. and the people of Africa. And the riots were not caused by any evil they experienced but by their own sin, so that even where we did wrong in introducing slavery, which we couldn’t have done without the help of the Africans, because it was African chiefs, let us never forget, who rounded up these people and sold them, and they were bringing them to the corals faster than the ships could bring them over. And that is why they were packing them in, in such great numbers that sometimes a lot of them died en route, because the chiefs were glutting the market with them.

But, be that as it may; when you have a free situation, even evils are made to work for ultimate good, so that the situation that has developed now has been one of an evil that has come about in recent years because of government interference.

Now I would like to take a little time, if you would bear with me, because I think this is important, a very important point, and I am grateful to you for bringing this up because it gives me an opportunity. Now, you and I have 2,000 years of Christian ancestry approximately behind us, give or take a century or two, because we are caught up with western civilization. This has meant selective breeding, this has meant that certain people were regarded as unfit socially and fell to the bottom, and gradually bred themselves out. Until WW1, this is based on studies of birth records in Western Europe and the United States going back for centuries, this is what they found: out of every hundred people who were very devout Christians, and whose records you can find in the churches right straight through, and evidences and data concerning their faith, out of every hundred you had something like 385 children. Out of every hundred people who were good citizens but not Christians, there were about 118 or 120 children. Out of every hundred people who were consistently in and out of trouble with the law, the criminal element and the near criminal and vagrant element, the number of children were very low, about 20-22-23 per hundred.

Now, what does this mean? It meant that in Western Christian culture the Christians were the ones who were multiplying, the non Christians barely so, and the worst element were being bred out. This meant a progressive strengthening, improving, developing of Western stock.

Now, you had however in Africa, untold centuries where the people had been living in terms of incredible depravity. Go to Sir Samuel Baker’s two volumes on the (?) explorations of the sources of the Nile, and as he describes, and he is a Victorian, the conditions that he sees among people who have never seen a white man, have no contact with any other civilization, and it’s almost unrepeatable. These people live in terms of the feeling: “Well, if I don’t gorge on all the sex and all the food I can today, I may be dead tomorrow and in somebodies pot, eaten myself. So all the sex, all the liquor, all the women I can get right now.” Now, they were breeding in terms of this, this was survival.

Alright. The Negro was brought to America. Now, when the slaves were freed what happened? Immediately the selectivity of freedom began to set in. The Negro population in the United States from the Civil War to 1933 in its ratio to the general population began to decline. Why? Because the worst element among the Negro’s were falling to the bottom, they were in and out of trouble with the law, they were not reproducing themselves; and the better elements were slowly rising to the top. So the Negro population was declining in its ration to the general population, and population experts figured that given a couple hundred years most of the Negro’s would disappear from the United States, just by this natural process; but those that survived would grow in ability through selectivity, through survival, and would be able to merge with the general population, they would be accepted; they would have met the general standards. What happened?

Well, beginning with the New Deal we had a gigantic welfare program. Today the worst element among the Negro’s represents the most prolific element in the United States, those on welfare. So that the Negro element in our population is being destroyed today, because it is no longer the better element that is growing numerically, but the worst element. And so today great harm has been done to the Negro, and it’s predominately the welfare element among the Negro’s that has been responsible for these social disturbances, so that government interference, whether from Washington or the U.N. is destructive of social order. And this is what we have seen take place with respect to the Negro in American life.

[New Question and Answer Period]

Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Well, our constitutions originally did far more than represent (God?), that is the state constitutions, they had very specific requirements that have all been dropped. The Constitution does not mention God because the framers of the Constitution knew that it would never be ratified if they did; and the clergymen of all the colonies felt so strongly that they insisted on the writing of the first (amendment?). In other words, religion is not within the jurisdiction of the Federal government, it is a matter of state rights, and originally Christianity was the established religion of every one of the 13 states, and 9 out of the 13 had established churches. The others, three of them, had (plural?) establishments, and three had established Christianity as (?) religion of the state. but they were all not only given to mentioning God, but had these various requirements of what you could believe, so that according to the constitution it is totally, as it was written, within the provenance of the state to say it is going to be Christian or non-Christian, to require prayer or to require a particular kind of faith for citizenship. This is of course being steadily outlawed. It has been in the papers recently for example, that Maryland’s Grand Jury indictments have been tossed out, because in Maryland belief in God is necessary to serve on a jury. A similar action took place last year in New Jersey, (?) it was necessary for a witness, (except in acts involving himself?) to believe in God for his testimony to be acceptable. This was once universal in all the states.

Yes?

[Audience Member] Do you believe that Christianity is the only faith by which one can have communion with God?

[Rushdoony] Very definitely.

[Audience Member] What about the devotion, the devoutness, …?...

[Rushdoony] Well, the Koran is very far away from our Bible, I have read the Koran clear through and I don’t believe there is any comparison. Its doctrines are radically different, its morality I don’t think you would find acceptable, and the practice of the Mohammedans based on their morality is I think a very unspeakable one. I feel that Mohammadanism represents one of the worst evils under the sun.

Then if we are to follow the Bible with any kind of integrity, it makes it clear that this is the way of salvation, and there is none other. Christianity is an exclusive religion. It says that truth is one, there are not several mutually contradictory that are true, but truth cannot have a contradiction; and if you say that Christianity is true and Mohammadanism is true, you are saying that black is black but black is also white when we choose it to be so. We cannot reconcile things that are irreconcilable, and the Bible says there is none other name under heaven by which men may saved than Jesus Christ. There it is categorically stated.

[Audience Member] …?... God will sacrifice 6-700 million people who have never had the opportunity to know Him?

[Rushdoony] They all have had the opportunity to know Him, and they all do know Him, and the Bible asserts this emphatically; not only in Romans 1 where this is the thesis of the chapter, but many places else where it says that God is known to all men, and the invisible things of this world are made visible to them by their conscience, by their heart. And men have this witness crying out in them, and Paul says they- and it is translated- ‘they hold the truth’, but more accurately it can be translated: “they hold down the truth” they sit on top of it, they suppress it, in unrighteousness. So that it is the sin of man that leads to it.

Then we must not be guilty of the fallacy of seeing other people as ourselves. You know yourself as a person of good character and generally decent standards and faith, but you cannot read for example the people in the heart of Africa in terms of that. They represent centuries of selective breeding, as I have indicated, in terms of a very different standard. You could go for example to some peoples such as some of the peoples for example in India, in North India, the (Bhutanese?) peoples, I forget the name…

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] (Pagan?) is the more popular name for them. The (pagans?) for example, there is very little in any library about them, because it is almost impossible to write a book that will pass the censors about them. One of the commonest proverbs among the (pagans?) in the most nearly printable form that can be rendered is that “A woman is for children, a boy or a man for entertainment, a goat for real pleasure.”

Now, as I say this is the nearest thing, and I haven’t given it literally, to being printable in their ideas and their thinking. They are a people so unspeakable, that basically they don’t write books about them. For one thing travelers couldn’t get in and out among the (pagans?) very well.

Now, this is the way that vast segments of the world are today. The only- a few books are written on anthropology that tell about some of the every day customs of vast areas of the world, and they are on the locked book section at the library, in the locked book section. So first you have a suppression of the reality of most of mankind. Second, we have in our background the Romantic movement and the Enlightenment which believes that all men are naturally good, so we approach men in terms of these presuppositions, and we believe that all these things we (read?) are there in those people, when they are not. These people know the truth, but they don’t want it.

Now I have spent 8 ½ years among the Indians, I like them. But they are not the kind of people that are portrayed in our romantic stories, these were Indians who lived a hundred miles from any bus, tram, or train line; and when I was there, this was through the forties, I saw the old generation who saw the white man coming across the plain, saw him, who could tell me of the technique of scalping and so on, describe it in great detail; I saw them die and I buried them. Now, these Indians were not the beautiful characters that were portrayed in the movies and in romantic stories, and their character was one that was pretty hard to report very readily without shocking people. And they knew there was a God, and they said: “Oh yes, we know there is a God-” and this was the old generation as they were asked by the first men who went among them- “But He is far away and we don’t have to worry about Him.” They were suppressing knowledge, and they were guilty.