Profound Questions and Answers

Regarding Debt

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels, and Sermons

Lesson: 15-24

Genre: Talk

Track: 15

Dictation Name: RR201B4

Location/Venue:

Year:

Are there any questions at this time?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Well of course the U.N. symbols so far are not too prominent, so that is a little difficult to cite, but there is a book that has been published in the last year or so on the symbols of the world order, and which of these symbols will predominate to be the particular symbol is hard to say. But it is a collection of all the occultist, pagan, esoteric symbols imaginable, and the absorption of them into this U.N. dream. now which particular symbol will ultimately be the chosen one and will become more prevalent I don’t know, but certainly they are collecting some of these thinkers for the U.N, all these symbols, and are declaring that they are fitting symbols of this order.

Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] The six pointed star is a double pyramid, it is basically a gnostic symbol going back to the ancient world, it is a double pyramid. The bottom pyramid represents man rising up towards heaven and becoming God, and the pyramid pointing downward represents the ones who have gone before and become Gods, coalescing, and you have the perfect order when the two pyramids coalesce to form the 6 pointed star.

Now this can be traced clearly to the Gnostics and certainly into the ancient world. It became a symbol of this type of order from ancient times, and throughout the Medieval Era was prominent in all kinds of occultist thought. It is called erroneously the star of David but it has no connection with David, it had no connection with Judaism except some who became involved in these esoteric groups; until Zionism adopted it in the last century, and it has become only in recent years predominate in Jewish circles. It was introduced after the early 1800’s. The first use by any Jewish group is from about the 3rd century A.D., and it is extremely rare until after about 1800.

Those groups who did use it were invariably connected with Gnosticism, and the faith of Gnosticism of course I believe is very closely linked to a tower of Babel concept and tradition. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, the reverse cut of the seal which began in middle 30’s to appear on our dollar bills is an ironic thing, first of all the idea of a seal having a reverse side is fantastic; if you have ever seen a seal such as a notary seal there is only one side possible, how can you cut a reverse side? Second, it is clearly an esoteric occultist symbol, and when it was first proposed, and they tried to sneak it in very early, it was rejected, emphatically rejected as nonsense. They wanted no part of it. And incidentally, the seal itself has been altered, the original seal as in George Washington’s day and for some decades thereafter simply had thirteen stars on the field there, scattered out. Then without any authorization or anyone’s knowledge it was quietly changed and the thirteen stars behind the eagle now form a six pointed star.

This clearly is an infiltration by occultists into high places, and their determination to use these things to indicate: “See where we are, we are pulling the strings.” Now the reverse side of the seal was cut and instituted at the request of Henry Wallace, who was acting in very close conjunction with Nicholas (Rorak?), a leading occultist, one of the most important figures internationally in occultism, and a man who while spending most of his life outside of the Soviet Union, nevertheless had close connections with the Soviet Authorities.

Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] We don’t know for sure about Leonardo although there seems to be some hint of that with regard to him also.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Well, Plato very pronouncedly, and Socrates. Plato and Socrates were very pronouncedly homosexual, they gloried in it. And one of the charges against Socrates of course was of corrupting the youth, at his trial. And many of the Renaissance figures of course went into homosexuality because they were such worshippers of Greek culture that they felt platonic love- that’s the real meaning of platonic love- was something to indulge in literally if not spiritually, simply because it was such an ideal thing. And this became quite a fad, so that you don’t know how far to go with some of these men because some of them wrote poetry that was clearly homosexual, just because it was the way to present yourself as a Renaissance man, as someone who believed in the great culture of the Greeks, which as far as I am concerned was a degenerate culture. An instance of this where we really don’t know how far to go you can find in a couple of Shakespeare’s sonnets, which very very openly indulge in this kind of talk. And it has been quite a (moot?) point with scholars, what this means. Was it actually something real? Was it something affected? Or did he write these sonnets for somebody else as a paid job?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, the Masonic orders and degrees have a very close tie with the whole ziggurat structure, faith, and symbolism. I think one of the best evidences for this is Albert Pike’s Morals and Dogma, because certainly in that, the official work of the Masonic order of which most Masons are ignorant, you find this basic faith in unity, and unity is the one great virtue, and all the symbolism also very fully worked out.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Well, the origin is in the Tower of Babel, but certainly you find it in developed form in ancient Egypt, and of course in ancient Egypt the pyramids were built; one way of showing their faith in this kind of system. Of course your greatest pyramid in the world is not in Egypt, do you know where it is?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Mexico, yes, and the culture there was essentially the same thing. And of course it always means total statism, the total control of man. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, quite a change, and the reason for these drastic changes is simply this: for centuries the church has used, every branch of the church, the Received Text. Now the Received Text has been abandoned, and they are going to defecting and wastebasket manuscript texts for all these new readings. As a result you can expect almost any kind of reading, very often senseless variations from the text as well as verses left out. These modern translations, because they are uniformly based on anything but the Received Text are defective.

Now, what is the Received Text? It is the text that was accepted by the early church, accepted by the Orthodox churches and all the Eastern churches, by the Roman Catholic church, by the Lutherans, the Calvinists, the Episcopalians, everywhere in Christendom was accepted until the end of the last century. And it was accepted because it was the standard text, it had always been the established text.

Behind also there is a question of faith. Do we believe that God, having given us an inspired and infallible word, will not then protect the transmission of that? And the church has believed that. Now the principle is that: ‘anything but this received text’, in other words, there must be something wrong with this text precisely because the church has accepted it all this time, and so you have got to go to all these defective manuscripts, and anytime they have a variation we can be sure that it is the truth, because the church couldn’t have the truth, the church couldn’t keep it.

There is a diabolical premise in all of this which has to be challenged, and the sad fact is that this diabolical premise now is being incorporated into all the translations used by the church everywhere. That is why for example you can go to the older translations, whether they are the Douay or the King James or any others, and you will find that in all the translations, say before 1870, there is a basic similarity. Occasionally there will be a difference, but it is a difference that is theological, depending upon the ecclesiology, the doctrine of the church, and the way they translate a particular word; they are agreed as to the original. No difference. For example, the King James translates ‘repentance’ and the Douay ‘penance’. They don’t disagree as to what the word is in the Greek, they say it is this word, identical.

But now of course they do not agree that there is a text to be translated, so what they are doing is to reconstruct a text, and they say: “This is what Mark or Matthew” (Although they don’t believe Mark or Matthew wrote those gospels, that’s another point) “But this is what the gospels originally said, we have reconstructed it on the basis of these defective manuscripts, and on the basis of our thinking and our reasoning. This is substituting something imaginary for something that the church for 1900 years approximately, and before that with regard to the Old Testament for another 2,000 years has accepted, and I say again it is diabolical.

Yes?

[Audience Member] Along the same line, could you comment on Martin Luther commenting on alterations to scripture way back in his day, he refers here to Old Testament alterations in I believe it was in (?) Table Talk.

[Rushdoony] I have read Table Talk, I do not recall that; Table Talk is not always accurate you know, because the Table Talk was made up of notes of various students and we do know that very often they garbled things because they did not take the notes down at the time, they took them down from memory at a later date. And the thing that was a little amusing, Katy was boarding these students and they were coming there and trying to get free lectures, at the university they had to pay. So the thing to do was to ask Dr. Luther at the table a question and get him to talk, and get a free lecture that way; and then they would hurry to their room and take notes on it, and sometimes their note taking was a little garbled. So whenever we quote anything from the table talks we have got to make sure it is verified by other things elsewhere in Luther’s writings.

[Audience Member] Along the same line, some people say, “well, you don’t take the text of the Bible literally, do you?” I wonder if you could comment on that. We are to take it literally except where common sense makes it impossible, in other words where it …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, right. When we say we accept the literal text of the scripture, we accept it in the sense in which it was intended. And we cannot allow people to say that figures of speech and similes are to be taken in a crudely literalistic sense; no one does that in their every day speech. You use figures of speech and similes continually, analogy. And we do take the text of scripture literally in the sense in which it was intended, and there are no problems in that sense. The problems are in the imagination of the critics. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?... We always have the argument that Jonah was not swallowed by a whale, and reading the footnote it says that Jonah was swallowed by a prepared fish, of which the true translation was a prepared fish, a fish that was prepared by God that could have swallowed or that did swallow Jonah. Now why is it that we jump to the conclusion that it was a whale all this time, and …?...

[Rushdoony] Of course it is in our day that there is doubt concerning the story of Jonah because we are a little remote from the day of the whalers, when many a sailor was swallowed by a whale or a large shark. A book was published of such incidents some years ago; and it was nothing… well, it wasn’t too common, but it did happen every few years to some Yankee sailor, because in those small whaling ships of a century ago, a huge shark or a huge whale could knock over the boat and take down a sailor in one gulp. And because there would be air in the stomach they would live, and sometimes the whale or fish would be caught, killed, and the sailor was again back on his ship sailing safely. And I recall reading one account by a seaman who was over two days inside of one whale, he said the odor was rather distressing and it was exceptionally hot there, just suffocatingly hot. But apart from that he was not in any pain or distress, and he lived quite a long life after he was recovered, it was quite a start to those who recovered him a couple of days later, because they had no idea that this was the particular whale that had swallowed him.

Now, as I say, this sort of thing has happened to more than one American seaman in the past; and in this instance God specially prepared a fish to receive Jonah and keep him until Jonah came to repentance, and prayed that prayer out of the belly of the fish. Yes?

[Audience Member] You mentioned that God chooses us, however Eve and Adam had a choice for evil, this was a separate idea (?).

[Rushdoony] Yes, in the question of choice, we definitely have a choice but ours is a secondary will. Now God is the first cause and the first will. We are secondary causes and our will is a secondary will. So the ultimate choice is in all things with God, but this does not take away the reality of secondary causes. In other words, you are a second cause and I am a second cause, and our will is a secondary will. We didn’t make ourselves, we didn’t create the conditions of our life. Everything was ultimately created and determined by God, but we are nonetheless real persons, and our wills are secondary wills. Does that clarify it?

You see…

[Audience Member] We do have a right, or an obligation let’s say, to choose between good and evil, and if we are again chosen by God then we can go along with our chosen good, with evil we have already rejected the possibility of that, I mean this is in my mind….

[Rushdoony] Yes, and Moses said: “Choose ye this day whom ye shall serve.” So that the secondary choice is real, but we cannot presume to be making the first choice, and this is what Israel was trying to do with Christ: “The decision is in our hands, not in yours.” The very choosing that we do comes as a result of Gods grace in our hearts, so that when we say yes to God it is because He has already implanted the grace in our hearts. To use an old, old term that goes back to Saint Augustine this is prevenient grace, grace that goes before the act, before our act of choice.

There is a line in an old hymn that goes something like this, the gist of it is: “I could not have said yes to Thee oh Lord, had Thou not said yes first of all to me” very crudely stated. Yes?

[Audience Member] You are not saying that we should not call on God’s guidance?

[Rushdoony] Definitely we should, at all times we should prayerfully call on God for guidance. But we should not ask God to give us a special leading to do something that our common sense should tell us to do. Now to give a very simple and crude illustration, we don’t have to ask God for guidance as to whether we should steal or shouldn’t steal, His word has given us the guidance there, “Thou shalt not steal.” But sometimes we face a very difficult choice between two things that are good. Then we can call on God to give us wisdom, and He has promised to give us wisdom. Now we don’t in such a case say: “Now Lord, give me some special sign that I should choose between these two,” because we can’t ask for revelations, but we can ask for wisdom to make a choice.

Then we have this protection: Romans 8:28 says that “all things work together for good, to them that love God, to them who are the called according to His purpose.” So we can’t lose, whatever choice we make. Because even if it turns out to be a rather unsuccessful course that we have chosen, God makes it work together for good to us because we are his. You can’t lose. That is the marvelous thing about being a Christian, you cannot lose. It is all going to add up to good to you in this world and in the world to come, supremely.

[New Question and Answer Period] Before we have our first question I would like to answer one that was raised last time with respect to debt. There are so many verses in the scripture concerning debt that I thought it would be better to have a selected few. First of all with respect to debt you have several passages in the law: Exodus 22:25, Deuteronomy 15:1-11, Deuteronomy 23:19-20, and Deuteronomy 28:12, 44. Which make it clear, as does also Leviticus 25:36-37, that between Christian and Christian interest is not to be taken and that the Christian is to avoid debt living. Paul summarizes this in Romans 13:8-9. Romans 13:8-9 “Owe no man anything, save to love one another.”

Then Proverbs 22:7 makes it clear that he that is borrower is servant to the lender, and the word ‘servant’ there means slave, and can be translated slave. This does not mean that interest is sinful or illegal, or an improper business, because the Bible is realistic. It recognizes that many people are going to be slaves, and I do not believe you can have any sound social order unless you recognize that many people have a slave mentality, and unless you build your social order on that reality. This country did, and it had certain limitations upon suffrage; people who did not own property could not vote, people who received any kind of welfare could not vote. Because they were not free men, legally, and the Bible recognizes that many people are going to live that way, and there is no harm in dealing with reality, honestly and fairly. And therefore lending money to them, investing money in something which loans money to people who live according to this standard.

Now one of the things that people fail to understand about the Bible is that it is strict in its requirements for believers, but it recognizes that unbelievers often have another standard. For example, the laws of meat in the Mosaic law are very strict, and they are basically the sanitary laws we live by today in our culture, because we have imbibed the sanitary standards given in the Mosaic law. But, a Hebrew was permitted to sell meat that had died, say a cow that had died, to a Canaanite who saw nothing wrong with such meat and actually often preferred it; as long as it was an honest business deal. In other words, here was a particular type of meat, there was no dishonest about the representation of it, you said: “This is a cow that died. You like this kind of meat? Alright, I will sell it to you for so much.” You could not impose your standard upon him, you could not say: “Because I am forbidden to eat this meat, you are forbidden.” No, that is not a part of the Biblical law. So that debt living for those who are by nature slaves is fine, but we are called to freedom; and to be called to freedom meant to live without debt, and so I believe the Christian has the obligation to get out of debt and to stay out of debt.

Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, because you have borrowed against something you have, so that you have really surrendered ownership, to a degree, in putting up the collateral. Yours is a tentative ownership, and it is a form of slavery. There is a real freedom in being debt free, I have been in both conditions and I can tell you that I know, since I came to realize what the Bible said I’ve had a real freedom, because whatever my income is, it goes for my current living, not for past sins as it were. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] In such an instance you are not dealing with a Christian personally, you are dealing with an institution, and it is up to the individual Christian who goes there whether he wants to borrow or not. But the Christian is told, the believer, that debt is only to be for emergency purposes, and not for more than a period of six years, incidentally. In other words you cannot mortgage your future or your countries future, or your children’s future. Emergency debts, for short terms only. That is the Biblical law. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, because while I considerate increasingly an unsound business, as long as it is a sound business he cannot compel them to live by his standard. You see, this is the same point as with regard to meat. But today the poorest form of investment is in money, really. Because consider this: supposing you have a hundred thousand dollars and you put in the bank. Now that is really supposing, but let’s suppose for a moment. You get, say, between four and five percent interest. Now, on top of that, you are taxed for your interest; on top of that, inflation annually now is 4%, so you have lose 4% right off the bat, haven’t you, of your capital. Then you are taxed so that your interest today is taxed, and inflation takes 4%, so that you are losing even though you are getting interest, your capital is decreasing. So that money is a very poor investment today, strictly from the financial perspective. But that is not a moral question, that is a commercial question.

[Audience Member] My question was just a little different from that, maybe I should clarify it- it seems the bank upon deposit of my money, then recreates upon the basis of that money a multiple factor thereof in the form of bank credit which is a non existent (?), and therefore this is fraud, and uses that to make purchases. For instance it purchases bonds, government bonds, stock appropriations and etc, and they keep multiplying and (?) this thing up, by its centralized structure. But the fact that it is a fraud and when Christians become aware of this are they then permitted Biblically to deposit, his wealth dollars in this bank?

[Rushdoony] I think I answered to that by reference to the matter of meats. In other words, you cannot take a non-Christian culture and expect Christian standards of it, and just as you deal realistically with people who will eat meat from a dead cow, so people who are going to live in terms of debt and in terms of debt money, you have got to deal realistically with the situation. And you cannot change that kind of world by saying: “I don’t like it, I am against it,” and so on. You can only change it as you change the people in it. as long as they are slaves to sin they are going to be slaves to one another, and the Bible says that slavery of this sort is not the great evil, but spiritual slavery is the key evil, and all things else (fold?) from it. So that if we are going to say: “These are the things we are going to wage war against primarily” we are going to have to get out of the world. But we are living in the world, and we have got to say that sin, apostasy from God, is the key evil. And this is what we have got to deal with, and we have got to take the world realistically, and we can’t start having scruples about all these facts that are faulty or wrong or partly wrong in the world, then we face an impossible situation and the Christian has to be, say, a colonist like some of the socialist colonies in the past which, in the last century, which withdrew completely from society and tried to live unto themselves; and it was an impossibility.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] The Amish have a different problem, but of course they are a group that have withdrawn. They do not believe in voting, they totally separate themselves. But their problem of course is that they are maintaining what has always been an American right, the right to educate their own children; and it has only been in recent years that the state has claimed this right. In this first 50 years of our American history as I pointed out before, there was no such thing as a public school, they were all Christian schools. And for many, many years after the public schools started it was commonplace for many mothers to educate their own children and then send them for the upper grades or for high school to a public school. That in fact began in the Puritan faze, in the Puritan or colonial era, a mother didn’t send her child to school to learn to read and write, she sent him to school after he’d learned to read and write. And she taught him to read and write between the ages of 2-4 depending on the child, and he started at five at a local school. And that is why they didn’t start with the elementary things and they very often learned Hebrew and Greek when they were six and seven years old. The basic skill of reading they had mastered at home, just about the same time they learned to talk.

Well, that continued in America for a long time, and the Amish from the beginning there was no question about it, they were people who wanted to have the entire education of their children, and the state of course is saying all the children must be educated in terms of what we want.

Now this is going to be increasingly a problem not only with the Amish but with all of us, but we are increasingly going to face this fact: the schools are religious institutions, but they are anti-Christian institutions. On top of that there is the demand increasingly that all schools be taken over by the state, and of course UNESCO has such a measure, it has been introduced at least once into Congress, it has not been acted on, but this would place every school and every member country under UNESCO, so that the curriculum, the faculty, everything would be controlled by them. The Amish are just a first run on this type of program, the total control of education.

This is going to be harder for them to put through than anything else, because at this point they have the liberals against them at many points also, and it is ironic what has brought the Liberals into the act, fighting mad in various parts of the country. A lot of their kids have Beatle hair cuts and the schools have said they have to have a haircut before they can come to school. So there have been committees formed in various cities by the Liberals to fight this infringement of the civil rights of their children, and to start declaring that the schools are getting too big for their britches, and too authoritarian. So there have been a lot of other little cross fires like this, but the schools have stirred up a few too many hornets. This matter for example of compelling all the children to buy lunches which developed in one eastern community is another thing. They moved a little too fast and have aroused people, but they are going to continue moving.

Yes?

[Audience Member] If we do not back away, and if we do not separate ourselves from the banking situation, (?) what are we going to do when the condition which you have just described comes upon us? In other words, do we separate at that point or do we give in and become part of it?

[Rushdoony] Well, we have to move in terms of wisdom, and right now I would say in terms of practical wisdom the poorest investment you can have is money. So I would say as soon as you can get your money out of a bank beyond what you need for emergency reasons and into something like land or gold or silver or any other form of investment which is a hedge against the total breakdown of money, you are wise. So we have to be governed by wisdom in these things, and I do believe we are facing the breakdown of money.

So money is a poor investment. It isn’t one I have to worry about… (laughter) but it is a poor investment. And virtually every conservative economist today has made that point, money is becoming the worst investment possible, and the purchase of silver and other things is becoming fantastic. Now I was talking yesterday by long distance with a friend in the bay area who is quite an expert in these matters, and he was telling me that the largest coin shop perhaps in that area and perhaps in all the west last week received a hundred and five thousand silver dollars, they bought them up from someone who had that huge a reserve. Within less than three days they sold every last one of them for $1.35 a piece.

Now, they didn’t even have to advertise that they had received them, as soon as the word got around, people were there converting their paper, withdrawing it out of the bank, and converting it into silver dollars. And there is a good reason for it, a gold coin from ancient Rome or Czarist Russia or the Kaisers of Germany is still as good as it was then, and better; it has a greater purchasing power. But you can have some paper Rubles and paper Marks, and they are worthless. I have one somewhere for $10,000 marks, five thousand dollars. And it is just a souvenir. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Because people are going to every kind of non-monetary means of investment to protect themselves. And some people are turning to stamps, there is a big sale of Jewelry now, such as you have around your neck; because people want something that is gold or silver as a substitute for money, and this is the reason for stamp collecting.

Now until 1960 the collecting of stamps was a far more popular hobby than the collecting of coins, but as the dollar has become worthless, the paper dollar, in 60, coin and stamp shops found that their biggest business was with coins, and now they are a runaway thing.

This past week I was in one California community of 600 people, and they had a sizeable coin shop. Now that is what is happening. As again coins, stamps are I would say secondary, very secondary; and the trouble with stamps is that in a time of crisis, nobody is too interested in paying you what they are worth. However what some people are doing is on the assumption that the United States in some form will continue, its stamps will be worth something. So unused sheets retain their face value as stamps, and if they are the higher priced issues and of the commemoratives they can increase in their value to collectors. So some people are investing in them, I wouldn’t prefer that as an investment however.

[New Question and Answer Period]

Before we have our questions, I would like to answer first of all a question at the end of the last hour from Mrs. Maxwell about Christian obedience, how far should we obey the state. I believe that was the question?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Oh, well, somebody asked me at the end of the hour how far should we be obedient, and I thought it was you.

First of all, before I answer it I would like to read a letter from the Santa Anna Register for this past week on Capone and the Amish. This person in Santa Anna writes: “The Amish indeed are a demanding minority. The Register reports that Louise (Hudgenson?) a reporter for the Chicago Tribune has obtained first hand information from one of their representatives, a Mrs. (Vontregger?) concerning her conflict with the school laws in Hazleton Iowa. The Amish refuse to obey the established law which provides that children shall attend the public schools, and when the school officials demand that they comply with the law, many folks on the outside chant persecution, claiming that the Amish have a sacred right to violate the law. Defiance of our laws is not peculiar to the Amish, most other parties defy them occasionally: Al Capone, Lucky Luciano, Frankie Costello, and others invaded our land and engaged in a lucrative business, and when our government broke up their nefarious schemes they shouted from the housetops that the government was interfering with free enterprise, and many are agreed with them.” and so on.

“Their representative, Mrs. (Vontregger?) in an attempt to justify the Amish in their defiance of the school law quoted from holy writ saying that: ‘we must obey God rather than men.’ This is a comical implication that the Almighty has admonished them to disobey this school law. But if they are really interested in Biblical references related to observing the laws of the land, they may profit by reading the following: All believers were admonished to be subject to principalities and powers, to obey magistrates, also let every soul be subject to the powers that be for there is no power but of God. The powers that be are ordained of God. Titus 3:1 and Romans 13:1. The Amish insist that they have a right to twist, bend, and violate the laws of this country to suit their convenience, and they are indeed a demanding minority.” Signed (T. Cartnell?) Santa Anna.

The editor’s note is: “We presume that (T. Cartnell?) would have been one of those who insisted on obeying the law to require the return of escaped slaves to their owners. If there were a law requiring persons to commit theft or murder, would he also insist on obedience? If the Amish believe as part of their religion they should provide for their own children’s training, are not their rights being violated under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution?”

Now many people I have found, quote these verses, and say: “Therefore we must obey the state, period.” Well, this is a blueprint for tyranny, and the word tyranny comes from the Greek and means literally ‘secular law’ or ‘man’s law,’ and we are never asked to obey man’s law. Now the word of God has many other passages, and these people are curious, they take a very strict demand towards obeying Civil Magistrates, kings and rulers, but what about all the other laws? For example, the law of God says that parents are under obligation to God to rear up their children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, to teach them, to give them a Christian education. What if they are forbidden by the state to teach them anything concerning the Bible, or to give them as in the case of the Amish a Christian education? Husbands have a responsibility to provide for, protect and care for their wives and their children.

Now, these are just two areas; the church law is another area and there are many more. Such children are saying the only thing that has any standing in the sight of God is obedience to the laws with respect to the state, and not obedience with respect to the laws of the family, laws concerning the church, laws concerning a man’s relationship to his wife. In other words they are saying there is only one kind of covenant we recognize, the covenant with the state; and this involves a fearful blasphemy. Because the state is not God, and we are to obey all civil authorities under God, and when their law violates the law of God, we are to obey God. Wives are told in scripture to obey their husbands, but under God. And their husbands cannot require of them any contrary to the word of God, because at all points their authority rests not only upon the word of God, but is governed by the word of God. So it is totally conditioned by that context. And similarly the authority of parents over their children, in every area authority is subject to the word of God, and so we have a duty to resist the state at certain points, even as the apostle said: “We must obey God rather than man.”

And at the time of the War of Independence the standard of the colonists was very clearly this, and they were quoting from Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos, one of the great Reformation documents. Obedience to tyrants is disobedience to God.

[New Question and Answer Period]

Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, that is quite a question. But first of all let’s analyze the Korean brainwashing. That is a very, very important and interesting subject. What happened was this: as the communists took Americans prisoners, they very quickly as they questioned this men and talked to them found out two things about them; one, are these people strong and intense believers in free enterprise, who know what they believe? In other words, have they read some books in conservative economics, and do they have a strong conviction here? They weeded them out. And are they strong Christians who believe the Bible is the word of God and that they cannot be budged from anything the Bible says? They weeded them out. Now, in weeding these two groups out, they weeded out approximately 15 out of every 100 they took. On the average it ran between 85-86%. These they put in prison camps behind barbed wire, very heavily guarded, and treated very nicely. They let them alone, never bothered them. They figured: “We can’t change them, we won’t touch them.”

Now what had they done by taking out that 15%? They had taken out everyone who had strong convictions. And the other 85%, whether they were as in one or two cases officers of the highest rank or above privates, were people who didn’t have strong convictions about anything. And so they went to work on them, and what they did was to take these people and put them in Korean villages where they had driven out all the Koreans, and just put them into the various little houses; no barbed wire around the village, only one or two (?). They gave them the food, they gave them shovels and equipment, and said: “Okay, you are on your own. We will haul the food into you, but you take care of yourselves otherwise.”

The appalling fact is that those soldiers, many of whom as I say included officers, high ranking officers, did nothing at all. They did not even build latrines. So that after a period of about 2-3 months, no it was not quite that long, it was hardly possible to walk around the village, it was so filthy. Instead of building latrines, they used the village streets as their latrines. And it reached a point finally where these Communists couldn’t walk into the village to bring the food, so they came in and cleaned it up and built the latrines, they were so disgusted with these men. Then they gathered them together for classes and said: “Now you don’t have to come, but if you come we will give you maybe an extra cigarette now and then or something like that. And listen while we give you a course in Marxism. You don’t have to come. We aren’t going to take away your food, we will give you a little something extra. We’d appreciate it if you’d come.”

Well, they went. Then they began to ask them to get up and give their reactions, and if any of them wanted to confess that they had been guilty of capitalistic sins they could do so. And of course at first they went along with it, you see. They were just typical Americans, they were ready to make a gag of it and go along with it, and they would get up and they would talk, and they would say: “My father was a plantation owner” and of course they were making it up, or “My father owned 16 factories, and we had umpteen servants” and so on. But little by little, although they were going along with it as a gag, they were being infected. And the Communists knew they were making a joke out of it, and they played it with a straight face. And little by little they got them to confess various things, and then they gave them privileges also for reporting on one another, so that if anyone got out of line in any remarks he made he was immediately reported and someone else got a little extra food or a few extra cigarettes for it, and pretty soon they couldn’t talk to each other, because nobody trusted anyone else.

And finally it reached the point where the only people they could talk to were the Communists, because they knew they could depend on them. If they said: “We will give you something if you do something” their word could be depended on, but they couldn’t depend on their closest friend if they said something to him he might turn them in for a pack of cigarettes. And the total irresponsibility was reached to the point where in one instance… well, this was the most flagrant instance and there was a trial for it and conviction when they returned.

There were about 30 or more men in this one hut on a cold night when it was 20 below outside, and two of the men were very ill with dysentery, and naturally the place stank because of it. One man who had been out with some others in another hut came back in to go to bed and he became furious, and he said: “You two are stinking up the place!” and he told them to get up and get out, or he was going to throw them out, and he pushed them out the door and they froze to death. And I believe that there were 28 who stood there or stretched out and watched them, and they all testified in the trial, and every last one of them when they were asked: “What did you do about it? Didn’t you say anything? It was one many shoving two of your buddies out to die, you could have stopped him. What did you do?” and the answer was: “Nothing.”

Now, the Communists knew what they were going to accomplish in that brain washing, and they knew they could accomplish it because these people had no strong convictions, and that is why the weeding out process: “We will get out all those who have strong convictions and we will put them there, and these others we can do what we want with, they are sheep because they lack strong convictions.” And people who are brainwashed, as well as people who are hypnotized easily are those without any real convictions. That is what the brainwashing was about.

And an army that has only a limited number who are capable of leadership becomes a dangerous army. It can be panicked easily, its morale can be broken easily; and that is why during WW2 I know of at least one division which before it was shipped out was broken up in Northern California, and the men scattered into other divisions, because they found that this division was so full of (culls?), human (culls?), so that the officers figured the minute they got out into battle they would be the first ones shot.

Now, it is interesting by way of comparison to go back to one of the greatest armies every assembled in human history, Cromwell’s army in England. And in Cromwell’s army, and if any of you have any ancestors who fought in Cromwell’s army, feel proud of him; he was a man. They had regular courses in doctrine and they had army debates, and I have a volume of those debates, and they are the most amazing things I have ever read, because they argued the basic theological issues, the basic political issues, and they did them from as total a Christian perspective as you can imagine. When the wars were over, for the first time in the history of England there was not a single Veteran seen on the streets as a beggar. Every last one of them within a month after their discharge, even though he was very seriously crippled had a gainful occupation and was a pillar of strength in his community.

Now that is the difference, you see. An army like that can never be brainwashed, and it was never defeated. An army and a people without any basic faith are easily brainwashed, and that is why today it is so easy for the press, our press, as well as for the enemy, to brainwash the American people, because there are no convictions. As someone told me this morning they had a problem with a very near and dear one because their attitude was: “Well, you can believe just what you want, and as long as your heart is right God will love you, and God does love you in spite of everything.” In other words, nothing makes any difference.

Let’s see, the second part of that question…

[Audience Member] …?... Moral rearmament

[Rushdoony] Yes, with their confession. Right. Moral Rearmaments confession is a dangerous thing, I believe, and it has been curtailed to a certain extent, because this kind of confession serves no purpose of self discipline, in fact they tend to be, those in Moral Rearmament, people who are running away from discipline. This is an easy answer to the problem of religion. And so they go to it, and in the early years of Moral Rearmament these confessions were quite a drawing card because you heard so much dirt; it was better than going to a Burlesque show. It reached a point where in England at a number of colleges they were barred from the grounds because of the scandals that had been sued. And (Buckman?) at that time did put his foot down on further confessions of that sort, but I understand certain areas they are tending to revive again. This is a very different kind of thing, this is a breakdown of discipline.

[New Question and Answer Period]

The February 1966 Science Digest has a feature article: Are Chimps Really Animals? And it has some breathtaking news fresh from the jungle, where this young woman has spent five years living with the chimps, and Jane Goodall after five years with her jungle friends tells us that maybe chimps are really people. Now the reason for this is that according to science we must define, we are told, human beings as animals that make and use tools. And so according to Doctor Louis S. B. (Leekie?) we must either redefine man, redefine tools, or accept Chimpanzees as men. The reason for this is that she found out, I didn’t think it was particularly new, that chimps use twigs and grasses when feeding on termites. And Jane says: “this was one of the most exciting discoveries I made. The chimpanzee when he strips leaves from the twig is actually modifying a natural object to suit it to a specific purpose, and he is thus making a tool.”

Now this is breathtaking news indeed. But this is the way science has of making people wonder, and perhaps accept their nonsense. First of all there is nothing new about this fact that she has reported, others have reported it, but of course they didn’t have a PhD degree, so chimps didn’t really use twigs until a PhD reported it. Now it is official.

Then, are we going to say that ants are people too because they can build bridges? And are we going to say that bees are people too because they can build very complex apartments? Or are we going to say that their definition of man is nonsense to begin with? That only if we have a Biblical definition of man can we have any Biblical perspective on man, and in terms of that a chimp is not a human being. And sometimes I doubt whether Dr. (Leekie?) and Jane (Goodall?) and some of these others are more than barely human.

Then I was very interested in this item from the Register, Sunday January 9, 1966. Moscow, a Russian woman who won a heroine mother medal for having ten children came under fire Saturday because she had them by ten different men, none of them her husband. The newspaper, Soviet Russia said (Olga Batanogova?) won the reward because nobody bothered to check up on her. You see they have under-population as a major problem behind the Iron Curtain, so many have starved to death that they are trying to promote population, they are not worried about a population explosion. To continue: When welfare workers became suspicious they found that Olga had put eight of the children in state homes, that the other two were neglected and starving, and that the unmarried Olga and her lover were spending her child support money on vodka. Such a thing cannot be forgiven, the newspaper said, indicating that Olga’s medal would be taken away.

Thousands and thousands of honest Soviet mothers are given an unworthy mother to take as an example; blasphemy has been performed over the sacred word, ‘mother’.

Well, it seems they have problems with welfare recipients behind the Iron Curtain in the really great society, so we should feel better after hearing that.

Then I thought very significant and indicative of the corruption of our law was this item from the front page of the Oakland Tribune, Sunday January 23 1966: Court says Alcoholism No Crime and I will just read a portion of a long article: “A Federal Appeals court in Richmond Virginia has ruled that a chronic alcoholic cannot be arrested and treated as a criminal because he gets drunk. In a land mark decision Saturday in the U.S. 4th circuit court of appeals, upheld the eastern half of the American Civil Liberties Union fight to end punitive action against alcoholics. The western half of the ACLU’s case involves an open man whose battle to date has been a losing one, but is expected to get a boost from the Richmond decision.

The decision was based on the fact that alcoholism is now almost universally accepted medically as a disease, the Richmond appellate court said, and jail sentences for drunkenness constitute cruel and unusual punishment. ACLU attorney (Marchel Crowds?) of San Francisco said that in view of Saturday’s decision in Richmond he will probably try again to get a California Supreme Court hearing for Thomas (?) 56 of Oakland. Failing that (Crowd?) said that he would take (Hudds?) case to the U.S. Supreme Court for a national ruling. (Budd?) has been convicted for drunkenness more than 50 times in thirty years, beginning in 1927, and the ACLU took his case last March after Oakland police arrested him on a charge of public intoxication. His counterpart in the ACLU fight is (Joe Beedriver?) 59 of Dura North Carolina convicted two hundred times for public intoxication.” And so on.

Now of course this is the toe in the door. They can step by step declare any kind of action a disease and remove it from the jurisdiction of the police and from prison sentence, and sentence people to indeterminate sentences in a mental institution, and of course people who are conservatives can be called victims of a disease, and since any such sentence is indeterminate they can be confined indefinitely. This is a very, very dangerous court ruling. Yes?

[Audience Member] I’d like to ask a question in relation to the National Review article January 11th, entitled Beauty and the Beatnik and they are talking about the Beatniks who have descended upon the Spanish steps in Rome and put on a quite a spectacle, …?.. by desecrating beauty. Now we know they do that here, but …?... and yet in Communist Russia once they took over they protected their art form …?...

[Rushdoony] Very good question. Clearly subversive forces are behind this moral anarchism, and behind much of this art, behind much of this modern music and the various beatnik type of activities. Why then don’t they permit it in the Soviet Union? The reason is, they know this is an instrument for destruction, and they are out to destroy us. Similarly in Russia before the revolution you had your nihilism with its total moral relativism, and this was encouraged by the Marxists. Then after the Revolution they encouraged this kind of thing very extensively, they encouraged the modernistic approach in every area, in education they adopted progressivism for a generation, because they wanted it to destroy every remnant of the past of any religiously grounded culture and art.

Now, having once they felt destroyed that, by putting a generation through progressivism, to separate them from their fathers faith, they then went back to a very rigorous kind of education, the abolished all such art, all such music, because now they wanted to establish something on a statist foundation, so their education became very conservative also.

Throughout the Western world they are exercising a destructive function. They feel that first of all they have to destroy the foundations. I think one of the most interesting statements made, and no one reported it I found it in the text as published by the (Viet day?) committee in the Berkeley demonstrations in May was simply this: that they were not concerned about a political and military revolution primarily, that would come logically and easily, but the first revolution they said must be the revolution in the minds of men, and they felt that this was the revolution they were accomplishing, and indeed they have; so that today most of the churches, virtually all the schools, both political parties, have in varying degrees a revolutionary faith, it is destructive of any kind of standard based upon God and His word.

This then is their first function, and so they use these people, but once having taken over, they will liquidate them, and this they did in the Soviet Union. Some of these elements that were quite far out were used for a number of years, and then were liquidated, ruthlessly. For example, the Anarchists, who are brothers to the Communists. They both come from the same revolutionary background, but there’s quite a bit of tension between them. The Anarchists were used with tremendous savagery, they were turned loose on the people of Russia. They were quite powerful and instrumental in the total Communism of all women, and they were handed over to the anarchistic commune, they were the ones who issued the proclamations. But after a certain period when they felt they had destroyed the middle-classes and the Christians, they then liquidated the Anarchists. This is the kind of use these people are put to.

[Audience Member] Are you going to include anything along this line in your book The Religion of Revolution (?)

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Audience Member] I still don’t understand why in Russia today though, that their standards is correct …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, well, there is… the difference is this. Pop-art, by the way, was recently cited by Fact Magazine, which is on the left, clearly, as being the homosexual attack on culture.

[Audience Member] Then why do the Russians want the good culture?

[Rushdoony] The culture they have is not really good, it has the form of goodness, in other words, the art follows the semblance of classical art, and so on. But what is its basic purpose? Its basic purpose is to glorify the State, and so the artists have to follow, as do the writers, the political turn of events. And they cannot say anything or do anything that will contradict what the politicians want.

The musicians of course, have had a greater degree of freedom because, apart from giving it a kind of socialistic title occasionally, they can write music as long as it is more or less in the traditional vein, without any problems. But the sculptors, the painters, the poets, the novelists, all of the artists, must follow the party line very rigidly. Because the purpose of culture is not to glorify God, but to glorify the Soviet dictatorship of the proletariat. So that it has been used first destructively, and now is being used constructively for the State. And we cannot believe that art has that function, its function is God-centered. But our background is so deeply humanistic that is it easy for us to make this mistake, because, as I indicated a few weeks ago, art in the modern era has become a kind of substitute for religion. And the aesthetic experience, and we have studied inspiration, has been a kind of substitute for the inspiration of Scripture, and this humanistic orientation of course has made it channel quite readily into the Soviet System. So that we can look back and see our ‘good’ art of a generation ago, and we can see the resemblance to the present day Soviet art, and we fail to see that that ‘good’ art was decadent, even though it had some character as compared to what we have now.

Now, you can see what happened to art very clearly with the Renaissance and immediately after. I think one of the most telling pictures is one by a student called Ruben. Now Ruben was a great artist and a very fine man, a thoroughly moral man, a very devout Catholic, and a very simple person who, I believe, was a genuine Christian. And yet, because of his simplicity, he reflected the culture of his day to an appalling degree, and he had as one of his most magnificent paintings, the Apotheosis of Venus, and here you have an ascension scene in which a big, lush Venus is ascending into heaven, and it’s exactly as the Medieval ascensions of Christ were portrayed, except that Venus, the flesh has taken over. And it was a fitting portrayal especially since it came through the channel of a man who was simplicity and innocence personified. Especially revealing of what had happened to art. And this has happened steadily We can find much to appreciate in many of these artists of a generation ago, but we have to recognize their basic humanism and how they have led to Communist art.