Profound Questions and Answers

Mongoloid.

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels, and Sermons

Lesson: 24-24

Genre: Talk

Track: 24

Dictation Name: RR202C6

Location/Venue:

Year:

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes…

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] I think it is highly questionable that it would, because first of all it would involve breaking the law, and we are not trying to further anarchy; and second, we would be the first ones that would be picked up, so that this would give them an excellent means of eliminating the conservatives, they would move in on them rather than the radicals that are doing this sort of thing.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, first of all I think we need to get across to people that slavery is a fact of life, and many people are slaves; that the Bible does not absolutely condemn slavery, it simply describes it as an inferior way of life which is to be regulated. Then, the minute we begin to get people to recognize that slavery is not to be condemned absolutely, then to recognize who the slave are, and to say: “Alright, take your place. We will provide for you as slaves, but we will not allow you to be slaves with the privileges of liberty.”

Now I wrote some years ago a study of this situation in Ur of the Chaldea’s in Abraham’s day and before, and it was published, oh, perhaps ten years ago in- maybe a little longer ago than that- in The Freeman. “Freedom and Slavery in Ur of the Chaldea’s.” And briefly, this was the situation in ancient Ur: There were three classes of citizens. There was a slave class. The slave could own property, he could conduct a business, and sometimes he could be fairly wealthy, but he had no right of vote, he had no say-so about anything in the city. The second class was a merchant class, those who wanted to do business and didn’t want to be involved in civic affairs or assume any responsibility. They paid a tax, they were exempt from military service, but they were free men. The third class was the free man. The free man paid a heavy tax, they were subject to military service, but they alone could vote and had the right to rule. You had your pick; what were you going to be? If you were a slave, you were a slave, you didn’t cross the lines, and you weren’t associated with except as a slave. In other words, you accepted a situation in which you paid virtually no taxes, in which you could make money and had no responsibility, but you went around as a slave, and people knew you for what you were.

Now, this system worked for centuries and centuries and it was based on the realistic recognition that there are differences in men, and you have to abide by them. Now, we had a similar system in this country in that we did have of course the African slaves, but then we did have those people who are not entitled to vote, because they were recipients of some form of aid, or had failed to meet their debts, been in bankruptcy or something and as a result could not bear responsibility. And this was a healthy system, it was only when we began to break with that system as a result of subversive influences from Europe and from the Unitarian movement in this country, that we began to see a disintegration. There are people who are slaves by nature, and there is no getting around it, and people who are sinners are the ones who are slaves by nature.

Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] They mean freedom for the state, not for the people.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] For them, freedom means socialism. So that by definition is the socialist state. Now Stalin could say with a straight face in a speech, I have a copy of the text which he delivered in the 30’s, and he meant every word of it, the sincerity rings out, that: “The Soviet peoples were the freest peoples in the world.” and he believed it, he truly believed it. He had put them through famine, he had put them through purges at the time, and he recognized that they had had difficulties; but in spite of that they were the freest people in the world, because they were communist; and communism is by definition freedom.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, they take our language and give it a different meaning. Now freedom means different things for different people. For a Buddhist freedom means to die, then you escape from the bondage of this world; so true liberty is emancipation from this world, and that is why Gandhi because he was a Mahatma and he felt he was never going to be born again, he was going to be free from the cycle of Karma- and the Hindu’s, like Gandhi have a similar belief- he was going to be free, he was never going to be born again. Now this is freedom for a Buddhist or a Hindu, death ultimately. Freedom for a Communist is for us slavery. When we say ‘freedom’ when we say ‘liberty’ our conception is completely one that is born of the Bible, and take away the Biblical faith and our idea of liberty is going to go down the drain. Yes, you had a question?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, now the question we need to ask ourselves there is this: How much of the Negro’s Christianity was really Christianity? And how much of it was really paganism under a semi Christian guise? And I think most of it was paganism. Most of it was paganism. So that he picked up the old time religion, but he put into it African Paganism. For example, I mentioned recently when I returned from Jackson Mississippi, the report of this elderly minister in the Delta country, a Southern Presbyterian, a white man, who said he had spent most of his life, I think he was close to eighty, not only taking care of his own pastorate, but teaching Negro pastors and laymen the Bible every week. And he said he had not been able to get across to them that fornication was a sin, they still had the African idea that it was just a connection, nothing wrong with it. Only when you took somebodies woman was it a sin, because then you were stepping on somebodies toes, and you could get into trouble. But any other kind of sexual relations with a woman was entirely alright, and you find mixed up in their religion all kinds of paganism, to the ‘nth degree, and this is true today.

I heard a service on the radio in Northern California just about a year ago this month, or next month, and it was supposedly the old-time religion, and it was fantastic. I turned it on, and the Negro was preaching about the old time religion. Now what was the old time religion? They sang the song: “Give me the old time religion.” Then he went on to say what the old time religion was, and the old time religion was loving your neighbor and giving him his rights, and so on and so forth. So he had a smattering of the whole of the civil rights thrown in as a part of the old time religion. And this was what the Lord commanded, so he started talking about the Lord, and then they went into another song, because it would be from one song to another, and the sermon had about 6-7 songs in it. And what was the song they sang? Shabbat Israel from the synagogue worship; they picked it up somewhere, and in kind of a half Jewish half Negro fashion they were singing it. So he went on to talk about the Lord a little more, and then about the Virgin Mary; so then they sang the Hail Mary. About that time I reached home so I didn’t hear the rest of the service, but I’d had about all I could take. (laughter)

Now, this is the way they are, and there are clearly discernible strata of all kinds of paganism in their faith, so that there has been very little Christianity that has really gotten ahold of the Negro peoples. Moreover, while there was a smattering of it, and there was no denying some were very fine Christians, a limited number; today there is very little even of that, because virtually all of the Negro churches today are in the Civil Rights movement outside of the south, and more and more of them in the south are being infiltrated by it.

I mentioned some time ago, that I met a couple of years ago a young Negro student and had quite a discussion with him, he was from Harvard, he wanted to go into the ministry; he has since dropped out, for which I am glad. He admitted there was only one church in all of Harlem where real Christianity was preached, and he said the pastor there was a white man, and it was a very small congregation. There was one other church where he said they get some real Christianity, and it’s because the pastor steals all his sermons and reads them, and occasionally he gets one that’s really Christian.

But this young man who was planning to go into the ministry, was very earnest but mixed up; admitted that he didn’t know where, in all of Harlem, he could find a girl who was moral enough to be the wife of a clergyman. Now this is the reality. What little they have had they have virtually lost, and today you see the results: what little restraint there was from the smattering of this old time religion that they did have is virtually gone now, so that their religion was very, very sub-Christian in most cases. There have been studies made of this, and even one or two from the Negro perspective which recognize that this was the case.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] These men are especially the worst, because they have gone overboard on the Civil Rights movement, yes. I have known a number of them, I went to seminary with a number of them; I don’t know a one who is not deeply involved, and involved moreover in very dangerous institutions. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Mhmm. Of course I don’t believe a woman can be a minister but-

[New Question and Answer Period]

Those cases exist, when I was in seminary there was this one Negro student, I often wish I knew what happened to him, he was out of the deep south, he was given a scholarship, and he left after about 3 months, and he came into my room and he said: “I don’t belong here.” And he said: “They just want to use me, and I am just a black boy from the deep south, and I am going back home.” And so he was going to find a school where he could get solid Biblical training and become strictly a preacher of the word of God, he was not going to get involved in anything of this racial conflict. But there weren’t many like him. He was, however, outstanding. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, in the Pauline epistles, it is 1st Corinthians very definitely, and in the letters to Timothy (?) for office. It is to be a man, and even for church officers like elders, not only is it to be a man, but he is to be one who has proven himself by his personal conduct, by his exercise of authority in the home, by his general stability in business, and his personal relations.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] A woman at that time did have rights, you see-

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] What rights does she have now?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] She had many of those rights at that time, you see, you forget that in the world of Greek and Rome at that time the old family stability had broken down, women had become emancipated; women were managing their own affairs, women were increasingly moving out into the world. So you had a situation that was not unlike our own, and this was the problem in Corinth that compelled Paul to speak, because so many of these Christian women felt: “Well, we have this same liberty that men have, and therefore we are going to use it.” and they immediately began to act like the women around them, pagan Greek women and others, and in Greece this emancipation force was very far gone centuries before Paul arrived there. And as a result Paul had to say: “No, your position is under the word of God, and the word of God is not governed by these things that govern women around you.” So the reason you had (this?) is not because this was the convention of the time, but because he had to prevent them from following the convention of the time. Otherwise it would have been unnecessary, because it would have been…

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Well, because these women were going to imitate the pagan women, or before they were converted were living like these pagan women who were taking authority unto themselves, felt that they were the head of the household, or that they had the same status before God as a man. So that coming from a pagan Greek background, it was hard for them to accept this, and Paul had to lay down the law to them.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] What is that?

[Audience Member] What says that woman doesn’t have the same status as a man?

[Rushdoony] The scripture does. (laughter) It isn’t my word, its…

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Well, very definitely, let’s look at this verse, because I think this is important. Now, this is what he says: “For the man is not of the woman, but the woman of the man; neither was the man created for the woman, but the woman for the man.” Now that is pretty blunt. And that is in 1 Corinthians 11. There is no way of getting around that, I know some years ago when I first began studying, that sounded awfully harsh, and I tried from the Greek and from the commentaries to see if there was any way you could take some of the punch out of that, but I realized it wouldn’t work, it wouldn’t work; this was the word of God, and I was trying establish my word, and that never stands. So that whether we like it or not, this is the way God’s word speaks. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] It can be, but it is a more limited meaning. The word ‘blessed’ does convey very definitely the meaning of ‘happy’, but it doesn’t convey the connotation of holy, sanctified, so that it is one side of the meaning of blessed, a very important side, but it limits the word too much. And so that while it can be so translated it does limit the original. I believe therefore it is best to remain with the older translations which give it as ‘blessed are the meek.’ Yes?

[Audience Member] Would you comment on (?) eternal and the order depicted in hell …?...

[Rushdoony] No, Dante’s Inferno… I hate to get started on this, but in my book The One and the Many I shall have a long chapter on Dante. Dante is one of the most subversive men in the history of western literature. He was a thorough going statist, he does in the Divine Comedy very definitely say that the best form of economic order was Communism; he was very hostile to the church, and wanted the triumph of the empire over the church, and he believed that there should be a one world order of communistic sort. Now, this was Dante, who is presented to us as one of the great religious figures of history. And he was very definitely hostile to the faith, and it is a good thing that his books were on the index for so many centuries, and they should remain there. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Ayn Rand very definitely leads us in this kind of direction, a very good observation; because Ayn Rand while she is healthy in her reaction against this sentimental doctrine of love of the Liberals, has simply said the affirmation of sheer egoism is the answer. And by reducing man to himself she hopes she is going to establish some kind of meaningful relationship between people, and all she is going to do is create hell her own way. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, very definitely.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, she very definitely hates Christianity. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?... Do you feel that in the Renaissance …?... did that indicate that the general population had a stronger faith in God in the fact that they could create that beauty rather than what we do now? …?...

[Rushdoony] The Renaissance was an age of humanism and statism, and fantastic cruelty. And you find that the Renaissance of course was basically an anti Christian movement, its hatred of Christianity was tremendous, and it treated the faith with contempt. It also believed in statism, so that you had for example in Italy where the Renaissance began, that whole area which previously had been living in relative peace and prosperity, becoming an area of the most vicious and degenerate tyrants. And the tyranny was fearful, the cruelty, the torture, the horror, almost beyond belief. And most of our textbooks today and even more clearly some of our research volumes, avoid the truth about the Renaissance. They depict the Medieval period in black colors and falsify it; then they come to the Renaissance when some of the greatest horrors ever perpetrated in all history were perpetrated, when killing was a refined art and torture was routine, and they pass over all of this glibly. And except for a few figures, they scarcely give you any awareness of the extent of the depravity of that era. It was a thoroughly anti Christian era, and what our textbooks don’t indicate is this, that the Reformation was first of all a reaction against the Renaissance, and the Counter Reformation was also first of all a reaction against the Renaissance, and a house cleaning, so that they were both anti Renaissance or anti Humanist movements, as well as dealing with the theological issues one with another.

The Renaissance humanism however, returned as the Enlightenment, and is again in power. But we have not seen horrors in our day to compare with what was routine at the time of the renaissance, and it is glorified consistently.

Moreover, in glorifying it, they overate some of it. No question some of the artists were very great, but I think you can find equally great artists in the preceding and succeeding periods; and we are not told a great deal about the perversions and depravities of some of the leading figures in the art of the Renaissance; it was a thoroughly degenerate era.

Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] No, there are no lost books of the Bible left out. These are Apocryphal books, obviously not canonical; they were books that were forgeries, they represent nothing of any validity. So the so-called ‘Lost Books’ and you can buy a volume of them, the lost books of the Bible, are just so much nonsense. You have then also the Apocryphal books the Apocryphal books are Jewish writings between the Old and New Testament period which are not Canonical, but some of them, notably the first book of Maccabee, have interesting and important historical information, and Ecclesiasticusor the book of Ben Sirach, has some very interesting material reflecting the thinking of Jews in that inter-testamental period. But we have the Bible, and we have it in its authentic text, and all such talk is aimed at destroying the authority of scripture, and it is not valid.

Moreover, you find a lot about the various manuscripts, the Masoretic text is the authentic text, it is the text in the Hebrew in which it was originally written; it is thoroughly dependable, so that again you have a great deal of nonsense written in this area about the text. But the Masoretic text has been vindicated over and over and over again. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] No, because first of all the Ethiopians, although they do represent a great of mixing today, are not an African people. And at that time, which was of course several thousand years ago, they didn’t have that element mixture that they acquired since. Ethiopia in the ancient world was an advanced country with quite a bit of culture, it was a Christian country in the early centuries, and quite advanced for some time, a center of a great deal of learning. And it drifted into heresy in the 4th and 5th centuries, and began after that its decline, and today the church there is just a relic of superstition, and the people have for over a thousand years lived far more poorly than their ancestors did, and in greater ignorance. The clergy themselves are ignorant in a way that would stagger the clergy of the early centuries in Ethiopia. But the Ethiopians even today look down upon the African peoples; there are three groups of peoples in Ethiopia, the Ethiopians, the Arabic peoples, and the Negroid. And the Negroid are very heavily discriminated against by the other two. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

i[Rushdoony] This idea of the common man comes into the modern era as a result of the Enlightenment and Rousseau, and a belief in Democracy. If you believe in Democracy then you are going to say that law comes not from God, but from the people. Because Democracy means ‘demos,’ people or mob rule. Therefore the people are important, because out of them the law has to come. So you exalt the people, but the people cannot rule, somebody has to rule. So the person who rules rules in the name of the people.

Now, according to Rousseau there is the common will of all the people, but the people don’t always know what they really want, and what they are destined to want; so you have the general will, that which truly represents what the people have in their minds. And this, the rulers, can embody and capture and represent. So that today in the name of Democracy, in terms of this faith, people in Washington and Sacramento are working to take away local school boards, local self government, any kind of- sometimes- right for you to determine things for yourself, because they say a majority vote is not necessarily a democratic consensus. You don’t know what in your heart you really want, but we the experts can tell you what in your heart you truly want, because we know you better than you know yourself. And so what you truly want is what we say you want, and this is the Democratic consensus.

This is why if you go to a conference of many of these Liberal groups, you break up into sections and you determine what it is you want, work out a consensus from section to section, and come together and then present it here. Well, before you begin to deliberate they already know what the Democratic consensus is going to be, so the section leader will tell you exactly, or guide you, into the proper channels of thought, and will report to the group exactly what the Democratic consensus is. So that the machinery is to inform you of what you ought to think, in order to be in tune with the Democratic consensus.

Now, the common man therefore is exalted in name, but he is like the king of England, he has the name of a king, he reigns ostensibly, but he doesn’t rule. He must not rule, that would be the worst possible thing.

[Audience Member] …?... God will destroy the evil from the earth… Now I don’t know how this will come out, but in voting in this election coming up, I …?... with the candidate, do you vote for the lesser of the evils to hasten our destruction, or do we as we always do ask God to guide us in our voting, help us to make that decision, or do you just stay away from the polls when there are no candidates worthy voting for, whom you know what they represent and what they are going to do?

[Rushdoony] That’s a big question. (laughter) Now, I would say- and it is a good one, a very good one- we have to move in terms of this realization: In this world we don’t always have our choice between good and evil, sometimes it is only between better and worse, and sometimes it is between the lesser of two evils. As a result, we have to sometimes- and we should vote- vote in terms of that hard realization that we are not getting anybody who is too good, in fact if anyone were really what we as Christians would want he couldn’t even be a candidate today, because there isn’t the character in the people. So sometimes we have to face the realization we vote for the lesser of two evils.

On the other hand, sometimes we have to be practical and vote strategically; perhaps sometimes if we vote for the lesser of two evils, we might make it harder to get rid of that evil; for example, if you vote for a certain man, say a senator who represents ostensibly Republicanism, but actually represents the opposition better, it is harder to get him out when he is your man than if you had someone from the opposition who might be a little worse, and you could get out. So you have to weight it, in each case fairly, and that is about all you can do.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] No, we are not necessarily doing that, because the scripture does tell us this: that God makes all things work together for good to them that love Him, to them who are the called according to His purpose. So that God makes even our mistakes work together for good. So that we vote to the best of our knowledge and to the best of our understanding of what our conscience requires us, and we leave the results to God. We do our duty and the results are in God’s hands.

[New Question and Answer Period]

I picked up a magazine the other day, a sample copy of which was sent me, and I encountered something which I think might end things on a slightly lighter note. It is from a book of letters that Fred Allen wrote, and this one he wrote on June 18, 1932 in considerable indignation to the state of New York Insurance Department, to complain about the treatment he’d received on an insurance policy.

“Dear Sir,

The soullessness of corporations is something to stun you. I myself am a victim, and instead of being a man of wealth and honor to the community I am now a relic of humanity, just from the hands of the surgeon who made an honest effort to restore me to the form in which I grew to manhood’s estate. Let me review my case.

I carry accident insurance policy in the Blank Indemnity Company, by the terms of which the company agreed to pay me $25 a week,” (This was 1932) “during such time as I was prevented from working because of an accident. I went around last Sunday morning to a new house that is being built for me. I climbed the stairs, or rather the ladder that is where the stairs will be when the house is finished, and on the top floor I found a pile of bricks which were not needed there. Feeling industrious, I decided to remove the bricks. In the elevator shaft there was a rope and a pulley, and on one end of the rope was a barrel. I pulled the barrel to the top, and after walking down the ladder, then fastened the rope firmly at the bottom of the shaft. Then I climbed the ladder again and filled the barrel with bricks. Down the ladder I climbed again, five floors mind you, and untied the rope to let the barrel down.

The barrel was heavier than I was; and before I had time to study over the proposition as a thoughtful man, I was going up the shaft with my speed increasing at every floor. I thought of letting go of the rope, but before I had decided to do so I was so high that it seemed more dangerous to let go than to hold on. So I held on. Half way up the elevator shaft I met the barrel of bricks coming down; the encounter was brief and spirited. I got the worst of it, but continued on my way toward the roof. That is, most of me went on, but much of my epidermis clung to the barrel and returned to earth.

Then I struck the roof at the same time the barrel struck the cellar. The shock knocked the breath out of me and the bottom out of the barrel; then I was heavier than the empty barrel, and I started down while the barrel started up. We went and met in the middle of our journey, and the barrel uppercut me, pounded my solar plexus, barked my shins, bruised my body and skinned my face. When we became untangled I resumed my downward journey and the barrel went higher.

I was soon at the bottom; I stopped so suddenly that I lost my presence of mind and let go of the rope. This released the barrel, which was at the top of the elevator shaft; and it fell five floors and landed squarely on top of me, and it landed hard too.

Now here is where the heartlessness of the Blank Indemnity Company comes in. I sustained five accidents in two minutes: one on my way up the shaft when I met the barrel of bricks, the second when I met the roof, the third when I was descending and I met the empty barrel, the fourth when I struck the ground, and the fifth when the barrel struck me. But the insurance man says that it was one accident, not five, and instead of receiving payment for injuries at the rate of five times $25, I only got one $25 payment. I therefore enclose my policy and ask that you cancel the same, as I have made up my mind that henceforth I am not to be skinned by either barrel or/and any insurance company.

Yours sincerely and regretfully, Fred Allen.”

[New Question and Answer Period]

Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] We have no property rights over ourselves, and so suicide again is a sin because it is assuming that our life is our property.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] It is murder, yes. Because I have no right to take anyone else’s life because it is God’s life, He created it, no man can take that life except in terms of God’s law; if he is guilty of murder or some other offense calling for the death penalty. Similarly, we have no more title for our life than we have over our neighbors. It is God who has absolute property rights, and this is the basis for His Biblical prohibition of suicide, it is a sin. It is a violation of God’s property rights and of His law. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Except that the Bible does not recognize the principle of neutrality, but that all men are at enmity with God. Paul makes this emphatic, who are not new creatures in Christ. And so it is either enmity or friendship, and anomia as it is used in scripture definitely means lawlessness and anti law. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Very good question. In 1 John we are told that any many who says he has not committed sin is a liar; the word used there is ‘Hamartia’

[Audience Member] How do you spell that?

[Rushdoony] ámartia, with the little comma above it in the Greek which indicates an ‘H’ sound, so in English you could put an h in front of it, ‘hamartia.’ So that ‘anomia’ is used later on in the gospel of John to indicate that the Christian is not a sinner in this sense. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] I think its… we grow in gratitude as we express it formally, and that is why the formal practice of prayer is a very good thing; a regular discipline, daily; at the table and at night. Then I think one of the finest things we can do is to cultivate the habit of sentence prayers, just spoken inwardly; so that as you face a situation, meeting someone or a problem, just to say a sentence prayer to God asking for strength and for guidance. Then sentence prayers of gratitude. And I think this is one of the richest areas of growth, if you cultivate this habit of continual sentence prayers. Once you get into this practice, you will find yourself doing it not once or twice in day, but dozens and dozens of times. And this does produce a tremendous growth and a tremendous sense of peace and assurance as you face all your daily problems. It involves truly resting in the Lord. And very soon we will deal with the concept of what rest really means, and what worship means. This is one of the most neglected, and in some sense the most startling aspect of what scripture has to say.

Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] I don’t think you can say there are so many doctrines, because you can coalesce a number of them into one; and you can refine them into a great many. For example, you can speak about the doctrine of the sovereignty of God, and make that one (?), but you can then subdivide that into the doctrine of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost; towards all three. The doctrine of the Ontological Trinity, and the doctrine of the Economical Trinity, the various aspects of the (?). Then you can go into the doctrine of predestination, and so on; so that you see, you can take the general heading: “The Doctrine of God” and divide it into about 20 or 30 heads. You can do the same thing with regard to the doctrine of sin, the doctrine of the Christian life, the doctrine of salvation; so that a list of these basic doctrines, the more detailed you became, the more numerous the list would be.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] No, the Social Gospel people deny the validity of these doctrines, because they say the only thing that matters is what you do for man. In other words, God is not important. So that they are anti-creedal, anti-doctrinal churches. To them doctrine is unimportant because God is unimportant, man is everything. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] No.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] I belong to a church which believes that the church has no right to legislate in a number of matters- well, any matter where the Bible does not speak. That this is a matter of individual conscience, that the Bible does not speak for example about smoking, or dancing, or drinking, and therefore no one can say this is good or evil, this is a matter of Christian liberty for the individual to decide for himself. So that I do not feel I have the right to express my opinions on these subjects, because I have one obligation, and that is to declare the word of God; not to go beyond that, lest my personal preferences or dislikes influence anyone. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] The question of birth control is a little more complex. Now, in the Bible fertility is spoken of as a blessing from God; however God makes it clear that the fertility of the ungodly is no pleasure to Him, so that God has a double law here as it were. The mandate to the believers is to increase and multiply, it is not spelled out more specifically than that. To the ungodly God says that nothing they do pleases Him, and it is listed a few times in the scripture as a matter of displeasure to Him that they have increased. I think I have a list of some such verses here: Ezekiel 5, 7, and 8; Isaiah 49:19-20, Jeremiah 15:9, Amos 1:13, and several other verses that go into this unblessed fruitfulness of the ungodly. Whereas other verses giving the contrary for believers, Genesis 9:1 “Be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth.” Genesis 9:7, Leviticus 26:9, Psalm 128:3-4, and other such verses. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Right, right. Yes, very definitely.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] That is quite a question, how specifically are race and predestination interlinked. Well, certainly God’s predestination covers all things, so that we must say that whatever has happened has happened by the predestination of God, and yet as I have indicated before, and we will go into it a few months, perhaps from now, predestination does not destroy human responsibility, it only emphasizes it.

Now, we cannot dent that the doctrine of predestination is totally anti equalitarian. What it simply asserts is that God does make a difference between people, and this is the offense of the doctrine of predestination, and that is why every now and then I find college students saying, that out of context seemingly, a professor in some class or other, phytology or political science, launches into an attack on predestination. They couldn’t see the connection with what he was talking about, but the connection was a very real one; because to be total equalitarian he had to attack this concept, because this emphatically declares that God makes a difference, so that there are differences of aptitudes, differences of blessing.

Now this does not mean that those who have lesser abilities are less blessed necessarily, because very often a child who may be not as talented as other children may be loved more and may be more lovable than others, and God makes it clear also to Israel that: “I did not seek you because you were the most, the most remarkable among peoples, because you were among the least of them. But I have chosen you out of my grace, and I loved you.” So that predestination first indicates there is no such thing as equality in God’s sight, this is a mythical doctrine, and second that superiority is no necessary index to blessing, because the superior are, God says, the wise are to be confounded in their wisdom when they separate themselves from God.

[New Question and Answer Period]

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] It’s been very easily and readily explained; Byron Nelson has written several excellent books on the Genesis account before Abraham, The Deluge Story in Stone (?), and he is an uncle of someone known to some of you, as James (?) of Santa Monica. Byron Nelson as well as others have pointed out that in Adam and Eve, all the genetic (?) of the races was present; so that they represented all the genetic potentialities of all the races. Now, out of that original family came all peoples, and through Noah after the flood.

Now in the early period, in the first few generations there was clearly, and we are told that this was the case, marriages of brothers and sisters, as there had to be. This was genetically possible without any damage, because the genetic strains were so diverse that each child was almost in modern terms unrelated to the other child, because the genetic potentiality was so great in the parents then.

Now, as the centuries passed and people went into different areas, they began to breed in terms of certain standards, so that the different races chose certain standards as their standard of beauty, and this became the ideal for them. For example, we know in China that one of the things that over the centuries bred out the whiskers in men was that they regarded a very hairy man as a barbarian, in fact the expression for foreigners is ‘a hairy barbarian.’ Now with that standard they naturally tended over several thousand years to breed such people out. We do know for example in Western civilization how at various times certain ideas of beauty came into being, and for a time came to (?) men, and (?) for example, the eagle beak has been several times in Western Civilization been highly admired as the most marvelous standard of beauty, so that those who weren’t luck enough to be born with a fine big eagle beak, their mothers would take and work the nose, the cartilage of the nose when they were young to improve it and to give it that appearance.

Now, that has left its stamp on Western man, so that compared to for example with the Orientals and the others, he has a big nose. Now, it has been selectivity you see, of these different standards that have led to the developments in (?) of varying things. But all these were potential in Adam and Eve.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] No, in that in Adam and Eve these things were all present potentially, but the represented something totally different, and they were created wholly good. But the U.N. standard is one of equality, whereas God created the differences in the beginning, so that the differences might emerge. So this is going contrary to God’s plan.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] They want them all alike, the U.N. idea of the bland man. But God did not intend that to be, and Adam and Eve were two people with very very diverse (strains?) in them, to set into motion these radical differences between us.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, a variety can change, but it remains basically the same. In other words, dogs can be developed in all kinds of traits and breeds, but they still remain dogs. And man has within him potentialities for all kinds of physical variations, but he always remains a man, and this is not evolution. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes. These (?) are highly imaginative, these drawings you see of cave men, and they involve a tremendous amount of artistic license. For example the pictures of Java man, one of the most important, so-called, varied over the years in the textbooks, depending on what their theories required he look like; how far along he was on the evolutionary ladder. So artistic license is very, very great in these things. Actually these jaws are not very different from jaws you see on the street nowadays. And it is significant that the Java man, the remnants of the skull that they have located, are not publicly shown. They are a deep dark secret. The Piltdown Man proved to be a forgery, but when I went to school he was very important on the evolutionary scale.

One of the things that tickled me was that in the twenties an important thing on the (?) was the Nebraska man, they built him up out of one tooth, and they actually have articles about his family life; and then they found out it was a peccary tooth. So these people have all the prestige because our modern world gives them the prestige, but they are putting out a lot of nonsense. There is a book that has been written now by a biochemist who is evolutionist, Kerket is his name, he is an Englishman. Kerket. It is one of a series of reports, and he does some plain speaking, he says most of these books in (?) and virtually all these evolutionary truths are full of holes, they talk as though they have some special revelation and knew how it all happened when there is no evidence that it did, and so on. And what he is saying is simply this: “I take it on faith. This is my religion. There is no evidence for it, but I believe it, and I hope someday we are going to find evidence for it.” But he knows it isn’t there (?). There is no evidence for evolution whatsoever, it is a matter of faith, it is a matter of religion.

And George Bernard Shaw said that the reason why people jumped at the doctrine of evolution was to get away from the doctrine of God. That was it, very clearly he said. And we know that is true, the textbooks give us a myth how the whole world raised its hands in horror when the Origin of Species came out, and everybody was so against it and the poor man was persecuted. That is nonsense. The first edition of the Origin of Species sold out on the day of publication. On the day of publication in 1869. This was the book everybody was waiting for, and when they heard there was a book that jumped God in effect, and said that man was descended from some animal ancestry they lined up on that day to get every last copy. It was such a relief to have an opinion that disposed of God.

One Bishop in England stood up against it, and they made it sound as though the whole church was up in arms, which was nonsense; most of the church was quite relieved that they had a scientific excuse to dispose with the Bible. Darwin’s book came out in 1859 and there was no real protest against it apart from this one Bishop within the church until the 1890’s, when a little measure of protest began, and it’s only been in recent years that you are getting some of these scholars and scientist who are writing against evolution. So it was not a case of this poor persecuted Charles Darwin rearing the banner of truth; he was giving the world what they wanted, and they grabbed at it even though there was no evidence for it. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Alright.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, that is a very accurate statement, because some of these so-called missing links from primitive men and so on have been demonstrated to have been deformed people, and one of the classic cases in modern times of such a man as the Neanderthal was a wrestler who was quite prominent in the 30’s, a French wrestler, the Angel? He had the perfect Neanderthal skull, and for the same reason, it was a deformity.

Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, those that are reconstructions. They are not actual skulls, they will find a piece, maybe a tooth or a lower jaw, or the cranium, and then they will reconstruct the rest, and then build the whole skeleton in terms of what they think he should have looked like. So that what you see in most museums of national history, these ascending scale skeletons, are reconstructions not actual findings. Yes?

[Audience Member] I think that the one thing the evolutionist has never been able to get over (?) has been the inheritability of acquired characteristics.

[Rushdoony] Yes, this is a fundamental problem. First, their science has demonstrated that there is no such thing as spontaneous generation, and they have to have it to start generation; and second there is no evidence of the inheritance of acquired characteristics, a (Markian?) theory. And yet they have to have that, because everything that their science tells them is that what has evolved has to be involved, which means therefore the whole universe and everything in it, man, the sun, the moon, the stars, all our arts, culture, everything; had to be involved in that first atom out of which everything came; so they made that atom bigger than God or equal to God, because everything was involved in it. So this gets them into fantasy. As a result what they try to do is to say: “Well, there had to be spontaneous generation” and they are going to try to sneak in acquired characteristics one way or another.

Now only a few have done it honestly, Freud said it was either God or the (mark?) if you did not have the inheritance of acquired characteristics you had no evolution, so you had to have it. Lysenko in the U.S.S.R. under Stalin of course maintained the same thing, and he was an honest (?) because he said: “We cannot retain our position apart from the inheritance of acquired characteristics.”

Now this was taught some years ago you know, and those of you who hear some old folks stating that, well, an expectant mother mustn’t go to the zoo or do certain things because the baby can be marred, they are not representing folk superstitions, they are representing the science they got in school, 60-70 years ago; because that was in the textbooks at that time, and, oh about 1900, 1905, 1910, most of your biology textbooks still carried that thesis.

Well, our time is up and we stand dismissed.