Systematic Theology – Creation and Providence

Humanistic Providence

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Systematic Theology

Genre: Speech

Lesson: 17 of 17

Track: #17

Year:

Dictation Name: 17 Humanistic providence.

[Rushdoony] In this last session we shall deal with Humanistic providence, humanistic providence. If we deny that man is God’s creation we then make man a product of the void. If man is to become anything, if he is to have a future than must re-make himself, or more accurately be re-made by men. If we deny God’s providence we open the door to man’s providence and to statist controls. Now in this session I want to deal very specifically with one area of humanistic providence. It would be very easy to cite examples of humanistic providence from socialism, whether in the Soviet Union, Red China, or in Washington D.C. Also one could go to someone like B.F. Skinner. But someone much more significant is William Burroughs; does anyone know who William Burroughs is? Well Williams is, I believe, the grandson of the Burroughs adding machine family, but even more he himself is a contemporary writer. His writings are definitely on the pornographic fringe. He has also been an addict, for ten years he was on hard drugs.

One of his more famous books was the Naked Lunch, not recommended, which was a book about humanistic mind-control devices & he satirized them. However, because Burroughs is a Humanist to the core of his being he sees no future for mankind apart from a man-made providence. As a result he is ready to accept the most radical kind of man control that is imaginable. He believes it is necessary for the welfare of mankind for everyone to have electrodes implanted into their brains. Now he says, and he admits fully there’s not a civil government in the world he would trust with the control of such a devise. He recognizes that the minute you have such a thing you create the possibility of enormous evil, but he sees no alternative. His hope is that there will be self-controlled implants so that each person can program himself, all hooked into a giant computer. The advantages he says are enormous. If you have such an electrode in your brain then you can be your own providence. You can wipe out pain by sending in a signal to the computer, you can solve all arithmetical problems, balance your accounts and your checkbook just by flipping the signal through your brain to the computer. You can eliminate painful memories and experiences; and he feels you will then be a free man.

Now Burroughs says there is a great roadblock to the possibility of such a kind of new world. He says the advantages are great, the electrodes would replace drugs, you could get all the experience you can get with drugs and liquor through the electrode without having any of the physical consequences. You could eliminate all problems, pain, bad memories. But, he says, the road block is Christianity. Christianity will fight, he says, this kind of thing to the last ditch; and of course he’s right. But he says the new man can be created by autonomic shaping, by electrodes, it will remove past conditioning and create a new world. It will mean that man can experience everything and every kind of sexuality without any guilt, because man will eliminate through the electrodes any possibility of guilt; and man will thereby have a perfect providence. All troubles removed, pain eliminated, conscious eliminated, he will have liberation.

Now if this sounds far-fetched you must remember that you do not think as Humanists. The humanists dreams continually of finding the liberation from God, and from conscious. He has sought it in the sexual revolution, he has sought it in drugs, he has sought it in drink, he has sought it in one thing after another and he winds up with a hangover or the side-effects of drugs, or with a bad conscious, so that wherever man goes seeking escape he finds instead only trouble. How then is he going to find freedom from God and from his conscious? Why he’s ready to accept even the possibility of some tyrant state totally controlling the giant computers. He wants the electrodes implanted in his brain because then he can switch on pleasure at will, and switch off God and conscious, or so he believes. This is Humanistic providence, and humanistic liberation

But ever time man has sought to change himself and to change his world and to be his own providence it has led to disaster. As a matter of fact even the humanists are beginning to recognize that their various programs of psychotherapy, such as psychoanalysis, instead of curing, retard recovery. People who get no treatment recover far more quickly than those who go to psycho therapy. Mans attempts to deal with his problems are failures. Because what man in every attempt to deal with his problem does is to try and run away from God, to eliminate God from His universe, to find freedom from God; this for him is liberation. As a result Humanism is in chaos today. In such chaos that men like William Burroughs are ready to have electrodes planted in their brain. Freud is losing his popularity, why? Because now they want electrical and chemical answers to their problems; because they find the psyche, the soul, continually witnesses in a way that they cannot find acceptable.;“our hearts are restless till they rest in Thee” Augustine said, and he understated them. Because our hearts are more than restless, they are at war with us, they destroy our every moment’s peace; and so man is disillusioned with his own ability to answer providence.

Some years ago in fact in 1932 a very prominent Humanist, E.S. Richards said, warning Humanists of the direction they were taking, and I quote “disbelief in man leads not only to moral bankruptcy but also to intellectual impotence. You can measure nothing with a rule that is always changing.” But since then Humanism has only turned more and more on man, and is more and more ready to trust the future of man to electrodes. Electrodes is a Humanistic providence and the humanist substitute for God. Why did the humanist do this? Why, since they’ve lost faith in man did they continue looking to themselves for an answer, rather than to God, and are ready to trust the something as radical as electrodes in the brain which a super state can control? I think we can understand the reason why by a little story that you may have heard, about the man who was gambling at a little cross-roads service station in Nevada, playing the slot machine and somebody came up and said “fellow don’t you know that slot machine is really, rated against you, you haven’t got a chance. He said “I know it, but it’s the only game in town.” The humanist you see recognizes no other game in town, no other possibility except man; and so he prefers electrodes in the brain to the God of scripture, and he calls this liberation.

William Blake, the poet, said that all evil is a result of frustration. Since then Humanists have said “yes indeed and frustration from the chains of Christianity, of sexual restraint, of laws, of requirements, of standards, of testing, and therefore the need of man is liberation.” One of the key words in the world today is liberation. We even have a liberation theology, which is more or less nothing more than a re-baptized Marxism. But wherever you encounter that word liberation in the modern world, in essence it means liberation from God and from the providence of God into a manmade God, the state, and a manmade providence.

Very recently one of our state assembly men was in Chico at the Chico State University speaking to the students. His name was John Vasconcellos; Vasconcellos is one of the most powerful men in Sacramento. If you should see Vasconcellos you would have trouble understanding why he is so powerful, because the man seems to be no more than a very hokey clown. But he is a humanist to the core, and he believes and repeats all the old myths with a fervor, and among the younger generation on campus he is something of a hero. The Chico paper, The Enterprise Record describes in part his address, and I quote “The question facing society, according to Vasconcellos, is whether the nature of man is basically good or evil. If we believe we are not, then we design institutions to make not-right people ok, he said; if, on the other hand, people are basically decent than societies designs institutions that try to nurture and liberate rather than repress. Vasconcellos believes people are basically good, and if they are treated with kindness and honesty they will respond in kind” And Vasconcellos went on to say that man is good but all the institutions around us are evil, and we must eliminate those institutions. He virtually indicated that the church was one of those institutions; which is another way of saying that God is a problem. Liberation in the modern world for the humanist means liberation from God. It means liberation, however, into the world of William Burroughs.

Now for us the alternatives seem incredible. How can anyone choose to live as Burroughs wants men to live and would like himself to live? But if you’re running away from God sooner or later you are ready to take any route, and because Burroughs has been running faster and further than most he is ready to accept the ultimate in a way that others who are not as far down the line as he himself, are ready to do. This is humanistic providence. Man creating a giant computer, himself the slave of his owner computer with electrodes in his brain. This is the providence of humanism. Is it any wonder that the world in humanism is collapsing around us? Do you see why if we as Christians make a stand in our day with a whole council of God, and stand up to these enemies of God, whether they be in the IRS, or in the statehouse, or in the church down the street, we cannot lose? This vision these men have of themselves and their future is a nightmare; and when man sees his hope the future as having an electrode put into his brain and thinks he can still escape from God, then we must say it is time for us to be up and doing, because the future belongs to us under God.

Are there any questions now?

[Audience member] Vasconcellos still in power in certain areas?

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Audience member] What district does he come from?

[Rushdoony] He’s from Sanza {?}. Vasconcellos is a very subtle man, he’s a flamboyant person who looks like a clown because although he was a dude in JFK’s day, in President Kennedy’s day, he decided later in the 60’s to join the campus revolution and so today he looks like somebody got cleaned up in admission on skid row, and whose pants are ready to fall off. And he acts like someone who’s the commonest of the common. But the kind of thing he does is to put through all kinds of legislation which subtly adds up; harmless sentences such as “every child is a unique individual” whose going to vote against a one-sentence bill like that? Nobody, it goes through. Then some time later another one-sentence, or two-sentence bill that seems harmless goes through. But when they’re added up in the statue book you have a deadly measure that works to destroy the family. He’s not a person to be underrated, he’s very capable.

Yes?

[Audience member] Seems here then that we leave the old ideas of environmental determinism and chemical determinism and go into an electronic determination, which still eliminates the responsibility of mankind.

[Rushdoony] Exactly, exactly. And hopefully, they believe, will eliminate any thought of God.

[Audience member] Also the consequences, hopefully.

[Rushdoony] Yes, these people are haunted, you see, by God. They’re haunted! They may claim that they do not think about him, that he’s irrelevant, but they’re haunted by God and they’re ready to go to the electrode.

[Audience member] The only thing to hold them back from doing this is the lag in their understanding of the human brain. They have the computer technology to do it already.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Audience member] Just as an illustration, in 72 they had two recent projects at Stanford research. One was a computer program they were working on which would enable a computer to monitor millions of phone calls, a large computer, and it would listen for certain words in a certain frequency, and when the words in the frequency occurred it would then signal a human operator by tape recorder to pick up the phone conversation. That was in 72. And then also in 72 they were doing another one which would enable the computer to tell what you were thinking by your brain wave pattern; and they said they were experiencing %76 success at that point, and the spokesman for the research that they were very crude level of research. So, it’s there.

[Rushdoony] They’re working towards this kind of technology as fast as they can. It’s hard for us to see how men can think of this as salvation. But if for you salvation is to escape from God, then indeed you’re going ot be looking very low for a place in hiding. It reminds us of a verse, does it not, in Revelations? Men will say to the rocks and the mountains “fall on us, hide us, cover us.”

Any other questions?

Well if not, is the first Friday of April, I believe it’s the 6th, an agreeable date for our next session? Alright we’ll meet on the first Friday of April, and lets conclude now with prayer, and I’ll ask pastor Jim Day to lead us in prayer.

[Pastor Jim Day] Our gracious God even as you’ve warned through the apostle Paul to Timothy, in the last days perilous times would come. We recognize Father that even since the advent of Christ man has lived in perilous times, even since the fall of Adam we have lived in perilous times. Yet in our day we see more and more of the peril. The perils of humanism, the perils of Satan control, the perils of civil government control, all around us we find in perils and threats the Christian life. But again Father we have your assurance that greater is He that is in you, than he who is in the world. We thank you Father that you know that Jesus Christ was our strength, and in him and Him only can we survive. Father we pray that you might make us each one more aware of how we should be reflectors of Thy light, that we might proclaim Your truth to all those around us. Father that we might be very astute about the business of learning Your word, learning principles of your word that we might apply them to our own individual lives, apply them in our families, apply them in our churches and in our schools. Father we give You thanks and {?} again as we recognize that you already are the victor, and we praise you for it, in the precious name of our Lord Jesus Christ, amen.