Easy Chair Series

Quality of Workmanship; Anti-Natal and Anti-Life; Retired People; Napoleon Bonaparte on Religion; Rock Music and Satanism; Parental Awareness and Drugs; Church Building Architecture; Louis XIV of France and Versailles; Cult of the Sun; Home Architecture; Karl Marx and Satanism; Human Immunization System

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 14-91

Genre:

Track:

Dictation Name: EC155

Year: 1986

This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 155, October 7, 1987.

I am going to start this Easy Chair with a discussion of a book that I don’t really recommend, although it is quite important. Its perspective is wrong. The author would not share our point of view at all. Nonetheless, what he has written is very important. The author is Marvin Harris. The title, Why Nothing Works: The Anthropology of Daily Life. It was published by Simon and Shuster first in 1981 and more recently in a revised edition in 1987.

The point that Harris makes is that we are increasingly facing a breakdown, a breakdown in products, a breakdown in services, a breakdown in every area of life today. He cites the fact, for example, and I quote, “At the filling station full service, whose perfunctory hood raising and window wiping already belies its name, no longer includes clean restrooms, once considered the birthright of every American motorists and is still internationally a measure of a country’s standard of living,” unquote.

The younger generation cannot appreciate the fact that a generation ago service stations were not only clean, but regularly inspected by the oil companies.

Harris goes on to say that, “Any travel by a bus and train is beginning to resemble life in under developed countries. The services on board both the bus and the trains are abominable. Plane travel is beginning to go down hill also. But this is not all. It used to be, as he points out, electric fans used to work forever. Now the plastic blades develop cracks and have to be replaced. Vacuum cleaners have plastic handles that wobble and break. Their cords come lose from the switch. Their motors burn out. Tug hard on your shoelaces when they are a month old and they will come apart or the little plastic tips come off and you can’t pass the frayed ends through the holes. Go to the medicine chest for a Band-aid. “Tear off end, pull string down,” it says. But the string slips to the side and comes out. On the same principle, there is a packing back for books. Pull tab down. But the tab breaks off sending a shower of dirty fluff over the floor,” unquote.

He cites a poll which says that in 1979 50 percent of the people polled said they were deeply worried about the poor quality of the products they were buying. One person told about the failure of the rescue mission in Iran a few years ago said, “What do you expect? The US can’t even produce a good toaster anymore.” And a shop owner said, “Now nothing works.”

Well, this is a very common problem increasingly, but we can say this part of the problem is due to inflation. Every time you have inflation, the businessman and producer is compelled to lower the quality in order to keep from raising the price too high. But what Harris has to say in other spheres is much more important.

He says something has happened to our world. We now have abortion. We now have homosexuality. We now have every kind of perverse perspective beginning to triumph in American life and, he feels, that it is going to go from bad to worse . Why? The reason, he says, is that Americans, in fact people all over the world, have become anti natal, that is, anti birth, anti life. There no longer is a love of life. Children are seen as a burden. The hatred for anything but a deliverance from the normal problems of life is increasingly intense. We have a drop out generation, not dropping out as the hippies did. They go on working. They are a part of the economic world. They are members of churches and so on, but they have withdrawn from life in that they don’t like problems. They run away from them. They want retirement above all else, not life with its problems, its battles, its struggles, its victories.

And he says what we have seen is that anti life things like homosexuality have become common place.: euthanasia, abortion and so on. The ironic fact is that as a good liberal Marvin Harris is pro abortion. And yet he sees a problem with it, that it is a part of a complex that is anti life. He also has a section on why women left home. Historically, religiously, biologically the home has been the center of life, the cradle of life. And a culture that is pro life is going to make the home basic and central. But a culture that is anti life is going to down grade the home and women are going to pick that up. They are going to run away from the home. They are going to regard it as slavery to be chained to the kitchen or to the children.

So women are running away from life. Men are running away from life. The elderly are running away from life. And we have an anti life generation.

Back in the 50s I became a pastor of a church in a community with a high ration of retired people. They seemed to be all good, evangelical Christians, the best of American life, the salt of the earth, the good, strong stable people.

But as I went around and called and became acquainted with the membership, I became aware of very serious problems, things that troubled me and with good reason. These were people who had moved away from their home towns to retire to a community of retired people. Why? Well, they didn’t want to be stuck with babysitting their grandchildren.

Now that in itself tells you something. They were anti life. None of them had been stuck oppressively. It was just that from time to time they were asked to be with the children or to take them over a weekend if the parents had to leave. It wasn’t anything oppressive, but they resented it. Moreover, when they moved to this retirement community they looked for houses with one bedroom as far as possible, two bedrooms if each wanted a separate bedroom. And their reason for it? And they made no bones about saying so. “This way,” they said, “if the children visit us they have to go to a motel.”

Now that was 30 some years ago. The older generation of that time had turned anti life. And that kind of thinking has only increased since then.

Those of you who read the position papers will remember that three, four years ago, perhaps, maybe not that long ago, I wrote a paper on the trouble with social security. It was reprinted in one Christian periodical, at least one, at any rate. Both from that magazine reprint and from other reprints by various individuals and church groups, I had mail, very hostile mail, people saying, “I think I am as good a Christian as you are, but the idea that my children should take care of me is oppressive. I don’t want to owe them for anything.” There was an anti family sentiment that was anti life.

Abortion did not spring out of the blue. All the conditions even in the Christian community pointed to it. Today the polls on abortion give very diverse results. The pro choice or pro abortion people can get results from polls in their favor and the pro life can get results in their favor. I don’t think there is anything wrong with either set of polls. Just by wording the question a little differently the great number of people whose feelings are on the borderline can be moved one way or another. There are a limited number of people who are militant and in favor of abortion, an equal number, perhaps of militant pro life people. The majority in between don’t like to have the question raised. They resent it. They feel that it would be better not to make a stand one way or another and they can be moved one way or another depending on how the question is phrased.

What we have is that most people now are indifferent to moral issues. In the Human Life Review for the summer of 1986, there was an interesting article by Eric Von Kunel the dean, “Where do Ethics Come From?”

I am not interested in analyzing the argument of the article, but basically to deal with just a little bit, his conclusion, and I quote, “Napoleon, no devout Christian, but an absolute realist and more than a merely military genius, knew well that the solution to ethical problems is religion.” He said in so many words, quoting from Napoleon, “Until now one has seen good education only in ecclesiastical establishments. I prefer to see the children of a village in the hands of a man who knows nothing but his catechism to a quarter scholar who has no solid foundation for his morality and no solid ideas. Religion is a vaccine to imagination. It protects it against all dangerous and absurd beliefs. It is sufficient for a Christian brother to say to a son of the people, ‘Life is only an intermediary state. If you take away the faith from the people, you will get nothing but first rate brigands,’ Thus far Napoleon. This is, perhaps, a roundabout way to express a truism. Theodore Dostoevsky put it more bluntly. ‘If there is no God, everything is permitted,’” end of quote.

Well, he is, of course, exactly right. Because people to do not believe in God, everything is permitted for them. And they are increasingly ready to abstract most of life from moral considerations. Morality is to them something that the church requires and it applies to a handful of subjects and very little more. As a result, we have an anti natal and anti life society. You cannot remove morality from life without being anti life, because life is simply one moral decision after another. If you say you are fed up with moral considerations, you are saying you are fed up with life. Only the dead in the cemeteries have no moral decisions to make. The rest of us do. If we sidestep moral issues we are thereby making an immoral decision and we are in trouble.

As a result, today our culture is increasingly death oriented. We have a vast realm where the drug culture prevails, where rock and roll, which is anti life, governs and provides the faith of millions of young people.

The heavy metal rock and roll is religious. It is satanic. It believes in the religion of Satanism. This is not just my opinion.

In the Stockton, California Record for Tuesday, October 6, 1987 an article entitled “Satanism Alive in Stockton, Officer tells DA Investigators,” is very revealing. The author Hugh Wright says that Stockton has a chair of Satanists ranging from teenagers who wear devil worshipping symbols only to be in fashion to practicing cultists who drink the blood of animals they kill ritualistically. He goes on to say that signs of satanic obsession can be found in various parts of the city. The police officer interviewed said, “Satan is probably the fastest growing phenomenon among young people today.” And he goes on to tell us that the teenager interest in the occult is largely due to heavy metal music that contains frequent and undisguised references to the devil and satanic practices. Many of them vandalize graveyards. They kill animals and drink blood.

In a very long book, which I will discuss on another occasion, the author says that human sacrifice is involved in some of the satanic churches.

The police officer says that Satanism is now a church, which it is. One of the churches, although the article doesn’t deal with it, is the Church of the Process or a Process Church. He cannot speak against the church because religious freedom prohibits him from doing so because, he says, “It is a recognized religion. But,” he says, “parents do not seem to be aware that their children who are listening to heavy metal rock are listening to satanic messages. So,” he says, “we have a problem.”

Now these advocates of Satanism are also heavily into drugs, very heavily. And the drug culture is very prevalent today.

This appeared in another article also from the Stockton Record for Sunday October the fourth, 1987 on the first page. In a small city or, let’s say, perhaps, a large town near Stockton, a young man became an undercover police officer in the high school. His father and grandfather were police officers and he desired to follow in their footsteps, but he was still too young, under 21, and could not enter the force. However, an undercover officer was needed so he was made a special undercover narcotics officer.

He entered school in this very conservative community’s high school. Let me say this community, 50, 60 years ago was very heavily reformed and evangelical. The community was largely made up—and still basically is—by people from one northern European country. Virtually everybody went to church. And while things are not as strong today and they are not orthodox anymore, it is still one of the better communities. And yet when this young man went into the high school he found things like this.

And I quote, “The students in one class sat and laughed as they watched another student pull out some coke, cut it with a razor and snort it. The teacher had her back turned to the students and was writing on the blackboard. She never noticed a thing,” unquote.

Well, this young man who looked like a 16 year old very quickly was buying narcotics, getting the names of all those who were dealers and when the time came turned in quite a number of students. And he said that drug deals were arranged while on campus. They drive to the student’s home for the drug buy, sometimes to an adult drug dealer’s home for the purchase. He said that the people in the community were blind to the problem because it is a small country town and the people thought, “It doesn’t happen here.”

“But,” he said, “it does. About 30 to 40 percent of all students get high at school while another 70 percent are weekend drug users. Thus, the greater majority of the students are drug users.”

This undercover officer said he barely made a dent in the drug dealing on school grounds. The drug dealers whom he was able to identify were a small number of the middle class dealers. The girls were involved, but they were selling, but he didn’t get into that group. Moreover, the large upper class population of students avoided him because he was not in their crowd. And he said of them, “They have a lot of money and nothing to spend it on but drugs, but they won’t talk to you. They won’t even acknowledge you if you are sitting next to them in the class,” unquote.

The lower class students, similarly avoided him.

Thus, the situation revealed in a conservative town in their public high school was a very critical one. Yet most of the parents were unwilling to believe the truth of the story, unwilling to believe that their children were involved except when they were arrested. And only the dealers were arrested.

This is the kind of thing that prevails because the public schools are not pro-life. Any person who is not a Christian, any teacher who teaches in a non-Christian school has a non-Christian perspective that he must teach, an anti-life perspective.

Our God declares very emphatically in Proverbs 8:36 that, “All they that hate me love death. He that sinneth against me wrongeth his own soul. All they that hate me love death.”

And we have to say the world today is filled with people who love death and that these communities where drug cultures are regularly revealed, nothing happens. How can anything happen when the parents keep their children in the public schools, when the parents are not pro-life, when as they go to church they don’t want a church that gives them too much religion? A lot of good feeling, a lot of pious gush and that is about the extent of it, nothing more. So we have problems.

And we will continue to have problems. I have called attention more than once to the fact that public school teachers have the highest percentage of any class in society of their children in the Christian schools. Evangelical ministers are low on the list. Something is wrong.

Too many people who are pastors and who preach the gospel are not really preaching. They are preaching sermons which are pleasant, which sometimes are even mildly informative, but they are ineffectual. They are not geared to action, because the church today is not interested in action.

I think one of the things that tells us this is the very architecture of the church. In the earliest days of the church a certain type of architecture developed. The church was a like a throne room. It imitated the palaces of emperors and kings. The pulpit was a place from whence the King’s Word was proclaimed, the law of the King of the universe, the King of kings and the Lord of lords. And the people who came to church stood to hear the reading of the Scripture because it was the king who was speaking. They sat and listened to that Word expounded because it was the marching orders of the King for his people.

Now what has happened in the last century and a half? Church architecture has changed. It is now like the concert hall or a forum. People are there to be entertained. They music, everything is for their entertainment. It is no longer the throne room of the King of kings. So the church is not geared for action. It is a place where people come to hear something interesting that will make them feel better. And so we have progress.

The anti life temper in the western world began roughly around 1660. This was an important date in European history. By 1660 some dramatic changes were underway in Europe. First Cromwell was dead and Charles II was recalled and made King of England. In France in 1661 Louis XIV came to the throne. In Spain about the same time the old order that Philip II represented was gone. Everywhere a new temper developed.

The Reformation and Counter Reformation tempers gave way to the Enlightenment, to a culture that was basically indifferent to Christianity and charting the course that led to what we today call modern culture, the culture of Modernism. It was, as a result, anti life, because, “He that sinneth against me wrongeth his own soul. All they that hate me love death.”

The court of Louis XIV is rarely appreciated in its implications. I have read a number of books on Louis XIV, but I think this one by Prince Michael of Greece titled Louis XIV: The Other Side of the Sun, published in English in 1983 by Harper and Rowe.

This is quite a remarkable book. And one of the things that makes it remarkable is that the author, Prince Michael of Greece, is a descendant of Louis XIV.

Versailles was built to be the temple of the new cult, the cult of the sun, the king. And Versailles was the place where not the Word of God, but the will of the king prevailed.

I quote from page 222. “‘This is a veritable brothel,’ whispered the Duke of Palestrina to Primi Visconti observing with amazement the mixed noisy crowd circulating without any sense of decorum through the galleries of Versailles. The place was certainly an Olympus, but entrances free in the morals no less so. The drunkenness and heterosexual debauchery were bad enough, but the homosexuals, organized into a confraternity with entrance examinations, oaths, statutes, et cetera were really too much,” unquote.

Well, this was a pro death culture at the time. And it brought nothing but disaster to Europe. The wars created by the rulers of that era, often without any rhyme nor reason to them, senseless wars destroyed countless numbers of lives, devastated farmlands, left people penniless.

During the hard winter, I believe, of 1709 people even resorted to cannibalism in France. This culture of pro death prevailed at the time.

But monarchy and the upper classes destroyed themselves. They destroyed themselves through their immorality and through their inbreeding. The royalty began to feel that the only kind of marriage to contract was with blue blood, that is, their own kind. And royal marriages were made in terms of treaties, in terms of national advantage and so on. And the result was that these marriages meant, in no time at all, excessive inbreeding. Royalty perished from England... from Europe not because there was any less need for able rulers, but because they ceased to be rulers. Inbreeding had led to problems.

Incidentally Queen Victoria with Albert passed on leukemia or a similar disease to a great many of her descendants. But apart from that, there was a problem of consanguinity. Prince Michael of Greece calls attention to the problem in Spain. And he says of the king, Charles II, “He was almost born an old man, for degeneration had affected his body even to the bone. Never had a face even in the most flattering portraits borne such cruel marks. His father and his mother, his four grandparents, six of his eight great grandparents belonged to the same family and were closely related. He was paying for this consanguinity which had reached preposterous proportions with a somewhat deranged mind, weakness of character and continual illnesses of all kinds. Torn between his inadequacies and his responsibilities, this man preserved a sense of dignity and honor that lent him a certain greatness in his misery. He was only 37 years old. He had married twice, but it was obvious that this deferred corpse was incapable of having children.

“This would not have mattered if his fortune had not been one of the most fabulous in history, for the Hapsburg Charles II of Spain possessed, apart from the Netherlands, half of Italy and the bowl of Latin America, from California to Terra del Fuego and other colonies around the world. His empire might be in decline, but this pathetic creature was nevertheless the greatest king on earth. Everyone was beginning to wonder with growing disquiet who would inherit this incredible collection of crowns,” and so on.

But here we have the kind of degeneration that set in. One nation after another in Europe had this kind of problem. And their tastes were comparable to it.

Let me cite the example of one person, again, quoting from Prince Michael of Greece, this time on page 275. This has to do with a young woman in the court, Mademoiselle Choy.

And I quote, “This young lady was a source of mirth rather than of fear and the entire court made fun of her appearance, a short, fat, ugly dark skinned, snub nosed girl. She looked like a pug, a bit mouthful of rotten teeth that stank so much that one could smell them at the other end of the room, a horribly thick neck, a back stairs wit to which others added a nose pointing up to the sky, a complexion the color of tanned leather and the deportment of a barrel.”

And yet, let me add, that this girl was the mistress of very important people, of an heir to the throne and a very powerful. They were not only bad in their morals, but almost incapable of any taste or any vision.

Now I cite all this because what has happened in western civilization—and it is the essence of the Modernism of our age, is this. This culture of royalty and nobility where the rule was anything goes as long as the king does not frown on it—whether God frowns on it or not makes no difference—corrupted all the people of any account. In the court of Louis XV, any man who felt that adultery on the part of his wife or any woman who felt that adultery on the part of her husband was a bad thing was ridiculed. They were old fashioned. They were out of date. They did not belong in the court.

Well, this culture was, in time, imitated by the middle classes with devastating results. The middle class began by being hard working, devout, dedicated to all the biblical virtues and to a work ethic. But what happened? In time they began to build homes. This was the first point of departure, the architecture. Their architecture began to make of their homes little palaces, estates of the nobility so that grandeur was the theme.

If you look at the great homes of the wealthy that are open for inspection you find that these are not homes that were meant for living. They do not have the amenities, the comforts, the conveniences that mark a good, well built home. They were built to impress people. They were built to make them look like important people.

As a matter of fact, that is still very much a powerful motive, even among very ordinary people, because this has now been passed down to the lower class, to the working man. Look at the showrooms, the windows of furniture shops or stores. Look at dresses. The whole idea today is to make an impressive appearance, to look like a princess, to have a living room or a bedroom that will be very impressive, more than comfortable. A boudoir that makes you look like Madame Pompadour in your imagination. This is our culture today. We are imitators on reduced level of Louise XIV and Louis XV’s courts, their lifestyles and so on. This is what television and the films propagate, a culture that is anti Christian, a culture that eliminates morality and a culture that says, “You are now the lords of creation. You deserve this. So come and buy the best for yourself.”

So we do not build homes that will make life richer and happier. We build homes to impress people.

If I may digress on that point, but it is related. When I was a boy some of the old farm houses, many of which are now gone, most of them, in fact, were built for family living. They were marked by an oversized kitchen, a kitchen that was a family room where you ate, where the children studied, where there were davenports for the old folks to sit in the evening, big enough, in some instances, for people, oh, 20, 30, 40 to gather around the table and eat.

You don’t see kitchens like that anymore. But the whole point of it was that the family stayed together, worked together and enjoyed one another. The children studied around the table. The women folk, mother and grandmother would do their sewing or whatever else. It was a family place.

Now, of course, you say partly the reason for that was you kept only one room heated during the winter. But it was also designed for family living. And today the kids go to their own rooms and the family is not a family unless they are all around the television set. But in many instances, now, there are two and three television sets in the house so the children are off by themselves.

Our architecture is a remote hand me down from Louis XIV’s Versailles, but, as such, it is important in that it still has as its basic thrust to make an impression.

When you entered Versailles, the idea you were to get was that this is the center of the universe. Other kings imitated Louis XIV and built little Versailles. In fact, even in the sands of the desert there were imitations. Rulers came from afar or sent people because they had heard about the grandeur of Versailles to study it and to copy it. And at least a couple of imitations are out in desert sands, or were. The whole point of Versailles was to impress you with the greatness and the importance of Louis XIV. He was the sun, S U N, the sun of the universe. Out of him went forth the light for his age.

Well, the idea in so many modern homes is that when someone steps through the door they are going to be impressed. They are not going to know people. I can recall when the things that struck you first when you went into a person’s home would be family pictures, family mementos, things that harked back to the grandparents or great grandparents. Now that is gone. Everyone is living in terms of appearances.

As a result, we, as a culture, are wide open to Satanism. And the reason for it is this. Satan’s goal was to be as God. And this was the temptation in Genesis 3:5 which he offered to mankind. “Ye shall be as gods knowing, every man determining for himself good and evil, every man his own God.”

And so people seek to impress, to be as god, to put on an act that will be impressive, not to communicate the fact that this is my life, my family. I represent a tradition of faith, a life that has roots in the past.

Most people’s homes do not identify them. They have no character. They look like showrooms.

This leads me to a related subject. Richard Wurmbrand wrote a book not too long ago—1986 it was published—Marx and Satan, published by Crossway books, West Chester, Illinois.

Marx was a Satanist. He sold himself to Satan by his own statement. Wurmbrand tells us, “Marx had loved the words of Mephistopheles in Faust. Everything in existence is worth being destroyed; everything, including the proletariat and the comrades,” unquote.

Shafarevich has told us that, “The essence of Marxism is the hatred of life and the will to destroy everything.”

Wurmbrand says, “Satan is called in Faust the spirit that denies everything.”

This is precisely Marx’ attitude. He writes about pitiless criticism of all that exists, war against the situation in Germany, merciless criticism evolved. He adds, “It is the first duty of the press to undermine the foundations of the existing political system.”

It sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

Marx said about himself that, “He is the most outstanding hater of the so-called positive,” unquote.

Moreover, not only do they hate god, but they hate all righteousness, all truth.

As Wurmbrand points out, the Satanists believe in eternal life on their own terms, a life of hate magnified to its extremes.

Marx made a profession of being dishonorable. He was an informer, a paid informer of the Austrian police spying on revolutionaries. This is on page 33.

Remember, Stalin was an agent of the czar’s police.

Marx was a man who wrote about the Capitalists abusing servant girls which is what he did. He raped his wife’s maid. He was in every sense of the word a Satanist.

There is an interesting point here. Wurmbrand says, “The bulk of Marx’ works is kept secret by those who guard his manuscripts,” unquote.

Much of it they will not reveal. It was Satanist in character.

As a result, Marxism is popular today. It is popular because it caters to the anti natal trend of our time, the anti-life impulse which is prevalent wherever people are not with all their heart, mind and being the Lord’s people, the Lord’s servants. Marxism, thus, is very essentially linked to Satanism.

It is interesting—Wurmbrand points this out—that, and I quote from page 47, “The naked figure of Zeus, known for his ferocity, is the only religious emblem in the main lobby of the United Nations building in New York,” unquote.

And Marx had a bust of Zeus in his study. Zeus was a cruel god who transformed himself into a beast, who was a rapist, seducer and so on. It was interesting that Marx would make that his favorite icon, as it were.

Well, the point I am making is this. Our culture is not going to defeat abortion just because we try to agitate against abortion, which we must do. It is only going to change its perspective when we again restore the dimension of faith, of a vital faith, a faith which is not that of a part of the showcase, the stage performance of a people at a concert hall or a forum being entertained, but people who are in the throne room of the King of kings, there to hear marching orders from that King. This is what our churches must become, places where people go to get orders and then go out and put the Word into powerful action, to bring every area of life and thought into captivity to Jesus Christ as Lord.

Because we have followed the culture of Louis XIV, we are now on the other side of the sun. We are now walking in darkness. We are now in the midst of a culture and an age that is near death. It is very, very revealing that our culture is going down in its last days with AIDS, because AIDS means simply this, the immunity system of a person has broken down. And, therefore, it is vulnerable to everything that comes along. The person can be carried off by the first infection. So very few people die of AIDS. They die of whatever infection comes along.

Well, what is the essence of an immunity system, but a pro life position? Pro life in all our being which means living for the Lord, being dedicated to him with all our heart, mind and being. And this does not mark our culture. It doesn't even have a full bodied Sunday religion, let alone a faith that governs every day of the week. It wants entertainment not only from the television set, but from the church. It is running away from life and from the problems of life. Therefore it is dying, which is wonderful.

We who are the people of the Lord, we must live, we must be pro-life in the fullest sense of the Word which means living for Christ who is the way, the truth and the life.

Well, thank you for listening and God bless you all as you serve Jesus Christ who is the life. Good night.