Easy Chair Series

Guilt Tripping

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 62-91

Genre:

Track:

Dictation Name: EC364

Year: 1986

This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 364, May the 31st, 1996.

At this time Douglas Murray, Paul Biddle, Mark Rushdoony and I will be discussing guilt tripping.

Now one of the most common aspects of our present era is that we are regularly invited by our leaders to feel guilty as though somehow we should feel badly because we are well off or we are living in the United States and should feel that we have an obligation to the rest of the world to give away everything to them, in effect. I recall as a boy in the 20s this was watching Thanksgiving roll around and seeing a familiar cartoon in some of the daily papers. The editorialist on the cartoon page, the cartoon would show a family seated around the Thanksgiving table getting ready to carve the turkey and the table loaded with everything and all around them shadowy figures of poor people all over the world looking hungrily. And you were supposed to feel that because you were enjoying a Thanksgiving dinner you were somehow guilty.

At the time the America people were very generous in a way that they are not now. They were giving to all kinds of causes. But they were supposed to feel guilty because they enjoyed something.

Now that is an immoral kind of suggestion to people that they should be guilty because they have so much. It is amazing to me how over the years since my college days I have seen so many young people who come from well to do homes, sometimes rich ones, who have been made to feel guilty because they have more than other people. Somehow they should apologize and some of them would be apologetic.

This is socially destructive. It is morally destructive. We cannot feed the world simply by divesting ourselves of what we have. We are not guilty of crimes that take place in the rest of the world. Much of the world denies Christ, denies the obligation to redeem the time, to work, to be productive. In fact, they feel that work is a puishment and an evil, something to be avoided. There are portions in the world where a girl from a good family which is poor but still can be considered aristocratic or noble can become for a time a prostitute to acquire funds but to be a typist is degrading.

In the last century one French poet who worked as a trader for a time in Africa found that it was not uncommon for people to sell themselves into slavery rather than to go to work on their own. There would be a stigma if a... as a free person they did this, but not as a slave.

Guilt tripping has grown dramatically since World War II. It has become so common place that most people are hardly aware of the fact that everyone is putting a guilt trip on them and they are somehow to feel guilty for being whatever they are, rich or middle class or whatever. One of the problems someone told me last year that is common place to men today is that they feel a bit guilty because they are males. It isn’t that they would like to be a female, but because our culture is so hostile to men and male chauvanism, chauvinist pigs, other such terms are current. They hardly dare assert themselves at home to their children or to their wife.

One man told me that ... that a number of seminars for me they really don’t know what to do as husbands and as fathers because they are afraid of being the head of the household, of exercising some discipline. The wife gets angry with them if they do and then because they are afraid to do anything is angry with them and treats them as an incompetent boob.

There are guilt trips also on women, more than a few times place by other women, because they are not fanatical activists for Feminism, even though they may be Feminists. On all sides, we have guilt trips that are laid upon people. It is an evil thing. People accept this because they are either not Christian or their Christian faith is defective, because if they had a mature faith they would know that we cannot be guilt bearers as Christians. Christ bore our sin and guilt and put it away. He commissions us to act. We must obey him. And it is a sin for us to allow people to lay a guilt trip on us when we have done no wrong.

Douglas, would you like to comment on the subject?

[Murray] Well, I was just going to say that guilt is one of the most powerful weapons of the con man.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Murray] Or of any criminal. It is used by racists. It is used geopolitically by foreign countries against each other. It is part of the foreign policy of many countries. It is used by politicians to extract more taxes. It is used by social engineers, as Rush has pointed out, to alter people’s behavior and perceptions of how they should behave. It is part of the brain washing of the... the... that the Humanists practice in this country, at least and, I am afraid, all over the world. It is used now routinely by con men who gain control or rise to the top in large charitable organizations in this country. It is used by certain televangelists.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Murray] If you watch them for a while and analyze how they evoke guilt in people as a tool for getting them to send in money, as if sending in money is like an offering to ... to absolve themselves of guilt, rather than repenting and praying to God for forgiveness. They want to take a short cut, you know, and send money to a televangelist.

So be... beware of the con man. Beware of anybody that tries to use guilt as a means of altering your perceptions of yourself or trying to get money. In fact, hang on to your wallet with both hands.

[M. Rushdoony] I think that is one of the things that infuriates them about Christians because Christians don’t feel guilty when they are told to feel guilty. Therefore, as they see it, Christians are heartless.

[Murray] Yeah, right.

[M. Rushdoony] You can’t be manipulated. Therefore you must be heartless.

[Murray] Well, the ... the certain knowledge of Christ taking the guilt off of our shoulders and I think education, real education, not indoctrination as we have currently in the public schools, but real education as is available in Christian schools and a knowledge of history gives you the strength, all of this things together, give you the strength to look analytically at the pitch of any one of these con men, be he politician, head of a charitable organization, a social engineer, a racist or any politician of a foreign country that tries to convince you that you are not doing enough for him or her. And you just have to say no.

[Biddle] Douglas, if ... if we feel guilt in a situation where something is requested of us and it is based upon sciruptral interpretation, should we feel guilt then?

[Murray] You... you don’t know enough. You... you really...

[M. Rushdoony] You can feel a responsibility to be charitable...

[Murray] Yeah.

[M. Rushdoony] You may feel that you have an obligation to act, but you don’t have to feel guilty. Guilt implies a sin on your part.

[Biddle] That is correct.

[M. Rushdoony] And you don’t have to feel that you have sinned unless you have genuinely sinned.

[Biddle] You find this and there is not. There is... there is guilt there that needs...

[M. Rushdoony] There is something that needs to be confessed on your part.

[Murray] Yeah, yeah.

[M. Rushdoony] But nobody can transfer guilt to you.

[Biddle] I... I think the essence that you strike there is that it is a violation of God’s law or something related to God rather than man’s law, a violation of that. I don’t necessarily feel guilty if I go over 55. But if I somehow slip off the path and I know I do something that God does not permit, I feel guilty as all get out. And I... I think guilt is something peculiar to God rather than to man’s laws.

We speak of being adjudged guilty in a court or what have you, but I really think guilt is something that is very wrapped up. It is intrinsic to your relationship with God more so than with the statutory law.

[M. Rushdoony] There was something intersrting on... I was talking to someone a few days ago and they were... they had seen something in TV, the gist of which is how honest are Americans. And they couldn’t remember the question. The one question they could... they could remember was: If a contractor asked you to pay him in cash, would you do it? And I said, “Are you supposed to say no to be honest?” And they said, “Yes.” Ok. Now I said, “Is it... is it illegal to offer to pay cash for something?” And they said, “Well, no.” I said, “So is it... is it... what is wrong with paying someone in cash?”

Well, the implication being that the contractor may not be paying his taxes as though that is our responsibility. You know, we would... we have to... we have to leave a paper trail so that when the government {?}

[Rushdoony] Yeah. As a matter of fact, it is now illegal for any automobile dealer to accept 10,000 or more in cash on a payment for any automobile without immediately reporting it to the IRS and maybe now it is illegal even to accept it. And not only so, but apparently federal officials are going around trying to buy cars for cash...

[Biddle] To snare them, eh?

[Rushdoony] To snare them and to revoke their licenses.

[Biddle] Oh, I love it.

[Rushdoony] Now, what moral...

[Biddle] The government is...

[Rushdoony] ...guilt is in there in cash?

[multiple voices]

[Rushdoony] You are creating sins. And you are tying up people’s consciences with things that are not sins.

[Murray] For a while drug dealers caught on to this so they would go to an automobile dealer and they would buy a car on an installment credit and then go, you know, a few days later and pay the installment credit thing off, you know, they... they... they do the little dance so that the car dealer wouldn’t get into trouble and he wouldn’t have any problem getting the car he wants.

Well, now these contracts are written so that you have to make a certain number of payments. You can’t pay them off right away without a penalty. So they have short circuited that.

[Rushdoony] Well, I do believe this matter of putting people under a guilt trip produces hypocrisy. I was angry. I was ready to swear I was so angry. Well, on TV for a very, very stupid bond issue that made no sense at all. This man who was asked about it, what did he think about it, it meant more taxes, but he said he was happy to pay more taxes. He regarded it as one of the privileges of being a citizen.

Now that was hypocrisy. He didn’t want to be on television on a news program saying, “No, I don’t want to favor this. I think the politicians are hitting us with more taxes every time you turn around.

[Murray] Well, he wouldn’t get on the program if he didn’t say that.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Murray] I mean you could.... you can... you could put him in the category of being either very well programmed or purposely selected to make that statement on television.

[Rushdoony] And a good hypocrite.

[M. Rushdoony] For the way those propositions and a lot of people may not be familiar with them. We can... bond issues and propositions can be put on the ballot at general elections in California. And for a long time I noticed, I think it is pretty much still the case, that anything that dealt with veterans, a bond issue to help veterans in some way automatically passed. People didn’t like... weren’t comfortable apparently with voting against veterans even if they didn't like the idea of a state going into debt. If it had to do with the environment, something to protect the environment, it would pass. If it had ... for a long time if it had to do with education it would pass. Now there... there has been a reaction to that in recent in year. But for a long time if it was for schools it passed. And what is currently in vogue, for instance, environment, anything doing with environment is... is going to pass because people aren’t that confident of what they believe or why they vote for something. They don’t... they don’t want to vote for anything that says it is for the environment. That is a... that is a very sensitive issue with a lot of people.

There was a recently an initiative on the ballot. We have had a problem with... there is mountain lion tracks right outside the house here. There has been a mountain lion that killed... has killed a goat out here recently and just a few weeks ago in California we voted on a law that would allow the state to... we have a constitutional ban right now that prohibits anyone from killing mountain lions in California. It would have allowed the hunting of mountain lions if it was deemed that there were too many in any given area, much like many predators are dealt with in many areas.

There was a commercial on television that showed the hunting of a... of a mountain lion, an old film of an mountain lion being treed, shot and falling into a creek.

[Murray] That was a licensed kill

[M. Rushdoony] Yes. And the guilt manipulation. You don’t want this to happen to one of these beautiful cats, do you? So much of our political campaigns are based on political conservative and Democrat are based on ... on guilt. You don’t want this to happen.

[Murray] It... it is a sorry commentary on the mentality of the electorate when they can be manipulated that easily.

[M. Rushdoony] Absolutely. But it... but it does reflect the general level of the populace that is...

[Murray] I have a solution to this mountain lion thing, incidentally. If the liberals are ... who are all in favor of neutering and spaying domestic cats and dogs don’t want hunting, sport hunting of mountain lions in order to control the population which has ballooned out of all proportion, then I think that they should be willing to pay for a capture and release program which neuters and spays all mountain lions in California so that the population can be controlled. Now you talk about guilt and the ... the... the people who were in favor of the propsotion that would have allowed the fish and game to regulate the numbers of mountain lions through hunting which has been done for years and years prior to the ban. And we ... we should put some of the people from the envioronmental movement in the case to give the mountain lion a sporting chance. And it is a mutually self liquidating problem. We will see who comes out on top, the mountain lion or the environmentalist.

[Rushdoony] Well, I...

[Biddle] I don’t mean to spring board from spaying and neutering in animals on to another topic, but it is one I would like to hear Rush speak out on, because it is... it is coming up now and I am reading it in the papers quite a bit and that is the marriage of lesbians and gays and whether it should be recognized by the law in the various states, whether it... now they are putting together a federal statute on it and that type of thing. That is a guilt trip of itself.

[Murray] Well, they are using, they are using guilt. I mean, every speech that any of these people make, they automatically use the... the terms which have already been provided to them by the spin doctors in the political left, you know, homo phobic, unfair, you know, I mean there is a whole litany of terminologies, epithets that are automatically hurled at anyone that questions the ... the .... the logic or the... the idea of doing what they want to do.

[Rushdoony] First to continue this bit, the last time we taped, you remember, the mountain lioness and her cub, the footprints were all over the driveway. Last night it as a neighbor’s goat that was killed. And even though in such a case you can actually call in a state hunter to do something about it, they will not come unless you can provide evidence of an actual kill.

To get to your question, of course, because we have abandoned any moral standards except those of Humanism, we are told it is bigotry to oppose marriages between homosexuals or lesbians. Nothing about the social consequences, nothing about the fact that the Bible calls such activities a burning out of man. In Romans one where it says they burn with lust one for another, in the Greek text the literal reading is they burn out. So homosexual acts are by the Bible presented as the burning out of man, the end of the road culturally.

And, historically, whenever you see it rise, it is the end of that civilization. So we are not only told we cannot condemn such things without being condemned ourselves, but we are told that they had the same right as we do. However, the practical fact is that they have more rights than we do. They are beyond criticism. We are not. We are told that our opinions cannot be enacted into law, but those of homosexuals can be. So we are in a moral crisis and every effort is being made to take the guilt off of homosexuals and place it onto Christians.

[Murray] Do you notice the... do you remember the guilt tripping that was used in order to stampede the politicians into voting billions of dollars for AIDS research? And yet other diseases which affect the general population are starving for research money or have been virtually eliminated all together or have to rely on private conributions.

[Biddle] You know, my skin is so thick that I feel very little guilt on most things that I read about in the newspaper. I ... I think of Bill Clinton wanting to raise our taxes and provide money for midnight basketball and we should feel guilty that these children don’t have a place to go in the middle of the night to play basketball. And now he is in New Orleans saying we should put them in curfew at eight o'clock.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Biddle] And how are they going to play basketball at midnight if they are under curfew?

[Murray] Well, obviously indoor gymnasiums at...

[multiple voices]

[Biddle] I find guilt is {?} guilt trip is something that is so selective and so arbitrary when you take it away from God’s law or scriptural interpretation. It is used ... we might as well have thin... thick skin, be indifferent to it, listen to it and toss it to the side.

Of course, Mark is probably more sensitive than that. What do you feel about that, Mark?

[M. Rushdoony] No. I ... I think that is one of the real advantages of... of having a moral perspective is you don’t... you feel... you don’t feel you have to feel guilty. If you really know what the source of guilt is in that sin and you don’t feel this sin...

[multiple voices]

[M. Rushdoony] ...guilty, it is... you may have opinions on what the solution to a problem is, but you don’t have to feel guilty about something even if you care about it and you want to solve it. And the people who do the most are not the people who feel guilty about something. It is the people who think... try to... try to find a solution, a fix to the problem and really attack it at its roots, because...

[Murray] Well, you never know.

[M. Rushdoony] The guilt... what have the guilt manipulators done? They have thrown money at a problem. And then they feel very self righteous, because look at all that we have done for the problem. We have thrown other people’s money at the problem. Aren’t... aren’t we noble?

[Biddle] I mean, we have so many things of a political nature which we are asked to take guilt for, bussing, whatever. And if it comes from a political perspective, the guilt becomes quite questionable. Normally politicians do not speak in terms of God’s law. They speak in terms of their own secular humanist intersts. So I don't think the... the guilt is part of the political equation.

[M. Rushdoony] It is... it is very broad, though. Parents are supposed to feel guilty for what their... their children do. Children are told to place guilt trips on their parents, because, after all, you raised me. It is... it is your fault.

[Murray] I didn’t ask to be born.

[Voice] Yes.

[Murray] ... is what we are hearing now.

[M. Rushdoony] But I just happened to... we have heard this past week in there in a magazine here that a couple of quotes, one is by Tom Daschle, Senate minority leader. “If the Republicans in Congress had gotten their way, Americans today would be drinking dirtier water, breathing dirtier air and facing public health risks that they should not have to face.” Just very typical...typical of election year ...

[Biddle] Makes you feel bad about being a Republican, my goodness.

[M. Rushdoony] Unfortunately, it works on both sides. I mean, look at the Bush thing with the pledge of allegiance. That didn't really pertain to a great deal of anything and yet it was... much of his campaign centered around that in what was that, 84, I believe or 88. It is sad when so much of our ... our campaigns can center on... on such non issues.

[Rushdoony] To continue with this matter of guilt tripping. One of the key factors in our current era is that sin has been separated from guilt. In terms of the Bible, sin always results in guilt and behind guilt, true guilt, there is always sin.

Now when you separate the two and you drop sin out of the picture, then you can create guilt by creating synhetic sin, sins against humanity, sins against the state, sins against the children, invented sins that have no relevance in terms of Scripture. And this is what we have today. Because people don’t know much about what sin is as the Bible defines it, they are easily made to feel guilty.

The Westminster Confession, simply quoted to the epistle of 1 John when it said that sin is any want of conformity to or departure from the law of God. So the law of God according to Scripture defines sin.

Well, nobody pays any attention to the law of God. If they do, they are regarded as one of those Christian Reconstructionist nuts. So they don’t know the meaning of guilt. And guilt tripping has become a simple thing in all quarters, whether they are children or adults, they are easily put under a guilt trip.

And with it is a loss of reality. People today have... are... are out of touch, really, with reality.

When we were at the doctors on Wednesday and Dorothy was in there and she came out laughing, because this woman was going to have a nail stuck in. It is done so gently. I have been there and had it done time and time again. But unless you are watching you don’t know they have done it. But this woman carried on. She said she was getting a headache. It had to be taken out immediately. She couldn’t proceed. Nothing could be done to her. Why? She was suffering. She had a headache. And she said, this was an older woman, when she was young she bore two children. And this was greater pain than that.

Now that is a loss of reality. Her daughter was there and her daughter was no spring chicken and she was embarrassed by her mother’s behavior. But it isn’t that unusual now. People who have no sense of reality, who feel that any pain is unendurable or any imagined pain or for them to be deprived of anything is somehow a tremendous sin. And this is true of children and adults.

With retirement, a strong segment of our population, especially if they are not Christian, have become childish. It isn’t that they have lost their marbles. It isn’t because they are senile, but beaus they have become so self indulgent. And they move to be away from their children and then whine and complain because the children don’t see them or come to visit them and when they do they whine and complain so the children go away feeling guilty because they have neglected their parents, but finding it too difficult an experience to go through too quickly. And the parents miserable because they don’t wan to be bothered with the children. They don’t want to have a sense of guilt at seeing them, a rightful sense of guilt, because they are busy spending their children’s inheritance.

So it is becoming an ugly situation.

Guilt tripping is becoming increasingly common place and it is a way of telling the other person: I can do what I want, because you are guilty and I am going to put a guilt trip on you.

[M. Rushdoony] It is interesting. While people are... are very quick to try to claim guilt on other people’s part, they are also ... they are... there is ... in such a hurry to transfer guilt to someone else they don’t want to look at where the guilt really lies.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[M. Rushdoony] Very often it is very close to home. There have been several... there are several prominent celebrities who lost a child, for instance that want to blame someone else because their child of an overdose of drugs or in some other way. Never saying that it, you know, that person voluntarily took those drugs. When we thin, of the.... there is... there is a great amount of guilt tripping regarding people who are anti abortion, because, oh, they are against abortion, but they don’t really love babies. And yet there is some real guilt regarding abortion and isn’t with the pro life movement. There has been a lot of evil committed and a lot of people are truly guilty. And maybe they help absolve themselves of guilt over their personal acts by pointing fingers at other people. But we live in a very immoral society and there is a lot of guilt out there. And maybe it makes people feel better if they point to others and they try to place guilt elsewhere other than where it belongs.

[Murray] Well, this has become pandemic in our society is blaming somebody else. It is not limited, really, to just that, but I was going to say that in the case of... I have read comments by women who have had abortions and they don't feel guilt so much as they feel remorse down the road.

[Voice] Yes.

[Murray] A feeling of remorse comes over them, because they realize that they will never know that youngster that they had aborted and they... they feel a deep sense of remorse and it doesn't go away.

[Rushdoony] What you said, Mark, I recall a few years back when there was lot of picketing at abortion clinics, this woman from the west coast, who could not afford it, flew back to New York and to several other states at different times to picket at abortions. On one occasion she had a heavy fine for demonstration. Again, she could not afford it. And it baffled me. Why in the world would she do that? There was so much good that she could have done locally and the money she spent she could have accomplished some important things locally. But she had to fly back to these demonstrations and come back with a glow.

[Murray] Well, I think that a lot of people in the pro life movement got... well, they were looking for a method, you know, a methodology that would ... a means of fighting abortion and they bought into the techniques that were used by the left during the 1960s.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Murray] And they really got sucked in to a method which is not accomplishing anything. And I don’t think they have accomplished anything. And, you know, there is this... there is this feeling of wanting to be a crusader. And there are other things that can be done, but the problem is, you don’t get a lot of credit for it. You know, such as helping facilitate adoptions or taking foster children in, changing the diapers, doing the dirty work. You know, it is grunt work. And it is hard and it is tough and you don’t get any credit for it, you know, from the.... from the ... the general public. But it is ... it is... it is a way to move forward and all of the sign carrying and all of the sloganeering in the world is not going to do any good. It is not going to change people’s minds.

[Biddle] The... just to get into a little flavor of that, because I would like to get some opinion from all of you, but something that is, I think, relevant to that is sin is very personal. Guilt is very personal. Atonement is very personal. Your communication with God is very personal and private. Is that one of the reasons that inherently we dislike people who gossip or people who malign or people who pass bad rumors? Is that God’s law written in our hearts that these people are violating the essence of the relationship between God and... and... and the... his creation, this little man there on earth? I... I think that is the case and I... I wonder, though, when you do observe sin what should be your reaction to it? Do you avoid it, deny it? I wonder. What is the proper response to sin?

[multiple voices]

[Rushdoony] The Bible says that we are guilty if we see a criminal act and are silent and do nothing about it. If we are a witness to a murder and we say nothing we are an accomplice in terms of God’s law or a theft and we say nothing about it, we are an accomplice. That premise still exists in some of our statute books. You cannot be a silent witness. You are liable.

[Murray] I remember the Kitty Genovese situation where a whole bunch of people stood around and watched her being stabbed to death in a New York or on a street, I guess, in New York City. And everybody was shocked at the time. But today that has become common place. Today people are routinely mugged and beaten and it is... now it is... people are astounded if anyone tries to come to their aid.

And the media treats anybody that comes to their aid with conditional approval. You will always get the comment from the police ... police, well, as long as it turned out ok, I mean, in so many words, as long as it turned out all right then, yeah, you know, you can be a good Samaritan. But if it turns out bad of something goes wrong, then they will say, “Well, you shouldn’t have gotten involved. You know, you should let us professionals handle it.” And the same thing, you know, people will ... will say, well, you know they... they think you are... you are un... very unwise, you know, to get involved in other people’s problems. You should mind your own business.

[Rushdoony] One of the consequences of the separation of sin from guilt and of guilt tripping is that not many people nowadays have a clear conscience. They have a vaguely troubled conscience and a bad conscience is a terribly debilitating thing. It weakens a man. Another reason for this problem is that we have lost the ability to make confession. Some churches still have in the liturgy a general confession which is very important. Others stress regular confession and that is waning. But basically all of us in the best form of confession is directly to God, the individual confessing to God.

But confession has tended to drop out of the Christian’s thinking. And it is the ability to confess to God and to say we have sinned. We have failed in this or that respect and to ask for his grace his mercy that gives us a clear conscience, that enables us to pick up and go ahead and not be destroyed by our yesterdays. One of the reasons why psychotherapy in various forms, psycholigsts, psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, had become so routine and common place in our world, especially in certain strata of society, is because these people are not believers and, if they are, they do not confess to God. And, as a result, they have a bad conscience, a continually troubled conscience. And they have got to see these psychotherapists with their quackery in order to clear their conscience which does not happen, because the essence of humanistic psychotherapy was very well stated by Freud when he scolded a homosexual’s mother when she wanted her son cured. He said that the purpose of psychoanalysis will not be to cure his son of his homosexuality, but to teach him to accept it.

[Murray] Well, the... the method of the... of the psychologist is to convince you that there is no sin, there is no such thing as sin. Therefore, you don’t have to repent. And if all you ... if .. you are... you only feel guilt then the psychologist’s job is to transfer that guilt to somebody else, your parents or society or your environment or whatever. And they paid to do that. But the problem never goes away. So you have to keep coming back. It is a problem that never gets solved. You never... you never feel good. You don’t feel free after going to a psychiatrist or psychologist, because there is always that element of doubt.

[M. Rushdoony] Man can’t atone for sin.

[Biddle] That is right.

[M. Rushdoony] You see, because if there is... guilt means there is... there is something wrong there, the sin. And ... and to put it in religious terms which they... they won’t... psychiatry won’t use, of course, psychiatry tries to atone for sin by making you accept the sin as normal. And therefore you just come to terms with this sin and that will not get rid of sin, because that... what they are trying to do is ... is... there.... it is a... it is a phony atonement. And ... and it doesn't work.

[Biddle] Redefinition from a different vantage point is not forgiveness.

[Murray] Well... well, they have got job security, because they never really solve the problem. And, you... you know, it is ... it is the installment plan. You know, you have to keep going back.

[M. Rushdoony] And... and that is funny that even liberals, comedians for years have been making jokes about how people will go to psychiatrists for years on a regular basis. And they even know that it really doesn't do any good. They have got to have that continual fix that it is ok. You are ok. I am ok. You are ok. There was a book some years ago by that title that was very popular.

[Biddle] And how much of our judiciary, in child custody cases in particular where they will ask a psychologist to determine the reality of a situation to determine custody, to determine how a child should be treated. And they keep coming in, month after month after month after month for treatment of the child or the children. And you never get a solution to the problem except the children gradually grow past the age of 18 and they get out of therapy.

[Murray] That is the game.

[Biddle] Yeah.

[Murray] That is the game. They have got a customer for all those years. They get paid. The court pays them or the parents pay them. And there is... it is a win, win situation.

[Rushdoony] Well, this matter of guilt tripping is now a matter of state policy. The way to keep people subservient is to make them feel guilty, not free. And as a result, we have programs in our schools that put guilt trips on children, very early. We do it politically. One of the tremendous arguments used during the debate at the... a year or so ago about the Medicare programs was to make people feel guilty of they would not favor the total takeover of medical practice and of medical care. Somehow you were a monster as one senator, John Kerry of Massachusetts said, “The Republican budget takes kids who have muscular dystrophy, Down’s syndrome, cystic fibrosis, cerebral palsy and takes away their wheel chairs, their communicative devices.”

Oh, we get a lot of statements like that. I suppose you could put together a fat volume of the insane quotations that are designed like that to put a guilt trip on people who disagree.

[Murray] They get away with it because they are so preposterous.

[Rushdoony] Because people are not Christian or they are Christians who do not know their Bible. And therefore the guilt trip can be laid on them. If they knew their Bible that would be impossible and they would regard any such statement as a joke and laugh at the folly of the man who made it.

[Murray] Well, if you don’t know what sin is, that is probably the reason a lot of people either don’t read the Bible or don't make any attempt to find out what sin is, because then they would have to repent.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Murray] And suddenly be faced with the dilemma.

[M. Rushdoony] It is easier paying taxes and letting the liberals take care of the problems.

[Murray] Yeah.

[M. Rushdoony] Than... than admitting there is sin somewhere.

[Murray] Well, you can... you know, you have to wonder if people sat down and thought about tit. It is a lot less expensive to confess your sin, to repent and get forgiveness for God... and from God and it is free. Whereas if you go to a psychiatrist, you never get through paying.

[Rushdoony] No.

[Murray] There is always that sense that it is not quite right, you know, and it is papered over. They just put a band aid on you and send you out into they world.

[Biddle] Well, I think the... the state or the people who apart from Christians, they devise their own atonement, so to speak. I... I am thinking of a particular situation where the president of an institution had to give up his position and the senior executive staff in the organization resigned. You had total turnover of the organization and when the new people came in, the wrong doing which had cost the public hundreds of millions of dollars was not of... of consideration. The fact was, we will determine the atonement and the atonement is these people are very ... feeling very badly about they did and their careers are ruined.

Well, their careers were not ruined. They went on to other things. But that was hardly {?} define atonement. There was never a question of how this should be viewed in terms of God’s laws or what we would consider forgiveness, true atonement, that type of thing.

[Rushdoony] Or restitution.

[Biddle] Or restitution.

[Rushdoony] God’s law. In that case it would have had to be at least double and up to five fold, depending on the various circumstances.

[Murray] Certainly it wouldn’t put a crimp in their lifestyle.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Biddle] But if we ever seen our government exacting that type of atonement, if I can put it in quotes, of the wrongdoers against public interest, it will be a peculiar day in July.

[Murray] You will never hear it.

[Rushdoony] We have a very fine man who is superior court judge in a state at the other end of the country. Before he became a judge he was able to get a law requiring restitution if a judge sought to impose it. And the hostility to him when he subsequently became a judge was such that although years have passed the media has never lost an opportunity to treat him as though he were a scoundrel or to take pictures of him that will show him in the worst possible light. They will wait until he has got his mouth open to say something and will snap the picture then. [54:26\

And it is all deliberate because they resent the fact that he has made restitution into law. They feel that this somehow is an insult to the community, because it throws you back into a biblical world and life view. But the people have been robbed. They like it, because it means restitution has to be made. So they are not paying for the man after losing, say, 50,000 dollars or whatever, they are not paying thousands a year in taxes to support him in jail. They get their money and the man has to work it off.

[Murray] Yeah, but it is not a... it is not a state imposed solution. It is not like having victim’s assistance like we have in California where all society has to pay... has to make restitution.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Murray] In other words the... the... the tax payers have to... have to pay it back, not ... have to make restitution, not the... the person that committed the crimial act.

[Rushdoony] Well, our time is about up. Thank you for all for listening. Don’t let anybody put a guilt trip on you. Tell them I said it was ungodly if they try to do it. Thank you. God bless you.