Origin Ideas Steer Values

A culture’s understanding of the origins issue steers the value of its people: The Judeo-Christian origins perspective tells the story of morally culpable human beings made in God’s image and for companionship with one another. This understanding alone leads to a particular view of free will, the intrinsic value of human life, and traditional marriage as a part of God’s plan. The Darwinian origins story, on the other hand, is one of individuals in constant competition, seeking not to flourish in harmony but to survive at the expense of the other, which justifies Nietzsche’s view of the world—the pursuit of unbridled power. Where you begin will determine where you end up, and this carries great consequences for everything in our lives, especially how human society should be organized.

Jeff Myers & David A. Noebel, Understanding the Times: A Survey of Competing Worldviews, pg. 256.

A HUGE Reason to Leave the Government Schools

Public (that is, government-funded, nonchurch) schooling caught on in the 1840s and thereafter, after the nation’s founders were gone. Many schools were not so much nonsectarian as anti-sectarian, and anti one faith in particular, Catholicism.  Catholics, perceiving the public schools as devoted to teaching Protestantism, worked to set up their own institutions and asked that some of their tax money be used to defray expenses.  The response was ugly:  Opposition among Protestants to the growing number of Catholic immigrants, largely from Ireland, and concern that children going to Catholic schools would grow up to oppose American liberty led to riots in the 1840s and 1850s.  One Philadelphia riot in 1844 resulted in thirteen deaths and the burning down of a Catholic church.

Some writers wanted to stop all immigration, but others looked to public schools to save America.  An article in The Massachusetts Teacher in 1851 stated that children of immigrants “must be taught as our own children are taught.  We say must be, because in many cases this can only be accomplished by coercion. . . .  The children must be gathered up and forced into school, and those who resist or impede this plan, whether parents or priests, must be held accountable and punished.”  The Wisconsin Teachers’ Association declared in 1865 that “children are the property of the state.”

Ironically, the public schools weren’t doing much to teach Protestantism.  The intellectual leader of the public school movement was Horace Mann, a Unitarian who pushed for largely secularized publics schools and overcame opposition from Protestants by assuring them that daily readings from the King James Bible and generic moral instruction could continue.  He succeeded largely because of bigotry and over the objections of theologians such as R.L. Danny (the Stonewall Jackson aide), who explained that teaching a person how to use a saw could be done in a value-neutral way, but “dexterity in an art is not education.  The latter nurtures a soul, the other only drills a sense-organ or muscle; the one has a mechanical end, the other a moral.”

Nevertheless, bigotry was so rampant that some Protestants were content to try teaching in a religion-less way as long as Catholics would be hard-pressed to maintain their own school system.

Marvin Olasky, Standing for Christ in a Modern Babylon. pg.91-92

Surplus Population?

The answer to anyone who talks about the surplus population is to ask him whether he is the surplus population; or if he is not, how he knows that he is not.

G.K. Chesterton

Controlling the Culture

Since the days of President Wilson and John Dewey, Progressives (née Socialists) have fought to gain control of America’s gatekeepers — academia, the media, entertainment. This struggle didn’t just begin amidst the turmoil of the 60’s with Timothy Leary’s infamous “Turn on, tune in, drop out” mindset. Certainly there were giant leaps for Progressive minds made in that decade. Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Great Society” programs began the wholescale dependence of lower income upon the government.

In the span of one decade, Progressives set the stage for subtle, but unrelenting indoctrination of subsequent generations of young people. Conjoined with LBJ’s Great Society agenda, the Left moved the public away from the Founders’ vision of faith and freedom, and toward an ever-increasing government dependency.

Now, 50 years later, academia in the United States is mostly controlled by the Progressives who have ushered in new textbooks to reaffirm their worldview. The gatekeepers keep a stranglehold on education materials, only approving those texts which reinforce the revisionist history worldview, a worldview that typically demonizes America, the Founders, the early settlers and pioneers.

Tami Jackson, “One Woman Battles to Restore Real, Not Revisionist, History to the Classroom”

The View From the Liberal Zookeepers

One popular tactic used by champions of the welfare state is to slander those who have worked diligently for their success.  The slander has worked, leading to a public perception that the rich got that way by stealing from the poor.  This perception includes that wealth-producing activities are unseemly and that free-market economic activity causes, rather than cures, poverty.  Just as it is wrong for a zookeeper to allow one elephant to eat considerably more than another, so it must be wrong for the government to allow one human or company to acquire or possess significantly more than another.

This view is consistent, of course, with the Leftist view that humans are merely another species of animal.  Secularists believe, if they stop to actually think about it, that humans contribute little or nothing to the satisfying of their needs.  Like animals, they can only exist on what is already available.  In other words, humans consume.  Therefore, isn’t it only proper of our Beltway zookeepers to equalize distribution and consumption?  Unfortunately, our nation’s politically correct (but morally incorrect) answer is to take from those who seem to have too much and redistribute the proceeds to those who seem to have too little, just as a responsible zookeeper would do.

In the view of government bureaucrats, entrepreneurs who create and market new technology and products in our country are very smart animals, but animals nevertheless.  By some form of skullduggery, under cover of darkness while the zookeepers were not watching, these entrepreneurs somehow seized more that their “fair” share.  They are obviously depriving others of that to which they are entitled.  After all, there are only so many bones, fish and pieces of meat available in the keepers’ bucket.

Thus our government zookeepers attempt to repair their mistakes by the vigilant taxation and prosecution of companies which have been “too” successful.  To gain votes, politicians often encourage those who have made self-destructive decisions in their lives to feel scorn for those who deployed self-discipline to become productive.  There is no better way than to exhibit a revulsion for what I call ethical capitalism.  Today we hear people referring to the 1980s as a period of moral depravity.  These individuals consider the miracle of economic enterprise to be the human equivalent of dogs fighting over a bone.

When America followed the biblical blueprint, it was clear that buying, selling, owning property , and being successful in business should evoke no psychological discomfort.  Economic activity is another way in which we satisfyingly distance ourselves from the animal kingdom and justify our humanity.

But if we continue to accept the godless alternative, then indeed we do not differ in kind from monkeys or other animals, only in degree.  Animals do not create wealth, they merely seize the commodities they need; people obviously do the same.  They may employ more sophisticated methods like bonds, debentures, taxation, and penalization of success, but it is seizing nonetheless.  Is it merely coincidence that those who most strongly advance evolution as the one and only approach to our origins are also those who most strongly oppose the free market?

Clearly, morally sensitive people must decry this activity.  If God created us and touched us with His abilities, then we are qualitatively different from animals.  Our ability to speak and to create is unique.  Therefore, animals plunder but people profit; the creation of wealth is an expression of our godly origins.

Rabbi Daniel Lapin, "America's Real War," pg.227-228

Christianity or Darwinism?

If all the world followed the teachings of Christ there would be no wars, no jails, no armies, no police, and no poverty.  There would be no crime, no prostitution, no alcoholism or drug abuse, no mental illness, no suicide.  There would be no abortion, no homosexuality, no pornography.  Since people would have inner peace they would be content with simpler lives, and there would be less waste of resources and destruction of the environment due to the manufacturing of innumerable trifles and superfluities.

If, however, everyone lived according to the principles of Darwinism, the world would become a hellish nightmare.  Ruthless egoists would trample on the weak and consider it their moral and scientific right to do so.  The death of weaker human beings through disease, famine, or strife would be considered as ordinary and natural, even beneficial and essential to progress.

There would be swift social breakdown as well.  People who followed their own instincts without regard to God’s law (as Darwin recommended) would become involved in all sorts of deviant social behavior.  Crime and immorality would abound, and the family would disintegrate.  In short, there would be much of what we see today, only more so.

Joseph Keysor, “Hitler, the Holocaust, and the Bible,” pg.392

Darwinists Can’t Live Their Philosophy

If life is essentially survival in an impersonal, amoral struggle; if staying alive is what it is all about; then keeping one’s mouth shut and looking out for number one is the rational and scientific thing to do.  Altruism, self-sacrifice as a virtue that emerged out of Darwinian conflict, is a theory only that does not touch the human heart.  It is a cobweb that breaks under any real pressure.

If Darwinism is true, there is not higher ethical law beyond that of survival.  Attempts to invent one are not only false at bottom, weak, and unconvincing.  They also betray the innate human inability of Darwinists to live consistently with what they say they believe.  Their minds assert one thing, but their deeper human feel ins say something that is more powerful.

Those who so far stifle human feeling as to attempt to really live according to a Darwinist ethic sink by degrees into a dark night of the soul.  The strong survive, the weak die—this is their ethic, their law, and their philosophy.  When they put it into practice, it becomes  criminal philosophy—one totally at odds with the vastly more enlightened and human concept of people as presented in the Judaeo-Christian tradition.

Joseph Keysor, Hitler, the Holocaust, and the Bible, pg.391

Why Should Darwinists Care About Suffering?

I have not yet found reference to groups of Darwinists in America or England saying that their philosophy compelled them to be concerned about suffering and starving people in other parts of the world.  What a joke.  Darwinism is fundamentally, necessarily, and essentially inhumane.  If people starve to death or perish from illness or violence, that’s just the way life is.  We are only animals after all, with no immortal souls, no spark of the divine, and nothing in essence to distinguish us from the beasts.  We don’t get excited if other animals are dying—why the unscientific species bias in favor of people?

Joseph Keysor, “Hitler, the Holocaust, and the Bible,” pg. 221

Darwinian Morality is Bankrupt

Since its advent in the mid-nineteenth century Darwinism has stirred up debate about many questions touching the very heart of human existence.  Not least among these is: How should we live?  While many philosophers and theologians ruled this question outside the purview of science, most prominent advocates of Darwinian theory—including biologists, physicians, social theorists, and popularizers—believed Darwinism had far-reaching ramifications for ethics and morality.  Many argued that by providing a naturalistic account of the origin of ethics and morality, Darwinism delivered a death-blow to the prevailing Judeo-Christian ethics, as well as Kantian ethics and any other fixed moral code.  If morality was built on social instincts that changed over evolutionary time, then morality must be relative to the conditions of life at any given time.  Darwinism—together with other forms of historicism ascendant in the nineteenth century—thus contributed to the rise of moral relativism.

But, interestingly, many Darwinists were not willing to live with complete moral relativism.  They still retained one fixed point of reference—the process of evolution itself.  Since morality arose through evolution, they argued that the purpose of morality is to advance the evolutionary process.   They thereby imported the nineteenth-century cult of progress into evolutionary theory.  The problem with this is that it presupposed that some forms of morality are “better” than others.  But, of course, Darwinism provided no basis to consider some form of morality “better” than any other, or for that matter, it gave no reason to think that morality was “better” in any real sense than immorality.  Yet most used morally charged language quite freely, apparently oblivious to the contradiction this entailed.

Those Darwinists who made the evolutionary process the new criteria for morality radically altered the way that people thought about morality.  Since they generally affirmed that good health and intelligence were key factors in the upward march of evolution, improving physical vitality and mental prowess—especially of future generations—became the highest moral virtue.  The greatest sin was to contribute in some way to the decline of physical life or intellectual ability.  This kind of evolutionary ethics flew in the face of Christian morality, in which one’s health, vitality, and mental faculty play no role in determining moral or immoral behavior.  While Christian morality demands a relationship of love toward God and one’s neighbors, which involves self-sacrifice, evolutionary ethics focussed on breeding better humans, even it if meant sacrificing other people in the process.


Richard Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler, pg.229-230

The Humanist Crusade Against Children

Seventy years ago, eugenics promised to cure America's social problems through better breeding.  Today, mental-health crusaders promise to eliminate behavioral problems among America's children by screening every schoolchild for mental illness and then putting millions of them on psychoactive drugs.  Like the eugenics crusade, the current push to dramatically increase the number of children on psychoactive drugs reduces all behavioral problems to a material basis.  And like the eugenics crusade, it is accompanied by grandiose claims that go far beyond the actual science.  Like the eugenics crusade, it is justified in humanitarian terms even while it raises serious issues about civil liberties and human dignity.  How many children will be hurt before this latest crusade runs out of steam?

John G. West, "Darwin Day in America: How our politics and culture have been dehumanized in the name of science," p.364-365

Public Education Danger to Family

The new education’s danger to the family comes in two stages.  The first stage weakens the family by “atomizing” its members — an effect that is reinforced by popular culture.  As the family flounders, the second stage capitalizes on its failures.  Because the family has been undermined, individual families become disabled — there are some functions they can no longer perform at all, and others they can’t perform fully or well.  At the personal level, families struggle, and often fail, against the forces that weaken and divide them.  Problems increase in number and severity.  At some point, state bureaucracies, typically led by education and social welfare, step in — first to oversee, then to take over, the functions that families are unable to exercise, or are willing to abandon.

When this process runs its course, the influence of the family will be mostly displaced by the influence of the collective, in the form of the bureaucracy, the schools, and the media.  The natural, biological family in general, and parents in particular, will become appendages of the “omnicompetent state,” watchfully regulated by state agencies.  The family will be redefined to prevent it from becoming a focus for loyalties apart from the collective.  If a form of the “family” survives at all, it will be as a convenient device for bureaucratic book-keeping, and will be redefined in mostly economic terms.

Brooks Alexander, “Abolished Man: From Instruction to Indoctrination in the New Education,”  SCP Journal, Vol 16:4, p.7

It All Began With Woodrow Wilson

During the presidential election campaign of 1912, Wilson explicitly invoked Darwin to justify an evolutionary understanding of the U.S. Constitution that would allow the federal government to dramatically expand its powers over the economy.

According to Wilson, the Constitution betrayed the Founders’ “Newtonian” view that government was built on unchanging laws like “the law of gravitation.”  In truth, however, government “falls, not under the theory of the universe, but under the theory of organic life.  It is accountable to Darwin, not to Newton. It is modified by its environment, necessitated by its tasks, shaped to its functions by the sheer pressure of life.”  Hence, “living political constitutions must be Darwinian in structure and in practice.  Society is a living organism and must obey the laws of Life … [I]t must develop.”  Wilson averred that “all that progressives ask or desire is permission — in an era when ‘development,’ ‘evolution,’ is the scientific word — to interpret the Constitution according to the Darwinian principle.”

The doctrine of the evolving Constitution articulated by Wilson and other Progressives opened the door to much greater regulation of business and the economy, eventually paving the way for the New Deal.  But once the door was opened to regulate the rich, there was no reason increased government powers should not also be used to regulate the poor.  The stage was thus set for a different kind of Social Darwinism, one based not on laissez faire but on the idea that government should scientifically plan and regulate even the most intimate questions of family life.

John G. West, "Darwin Day in America: How our politics and culture have been dehumanized in the name of science," p.122