The Day After the Elections – A Biblical Perspective

The cultural shift toward Darwinian humanism was displayed in its fullest form yet in the elections of 2008 in the US. Here is one theologian’s perspective that I HOPE will be the normal reaction from professing Christians to this year’s presidential election.

Since you have been raised up with Christ, keep seeking the things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your mind on the things above, not on the things that are on earth. For you have died and your life is hidden with Christ, in God. Colossians 3:1-3

More Arrogance From The “Scientific” Establishment

Here’s an interesting quote.

“It’s (EXPELLED) going to appeal strongly to the religious, the paranoid, the conspiracy theorists, and the ignorant –– which means they’re going to draw in about 90% of the American market.”
-Atheist blogger and fabulist PZ Myers, on a film he (had) not yet seen.

So, P.Z. Myers, one of the country’s alleged leaders in science, thinks that 90% of you are “religious” (like it’s supposed to be an insult to be religious…), paranoid, a conspiracy theorist, or ignorant.

P.Z. Meyers thinks 90% of us are stupid, and he thinks he is smarter than 90% of you.

How very tolerant of him. Certainly the epitome of religious neutrality.

This only illustrates how arrogant the people who have been deciding what is in your child’s science curriculum can be. And he’s not the only one who feels this way. You only have to go to the main page of the NCSE (National Center for Science Education) to see the fervor with which the NCSE not only try to defend their stance on Darwinian evolutionary theory, but how they fairly froth at the mouth to discredit any other position to the point of excluding any debate on the subject. Period. One would think they had actually proven that life had come from nothing and that there was, in fact, no God. This they have not proven – not even close.

Whether they like it or not, the monopoly on scientific commentary is now being opened up to some pretty serious competition (although they would beg to differ), which in my opinion only causes quality to go up. It will perhaps open up areas of research that have been cut off due to the prejudicial scientific funding process and rules, and it will force scientists who manipulate data to fit their philosophical (humanistic) worldview to be more honest in their assessments and perhaps make their headlines less propagandistic in nature.

The “scientific bigwigs” must learn that just because they keep repeating the same thing over and over again, it doesn’t make it true.

The Great and Powerful Evolutionists – Expelled, The Movie.

By The Reformed Faith Weblog Administrator

While many detractors believe this movie is an attempt to prove Intelligent Design, in reality it is mainly about academic freedom and the monopoly that humanist/evolutionist philosophers have had for so many years and will do anything to maintain. I mean, if you were getting (all the billions of dollars in) scientific grant money given out every year to research facilities and that money was gotten with the assumption you must continue maintaining that Darwinian Evolution is the only way life could have “evolved” on earth (or else look like a theorist – GASP! The Horror!), wouldn’t you defend your job, even if it meant lying or trying to “scientifically discredit” a film that threatened your monopoly before the film was ever even released into the theater?

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the last few years… (how long has it been since they’ve “proven beyond a shadow of a doubt” that Richard Dawkins uncle was actually a monkey?)… the state of our culture is reflective of the humanistic belief that morals are an invention of man, and not instituted by a sovereign and almighty God… and so everyone does what is right in their own eyes.

Ben Stein obviously is a firm believer that our schools system should be teaching children HOW to think instead of WHAT to think. In Expelled, Ben simply pulls back the curtain to show the world that the wizard is simply a desperate old codger who stands to lose the satisfaction of having a fearful and trembling public stand in awe of him – the public that he has been duping for so many years as he shouts imperiously, “I AM THE GREAT AND POWERFUL OZ!”

I submit that the “first cause” of the demise of the evolutionary monopoly is… this great and powerful film. Way to go, Ben!

Related articles and links of interest:

Expelled The Movie Comes Out Friday, April 18th, 2008!

Expelled, The Playground – View Trailers and other fascinating phenomena.

R.C. Sproul Interviews Ben Stein

‘Expelled’ Producers Deny Deceiving Scientists to Appear in Film

Expelled – No Intelligence Allowed… Watch the NEW Super Trailer

If this doesn’t intrigue you to go see Ben Stein’s new movie, Expelled – No Intelligence Allowed, out this Friday, April 18th, I don’t know what will… the new (and very funny) super trailer is available to watch HERE AT THE EXPELLED PLAYGROUND. Be sure to check out the other great features… I especially love the Darwinian Sock Hop…

Expell Those Myths About “Expelled – No Intelligence Allowed”

Before it has even been released into theaters, gossip and myths abound about the new (and soon to be blockbuster) film Expelled – No Intelligence Allowed. This is understandable, since it truly takes on the monopolistic and unyieldingly closed-minded Darwinian evolutionist camp to task, exposing their true agenda… saving their own hind parts.

One of my previous posts, Expelled – No Intelligence Allowed – Supertrailer, received a couple of comments from someone posing (I think) as an expert on the subject. These guys must be really SCOURING the internet to try and refute the films findings and make people lose interest in the film before the fact, but they appear to use very few of those… facts, I mean. The furor within this scientific sect and the hostility they have shown toward this film is just one more incident in a long list of incidents surrounding their attempt to protect their status quo… It only exposes and magnifies their desperation in my humble estimation.

Check out this excerpt from a recent article from Breakpoint, Chuck Colson’s web ministry.

Myths about Expelled
Don’t Believe Everything You Hear
By Chuck Colson
April 11, 2008

If you have heard of the new documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, opening April 18, chances are you have heard all kinds of distortions and myths about it. So let me set the record straight about some of the most common myths.

Myth #1: Darwinists interviewed for this film were tricked into participating.

Not so…

Feel free to go over there and read the rest of the article and be sure to check out the references and their links at the bottom of the article yourself. Go ahead… I’ll wait.

Other Reformed Faith Posts of Note on this subject:
Atheism’s Aggressive Political Agenda
The Threat of Creation

R.C. Sproul Interviews Ben Stein about “Expelled”: Is Free Speech Dead In Science Class?

Freedom of Speech implies freedom of inquiry… academic freedom has been enjoyed since the foundation of this nation. This is the basis of our whole education system, isn’t it?

Ben Stein poses that this phenomenon no longer exists in the American scientific community… hear this great conversation between theologian R.C. Sproul (Ligonier Ministries) and actor/commentator Ben Stein here:

R.C. Sproul Interviews Ben Stein

Is free speech taking it’s last breaths? Stay tuned… Or, you can read this related article:
Atheism’s Agressive Political Agenda

Be sure to visit the Reformed Faith Weblog Home Page for devotionals, news and commentary.

Dawkins Crashes Screening of “Expelled”… Eyewitness report!

In an interesting turn of events, Richard Dawkins was reportedly a screening-crasher at a recent screening of Expelled – No Intelligence Allowed. You can read the post here: Dawkins Crashes Screening of “Expelled”… Eyewitness report!

So, is it really true that every party needs a pooper?

Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed – Supertrailer

The always irrepressible Ben Stein takes on the scientific super-establishment in the soon-to-be-released documentary style movie slated to release in theaters – ironically at the end of the school year.

The firmly ensconced ruling philosophy of humanism (disguised as “science”) has, until now, been like an imposing, impenetrable wall. Launch any weapon at it, and the weapon would fall, useless and clattering before the formidable structure.

And then along comes Ben Stein.

With his usual rapier wit, Mr. Stein peels away the layers of power to reveal that what lies below is not a reasoned, scientific body of intellectual scientists, but rather a bunch of philosophers posing as such. Expelled – No Intelligence Allowed deftly exposes the true agenda of the anti-achademic-freedom camp that direct “science education” from on high.

You can watch the supertrailer here:
“Expelled – No Intelligence Allowed”

Atheism’s Aggressive Political Agenda (Related Article)

Be sure to visit the Reformed Faith Weblog Home Page for devotionals, news and commentary.

Before You Give That “Gift of Reading” to Your Christian Child… “His Dark Materials” Blatant Satanic Agenda

A Little Note From The Reformed Faith Weblog:
Before I get a bunch of comments on how wrong I am (or how right I am, for that matter…) please be advised that I did not write this! I’m just reposting it for your information. Also be advised that I, the administrator, agree with every word of the article. So, on that note, here it is…

Satanism for Young Readers: A Review of His Dark Materials

by Lee Duigon
Posted on December 21,
2007 FAITH FOR ALL OF LIFE (The Chalcedon Foundation Report)

Books in the trilogy:

—The Golden Compass (1995)
—The Subtle Knife (1997)
—The Amber Spyglass (2000)
If you find that you inadvertently become a satanist, you can write to the publisher and get your money back. —Philip Pullman[1]

Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read. —Publisher’s Disclaimer

Showered with awards on both sides of the Atlantic; promoted enthusiastically within the public schools; hailed as the greatest children’s entertainment since Harry Potter first bestrode a broomstick; converted into a major Hollywood movie just in time for Christmas: you’ve got to admit Mr. Pullman’s trilogy suddenly has a lot going for it.

But before you run out and buy His Dark Materials as a Christmas present for your twelve-year-old, there’s something important you should know about it.

Philip Pullman has been anything but bashful about his atheism. He proudly proclaims it whenever he spots a microphone.

The message of his books, however, is not atheism.

It’s satanism.

We’re not talking about pop-culture satanism here, a bunch of dolts in black robes dancing around a pentagram. This is real satanism.

“In his [Satan’s] hostility to God,” R. J. Rushdoony writes, “he believes that the creature should have the same powers [as God] by right. Satan believes in creaturely and human rights. His goal therefore is to push man into rebellion to test his theory in the hopes that man, as civilization develops, will triumph.”[2] This is what satanism is about: the tempter’s seduction of man by offering him equality with, or even superiority to, God.

This is what Philip Pullman is serving up to children. This is not the kind of charge you can just laugh off in a flip comment to an interviewer. Nor can the publisher get out from under it by making a disclaimer.

Let’s get down to business. We have prepared an eighteen-count indictment of Pullman on the charge of promoting satanism. Each count is a satanist proposition advanced by Pullman in his trilogy.

The first six counts charge Pullman with purposely and maliciously misrepresenting the work of God.

1. “Truth” exists independently of God, and man can know truth without God, even in spite of God.

In all three books, the girl protagonist, Lyra, resorts to a “golden compass,” a fantastic trinket called an “alethiometer,” which infallibly tells “the truth” to anyone skilled enough to read it. The alethiometer is a man-made object and is obviously a symbol of man’s science. And we all know “science” reliably tells the truth all the time, don’t we? Until, of course, someone else’s science comes along and proves that our science is all wet. The junkyard of history is littered with discarded “science” like phrenology, eugenics, the steady state theory of the universe, and whatnot (not to mention outright scientific frauds, like Piltdown Man). By teaching us that “truth” changes with time and new discoveries, Satan is really teaching us that there is no truth at all—only a temporary, man-made consensus.

2. “Consciousness” exists apart from God.

Another man-made object, the “subtle knife” introduced in the second book, has “intentions” and a consciousness of its own. Pullman makes it sound “scientific,” but it’s just old-fashioned idolatry—a satanist message that man, being equal to God, can create life as God does.

3. God did not create us; mysterious “shadow particles” did (Knife, p. 211).

Depending on which of Pullman’s characters is speaking, “shadows” or “Dust” or “dark matter,” alive and conscious in its own right, is responsible for human consciousness. God has nothing to do with it.

4. This “Dust” intervened in human evolution, as “vengeance” against the “tyranny” of God.

Here Pullman exalts Satan and denounces God as a tyrant. Satan has been teaching this for thousands of years. Philip Pullman is only his mouthpiece.

5. Therefore life itself is self-created, without God.

Pullman says this flat out in The Amber Spyglass (p. 28).

6. Not God, but “some lucky chance” produced the vertebrates (Spyglass, p. 390).

You would have to be lucky indeed to start out with a cosmos-full of random, inanimate molecules and wind up with tree shrews, humpback whales, and Shakespeare. The whole satanist idea here is to deny God’s work as the Creator. Some call these notions “Darwinism” or just plain “science,” but they are satanist ideas.

The next four counts of the indictment charge Pullman with blaspheming against the character of God.

7. God can be killed.

The characters’ intention to do this is baldly stated in The Subtle Knife (p. 211), and the boy and girl heroes, Will and Lyra, actually do it in the climax of The Amber Spyglass. Certainly a god who can be killed is not the God we know from Scripture.

8. God is a liar (Spyglass, p. 28).

He lied about being the Creator; He lied about being the Savior of mankind: He has lied about everything, all along. Never mind that Scripture proclaims that “God is not a man, that he should lie” (Num. 23:19). For Pullman, all of Scripture is a lie; and that’s satanism. As Rushdoony writes, “[T]he tempter offers to man an esoteric knowledge of good and evil, one attainable only by rebellion against God. Satan presents God as a liar … and himself as the bearer of suppressed truth.”[3] That’s Pullman in a nutshell.

9. God has a beginning (Spyglass, p. 187).

The Bible proclaims throughout that God is the same from everlasting to everlasting; that the heavens and the earth themselves “shall wax old as a garment” (Isa. 50:9) and pass away, while God remains unchanged. Again, Pullman misrepresents the nature of God.

10. In The Amber Spyglass, Pullman shows his young readers a God who has aged, grown weak and senile: He is a picture of “terrifying decrepitude” (p. 354), a “poor thing! … Demented and powerless” (p. 366).

As soon as the children cut him out of his crystalline life-support system, this poor excuse for a god simply dies, dissolves into atoms blowing in the wind.

Is this what you want your children to learn about God?

Pullman also presents a satanist version of the nature of man.

11. Throughout the trilogy, Pullman tells us that the act of disobedience to God gave man his soul.

This is the original satanic message, first spoken in Genesis 3:5—eat the forbidden fruit, Satan tells Eve, “and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.”

Rushdoony comments, “[T]o know here means to establish or determine. Instead of an absolute and eternal moral law, all reality would be subject to the redefinition given it by man.”[4]

For Pullman, “Dust” or “dark matter,” the stuff of life and consciousness itself, which is in the universe for no reason at all, is also Original Sin; and without it, humans are no better than zombies.

12. “Natural impulses” are good. They must be, because the church, which in Pullman’s world is evil, has always “tried to suppress and control every natural impulse” (Knife, p. 44).

Perhaps Mr. Pullman ought to visit a prison and talk to the inmates about some of the natural impulses that landed them there. Ivory tower types (Pullman is an Oxford don) can be incredibly naive about these things.

13. Satan’s angels who rebelled against God are the original “followers of wisdom,” and human beings should imitate them (Spyglass, p. 429). The satanists in Rosemary’s Baby could hardly have said it better.

Pullman has a satanist view of the church, too. He is truly an uncircumcised Philistine who defies the armies of the living God (1 Sam. 17:26).

14. Every single clergyman or “Christian” in this trilogy is described as 100 percent evil, 100 percent of the time. I doubt this can be truly said of any human institution in the real world, no matter how wicked or corrupt; but when you’re writing fantasy, you can stack the deck as you please. It doesn’t have to make sense.

Pullman pours invective on the church—which for him is cruel, ruthless, intellectually dishonest, abducts and tortures children, employs assassins, is up to its elbows in dirty money, and willing to baptize animals (Compass, p. 299). Clergymen and church officers are “insane” and “want to die” (Knife, p. 113), “a body of men with a feverish obsession with sexuality” (Spyglass, p. 292), they practice voodoo (Spyglass, p. 298)—I’ll bet they don’t even remember to recycle.

15. Pullman is not just an atheist fathead inveighing against all theism in general. Consider this quote from Spyglass, page 393:

“I thought physics could be done to the glory of God, till I saw there wasn’t any God at all and that physics was more interesting anyway. The Christian religion is a very powerful and convincing mistake, that’s all.”

Can you imagine what kind of hot water he’d be in if he said Islam was a mistake? Or feminism, gay rights, or global warming? But if you single out Christianity for disrespect, the American Library Association and all the other award-givers will beat a path to your door.

16. As a substitute for communion with the living God, Pullman offers “love,” by which he means sex. After one of his characters first experiences sex, she says, “I stopped believing there was a power of good and a power of evil that were outside of us” (Spyglass, p. 398). There we are, being our own gods again.

Satan always tries to distract us with the fleeting pleasures of this world: after all, he says, that’s all there is. Pullman’s wholehearted agreement with this proposition is glaringly evident throughout the trilogy.

17. Pullman states that there are three parts of human nature, “spirit and soul and body … But the best part is the body” (Spyglass, p. 392). This same body, so susceptible to disease and injury and aging, foredoomed to die—that’s the best part.

No faithful Christian would deny that the human body, created by God, is important, valuable, and good. To say otherwise is neoplatonic dualism. We believe in the resurrection of the body, as stated in the Apostles’Creed.

By insisting that the body is “the best part” of us, Pullman is trying to convince us to concentrate on temporal and transitory things: to worship not the Creator, but the creature.

Finally, while we believe in the resurrection of the body, Pullman believes in its total and irreversible dissolution.

As always, wherever we find humanism—which is merely one of the synonyms for satanism—we find a morbid mania for death.

18. There is no afterlife in Pullman’s world. Yes, there is a “prison camp” of a parallel universe to which all the dead have been condemned (because Pullman’s God is unjust and cruel). It’s part of the children’s quest in The Amber Spyglass to go there and set the dead free to find their true destination—“oblivion” (p. 286). Once released from this rather nasty place, the dead will “become part of everything” (p. 286): they will be reduced to disconnected atoms floating randomly about the universe.

So God lied to us about salvation, too. And just as it always is in the humanist scheme of things, the payoff for each and every one of us, whether we’ve done good or evil, whether we’ve enjoyed our full share of the pleasures of this world or been unfairly done out of them by someone else’s wickedness, is death. Each and every one of us gets exactly the same reward—nothing.

That’s why, for Pullman and his kind, we have to do everything in our power to get all we can while we’re still alive. Whether it’s a soviet workers’ paradise, a world government run by the United Nations or a scientific elite, or Pullman’s own “Republic of Heaven,” we always wind up turning to an all-powerful worldly state that promises to make this vale of tears a paradise.

And that’s satanism.

It were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he cast into the sea, than that he should offend one of these little ones. Luke 17:2

This stuff is too bitter to be taken straight, especially by children. So Pullman sugarcoats his poison; and because he is a skilled literary artist, he does it very well.

It’s easy to fall under the spell of Pullman’s writing. He knows how to keep the story moving and make the reader eager to see what happens next. These are marketed as children’s books, but Pullman doesn’t write down to a child’s level. When he wants to make you feel for a character, he can do it—whether you’re twelve years old or sixty-two.

Artistically, His Dark Materials is miles and miles ahead of the Harry Potter books. Pullman is simply a much better writer than J. K. Rowling.

But that only makes it worse. St. Paul warns us (2 Cor. 11:14–15) that “Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light,” and his ministers into ministers of righteousness. Pullman’s art is quite simply to make the evil appear to be good, and the good to seem evil.

God gave Mr. Pullman the gift of literary talent; and Pullman has chosen to use it in the service of the devil, with children as his target audience.

Besides which, he cheats.

Let us admit it is not possible to write any fiction, especially fantasy, without cheating. The world conjured up by the writer’s imagination is not real. No novelist can plead innocent to the charge of stacking the deck in his imaginary world to make events fall out as he wishes. Hercule Poirot will always be more successful at solving mysterious crimes than any real-world detective.

But Pullman’s cheating is in the service of a religious agenda. (Yes, atheism is a species of religion, albeit a perverted one.) In his imaginary world, atheism has no downside. His science can give you a machine that always tells the truth, and everyone has an externalized soul—a “daemon” in the form of a lovable talking animal: so no one ever really has to feel lonely or unloved because his true-blue, ever-loving daemon is always there for him.

Maybe in the real world we could get by without God, if only we had cuddly talking daemons who loved us unconditionally, and science that could truly do the things it always promises to do: abolish disease, poverty, war, etc., as well as moral and factual uncertainty. By providing such amenities for the inhabitants of his creation, Pullman presents a world in which the rejection of God makes people happy. Satan always needs to resort to fantasy to do this.

Which lands us right back on square one, with Satan promising Adam and Eve that “ye shall be as gods” if only they disobey the real God. Rebellion against God will work, if only you give it a chance.

Pullman also cheats by borrowing themes and images from the Bible, John Milton, C. S. Lewis, and J. R. R. Tolkien and twisting them to serve his purpose. So we have a “city in the aurora” aping St. John’s vision in Revelation of the New Jerusalem descending from heaven (Compass, p. 331), angels kneeling in adoration of Lyra (Knife, p. 244), Lyra’s father and mother wrestling with an angel, like Jacob (Spyglass, p. 363), and Will and Lyra reenacting Adam and Eve eating the forbidden fruit (Spyglass, p. 416). By way of warning to parents, the two children then go on to have sex together.

The whole climax of The Amber Spyglass, page after page of it, shamelessly mimics the climax of Tolkien’s Return of the King: Will and Lyra (=Frodo and Sam) toiling through the darkness toward their apocalyptic goal, while Lord Asriel (=Aragorn) leads his armies in a desperate, last-ditch battle against the overwhelming forces of God (=Sauron). We cannot say whether this much borrowing is done on purpose, to mock Christian writers, or just because Pullman’s own atheistic worldview cannot generate many ideas of its own.

Finally, Pullman has his characters recite bits of Scripture; but he tampers with the text to put his own spin on it. Some Biblically-challenged readers might be gulled into thinking these parodies are the real thing.

We’ll say nothing here about the Golden Compass movie, which we have not seen. But parents need to know that Philip Pullman’s books, satanism and all, are being energetically promoted to children in the public schools.

Scholastic Books makes them available at school book fairs, but they are also for sale every day via The Scholastic Store on the Internet,[5] along with study guides, lesson plans and school activities, and an essay contest for students in grades 8–12.[6]

As bad as the public schools already are, this is a way to make them worse. Random House’s “right to read” sounds more like a euphemism for spoon-feeding the ABCs of satanism to a captive audience in a classroom.

Are we making too much of this? Is there really any danger that children who would otherwise grow up to be Christians will be deflected into atheism by reading Pullman’s fantasies? After all, “it’s just a story, isn’t it?”

Sure, and Desperate Housewives is just a television show, and you should let your children watch it. While you’re at it, let your twelve-year-old daughter watch Girls Gone Wild, and let your twelve-year-old son watch dogfights.

We remember how upset the humanist crowd got, two years ago, when Florida Governor Jeb Bush tried to get C. S. Lewis’ Narnia books into his state’s public schools.[7] Their objection was that Lewis’ fantasy stories are a Christian allegory. The Huffington Post called the governor’s suggestion “another faith-based initiative.”

Well, what is the Pullman push, if not a faith-based initiative on the part of atheists? It goes along with “comprehensive sex education,” “social justice education,” and the rest as part of a ruthless program of humanist reconstruction of society. This is to be accomplished primarily in the public schools.

We take it as a given that the whole public education enterprise is dedicated to replacing children’s Christian faith with faith in statist, secular humanism. John Dewey called it “democracy,” but what he really meant was the elevation of man’s law over God’s. The addition of His Dark Materials to the curriculum adds another weapon to the schools’ anti-Christian arsenal.

We cannot conceive of a single reason for a Christian parent to put these books into the hands of a Christian child.

Can you?

—All citations from the novels are from the Laurel Leaf boxed set.

[1] Pullman in an interview with the Washington Post, see http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A23371-2001Feb18?language=printer.

[2] R. J. Rushdoony, Genesis (Vallecito, CA: Ross House Books, 2002), 41.

[3] Rushdoony, Leviticus (Vallecito, CA: Ross House Books, 2005), 306.

[4] Genesis, 33.
[5] See http://store.scholastic.com.

[6] See http://content.scholastic.com/browse/unitplan.jsp?id=284.

[7] See http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-verini/narnia-invades-schools-an_b_11787.html

Lee Duigon is a Christian free-lance writer and contributing editor for the Chalcedon Report. He has been a newspaper editor and reporter and a published novelist.

Atheism’s Aggressive Political Agenda

BY JOEL MCDURMON

Note from Reformed Faith Weblog Administrator: I read this post by Joel McDurmon today and felt it extremely important to post this to the blog asap. You’ll see an “editorial plea” about 2 thirds of the way into the article to repost this quote wherever it can be posted… but I will go one better and just post the whole article. I feel if the quote is not posted in context of it’s background, the weight of what the man said will not come down and bring us to a realization of what kind of mindset, and yes, social agenda, Christians are and will be dealing with. So on that note, here is the post in it’s entirety…

“We don’t care what they say in order to get elected in this religious country. We care about what kind of judges they give us on the Supreme Court . . . I don’t care what kind of verbal obeisance they pay to religion if that’s what it takes to get a person in the White House who will give us church-state separationists on the Supreme Court.” — (Atheist, Edward Tabash, on Democratic Candidates)

From my very first encounter with the writings of the modern atheists I have argued that the movement is not philosophically sophisticated, nor intellectually rigorous, and it was never intended to be. Despite their pretense to a monopoly on “reason” and “honesty,” these guys’ motivation has been a political agenda from day one.

Nowhere have I seen this agenda as brazenly presented as in the recent Convention “Crystal Clear Atheism” 2007, organized by the Atheist Alliance International. The Alliance, which claims as its purpose to “help establish and strengthen the religion-free community,” invited all the big names of atheism to address a crowd of — judging by the videos and audience applause — 200 people max. The convention was a mirror image of similar conferences put on by religious groups, with plenary speakers, nightly movies, a “secular parenting” workshop, advice on how to start local atheist cell-groups, and, believe it or not, even an atheist apologetics workshop entitled, “Snappy Answers to Religious Questions: How to Combat Common Questions Posed to Atheists in Formal and Informal Settings.”

Admittedly, I’m guessing about the small number of attendees, but there was no need to guess about the message these speakers where there to promote. Far from merely a rehearsal of their typical jokes and name-calling, the speakers spilled an overt agenda to insulate American public life from any and all religious influence (as if that is what the First Amendment meant), called for a concentrated effort to establish and solidify the U.S. Supreme Court as a secular and anti-religious tyranny, and appealed for a radical leftist vision of America.

Well, OK, you may think that as one who has an interest in painting these atheists as bad guys that I have exaggerated my description of their party. Not in the least. Hearing this has again confirmed my presentation in Return of the Village Atheist that the current popular atheism is a reincarnated Marxism. Let the reader decide.

Atheism, Socialism, Marxism: the Hope of America?

The link between atheism and tyrannical socialism became very obvious when former Hollywood screen writer and author Matthew Chapman made an overt plea for American to be made into an openly atheistic and socialistic country. I say socialist, but the whole talk sounded openly Marxist to me. Chapman argued that religion won’t die away in America because it still provides so many great things for its people: community, support, help for the needy, etc. If the delusion of superstition were to be taken away, and government institutions were to take over the support roles, then the need for religion would die away too. He put it like this,

“The church takes care of people . . . and how does atheism compete with that? I don’t think it can. I don’t believe atheism actually can ever succeed in isolation; only as a result of a much larger political change.
. . . It’s quite clear that the better a country takes care of its citizens, the less religion there is. . . . I don’t think atheism can succeed in a country as primitive as this one [the U.S.] now is; a country where politicians deride their own profession, sneering at the political process as if it was the problem not the solution, who deride the idea that government should help, protect, and raise up its weaker citizens; where the current government has turned over the delivery of basic needs to religion and made them a matter of charity.”

Get that. We need less religion, less charity, and more government care-taking. Indeed, he argued that, “without gigantic social change, the church will have to remain the only place where ordinary people can go to find community, and equality (albeit under the eye of a very stern god) . . .”

Now if this sounds openly Marxist, it is for good reason: it is a direct repetition of one of Marx’s most famous ideas, that religion is the “opium of the people.” Marx wrote, “The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people, is the demand for their real happiness.” This is the core of the atheist political agenda: religion is a false hope which must be destroyed in order to society to progress. Religion must go, and all the functions of religion must be replaced by non-religious institutions in order to convince people that religion was wrong to begin with. Thus, Marx assessed, “The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.” (Karl Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right)

Now, it seems to me that this is exactly the type of “social change” that Chapman calls for. Build society upon decidedly atheistic institutions, hijack the role of religion in society, and push religious groups to the fringes, then claim victory for atheism. Equally, with anti-capitalist odor, Chapman followed up, “If atheism, if reason is to flourish, it will only do so when people feel protected by a rational system in which they have involvement, and which is run on principles of compassion, not profit.” It is this profit, he argued — the greed and fear allegedly nurtured by the free market — that enables religious hunger to grow also.

Let me translate: for atheism to flourish in the marketplace, we must destroy the marketplace, and bring its role under the direct supervision of atheists.

All of this leads me to the obvious conclusion: big-government socialism is the opiate of atheism.

Chapman was hardly coy about this idea. He literally cursed the idea that “big-government” should be frowned upon, and retorted, “I am for big-government,” and to even my surprise — and having studied them for a while now, I usually am not surprised by the continued antics of the atheist crowd — the audience heartily applauded.

A View of the Atheistic Agenda

The second overt rally cry was given by crusading anti-religion lawyer Edward Tabash. Tabash caught my attention by name at first because I am familiar with his active role as a debater of the existence of God. I have heard a few of his debates, particularly one many years ago in which he did not fair too well under the acumen of Dr. Greg Bahnsen. Nevertheless, Tabash continues, primarily as chair of the activist legal group “Americans United for Separation of Church and State.”

At first Tabash merely called for the atheists to have two objectives:

1) “To secure an America in which the separation of church and state is absolute (in the words of John F. Kennedy), and to make sure that no branch of government is able to treat the believer and non-believer differently”
2) “To promote the atheistic idea to society at large, and use our powerful scientific and philosophical arguments to explain why the supernatural is non-existent.”

Related to these objectives Tabash foresees two possible futures:

1) One where “secular government” secures that “religion will be left as a matter of private conscience to the individual, and not be legislated by government,” or, conversely,
2) one where “by a shift of only one vote on the United States Supreme Court, we will essentially become a theocracy, in which all branches of government will be freed to favor religion collectively over non-belief.”

Tabash’s inability not to editorialize was already showing through. But his real feelings came out much later. For now, let us rehearse quickly what awful things Tabash fears that imminent “theocracy” threatens to take away. What is Tabash afraid such a “freed” government will cause atheists to lose? He gives a list:

1) “We will lose autonomy in every area of our private lives if the Supreme Court in a new decision nullifies government neutrality in matters of religion. We will not just lose the right of abortion for women, we will lose the right to use birth control even for married women . . . we would lose the morning after pill, … [and] all post-fertilization forms of birth control.”

2) America will be plunged into scientific ignorance: citing a “shocking example of the attack on evolution,” Tabash added, “Not only would they bring about oppression here at home in America, the Religious Right is in danger of being able to actually cripple our competitiveness worldwide by destroying rational modern scientific education here at home.”

3) This includes stem-cell research: “we are going to forfeit our leading role in science to those nations who do not have a religious right that hampers the development of this most important aspect of modern biotechnology.”

4) Worst of all is the “overt effort to oppress gays and lesbians.” Referring to a 6-3 Supreme Court decision that decriminalized homosexual behavior to the extent that “no state can punish what two adults do with each other in private,” and lamenting that a more recent ruling reduced that decision to 5-4, Tabash gave the awful news : “Justice Scalia very chillingly said that the people of a state should be able to use their sense of tradition to criminalize all sexual behavior they regard as deviant.” (Imagine that. States actually determining their own laws without the Supreme Court forcing them! Why, it sounds almost like the Tenth Amendment.) Tabash will have none of that: “We don’t want this man to have a majority on the United States Supreme Court.”

5) Further, “We will lose modern sex education.”

6) “End of life issues” (read: euthanasia)

7) Further, tax money to “faith-based initiatives.” Eddie expounds on this one: “It is not the business of the President of the United States to appropriate billions of dollars of tax money to fund charitable programs through religious institutions, when it should be secular government that provides social welfare services to the people.”

So, in short, this is what Tabash fears his atheistic community will lose: abortion, post-fertilization contraceptives, embryonic stem-cell research, homosexuality, sex education, euthanasia, government socialism, and tax money. Condensing these into their fundamental concerns, Tabash fears the loss of atheistic powers to define and arbitrate life, family, and wealth.

In the face of imminent danger, how can atheists preserve these great delights of free society? Tabash advises: “This is what we must do. We must make sure that the next president of the United States supports church-state separation.” Further,

“Every single time there is a vacancy on the United States Supreme Court, we must deluge our Unites States senators with as many letters as we possibly can, and phone calls, to make sure that they do not pass through a religious right-winger,” and, “we must vigorously oppose all United States Senate nominees who indicate a willingness to support the confirmation of religious right-wing judges.”

The agenda was becoming more clear. Rather than peaceful, freedom-loving people who simply have a “lack of belief in God,” the atheist conference courted and promoted a radical political agenda: to gain control of political power in strategic places.

Lying to Win

Then Tabash got really scary. It was not until the question and answer session when he revealed his most ominous side; perhaps due to the more informal nature of the format, he spoke as unguardedly as any liberal I’ve heard. One questioner asked that due to the abundance of religious talk coming from not just Republican (which is to be expected) but Democratic candidates as well, whether atheists should be concerned. Tabash responded with this gem:

“We don’t care what they say in order to get elected in this religious country. We care about what kind of judges they give us on the Supreme Court, because only the Supreme Court determines if we’ll have secular government.” So, he expanded, “Don’t look to the rhetoric they need to pander to, remember what country they’re running in. I don’t care what kind of verbal obeisance they pay to religion if that’s what it takes to get a person in the White House who will give us church-state separationists on the Supreme Court.”

[Editorial plea: Please mark the preceding quote down, copy it to every website you can imagine, email it to everyone you know, mail it to those who have no email. Distribute!]

Tabash’s endorsement of blatant dishonesty was unsettling even for an atheist audience. One questioner pushed the issue, arguing that we should hold the candidates’ “feet to the fire” for what they say as well as do. Tabash would not budge: “When it comes to Democratic presidential candidates, they all will give us the right judges on the Court, courts [emphasizing the plural, and thus the entire federal court system] . . . so let’s not make the fire too hot.”

Tabash could not get off the issue. When another questioner asked for his comments on how to stop the “the proliferation of church-based law schools,” like Regent and Liberty, and their “influx into government legal roles,” Tabash continued his campaign: “The only way to do that is to have a president who disfavors the Religious Right and will not be accepting those people into White House positions.”

Here is a good point to note the hypocrisy in our crusader’s agenda. Aside from his open endorsement of lying when pragmatic for his cause, in his opening “objective,” he claimed to fight “to make sure that no branch of government is able to treat the believer and non-believer differently.” By the end of his talk, however, his agenda was noticeably opposite. Apparently, for him, it’s OK to reverse the prejudice and disfavor the Religious Right and bar them from White House positions.

When it seemed as if his rhetoric could sink no lower, Tabash closed his atheistic spin with this completely debasing comment: “We [atheists], the true First-Amendment patriots, cannot allow these vicious fanatics to take over our country.” He made no attempt to hide the atheistic political agenda, “Let us make saving the United States of America from the Religious Right our absolute number one priority.”

Conclusion

What have our atheists told us in just this one brief conference? Far from docile citizens hoping to live their lives quietly in private peace, these atheistic leaders have your government, your children, and your money in their sights, and they are serious about things. Society can only progress when religion is eradicated from society (Chapman) or at least driven to the dark corners of something called “private conscience” (Tabash). In addition, they say, we must fight for atheistic control over the definitions of life, death, family, sex, and taxes.

Worst of all, we have learned that these atheists believe it is acceptable for a presidential candidate to consciously deceive religious people in order to gain votes, and then work to promote a secular atheistic society in opposition to those who voted them in. As we have know all along, and now have Tabash’s own words, an atheistic society must be built on the foundations of deception and political strong-arming. Apparently, the only thing stronger than a Christian faith is the atheist’s faith in the dishonesty of Democratic candidates. Blessed be the lie than binds!

And we, Christians, we are the ones they call vicious fanatics.

Joel McDurmon is the author of Return of the Village Atheist
He is a graduate of Reformed Episcopal Theological Seminary, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and an adjunct speaker, writer, and researcher for American Vision.