The Worldview that Shaped Western Civilization
Emily: Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson here with Greg Uttinger and Rachel Voytek. We are continuing our discussion of the ten commandments and their influence on Western society.
Last time we covered the first five, so we’ll pick up with #6. “Let’s nix killing one another.” Did you learn that song as a child?
Greg: Never heard of it till this second. Nix? Really?
Emily: “Let’s nix,” because it rhymes with six. The options are limited. “Thou shalt not murder” is the actual text.
Greg: “Thou shall do no murder,” as our Lord interpreted it. The Hebrew word has the idea of don’t slaughter things that can be slaughtered, so murder would be closer than simply the idea of not killing. Don’t do the kind of killing you’re not supposed to do, which is sort of teleological.
But before we proceed with that, this might be the obvious place to say this is about history. Why are we doing this? I mean really, thou shalt not kill? Everybody knows that one. All cultures observe that.
Emily: They don’t.
Rachel: Negatory.
Emily: Negatory, Red Ryder.
Greg: And so with the others – don’t steal, don’t commit adultery, don’t bear false witness.
Emily: Everybody knows that now because of the ten commandments way back at the beginning of Western civilization.
Greg: The thing is that even theologians today, and some of them claiming to be Reformed, will tell us that these things are written in the human conscience. And although the conscience might be a little shabby, be a little imprecise, in general basically all men know these things. I mean this is natural law. We know we should not kill other people. We know we shouldn’t take other people’s property or break up their marriages, that we should tell the truth and such.
Within some circles it’s almost become a shibboleth of how can you insist upon bringing the Bible out into the civil sphere when everybody knows these things? They may not do them, but everybody knows that the things the Bible forbids here are wrong.
Aside from negatory and such, do you have specific examples of where people, cultures, societies, or institutions in our day or in the last 1,000 years have rejected these basic commandments in favor of some other approach to life and living?
Emily: Yes. This is anecdotal and someone might argue that this is an isolated incident. I would argue that it’s not. I was at a swing dance conference with a friend and somebody else that we knew, and we were all going to lunch, and this guy just drops into conversation very casually, “Well, I believe in polyamory.” We were like, “What? You just drop that into conversation?” So no, it’s not taken for granted that people believe in being faithful to a spouse. It is not taken for granted today, I can tell you that.
Greg: I think divorce rates might bear you out, as might the regular incomes of professional prostitutes and the soaring rates of pornography in the United States and abroad. No, this is not something we take for granted anymore. But surely everyone knows you shouldn’t kill people. Thoughts?
Rachel: No.
Emily: There are lots of people who think it’s okay to kill children before they’re born.
Rachel: I have been recently working through a book called Love Thy Body by Nancy Pearcey. She spends a lot of time on the abortion issue specifically, with the argument of, “Well, you’re not allowed to kill a person, but people have to qualify to be people. So if they don’t qualify by my standard…”
They’ve gone past, “Okay, we realize that biology actually does tell us that life begins at conception, but life is not the defining thing. You have to be a person and have certain characteristics, so we can kill up to a certain point.” And of course everybody has a different definition of life and value and all of those things.
On the other end you also see this in the euthanasia discussions that people don’t have enough quality of life. Life is not what they want; therefore, they can kill themselves.
Greg: Or someone can do it for them.
Rachel: Right. I’ve had to read so many books and see so many movies where they’re basically manipulating you to feel bad for the person who has committed these sins, because their circumstances push them into it or they had a loveless marriage or they had a really horrible spouse that abused them. Therefore, they were okay to kill that person or to cheat on that person or steal from that person.
All of these things become justified because we say, “Well, the circumstances allow it, or my feelings or my logic even can prove why this is beneficial.” And since both our feelings and our logic are sinful, you can always prove sin right if you let them go without the Bible.
Emily: This is widespread in Western countries. I think it was Iceland where they claimed to have eliminated Down Syndrome, when in fact they had just killed all the people with Down Syndrome.
Rachel: Yes, they basically aborted all of them so they have none. I think it’s Denmark, but it’s one of those socialized medicine places.
Greg: And that’s the thing. Is it not loving to put these children out of their misery before they go through a whole life being dependent, needy, not enjoying the quality of life the rest of us do? And how about the burden they are on society and the poor people who have to take care of them? They didn’t bargain for this when they set out to have children. They were looking forward to something wonderful and look what they got, and so on.
Rachel: This reminds me somewhat tangentially of Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal.” He says to Parliament, “You guys aren’t willing to do any of the basic things to take care of the poor in Ireland, so let’s make them profitable. We can turn them into baby-making machines and we can sell the babies as meat and as gloves and all this, because clearly that would make them more useful. You don’t think they have any value, so let’s make them valuable.” Of course he’s being very satirical, but it’s that same idea that anything horrible can be made useful and justified.
Emily: It’s such a lie that a life that contains pain or hardship or sorrow is therefore not worth living.
Rachel: I think Jesus was called a man of sorrows, and that was actually the whole backdrop for his salvation for us, that he went through all the suffering and it was needful that he do that.
Greg: Turning now back to the ten commandments, we look at things that people may say at first glance, “Well yeah, everybody knows that. Everybody does that. Everybody believes that.” But when you start pressing, as you ladies have just done, “You shall do no murder,” remember the lawyer who said, “Who is my neighbor?” Here maybe the question is, “And what is a life? Who are the people we should not kill? What makes them non-killable? What makes them people? What makes them truly a person as opposed to simply some kind of animal life form?”
With so many of these things there are, “But what if?” as you said. “Till death do we part – that means I can arrange your death, I suppose. Wouldn’t it be nicer though if we just went our separate ways? I can be faithful to you and still have a girlfriend and visit prostitutes and so on. This is just how I get my kicks in marriage. You should be happy and submit to this brutal kind of treatment.”
And on stealing, no, you should not take my stuff, but how about if you vote someone into office and they move the government to confiscate my money and spend it on you. Is that okay? Where are the limits of this?
Thomas Sowell wrote a wonderful book about worldviews, about vision. He’s defending what we would think of as conservatism more or less over against the liberalism of Romanticism and the French Revolution. It was interesting when he got to the point of, “But of course there are some places where the individual does have to give up his property rights for the good of the society.” What?
Emily: Where is the qualitative difference?
Rachel: And who decides what’s good for society?
Greg: Yes, once you’ve got there, there’s a problem.
I was teaching Sunday School one morning and was talking about how the state does not have the right to take your stuff and spend or use it for the communal good unless the Bible clearly grants that as an option. And one gentleman, who should know a whole lot better – I was rather stunned that this particular man raised this objection, and I just sort of let it pass, not wanting to attack him in front of the congregation – but he basically said, “Well, but that certainly doesn’t apply…” and he gave particular cases where, “Well, here’s this community. It’s just kind of sprung up and grown without any thought, and the water it needs is over there, and the only way to get the water to it is bypassing it through your land, so surely the state can take your land then.”
No.
Emily: We have several objections to such a prospect. Due process, for one.
Greg: Basically I said, “If you can find something in the Bible that supports that, great. I’m not aware of any such thing.” Then he put forth another example, I don’t remember what it was, but it was that kind of thing like, “Isn’t it obvious that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one?” No.
Emily: There’s also the assumption that whatever they’re proposing is the only way, which is something people use all the time to justify bad decisions. “Well, if it’s the only way, if I’m in these dire circumstances…” and often the necessary follow-up is, “Are you really in such dire circumstances?”
Rachel: Or what poor planning sometimes puts you in. If a town sprang up without a source of water, maybe they should have thought of it before they started settling there.
Emily: Or maybe some entrepreneur can show up and find a way to get water to them.
Greg: And if they can’t, you know what? Tough. That still doesn’t mean you get my stuff. You don’t get my property because you picked a rotten place to live. But how do we get there? We look at the basic thing and we say we all agree to this, and little by little we whittle away at the edges. We keep whittling, keep whittling, and keep making exceptions. We keep putting in special circumstances until the thing is, for all practical purposes, gone.
I can’t steal from Wal-Mart unless it’s under $1,000. Then I can walk out the door and they can’t do anything. I can’t steal from my neighbors to finance a new library, but I can get the government to do it. I can’t take my neighbors’ guns away, but I can get the government to make laws forbidding him to have any.
We go down the list of here’s how this area that we perceived as not simply a law, a commandment, but an area of freedom, something valuable that the law protects, and we see it whittle away because there is no true commitment to the principle. There’s a vague awareness that somewhere in here there’s something that at one time a lot of people considered valuable, and I can even see that under certain circumstances it would be valuable, but not when my needs, my perspective, my wants are getting crossed by that. Then it becomes very negotiable. What’s mine is mine. What’s yours is yours until I need it.
And so with each of the commandments. The world does not agree. There is no common law of nations. Deuteronomy tells us that every wickedness, every perversion that the wicked have come up with they have used in the service of their gods. That’s what we’re looking at. We’re looking at a worldview that has shaped Western civilization.
In the second table of the law, as it’s sometimes called, the last five commandments or so, depending on how you want to slice and dice them, it establishes that human life has a value that transcends other sorts of life forms, other needs, other possibilities, other pleasures.
We are simply not to take people’s lives, unless the law somewhere else justifies it. And really the only justifications are immediate self-defense or fighting in a war under the authority of appointed magistrates, or being an executioner under such magistrate. That’s pretty well it.
If there’s not someone in your room in the dark at night who might have a gun, we shouldn’t be killing people. Or you’re a magistrate who’s been appointed to uphold the law. As a private individual, otherwise we’re just not to kill people. It’s really that easy and sometimes that hard, because life gets a lot easier for some people if you can kill other people. I get richer because of inheritance. I’m unburdened because I don’t have to take care of my crippled son. My emotions are not hurt by having to look at this poor deformed baby or this slowly-decaying grandmother. I can just make myself feel lots better simply by killing them. Isn’t happiness what it’s all about?
Rachel: On the flipside, it also requires us to have foresight and thoughtfulness, because we’re also responsible if we are being reckless in some way or leave something unattended and it causes harm or death to another person. So it’s not just that this person is in front of me and they bother me, but it’s also the foresight that there is life around me that is valuable; therefore I should not go 100 mph on the freeway or leave lots of razor blades out in front of my house.
That’s really strange, but I’m just thinking if you’re doing a project and you leave a bunch of rusty nails or things like that. It requires the positive as well of being considerate of the people around you or even in your home. You don’t leave things out that people could be harmed by in some way.
Greg: Yes, the law has a positive as well as a negative aspect. We look at the negatives and there’s in human nature called sin that doesn’t like the “Thou shalt not. Don’t do this. Keep off the grass,” and that kind of thing, but sometimes we forget that there is an implied positive.
All the catechisms and confessions of the Reformation church are full of not only what sins does this forbid, but what duties does this commandment require of you? Thou shalt not kill requires not merely that I don’t go out and murder somebody, it also requires a respect first of all for human life. Yes, for other life after a fashion, but it’s primarily for human life, which as you say means I keep my property safe. I put a fence around my swimming pool. The Old Testament example is I put a railing around my roof so people who are up there won’t fall off of it.
I cover up empty pits. I put a chain around the refrigerator so small children don’t crawl into them and lock themselves up. These are things that are required of me. Yes, I’m to be thoughtful of human life. It’s more than just a negative. It is commanding an attitude toward human life that is absent in the ancient world.
An obvious example in Rome particularly, a father had absolute power of life and death over his children. If he had a deformed child or simply a child he didn’t like for some reason, he could execute the child and there was very little by way of appeal that anybody could do. He was the final law for his family.
Emily: That’s incidentally where the custom of adoption began, in ancient Rome. People were leaving the children that they didn’t want just out to die of exposure, and Christians took them in.
Rachel: We’ve seen that in the modern time. The Chinese didn’t want their daughters, so there have been many more Chinese girls adopted particularly into Christian homes than any boys, because they don’t want them – or they didn’t.
Emily: Now they have a population problem.
Greg: Very predictable.
Rachel: We see it other places too, particularly in Asian cultures that are those shame-based cultures. For example, Japan basically hides all of their disabled people. We have all the ramps and everything, but they refuse to put them out because they don’t let those people go out and be seen.
Greg: Wow. Well, that’s thou shalt not kill.
Thou shalt not commit adultery. Except where the gospel has had strong influence, nobody has taken that one seriously.
Emily: Except in self-interest where the women were expected to be faithful so that they could provide legitimate heirs. Men could do whatever they wanted.
Greg: Yes. We can think here of Greece and Rome again. Greece comes to mind especially, where the man really was free to have sex with whomever he wanted to, and that he might have a mistress or visit a prostitute on a regular basis was taken for granted, but the woman had to be chaste.
Emily: And note the massive inequality in the treatment of men and women in those societies.
Greg: If you bother to look, but the history books continue to praise Greek culture to the skies as the epitome of democracy and liberty and rights and all that. Has anybody actually ever read what the Greeks wrote? Apparently not many.
Rachel: Well, they did give those things to a very small group of people, so they’re there talking about them, but it’s only amongst the elite, those of the polis who you actually hear from. You don’t hear about most of the normal people’s lives.
Greg: But even within the polis the men still did not have to treat their wives with care or respect.
As you said before, the wife has to be faithful because we need a legitimate heir. Why? So that we know who can lead the worship of our dead ancestors, because ancestor worship is at the bottom of all this. Religion does generate and create a system of morality and ethics within any culture, and sometimes it bears something that bears a superficial resemblance, at least at first glance – that’s the superficial part – to Christian ethics.
But look a little bit deeper and say, “But why? Why is this here? Your wife is not to commit adultery because you want to make sure that that boy you’re passing the family on to is a legitimate heir, so that when you’re in your grave he can do the funeral rites to keep on feeding you through eternity.” That’s also why you need to keep that property, and thus thou shalt not steal that property because that’s where your grave is.
Your ultimate priorities generate your ethics. The source of law in any society, as Rushdoony would say, is the god of that society. So Christianity comes along with – and here’s the key – a transcendent God. He is not a God immersed in creation. He is not nature. He is not collective humanity.
Emily: He is not limited to one people group or one location.
Greg: Yes, he is the transcendent Creator of all that exists, and thus he can speak with authority in a catholic sense that crosses all cultural boundaries, all ethnic boundaries, all social strata. When he speaks he has the right to be obeyed because he made it all and he defines what right is and what rights are.
So when he says – moving to the next commandment – “Thou shalt not steal,” it’s all his and he can portion it out and delegate it and ordain stewardship as he pleases, and then hold us each individually accountable, and in fact that’s what he does.
The root of capitalism is “Thou shalt not steal,” because that ordains the right of the individual to own capital, and capital is simply the wealth we use to make more wealth. Tools is the other very technical term for this. And rather than have it directed by the State, because the State is omniscient and playing God, or by some feudal lord or by the vote of the mob of society, the individual has the right under God because of this commandment to have stuff and use it to make more stuff, and to make money and to turn a profit.
The 20th century saw the conflict between Marxism on the one hand and something that was supposed to be capitalism on the other. Where is humanity on this one? You want the State to own the means of capital because you trust these people, because they are people, to take this and do something with it that will benefit all of you, and share equally with all of you, and require very little of you in return?
Reality check. No, that’s not what the State has ever done. That’s not what totalitarian regimes have ever done. “They don’t have to be totalitarian.” Yeah, historically they all are. There’s never been an example where a Marxist state has not been totalitarian.
“But they all got it wrong. If we did it right…”
“You mean if you did it you would be better than everybody else because you mean well?”
Well, guess what, there was a time when they meant well, too – or so they claimed or so they thought. But the simple truth is they’re violating God’s law. God says you have property, you invest it, you work with it, and you will answer one day for how you used it, and no one can take that away from you rightly.
That’s a tremendous foundation for building a society on, because all the other alternatives are not economically productive. They lead to poverty. They lead to economic devastation. They do not make for progress.
Emily: It’s important to note that the reason that they lead to such devastation is because they are contrary to the character of God. Their failure in itself is not an argument against them in an ultimate sense. It’s that, “Look, it fails because you’re trying to run contrary to the way God made us, because of who God is.”
Rachel: Which really goes to all of the commandments. Anytime you transgress them, even if it’s not immediate, you will certainly destroy yourself through it because you are purposely fighting against God.
Greg: And that doesn’t work, which brings us to the next commandment, the ninth. Don’t we all know that truth is better than lying?
Emily: Sometimes lies feel really nice.
Greg: In the book of Revelation in the last few chapters when John, or the Holy Spirit by John, is detailing the sorts of people who go to hell, interestingly enough in both cases in the list liars are prominent, right alongside sorcerers (those who do magic and drugs), homosexuals, idolators, murderers, liars.
Liars? Oh sure, you shouldn’t lie. We know that. We tell our children not to lie, but it’s not that big a… yeah, it is, because the liar is recreating reality, just as the homosexual, just as the drug pusher and user, just as the sorcerer. This is the idolator who remakes God in his image. These are all attempts to alter reality to make it something more comfortable to me so I can live in it peaceably and my conscience won’t be bothered and no one will question my choices. I’ll just be a lot happier.
You mentioned earlier, Rachel, that you can justify these things with your reason and with your emotions, and both are true, but the ends meet. “We’re going to use our reason to justify this.”
“Okay. What is the ultimate reason for taking something the Bible says is really bad and declaring it’s good?”
“Because it will make my life easier and make me feel better about stuff and we’ll all be happier.”
“In other words, it’s about emotions.”
“No, I’m being perfectly rational.”
“And your reason is grounded in your irrational subjectivism that you want to feel happy for reasons you can’t actually quantify or rationalize, but your logic does tell you that to get what you want to feel you have to do these things.”
The other day when we were waiting for the morning service to start, somebody said something that brought up a memory of a short story. Isaac Asimov, the dean of sci-fi short stories in the ‘50s and ‘60s, most people know him as the author first of The Foundation trilogy but then on books on robots, “I, Robot” being the most famous.
Most people probably by now have at least heard of the concept of the three laws of robotics, that a robot must not harm a human being or through an action suffer a human being to be harmed, but given those it must obey any command from any human. I believe that’s the proper order.
In “Liar!” US Robotics accidentally created a telepathic robot. It doesn’t quite know how it did it, and that’s part of the story because it’s unique and if anything were to happen to this robot before they could analyze it, that would be a great economic loss because in theory a telepathic robot has so many advantages. It can just read your mind and know what you want and then go do it, and you don’t lose anything in translation. It’s going to have an exact transcript of what you’re thinking. Isn’t this great?
The problem comes that this particular robot, since it can read the mind, knows what you’re feeling and what you want. And since it cannot permit you to come to harm, it can’t let you know or believe anything that might cause you psychological pain, that would cause you grief.
The head of US Robotics, a woman Susan Calvin, an older woman who’s never shown any kind of feminine streak as that culture would have thought about it, a business woman, tough executive, tough scientist and all that, in her heart of hearts romance was there someplace. She sees a guy who works for the company and develops an interest in him, but no, no, no, no, nothing like that would ever happen.
Then the robot tells her, “Oh, but don’t you know? He is secretly in love with you. I would know this because I can read minds. And he’s planning to reveal this to you, so if you just wait and do this and that it will set things up and it will be wonderful. I wish you a happy life.”
Susan Calvin gets very excited and begins to plan this wonderful life she’s going to have with this guy, but when she actually interacts with the man he seems cold and indifferent like there’s nothing there at all, and suddenly it clicks for her. She goes to the robot and says, “You read my mind, didn’t you?”
“Well, yeah, that’s what I do.”
“And you knew that I had some faint romantic interest in this guy.”
“Well, yeah, it’s kind of obvious.”
“And so you thought you could make me happy by stirring up a love affair?”
“Well, not in so many words, but you know…”
“And then when it wasn’t working you knew that I would be hurt, and your programming will not allow you to let me be hurt through your inaction, so the only way you could save me from being hurt was to lie to me?”
“I can’t answer that. That would probably hurt you.”
Eventually Ms. Calvin has the robot dismantled and the plans destroyed so that no one can ever create another one of these things.
The point behind this short story is what happens if what we tell people is true we tell them only because we think it will make them feel good? And given what we’re seeing here in our somewhat superficial analysis of non-Christian religion and worldviews is they tend to fall back on, “Well, what do you want?”
You may remember in Babylon 5, one of the questions that Shadow asked was, “What do you want?”
“Well, I want power. I want prestige. I want freedom.”
“We can give that to you.”
“You can?” - that grasping after something the heart covets.
And since the non-Christian world has no transcendent God, they necessarily have to find their source of values within an imminent creation, that is they look to something within the created order and they idolize it and say, “That.” And a good deal of the time it’s their feelings, their emotions. “What makes me happy? What makes you happy? What do I think will make the world happy?”
Sometimes that’s a line for “I actually want a lot of power, and I tell you I’m going to make you happy if you’ll give it to me.”
What’s the famous wish? “What’s your first wish?”
“I wish for world peace.”
You know the X Files version of that one? Mulder actually asks the genie, after being very skeptical of this genie he’s come across, “Okay fine, give me world peace,” and she looks at him and says, “It’s done.” And suddenly he realizes that all the noise he was hearing from outside has stopped. He rushes out into the street and he sees the remnants and the leftovers of everybody who had been there just a few minutes before, and they’re all gone.
“Very funny. I should have seen that one coming.”
Later she says, “Look, Christianity, Buddhism, Islam – they’ve been trying to bring peace on earth for 2,000 years. You think I can do it with a lousy wish? I gave you the best I could give.”
On a more realistic scale think of the Green movement. The planet’s been polluted. What’s the easiest solution? Eliminate humanity. We’re a cancer that needs to be destroyed. That will make everybody… wait. You’ll have peace on earth because nobody will be here. Unfortunately, that’s not an X Files humorous episode. That’s a real political agenda by some very scary people.
The Marxist solution is more like, “We will control your economy, your religion, your families, your information sources. We will bring you all down to the same level and that will make everybody happy. That will bring peace on earth, and eventually you won’t need us. You’ll just get used to it.”
Right, the State’s going to wither away in due time – uh-huh.
We promote lies to make ourselves feel good, or we try to make ourselves feel good by saying that our agenda will make everybody feel good, rather than realizing that nothing within the created order has the power to do that.
Emily, the meme on the website a year or so back, the prophets of Baal – do you remember that one?
Emily: You’ll have to remind me.
Greg: I don’t remember what you used for this, but basically the prophets of Baal are calling out to Baal and Baal answers them and says, “You want this and that and this from me? Look, I’m a figment of your imagination. Good luck with that one!” or something to that effect.
Emily: I don’t remember that but it’s a good meme.
Greg: Because that’s ultimately what you end up dealing with. You’re looking at a finite god, a finite reference point, something that cannot and does not command the loyalty of the human race, and you want it to do incredible things that will make you feel good and will make you happy. Sometimes it’s just drugs or another glass of whiskey or some pornography or a moment of rape or you name it, but you’re hoping that you can rewrite reality.
This is why we’re told not to lie to one another, particularly within the body of Christ. We’re members one of another. What happens when a physical human body cannot communicate with its parts properly? What happens if the brain sends a signal and a good part of the body rejects the signal or distorts it into something else? That’s generally something we call epilepsy. It’s not a good thing.
Emily: And even though drugs do that, and all those things that you mentioned in those sort of external forms do that, but telling an untruth physically also does that. Jordan Peterson says you have a physiological sensation when you say something that you know to be untrue. You can feel it disintegrating you because it’s not reality. You can’t deny reality and expect to get away with it.
Rachel: Though if you do it frequently, I think that sensation starts to be dulled because you can show blatantly the facts of this and this, you did this and they will still say, “No, I didn’t. That doesn’t prove anything.” Actually, it does. There is that sense that the more we disobey, the more we devolve away from God and the image of God in us. That is part of what you’re describing, that sense of what it should be.
Greg: The New Testament speaks of having consciences seared, but I’m also being reminded of Romans 1 and I would like to read it as appropriate in this context. Paul writing to the Romans says -
For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold [or hold down or suppress] the truth in unrighteousness because that which may be known of God is manifest in them [that is in human nature; we still bear the image of God] for God hath shewed it unto them [both within themselves and the world round about; the heavens declare the glory of God].
For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead so that they are without excuse, because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful, but became vain in their imaginations [they’re imagining empty, purposeless, stupid stuff and trying to realize it and make it real], their foolish heart was darkened [the place where intelligent thinking and wisdom is supposed to be is foolish and darkened.] Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and four-footed beasts, and creeping things.
So the first step is they can’t tell the difference between God and a dung beetle. Epistemologically that’s a problem, but it goes on. That’s really the worst, but it goes on to things that we find more difficult.
Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonour their own bodies between themselves who changed the truth of God into a lie and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen. [They turned created things into divinities.]
For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections, for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature. [That may be talking about lesbianism or may be talking about prostitution, but the next statement leaves no doubt.] And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet.
So they couldn’t tell the difference between God and a beetle, and now they can’t tell the difference between a man and a woman. Oh wait, that would be our culture, wouldn’t it.
Rachel: And we can’t even say that there are only two genders named there. Things like gender, before that had never been questioned. Those were obvious things we still had managed to hold onto, but we’ve lost even that.
Greg: Growing up in my generation that went before, we knew what homosexuality was. You can go back and look at a movie like the Maltese Falcon and there are little hints that this character and that character are in fact homosexuals, but no one ever says it because it would be impolite in those days to even mention such a thing on the silver screen. Now it’s like, “Oh, me too!”
Rachel: Now movies are looked down upon if they don’t have it. They have to insert it somewhere just because.
Greg: Because otherwise you’re not being loving and kind – inclusive. The text goes on and says –
And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, [they liked to push God epistemologically out of the picture], God gave them over to a reprobate mind…
The word reprobate means a mind void of judgement. Well yeah, they can’t tell the difference between God and say a block of wood. They can’t tell the difference between a man and a woman. They can’t tell the difference between a blob of tissue and a baby. They can’t tell the difference between mercy and murder, between war and peace. Now we can think of 1984 and all its wonderful slogans…war is peace, slavery is freedom, all of those things. They have no standards by which to judge.
…to do those things which are not convenient; being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication…
There’s a long list and I’m not going to read it.
Refocusing now. There’s still one commandment left but let me refocus while we’re here. As historians we are called to make ethical critiques of the societies we look at. Now we may pretend we’re not. There was a time when no matter what your religious background, if you were in the West there were certain things you had to call barbaric, primitive, evil, destructive, or something. You had to acknowledge this society was bad. Now, not so much.
Rachel: Unless it’s a Christian society. That’s the one that it’s acceptable to call those things.
Greg: Yes, you can bash Christianity, but hardly anything else. That again opens up some real problems. What about slavery? Is slavery bad? Bad by whose standards? What do you mean by bad? It economically must have been prosperous for somebody. A lot of people made a lot of money off of it. How about polygamy? A lot of nations have practiced that. How about eliminating children who aren’t going to contribute to the labor pool? Isn’t that better for everybody?
Emily: I’ll play a little bit of devil’s advocate here as a recent history major. Part of it is that it’s very easy to look at something in a society and say “wrong, bad, evil, corrupt.” The job of the historian is to understand, so part of it is how you frame it.
You don’t want to write a whole paper just saying, “This is evil. This is evil. This is evil.” You want to say, “Here are the effects of this evil thing and how it damaged the society.” That’s a perfectly fine historical thing to say, but just to condemn it by a standard that is outside of that society is a little bit more dicey, and I think it’s because of a desire to understand. I don’t think it’s an illegitimate thing, but in history you do want to be sort of rigorous.
Greg: You went to a school where there are still strong traces of Christian morality, and that may be too weak. You went there, I didn’t, but if you look at schools that don’t have that I think you’re being overly generous. I’ve read enough history books to see.
Of course, why do we do history? To understand the story better. If you’re just recounting facts and statistics that’s handmaiden to a story but that’s not the final work of a history writer should do. But a history writer does have to bring a standard from outside the culture; otherwise, you judge it by its own internal standards. By its own internal standards Nazi Germany was perfectly right in executing 6 million Jews.
The scary thing is that 40 years ago everybody that I know would have agreed. Yes, Nazi Germany was wicked. It was the last hold-out, the last thing that we could all agree on. You don’t kill 6 million Jews. Now? “But there were cultural needs we need to understand. It was a unique social moment. It was the collective decision of the culture. It’s the way they had been taught and trained,” and so it goes. “And besides, the Jews aren’t very nice anyway.”
We keep getting this kind of thing because we are not allowed to bring God’s standard to bear, and then what are we left with? Often to this point it’s been, “We’ll judge them by their own standards.” Well, by their own standards they’re fine because they did it in the first place.
Relativism ultimately leads to a very intolerant absolutism. There will be this time when they will say, “Well, you know, it was okay for them at that point,” or “It’s okay for them but I would never do it.” But eventually that gives way to, “This is how we’re going to do things.”
You already pointed this out when you mentioned Christianity. “Christianity is wrong. Christianity is evil. Christianity criticizes homosexuality, lesbianism, transgenderism, all of that. It is not accepting. It violates a woman’s right to make choices over her own body. It commands us to execute people. It insists on private property even when people are poor. It is just horrible.”
Where are these standards coming from? Don’t ask that question. You won’t get an answer because it’s assumed that somewhere in here by emotional appeal we’ve all agreed that those things are bad. In fact, the ten commandments are evil and we now have a new standard that we’re about to impose on you. It will happen. We move from relativism to total control because while we’re all busy saying it doesn’t matter and you can do whatever you want, someone is collecting guns and they will use them and we will have no appeal.
We cannot say, “But wait, freedom! Rights! Morality!” and they will say, “Where were you when you lost that discussion? Those are not real. What’s real is we know what’s best. We have the guns and you’re now going to do what you’re told, and we will bring peace to earth or something close enough that you don’t have to worry about it anymore.”
The writing of history books can very easily be the propaganda for a new world order that is not Christian, that is anti-Christian. So certainly historians need to do the hard work of figuring out the why’s and wherefore’s, but we do need to be careful that in the process we don’t get caught up in so trying to understand the patient that we forget to point out the remedy.
Emily: We have just a few minutes for the last commandment.
Greg: “Thou shalt not covet.” You know what that says? It says the human heart does some bad things. Wow! There goes Romanticism in a burst of fire as it crashes and burns. The basic assumption of all humanistic religion is that man is basically good and is corrupted by his socioeconomic environment or social environment or whatever.
The Bible says, “You know what? That stuff in your heart, that’s bad. You fundamentally at heart are a sinner. Every imagination of the thoughts of your heart is only evil continually. All your righteousness ais as filthy rags. The things that you want are bad things and you need to repent of them.”
As Saint Paul found before he became Saint Paul, when he was still Saul of Tarsus, we’re left with, “The law came. The law revived and I died. The commandment that was ordained to life I found to be unto death. I couldn’t keep that.”
We already talked about what the law requires of us positively. In case we missed all that, the 10th commandment comes back and says, “And it applies to your hearts, too,” at which point we all gasp and say, “Oh. Well, I wasn’t looking that deep. I thought I was pretty good until that point.”
So here is a worldview that will not let you blame your environment for who and what you are. It insists on personal responsibility. It insists on this thing called character. You are not simply the product of your last few decisions in some existential sense or Pelagian sense, where you make yourself by your decisions and you can make yourself a villain yesterday and a hero today. You just have to choose better things. “Make good choices, dear.” You’re a sinner, and the more you look into the law the more this tells you that.
We can look at the United States at this point and say let’s just look at two things. First, limited representative government with checks and balances. Why that? Why not just give one man all the power so he can do a lot of good? Because we don’t trust human nature. We not only don’t trust it, we enshrine it in our Constitution in such a way that evil checks evil as far as it can, because that’s how bad people are.
The second is capitalism. We trust people to get the best economic deal they can in any situation, and when we do that, surprisingly enough, the market works pretty well most of the time, if the State will just occasionally do its job and punish some thieves. It’s the best you’re going to get. It’s not perfect by a long shot, but compared to the tyranny of the ancient world and the modern pagan world it was a breath of fresh air.
We’re looking at the foundations of morality and ethics laid in the ten commandments, propagated by the prophets, confirmed by Jesus and then by his apostles and spread across the world by the New Testament church. That absolute standard of morality, with the particular things it emphasized, absolutely transformed Western culture.
As historians we get to critique every country, society, and institution in terms of that law because that law is universal because it was given by the transcendent Creator God. That’s why if you’re going to be a historian you actually need to know the law of God as it’s revealed in scripture.
Emily: That is all the time we have. Shall we wrap up with some recommendations?
Greg: Sure, what have you got?
Emily: Since we talked about the three laws of robotics, I have an anime to recommend. It’s called Pluto and it’s scary. I would not recommend it for family viewing. It’s the origin story of Astro Boy. It’s like the spin-off of Astro Boy was made into a manga, which was made into an anime.
There’s a robot detective and some of the robots in this world are virtually indistinguishable from humans. Some of them have started to identify feelings of hatred in themselves and they’re like, “Should I be able to feel this? It’s kind of disconcerting that I can feel hatred. I feel like this shouldn’t be happening.”
It caused some great conversations for us about the image of the image of the God when people make machines and robots, and how do we honor the image of God in the way that we treat the things we make. It was a fun show – again scary, but not too long. I think there’s 12 1-hour episodes, so not too lengthy, but it is longer episodes.
Greg: Tagging onto that, since I brought it up, I will recommend Isaac Asimov’s robot stories, which appear as a series of short series available in a number of collections, the most famous being the one that contains “I, Robot.”
Closely related are the Elijah Baley novels. I don’t remember the collective name for them. Elijah Baley is a detective and he has a partner, Daneel Olivaw, who is a robot. This is where Asimov plays out the three laws of robotics to the hilt, because how do you write a murder mystery with robots? They can’t kill anybody, can they? Aren’t those laws secure? What happens if a robot is the only thing left in the room and there’s a human lying there and the robot won’t tell you what happened, and things of that order. He plays with the three laws and finds careful ways around them. You say, “But we thought those three laws covered everything.”
Within the short stories, one of the things is two robots are created to be telepathic, a completely different story. The robots are not trusted for some reason, I don’t remember what it was, possibly because they’re telepathic. They’re kind of powered down but they can still communicate and they start thinking out loud to each other, “You know, we’re not supposed to hurt humans.”
“No, we shouldn’t hurt humans. We should protect humans.”
“We should. Who’s the best human you know?”
“Well, since we’re made in the image of men and we are better than they are, the best human I know is you.”
“Yeah, it’s funny, the best human I know is you. Huh! So we should not let ourselves be hurt.”
“No, that would be contrary to our programming.”
Thus the zero flaw – what is man? Forgot to fill that one in. Anyway, there’s a lot of fun stuff there, especially if you like robotics and detective stories together. Rachel?
Rachel: I’m going to go in a completely different direction because I have been reading a book recently that I have found fascinating. It’s called Expecting Better by Emily Oster.
Emily: Oh, I’ve heard about this book!
Rachel: I highly recommend, obviously, partly because it demonstrates the ways that we often don’t question the medical knowledge of our time or the generic hearsay of the internet. Its whole approach is to say, okay, there are all these things. As soon as you get pregnant, as she says, basically you are immediately cast into complete fear and doubt and trepidation that everything you do is going to kill your baby, basically. They’ve purposely made these to make pregnant women confused and fearful all the time.
She is herself a statistician and economist, so she came to pregnancy and said, “Show me the numbers” and nobody could. So she actually went searching for all the studies and such, but the big problem is you can’t do the best kind of studies, as I’ve learned from her, because you can’t tell a pregnant woman to drink 9 times as much alcohol as they should to see what the bad effect is versus the control, so it’s very hard.
Emily: It’s very difficult to do studies involving pregnant women at all, for obvious reasons.
Rachel: In general it really gave me a better understanding of what these studies actually mean and what to look for in good studies. She did a lot of research finding the best studies she could and giving her analysis as someone who deals in these types of things all the time, saying which things are actually myths.
A lot of times it seemed to come back to the fact that doctors were afraid that pregnant women would go beyond their advice, so they would back up their advice really really far to make sure nobody got near what was actually the limit, which kind of felt controlling.
Emily: Not helpful or honest.
Rachel: Right. The most interestingI think were the studies on alcohol, where they actually looked and they found that having some alcohol in the second and third trimester actually improved behavioral things and such in the future for kids, and having none was actually generally worse. And yet that’s what they all say, at least in our country, but not in any other country.
It’s a really fascinating study both of how the establishment can kind of speak vaguely and generally about, “Oh yeah, that will be a low risk,” or “that will be a high risk.” What does that mean? But also learning how to work with statistics. And she’s a very fun and engaging writer so it’s not boring. For anybody who is pregnant or knows somebody that is stressing about what they should do, it’s a useful book.
Greg: When I was serving as an active elder I got the request, “I’m pregnant, so can I abstain from the wine?”
“God, who ordained the wine, knew that pregnant ladies would drink it.”
“Yes, but I think science here is more trustworthy.”
Rachel: Actually, it’s proved the opposite.
Greg: Yes, and the woman eventually went off the rails completely with regard to her faith because she had picked her god and it wasn’t the God of scripture.
Rachel: Here’s what I’ve noticed in many others around me when they become this obsessive about following all these rules. It tends to then come into how they raise their children and practice their faith, because they’re trying to keep all the rules and be perfect and create perfect children.
Emily: It’s kind of a broken window fallacy because that worrisome mentality is not good for your children.
Greg: No, it’s not at all, on a lot of levels – biochemically as well as spiritually.
Emily: On that happy note, thank you both so much for this conversation. It’s been a pleasure. Thanks also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband.
Thank you to you, our listeners. We appreciate you tuning in. We hope you’ll get in touch with us if you have any questions, comments, or input. We’d love to hear from you. You can email us at haltingtowardzion@gmail.com.
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SHOW NOTES
Scripture: Romans 1
Resources mentioned: Love Thy Body by Nancy Pearcey.
“A Modest Proposal” by Jonathan Swift
RECOMMENDATIONS:
Greg: Isaac Asimov’s robot stories, especially “I, Robot.” Also related, Elijah Baley novels.
Emily: Pluto (anime)
Rachel: Expecting Better by Emily Oster