Out of the Driveway, Into the Game: Chapter 3

Chapter 3 – Planting Your Feet in Mid-Air

Epimenides of Crete was a 6th century BC Greek seer, prophet, and philosopher-poet. Not many specifics are known about the life of Epimenides, but several myths about his life have survived. According to one of these myths, he fell asleep for fifty-seven years in a Cretan cave sacred to Zeus and then awoke with the gift of prophecy.

Plutarch reported in Life of Solon that Epimenides was a great help to Solon in purifying and reforming the Athenian state after the pollutions brought by Alemeonidae. Particularly helpful in this process was Epimenides' expertise in sacrifices and reform of funeral practices. Pausanias reported that when Epimenides died, his skin under his clothing was found to be covered with tattoos. This would have been odd, because generally only slaves in Greece were tattooed. This was quite probably evidence for the fact that Epimenides had become initiated as a Central Asian shaman.

Many of the works of Epimenides have been lost to history. One of those exceptions is his poem Cretica. The New Testament quotes twice from this poem, although specific citation to Epimenides is never given. In the poem, Minos addresses Zeus:


They fashioned a tomb for thee, O holy and high one

The Cretans, always liars, evil beasts, idle bellies!

But thou art not dead: thou livest and abidest forever,

For in thee we live and move and have our being


The fourth line of the poem is quoted without attribution to the author in Acts 17:28. The second line is quoted in Titus 1:12, although Epimenides is not credited by name. He is only identified by the veiled, "one of their own prophets." Clement of Alexandria, an early church father, wrote that the prophet referred to by Paul was, in fact, Epimenides. Clement mentions that "some say" Epimenides should be considered among the seven wisest philosophers.[i]

Near the beginning of Paul's letter to Titus, he counsels his young "son in the faith" who is serving God in Crete. Titus, evidently, is facing a fair amount of hostility from the people of Crete. Paul's response is basically, "Well, what did you expect? Look at who you're dealing with." Paul then quotes Epimenides, a Cretan, to show what kind of people Titus is dealing with. Epimenides claims that all Cretans are liars, brutes, and gluttons. Most Bible readers will catch the irony in Epimenides' logic. If all Cretans are liars, and Epimenides is a Creatan, then how can we trust his statement that all Cretans are liars? He may be lying.

This conundrum with Epimenides is similar to the flaw from which post-modernity suffers. One of the tenets of post-modernity, and probably the most well-known, is that there is not such a thing as absolute truth that can be objectively known. Just as Epimenides' statement that all Cretans are liars is a self-refuting one, so is the claim that there is no absolute truth. This is an absolute statement that says there are absolutely no absolutes. Self-refuting statements simply cannot be taken as true (We will look at this concept in detail later in the chapter.)

Post-modernity is a rising philosophy that is quickly replacing modernity in our culture. It is a cataclysmic shift in thinking that happens only every 500 years or so. The shift from modernity to post-modernity is no small change. It has and will continue to necessitate changes in the way Christians view the world, communicate with the world, and train our children.

Post-modernity is an important concept for Christian parents and youth workers to understand for two reasons. The first is that most parents of teens were probably still brought up in the modern-thinking world, and we tend to think and view the world as moderns. Our children, on the other hand, are growing up in a world that is increasingly post-modern in its views and philosophies. They will see the world in a much more post-modern way than will their parents and grandparents. Many adults who grew up with modern philosophies don't understand post-modernity and see it as dangerous, yet, it is all their children will know.

The second reason that parents and youth workers need to understand post-modernity is due to the large impact that it is having and will continue to have on children and the world-at-large. This is no short-term trend. Post-modernity will likely change the way the world and everything in it is understood and viewed, including the Bible and Christianity. If Christians don't understand these changes and are unable to convey the gospel to a post-modern generation in a relevant way, the church runs the risk of becoming irrelevant and being discarded by a majority of the new American culture.

The belief systems of Secular Humanism and post-modernity are not identical. Not every Secular Humanist is a post-modern, nor is every post-modern a Secular Humanist. In fact, Secular Humanism's roots are decidedly modern. Just as the church has gone through major philosophical changes and has splintered into various denominations over the years, Secular Humanism is undergoing its own set of changes. Much of what students will find at schools these days is a hybrid of Secular Humanism and post-modernity, as opposed to classic Secular Humanism rooted in modernity. In many ways, it would be correct to say that the most popular and burgeoning faction of Secular Humanism is the denomination of post-modern Secular Humanism.

Before we can look at the tenets and beliefs of post-modernity, the major philosophers of post-modernity, and how to answer post-modernity, we must first look at modernity. It is impossible actually to understand post-modernity without having a grasp of modernity, so we will briefly define and look at the history of first modernity, and then a slightly more in-depth look at post-modernity.


Modernity


The foundations for the modern view of truth and knowledge were laid by Francis Bacon in the late 16th century. Bacon said that humans could master the world by discovering its secrets. He believed that science and knowledge would be the vehicles that would drive humanity to the place of being able to conquer the universe and everything in it. In the early 17th century, philosopher and mathematician, Rene Descartes affirmed modernity's belief in objective truth and human reasoning by affirming the 5th century theologian Augustine's concept of "I think therefore I am." Then came Isaac Newton in the late 17th century. Newton had a scientific view of nature that said that everything in the world was a machine governed by laws. Modern thought believed that knowledge was certain and discoverable through human reasoning. These enlightenment thinkers believed that the autonomous self had the ability all by itself to discover the absolute truths of God's creation. Eventually, however, God was pushed to the side and the only things that became important were the all-knowing self and the discovery through science of a universe that was now believed to consist of only the material. The modernists, primarily after Darwin, began to argue that nothing supernatural beyond the material world existed. Another aspect of modernity's exaltation of knowledge was the belief that the discovery of knowledge was not only objective but that it was always a good thing. Knowledge, they said, was always pushing man towards progress and eventual utopia.


Autonomous self accesses truth/knowledge through reason


To the modern thinker, all of the actions, thoughts, emotions, and perception emanating from an individual human were all components of a coherent autonomous self. This autonomous self served as the ultimate arbiter of reality. Truth, which is finite and singular, was able to be discovered and perceived by this autonomous self. The concept of this autonomous self led to rise of concepts such as nation-states, self-discipline, and even urbanization. The autonomous self became sovereign rather than any external authority. With the advent of the autonomous self and the belief in evolution, God was no longer necessary for most modern philosophers.


Human reason provides objective view/knowledge of reality


In modernity, human reason is the ultimate arbiter of knowledge, truth, and reality. The universe, they believed, was structured and discoverable. There was one true answer to every question and humans had the ability to discover that answer. The answers would come, they argued, through the scientific method developed by Bacon, which relied on experimentation and observation. Man was an objective, outside observer who was able to discover the truths of the universe through reason and deduction.


Objective truth/knowledge can be know with certitude and is inherently good


To the modern thinker, objective knowledge was inherently good. They embraced John Locke's view that each human being was a clean slate. Humans did not, said Locke, have an inherently evil or sinful nature. To the modern thinker, the universe was inherently reasonable, knowable, and orderly and was manifested in an over-arching harmony. Harmony, then, was not only a characteristic of the universe but was an ethical ideal that should and could be reached by all humans.


Knowledge leads to technological advancement



Building of the foundation of Descartesian thinking, modern thinkers believed that the universe was able to be known by humans because it was orderly and reasonable. By using the proper methods, humans could discover the truths inherent in the natural universe. Since the universe was made up of laws and order, the discovery of these laws would always be a positive because it would allow humankind to work in harmony with the universe. All discovery of knowledge was necessarily advancement because it brought mankind closer to the ultimate truth of the natural universe.


Knowledge and technological advancement allows benevolent control of the universe


Because the universe was considered reasonable and orderly, knowledge of that universe was also considered reasonable and orderly. Any knowledge and technology was simply a progressive advancement towards the final and ultimately knowable truths of the universe. With each discovery, mankind would be able to make life more reasonable and orderly, and consequently better. Man could bring the universe into submission as they garnered more knowledge which would afford them the ability to solve the ills that had plagued society. Knowledge was, in their mind, the key to solving man's problems. In essence, knowledge was the salvation of mankind.


Post-Modernity


Post-Modernity is an interesting worldview and philosophy in that it exists more as a criticism of the excesses and arrogance of modernity, than as a stand-alone, consistent worldview. It is a radical rejection of the Enlightenment mind-set that gave rise to modernity. Post-modernity has rejected the belief in inevitable progress and has ushered in a growing pessimism about the future and mankind's ability to fix it. (For instance, it is unlikely that the global warming movement would have gained any momentum in the modern age, because it would have been believed that science and technology could find a solution, whereas with post-modernism, a "sky is falling" mentality has set in.)

Post-modernity has rejected the modern belief that rationality and reason are the arbiters of truth. The philosophers of post-modernity look at any claim of absolute truth with skepticism. Rather than reason, non-rational ways of knowing such as emotions and intuition are given priority. "Postmodern holism entails a rejection of the Enlightenment ideal of the dispassionate, autonomous, rational individual. Post-moderns do not seek to be wholly self-directed individuals but rather whole persons"[ii] In other words, truth can only be known to an individual if they use every part of their being (emotion, experience, spirit, body, etc.), and then the truth is only true to them. One person's truth may not be another's. The post-modern's understanding of truth leads them to be less concerned than moderns to think systematically or logically. This also means that post-moderns are generally unconcerned with being right or wrong. What is right for them may be wrong for someone else. The one exception to this is those with an absolute worldview, but we will consider that in detail later in this chapter.

One major aspect of the post-modern philosophy is deconstruction. The task of deconstruction is to take apart the concepts that have served as the axioms or rules for a period of thought. It is, as stated earlier, more of a criticism of modernity, than a stand-alone philosophy. It seeks to deconstruct modernity and then see what comes of the world. This is seen in an old story going around that describes two umpires talking after a game. The modern umpires says, "There are balls and strikes, and I call them as I see them." The post-modern umpire says, "There are balls and strikes, and they're nothing until I call them."


The Architects of Post-Modernity


Three major philosophers of the post-modern movement are Friederich Nietzsche, Michael Foucault, and Jacques Derrida. Each has contributed a different aspect to the post-modern thought system.

Friederich Wilhelm Nietzsche, a German, was born in 1844 and died in 1900 after an eleven year battle with insanity. Nietzsche's father, a Lutheran pastor, died when he was four so he was raised by women, primarily his mother, grandmother, and sisters. Nietzsch struggled with mental illness throughout his life, and was completely incapacitated during the last eleven years of his life, following a complete mental breakdown. Although he is known as a philosopher and critic, Nietzsche preferred to be called a psychologist. He sought for the re-evaluation of all values based on their actual value for life. Nietzsche argued that all knowledge is a matter of perspective, knowledge is really interpretation, and all interpretations are lies. According to Nietzsche, Truth is not really accessible due to the restraints of language. Reality, he said, was a construct of language. If language cannot convey truth, and reality is constructed by language, then there is no knowable truth. Nietzsche is often considered the father of post-modern thought and is, perhaps, most famous for his declaration that "God is dead," in which he argued that western civilization was no longer influenced by religion.

Paul Michel Foucault was born in France in 1926 and died in 1984 from AIDS. He later dropped the "Paul" from his name due to his hatred for his surgeon father. Foucault suffered from acute depression throughout his life resulting in at least one suicide attempt. Foucault was well known for his critiques of social institutions such as psychiatry, medicine, and the prison system. He was also famous for his views on human sexuality which included his own extremely deviant homosexual life-style. Foucault is known as a philosopher for identifying knowledge with power and was opposed to all social constructs that implied an identity. According to Foucault, Western society erred in believing that there was an objective body of knowledge that we could possess and that would benefit. It is not possible, though, he argued to obtain an objective body of knowledge. Each society, then, created its own body of knowledge and its own controlling narrative (which is the controlling story through which each society interprets the world), which was equally valid to any other society's narrative.

Jacques Derrida was born El-Biar, Algeria in 1930 to an Algerian Jewish family. He moved to France at the age of 22 to begin his studies in Paris. It was Derrida who contributed the concept of deconstruction. He believed that language was such an imprecise and multi-layered construct, that it was impossible to read any text and know what the author meant by it.


The Tenets of Post-Modernity


Just as we looked at the major motifs of modernity, it will be helpful to look at the motifs and beliefs of post-modernity before we look at the impacts of the post-modern belief system.


An objective unbiased truth or view of reality does not exist.


Whereas modern thinkers purported that objective truth existed, the post-modern thinker argues that there is no objective, knowable truth. They contend that there is no fixed point from which humans can gain objective truth. Rather than discovering absolute truth, each community creates its own reality through the construct of language. By doing this, each group creates its own reality which is just as viable as any other reality. Because we cannot step outside of our own constructed reality we do not find absolute truth but only constructive and useful truths. Post-modernity rejects the modern notion of the objective self that can discover absolute truth and argues instead that each community constructs one of an infinite possibility of answers to each question.

Truth/knowledge are not inherently good.


The modernist would argue that there is a meta-narrative that embodies truth that is applicable and knowable by all humans at all times. The closer we get to that truth, the more advanced our society becomes and the better off we are. Knowledge is, therefore, inherently good. The post-modern rejects the truth of the meta-narrative and says, instead, that each community constructs its own narrative through its use of language. Each community creates these local narratives which are equally valid but since their can be no objective human observer, there can be no pronouncement of absolute truth to any individual narrative. Knowledge cannot, subsequently, ever judged to be inherently good because what may be good in one community is not good in another.

No inevitable progress


Once the modern concept of knowable truth is gone, so is the idea that further acquisition of that knowledge, which is inherently good, will inevitably lead to progress for mankind. Without absolute truth, says the post-modernist, any thoughts of inevitable progress evaporate. The reason for this is that there is no objective way to conclude as to what is progress or what is digression. Since each community constructs its own reality and truth, there is no objective means for humans to decide what progression is.


Truth/knowledge are not limited to rational


According to the post-modern philosopher, truth and knowledge are not limited to the rational. They are not absolutes waiting to be discovered by human reasoning and intellect. Advancements in science fields such as physics and quantum mechanics seem to indicate a sub-atomic world that is erratic at times and does not follow set laws. This eats away at the modernist foundation of rational laws that govern the universe. The post-modernist believes that within and beneath the real world is a second world, which is unseeable, yet somehow more real.


Truth becomes communal – assigned value by the group


Post-modernity teaches that rather than discovering the objective universe, we construct it through the use of language. This "real world" is constructed by societies through the use of language. Because languages are always changing, these constructed realities are constantly changing. Due to the fact that reality is constructed by the language of a society, that language and its subsequent truth are only valid and understandable within the confines of that society. The truth created in one society does not necessarily apply to another group.


The Impact of Post-Modernity


Post-modernity is far more than just a trendy new philosophy that is being taught at colleges and universities among the academically elite. It is a torrent of new ways of thinking and viewing the world that is changing civilization as we know it. This new way of thinking has been embraced by many Secular Humanists and is now part of the everyday language in schools. It is the language in which most curriculums are written and it is how the students are being taught to view the world. In what follows, we will discuss three aspects of post-modernity that has had, and will continue to have, the biggest influence and impact on society, the three biggest influences and impacts on the way the Bible is to be understood, and three practical impacts on the average teen.


Societal Impacts


The first area of post-modern thought that is deeply impacting society is the deconstruction of knowledge and truth. Because the post-modern would argue that truth is unknowable, this means that no one can ever be sure that they are right about anything. This, conversely, means that no one can ever be sure that someone is wrong about anything. Public schools are now, routinely, turning out students that are no longer able to identify evil. "The virus of moral relativism has created a mental and moral psychosis that has rendered a younger generation of citizens incapable of recognizing the existence of evil. Their ethical imperative is to be tolerant, nonjudgmental, and affirming of people no matter what."[iii]

Professor Robert Simon, professor of philosophy at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, says that at least 20 percent of his students who acknowledge the Jewish Holocaust as fact, can't bring themselves to admit that killing millions of people is wrong. They report deploring the actions of the Nazis but only as a matter of personal taste or preference, not a moral judgment.[iv]

Christina Sommers, who teaches philosophy at Clark University in Massachussetts says that a majority of her students now will say that treating humans as superior to animals is immoral. She said that students coming to college "dogmatically committed to a moral relativism that offers them no grounds to think about cheating, stealing and moral issues." She says that young people today are suffering from "cognitive moral confusion" and says that they not only have trouble distinguishing right from wrong, they won't acknowledge that such standards even exist. Sommers says that she often meets students who are incapable of making one single confident moral judgment.[v]

The new absolute is that there are no absolutes. This leaves only moral relativism. Subsequently, if all morals are relative to the individual, then absolute evil is impossible in the eyes of the post-modernist.

The second major area of societal impact of post-modernity is the deconstruction of the autonomous self. The all-powerful "I" was king during the age modernity. Each individual was in control of his or her fate and was capable of discovering truth for themselves through knowledge. Individuals were constantly capable of improving themselves. Society was built around the autonomous self; summed up in the famous, "I am the master of my fate, the captain of my soul."

This is rapidly changing with the onset of post-modernity. The "I" is just a floating mass of symbols that means nothing apart from his or her community. The irony of post-modernity is that while they have deconstructed universal truth, they have affirmed that each individual creates their own truth. None of that is too terribly important, though, because each person's personal truth changes constantly as they change. There is no permanent self, just a mass of shifting beliefs and truths.

The third major area of societal impact of post-modernity is the death of the meta-narrative. Modernity had an implicit narrative that told the story about the way the world was. History had been steadily improving through technology, marching towards utopia. Societies that were advanced technologically were more superior, period. This meta-narrative has been rejected by post-modernity as oppressive, imperialist, and self-serving. Post-modernity has said that any narrative that claims to be absolutely true and to explain the world must be rejected. All meta-narratives are suspect; they are all power games. This means that even Christianity, in the eyes of the post-modern, is no truer than the Nazi super-Aryan religion, and that each are equally power games. It is nearly impossible for post-modern American students to declare that any country can be considered to be good in conflict with an evil combatant, even if that combatant is a terrorist organization. Since there are no true narratives that are universal for everyone, neither side can be declared absolutely good or evil. What one society would call a group of evil terrorists another would call valiant freedom fighters. The post-modern would say that they are both right, because that is their truth.


Biblical Impacts


Just as post-modernity holds many implications for society as a whole, it promises to change the way people understand and read the Bible. If we are to understand the true impact that this culture shift will have on Christianity, we must understand how it will affect the world's understanding of God's Word.

The deconstruction of the meta-narrative has a large impact on the way that the post-modern generation views the Bible. The Bible is the story of God's covenant relationship with His people, first the Jews, then Christians. For the post-modern, though, all narratives are suspect. Rather than viewing the story of the Exodus as a glorious account of God protecting His people through whom He would bring salvation to the world from their enemies, post-modernity would ask "what about the Egyptians on one end and the Canaanites on the other end?" There can never be one point of view. What about, for instance, the fact that the Jewish way of telling the story of the Middle East is now deeply damaging to the Palestinian communities who comprise most of the native Christians in that part of the world.

The second major area of impact in the way that the Bible is viewed in post-modernity is the biblical view of reality. It comes under attack in the world of the post-modern. Paul saw things his way, but what about those that he branded heretics who also thought of themselves as Christian. Paul's viewpoint has survived, they would say, because his side was the conqueror, not because Paul had the truth or God on his side. Many post-modern authors now claim that rather than Paul arguing passionately from the cross to a particular way of truth, he is actually manipulating his readers and hearers with impressive-sounding rhetoric that is really just another power trip. This is a classic example of postmodern deconstruction of a passage of the Bible.

Biblical historian N.T. Wrights describes this deconstruction of the Bible, noting:

The Biblical view of the whole of reality, in which Jewish-style creational monotheism is by and large taken for granted, is also under attack; some have argued that this rather one-dimensional and puritanical Deuteronomic viewpoint was imposed heavy-handedly upon various other viewpoints, scrunching the little stories of the cheerful and interesting semi-polytheists in Israel under the jackboot of a uniform, and subsequently canonized, monotheism. (The imagery is not chosen at random; memories, and imaginations, of the tyrannies of the first half of the twentieth century provide fertile soil for the protests of the second half. Postmodernism looks back to Hitler and Stalin and says, 'Modernism; that's what it always does.')[vi]

Practical Impacts

Post modernity is not evil in and of itself. It holds some valid criticisms of modernity. Modernity did put too much value on the material world, knowledge and self. It had replaced God with its own master narrative of a technologically-driven world marching towards utopianism. What started out with good observations, though, has ended with bad conclusions. Creationist Kent Hovind often tells a story of scientists studying a frog that can jump 100 inches. They cut off one leg of the frog and it then jumps 80 inches. They cut off a second leg and it jumps 60 inches. After cutting off the third leg, it jumps 40 inches. The scientists then hypothesize that after they cut off the fourth leg, the frog will jump 20 inches. They watch as the frog refuses to jump and finally conclude that frogs with all of their legs cut off lose their hearing; good observations, bad conclusion. In the same vein, post-modernity correctly identified the problems with modernity and its adulation of the individual's ability to discover perfect truth. They came to a bad conclusion, however, in determining that this must mean that there is no absolute truth.

Students today will march off from the house of their modernist parent's right into temples of Secular Humanism where they will come out full-fledged post-modern Secular Humanists. Although, there are good aspects of post-modernity, there are three specific aspects of danger in this philosophy for the children of Christian parents that we will consider here.

The first is that the absolute way of Christianity is destroyed in the post-modern worldview. They will be taught to believe that it is impossible for one viewpoint to corner the market on truth. Christianity may work for some people, but it cannot work for everyone. When Christians say that it does, they are committing acts of rhetorical violence towards people whose worldview is just as valid as that of the Christian. The only thing wrong, then, with Christianity is when it claims to be the only way. The problem with this is obvious. If Christianity is not the only way, then Jesus was a liar and Christianity is completely false.

Kids are being taught to think differently right under their parent's noses. These children come away from school incapable of seeing the world in a truly biblical manner. They have been taught to believe that there is no such thing as one truth for every human. What this means is that as soon as Christianity doesn't appear to be working for them, they will quickly shed it for a new worldview that does work at the time.

The second problem for children of Christian parents is the way they arrive at truth. Of course there is no universal truth, but there is temporary personal truth. They are trained, however, to view the world so that whatever they believe at the moment becomes truth. Rather than believing something because it is true, they declare something to be true because they believe it.

This means that rather than viewing the Bible as a collection of the very words of God that will bring all men to truth and salvation, it is simply a record of the fleeting truths of a certain community of people at a particular time. The truly post-modern thinker will not accept the Bible as a timeless, universal truth. If it works for them for a while, they will believe it and that makes it true, but that is as far as it goes. This is one of the primary reasons that so many post-modern's grasp on to Christianity so fervently, only to reject a few months or years later.

The third major problem is the disconnection between modern parents and post-modern children. This is more than just a generation gap. This is a deep divide between two worldviews. This problem will fade away in a generation as modernity completely dies out, but for now it is a major problem. Parents think and live in the language of modernity. Students think and live in the language of post-modernity.

Where the modern thinker values the rational, the post-modern thinker values the experiential. The modern thinker values the scientific; the post-modern thinker values the spiritual. The modern thinker values unanimity; the post-modern thinker values pluralism. The modern thinker values exclusivity; the post-modern thinker values relativity. The modern thinker values egocentrism, individualism, functionality, and the industrial world. The post-modern thinker values altruism, communalism, creativity, and environmental. The modern thinker values the local, the dichotomized, the relevant and relational; the post-modern thinker values the global, holistic, and authentic.

Parents and kids are speaking a different language and the parents don't realize it. Schools and the secular culture have learned to speak the language of post-modernity. When society speaks the language of our children and the church and home are not, what do you think the result will be? How effective would we be if we spoke only English while our student spoke only French? If they went to a French-speaking school, the school would have far more influence than we, as parents, would. Yet when it comes to connecting to our children on a worldview level, we are not speaking the language of our children. Most parents don't understand their kid's worldview language, and even worse, don't even realize that this is the case.


Answering Post-Modernity


Many in the religious community have become so freaked out by the relativism of post-modernity that they have completely demonized the entire movement as from Satan. As with anything, however, there are positive and negative aspects of post-modernity. Post-modernity does offer some wonderful opportunities for the Christian community. The first area is in their emphasis on community. Rather than putting all emphasis of importance and truth seeking on the self, the post-modern looks for community to bring them identity. The post-modern also rejects the belief that there is nothing beyond the natural; they have once again opened up the world to accept the idea of the supernatural. The final positive aspect of post-modernity that we will discuss here is that they have preached the Fall of man to an entire generation. Modernity believed that mankind was inherently good and constantly marching towards utopia. Post-modernity has deconstructed the individual man, the concept of absolute good, and the belief in a certain utopia. This means that the Christian community no longer has to try to convince men that something is wrong; they now know that something in the world has gone terribly wrong. We simply need to show the world that the problem is that they are in exile from God, separated from Him. This is the cause of the problems of the world.

Post-modernity, as we have already seen, does, however, have some serious problems. I believe that none is more dangerous for the Christian parent and youth worker than the rejection of absolutes. This leads to this concept of relativism that puts all beliefs, opinions, religions, societies, etc. on equal footing. Of all the aspects of post-modernity and Secular Humanism that have been discussed above, this relativity of post-modernity is the most difficult to combat once a young person has completely integrated it into their way of viewing the world. Once someone has embraced that there is no absolute truth, it is difficult to convince them otherwise. The problem is that one simply cannot be a true Christian if they completely reject the concept of absolute truth. Unless one believes that Jesus Christ is the way, the truth, and the life, their Christianity will be no different from a sweater they put on when they are chilled. As soon as the temperature changes, the sweater will come off.

The fact is this rejection of absolute truth has hit Christian truth as surely as it has effected non-Christian youth. According to the Barna research group, 81 percent of teens who identify themselves as evangelical Christians claim, ". . .all truth is relative to the individual and his/her circumstances.[vii] Humanist thinking has infiltrated the minds of our children. This idea that truth is relative, that there are no absolute truths, is perhaps the most pervasive and dangerous of the Humanist beliefs. It is the most difficult to combat.

There is no other area of post-modernity that is pushed more than this new definition of tolerance. No longer does tolerance mean to respect and protect the legitimate rights of others; listening and learning from other perspectives, cultures, and backgrounds; and living peaceably alongside others despite differences. The post-modern definition of tolerance includes the idea that there is no objective truth so "The definition of new. . . tolerance is that every individual's beliefs, values, lifestyle, and perception of truth claims are equal. . . There is no hierarchy of truth. Your beliefs and my beliefs are equal, and all truth is relative."[viii]

Christian parents must learn to embrace the positive aspects of post-modernity while training their children to identify and reject the negative aspects such as the belief in moral relativism. Make no mistake, many teachers and curriculums intentionally seek to plant the "truth" of moral relativism in the minds of children.

On common technique is to give students seemingly impossible moral situations to prove to them that morality is not as black-and-white as they thought. The most common technique to accomplish this is to present a situation for students and then ask them to solve it morally. The problem is so artificially difficult as to be virtually unsolvable.

One example is that of a poor man whose child is about to die. There is a medicine that will cure the child but they cannot afford it and no one will give it to them. The only thing that will save the child is for the loving parent to break into a pharmacy and steal the medicine. The question then presented for the unsuspecting student is, "what is the right thing to do here?"

Most of these situations are so artificial that they would never happen, but that is not the point. For example, another scenario given to students is that there are five people trying to survive on a life raft that is designed to hold only four people. If one person isn't thrown out, everyone will die. What should they do?" They use this difficult question to confuse students and argue for moral relativism. In other words they say that if killing a person in this situation is right, then that proves that there is no such thing as absolute right and wrong; that it depends on the situation.

On the surface, both of these situations seem to make a good case for moral relativism, but in fact, they both prove that there is a moral law. If stealing or killing weren't morally wrong, there would be no dilemma. Who cares? Let the kid die, steal the medicine, throw all five people in the water. If there is not morality then none of these are problems. These are only difficult scenarios because of the moral law that God has written on the hearts of each man and woman.

Just because morality is sometimes difficult to determine in complicated situations does not mean that there is no morality. It would be foolish to throw out the truth of the moral order because of a few complicated situations. The fact is, we may get it wrong in some difficult situations, but we get it right when it comes to the basics. Serial killers like Jeffery Dahmer, or mass murderers like Hitler are wrong. We know murder is wrong.

The basic principles are clear even if some difficult scenarios are not. This does not prove that the principle does not exist. Asking the question, "Can murder ever be justified?" shows that at least one moral law has been accepted (that murder is wrong). If we accept even one moral obligation like don't murder, don't steal, don't rape, or don't torture babies, then the moral law exists. If the moral law exists then the moral Law Giver exists.

This goes to show that moral relativity can be combated in our own minds and the minds of our children if we are aware of the tactics used send us down that road of thinking. There is a very simple principle that will insulate the well-trained child against the theories of moral relativism. The fact is that all the morally relativistic mantras of post-modernity and Secular Humanism are self-refuting. Children can easily be shown how the beliefs of this worldview don't hold up to their own standards. Norman Geisler, in his book I Don't Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist, calls this the road-runner technique, named for the coyote who would run through his own trap and off a cliff, only to look down and realize that he was standing in mid-air. Let's see this in action with eight common mantras of post-modern Secular Humanism.



"There are no absolutes"

This statement, like the other seven we will look at, is self-refuting. It says there are no absolutes, yet it is an absolute statement. The person saying there are no absolutes is saying that there are absolutely no absolutes. Either there are absolutes or there are not. It is not logical to say there are no absolutes except the one in which I believe. The Christian, for instance, would say there is only one true way, but there are many absolutes in life. This is a consistent worldview. The post-modern view of no absolutes is not consistent.


"Truth is unknowable"

If this statement were true, then how would I know that it was true? If truth cannot be known, what is the point in saying that truth cannot be known? What is the point of saying anything? To say that truth is unknowable is an automatically self-refuting statement, because the person saying it is assuming that you accept that this particular statement is true and knowable. It is, evidently, only in all other statements that truth is unknowable.


"It's true for me, but not for you"

This statement, like all the others is self-refuting. Is this statement true for you, but not for me? If so, then I reject the notion entirely. I contend that some truths are absolute. Is it possible that this belief could be true for me but not for you? Can truth be absolute for some people, while for others there are no absolutes? This is not logical or possible.


"There are no meta-narratives"

This statement presupposes that there are no prevailing stories or worldviews that can explain the world that are true and universal. Yet, the belief that there are no meta-narratives is, in itself, a meta-narrative. It is a meta-narrative that there are no meta-narratives. Again, it is not logical or tenable in the real world.


"You can't push your morality on me"

The easiest way to answer this question is with another question: "why not?" This is also a self-refuting argument because they are, in fact, pushing their morality on you while telling you that you cannot push your morality. It is like saying "The first rule is that there are no rules."


"Christians are judgmental"

This can also be refuted easily with a question: "What's wrong with that?" Relativists will often say that Christians are judgmental. That is their judgment on Christians. Why are they being so judgmental? The mantra that people shouldn't be judgmental is, in fact, a judgmental statement, so it is self-refuting. In addition, if there are no absolutes, or no concept of right and wrong, then who is to say that being judgmental is a bad thing?


"We need to be tolerant"

For post-modern Secular Humanists tolerance is a virtue of the highest order. This is also inconsistent. If they really value tolerance then they have to be objectivists. You can't argue for tolerance and tell people that they have to be tolerant unless you accept that there are moral absolutes. In order to demand tolerance as a virtue, the one doing the demanding must believe in absolutes. You simply cannot be a relativist and still call for everyone to be anything, including tolerant.


"You think that way because you accept the either/or philosophy rather than the both/and"

If backed into a corner, some post-modern thinkers will try to assert that the law of self-refutation only seems to dismantle their beliefs because we are working from a Western "either/or" philosophy. This, they say, is not necessary. We should abandon the "either/or" philosophy and embrace the Eastern "both/and" philosophy. While the "either/or" philosophy says something either is true or is not, the "both/and" philosophy says that something can be both true and not true at the same time. While it is true that many Eastern cultures embrace this philosophy, it still has a fatal flaw. Its proponents will say that we should reject the "either/or" in favor of the "both/and." In other words, we have to choose either the "either/or" or the "both/and." In their very attempted refutation of "either/or," they are using "either/or" logic. The "both/and" philosophy doesn't hold up in the real world because in order to get there one must use "either/or" philosophy.

The other weakness with all of these type statements, which are all just different expressions of relativism, is that if carried out to their full measure they become ridiculous. For instance if there are no moral standards and right and wrong are up to each individual to decide, then who makes the rules? You have no authority on which to declare anything to be wrong. I could steal your car or even kill you. It works for me, so who are you to say it's wrong? Unless there is a Creator God that sets the moral standard, then all bets are off and anything goes. The true moral relativist has no grounds on which to ever call any action wrong.


Conclusion


The important thing for parents to understand is that post-modernity is probably not going away any time soon. It is the way of viewing the world that our children will face. Just as modernity had its strengths and weaknesses, and was neither inherently positive nor negative, so it is with post-modernity. The dangers come when post-modernity is taken to extremes and combined with Secular Humanism. As shown above, however, the child who is armed with critical thinking skills and an understanding of basic logic will be better-prepared for their encounters with relativism and the negative aspects of post-modernity.




--------------------------------------------------------------------------------





Chapter 3


[i] Epimenides, < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epimenides> (July, 2006)

[ii] Stanley Grenz, A Primer on Postmodernism (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdman's Publishing, 1996), p. 14.

[iii] Maddoux, Public Education Against America, p. 42

[iv] Robert Simon, "The Paralysis of 'Absolutophobia,'" The Chronicle of Higher Education (June 27, 1997): B5-B6.

[v] Christina Hoff Sommers, "Why Johnny Can't Tell Right From Wrong," Imprimis, (March 199): Volume 27, Number 3, 1.

[vi] N.T. Wright, The Bible for the Post-Modern World, http://latimer.godzone.net.nz/orange_lecture/orangelecture99.asp (July, 2006)

[vii] Barna Research Group, "Third Millennium Teens" (Ventura, CA: The Barna Research Group, Ltd., 1999), p. 43.

[viii] Thomas A. Helmbock, "Insights on Tolerance," Cross and Crescent, summer 1996, p. 2.

Out of the Driveway, Into the Game: Chapter 2

Chapter 2 – 180 Days at the Temple

One of the most shocking and uncharacteristic incidents in American history took place during the Korean War. The American military man has had a long, proud history of holding up remarkably well while being prisoners of war. They have been courageous, orderly, still maintained discipline and respected the authority of captured commanding officers. Despite the conditions and temptation to feel hopeless, the prisoners remained loyal to one another, resisted the authority of their captors and repeatedly made attempts to escape.

The Korean War, however, was a marked departure from that tradition. In Korea a relatively small number of Chinese Communist soldiers kept thousands of American soldiers under control without fences, barbed wire, physical torture, or any of the other usual methods. Major William Mayer, a U.S. Army psychiatrist who participated in extensive debriefings following the war, reported that only 5 percent of POWs resisted the enemy, 15 percent became hard-core defenders and collaborators with the enemy, and the other 80 percent were rendered passive by the tactics of the enemy.[i] Of the thousands of American POWs during the Korean War, not one made any attempt to escape during the entire period of imprisonment.[ii]

In his work, None Dare Call it Treason, John Stormer reported that “. . . some American POWs had broadcast anti-American propaganda, informed on other prisoners, wrote articles, letters, and stories praising life under communism, confessed to ‘germ warfare’ and other atrocities, and generally cooperated with their captors in every way.[iii]

What could possibly keep thousands of Americans from resisting their captors? It was simple really. They did it not through torture or intimidation, but with a teacher and a classroom. The Chinese had mastered the technique of classroom manipulation. They took groups of tired, scared, and confused soldiers into classrooms and encouraged them to relax and “confess” their feelings to the rest of the group. For weeks they would discuss things such as Christianity, Marxism, the American way, and communism. They were constantly told that there were no absolute moral truths, only differences in opinion. They were constantly told to lay aside their own selfish opinions and work towards creating a group consensus; this was they were convinced, beneficial for the welfare of the group. What they were not told is that they were being constantly shepherded towards predetermined conclusions. It was the facilitator’s job to constantly push his students towards this enlightenment.

The Chinese were so effective with these techniques in changing the worldview of the prisoners that an inquiry was called for at the end of the war so as to be able to study the techniques of the communists.

Edward Hunter, a foreign correspondent, author, editor, and specialist in propaganda warfare testified before a congressional committee on March 13, 1958:

I have been watching developments under communism in other parts of the world, and now I see exactly the same developments here in America. . . War has changed its form. The communists have discovered that a man killed by a bullet is useless. The objective of communist warfare is to capture intact the middle of the people and their possessions, so they can be put to use. . . A more exact term in the military lexicon would be “mind attack”. . . This is the modern conception of slavery that puts all others in the kindergarten age.[iv]



In describing this process, Hunter introduced the word “brainwashing” into the American lexicon. He explained that people were first put into a fog before they could be effectively brainwashed. They need to be shaken loose of their precepts and convictions until they lose belief in them. Hunter noted:

The one thing the prisoners least expected was to come into a classroom atmosphere. . . Americans respect learning and have been taught to. . . see all sides of every question. . . The facilitators lured them into believing the pseudoscientific Marxian philosophy, which teaches constant change, even in such basic conceptions as truth and falsity, good and bad. . . Where convictions were already worn thin by their upbringing, the line became blurred until these noble traits were twisted out of shape by becoming tolerance for evil.[v]



Textbooks were given to the prisoners that were written in English, covering the topics of American history, government, and economics. The information, however, covered these topics from a much different, but reasonable sounding perspective. It was done in such a way that unless these Americans had a solid foundation of these topics previously, they would not be able to detect the differences and misrepresentations. The facilitators constantly stressed that their captives examine the good points of every side so that they could get along with everyone and not be isolated in their beliefs.

The Chinese had learned a very practical and effective technique to control their prisoners. It was not through fear and intimidation, but was rather through indoctrination. Those who are controlled by fear are always a step away from revolt. Those who have been indoctrinated will go along willingly because their desire to resist has been removed.



The Temples of Secular Humanism



Being brainwashed is obviously an incredibly dangerous situation. Resistance can be lowered and the way someone views the world can be drastically altered. It is a battle for the mind. The only things worse than being in a battle, is being in a battle, and not really being aware of whom your enemy is, or the fact that you are under siege.

Yet, Christian parents send their children to public schools everyday not knowing that, in effect, we are sending our children to church five days a week. I was listening to a message from a nationally televised evangelist not too long ago, and made a point to stop and listen as he began talking about raising Godly children. His words proved the extent and degree to which so many people have been fooled in this area. He was talking about training our children to be Godly. It was mostly the usual things including teaching them to obey, knowing where they are at, controlling their friends, being aware of what they watch on TV, etc. Then he made a statement that shocked me. He said something to the effect that he was glad we didn’t have prayer in the schools anymore. He would not, he said, want most teachers teaching his children to pray because they probably do not know how to pray themselves. Stay with me for just a second because I have not yet gotten to the shocking part. He went on to say that schools have no business teaching religion. That is the job of the home. Schools, he stated, were a neutral place where simple facts and knowledge are taught. They teach reading, writing, arithmetic, history, etc.

Is this true? Are public schools today simply neutral places that teach nothing more than simple facts to our children so that they will be educated and ready to face the world? As we will see in the remainder of this chapter, that belief couldn’t be further from the truth. This erroneous belief is exactly the problem with our children that are attending public schools (and many private schools for that matter). Public schools are not neutral, objective institutions of learning and neither are most colleges and universities. Public schools have become well organized places of instruction and worship for the church of Humanism. Secular Humanists and the newer denomination of post-modern Humanists dominate public schools. They are also quite prevalent in colleges and universities, although, at that level you see a much larger Communist and Socialist Humanist influence (the influence of Communist and Socialist Humanism in colleges and universities is outside of the scope of this current work).

What this evangelist had all wrong is the belief that we send our children to school to be merely educated in a non-partisan dissemination of objective facts. We believe that our children are being taught how to learn and how to acquire knowledge for themselves. This is not at all true. Public schools have become hostile ground for Christian ideas because they are dominated by a different religion, rather than no religion at all. The influence and beliefs of this religion of Secular Humanism will be the topic of the remainder of this chapter.

So, what is Humanism? What does humanism mean? The prophet Isaiah gives perhaps the best answer, “Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes and clever in their own sight (Isaiah 5:21). Humanism is belief in humanity without the need or benefit of God. It banishes the concept of God because it believes that human beings are sufficient in and of themselves. That is the very essence of humanism. Man is the center of the universe, and there is nothing bigger, and nothing greater.

I will be willing to bet that if I could ask 1,000 Americans what they think should be the main goal of public education; I would get many different answers. Most of them, I assume would have to do with the actual education of students. Yet, for a large percentage of schools these days, if not all, this is not the case. Behind closed doors, many educators talk about different goals than the types of goals on which most Americans are hoping our schools are focusing. The goals that I most heard about as a teacher were things like building self-esteem, teaching the students social skills, providing them a safe emotional place to go, and giving them new experiences. A few years ago I sat in on an in-service meeting where the presenter asked us as a staff about our purpose in giving grades and ultimately our primary goal in educating our students. Nearly every teacher agreed in one form or another that building the self-esteem of the students was the key for them. They also argued that students should be graded on their effort rather than their actual achievement. I found only one or two other members on the staff that was willing to voice an opinion that included that high standards and truly teaching our students factual information was their primary goal. This is indicative, however, of an education system that abandoned long ago the primary goal of imparting absolute facts to students.

Clearly the educational focus has changed radically from the days of the New England Primer which taught kids the alphabet through the use of the Bible stories, or the Old Deluder Act, which was passed by the people of Massachusetts to defeat illiteracy, which they believed was one of the primary weapons of Satan, the old deluder. Christianity is no longer allowed in schools, and the focus and techniques of education are quite different.

So what are the results of this change in the education system? How effective are the new techniques? In September 1993, the U.S. Education Department revealed the results of its study of adult literacy in America. Among the findings of the report were the facts that:

· 90 million American adults could barely read or write;

· 40 million adults had only the most rudimentary reading and writing skills;

· an additional 50 million adults fared a little better but were still considered to have

inadequate reading and writing skills;

· only about 20 percent – 34- to 40 – million scored high, handling challenging tasks that

involved complex documents and background information[vi]



The decline of the education system in America is undeniable. It’s results are sad and predictable. Student violence is on the rise nation-wide. Gang violence is a constant problem. Disrespect for teachers and other adults has become so common it is now expected and accepted to a degree. Teen pregnancies are rampant. The generation of the 1960’s and 1970’s created a culture that had no morals. Those generations have now produced a generation which in large part has no conscience.

Worsening the situation is the postmodern concepts of things such as “values clarification” that is often taught in today’s schools. This is a method of moral training that teaches that there are no right or wrong answers. Rather than teaching absolutes, the teacher should direct students in techniques that will assist them in coming to their own conclusions.

There is an account of the teacher who learned these techniques at a workshop and was dutifully applying them in her sixth grade classroom. Before long, her class decided that they valued cheating and would be exercising their newfound value on the next test. The teacher was perplexed with this dilemma. Don’t worry, though, she came up with a typical postmodern solution. She told the class that due to the fact that she was personally opposed to cheating, they could not do it her class. She then informed them, “In my class you must be honest. In other areas of your life you may be free to cheat.”

Without an absolute moral standard, we are free to choose whatever course of action seems right for us at the time. This is exactly what has happened in our schools. Students are taught that this is a good thing. They need to find truth for themselves. This is why there is such an emphasis these days on hands-on and explorative learning. The students need to be trained to discover their own version of the truth for themselves. Notice that I did not say, the truth, I said their truth. This, they are taught, is the ultimate goal of their education.

How did all of this come about? Was it an accident? Was this the result of a slow, unknowing drift of a country away from God? The answer is a resounding “NO.” The real question, then, is who are the real perpetrators and in what kind of battle are we engaged?



The Foundations Are Laid



Over twenty years ago, a former schoolteacher, Jo Ann McCauley went on the national radio show, Point of View with Marlin Maddoux and shocked her listeners. Her fifth grade son had come home with a history project on which he needed help. As Jo Ann began to look through her son’s textbooks she was concerned about the emphasis on people like Marilyn Monroe, and the fact that there was but one small paragraph on George Washington. She began a campaign to investigate not only the textbooks in her son’s school but she also looked into the American public school system as a whole. She came to the conclusion that the schools were being used to systematically change and undermine the moral values of American children. She concluded that what she uncovered “was the worst of all crimes: willfully manipulating the religious and moral beliefs of children, without their parents’ knowledge or consent.[vii]

To understand all of this we need first to go back to the early 1800’s. Harvard and Yale, and most other early American universities began as schools for the training of ministers and Christian scholars. By the early 1800’s, however, Harvard became dominated by Unitarians and liberal Christians who were virtually Christians in name only. Harvard began to send their most gifted scholars to Germany to learn under the tutelage of the German philosophers and scholars that they greatly admired. Before long, these students were bringing back to America the ideas and philosophies of the Germans.

The most influential of these German scholars were Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), and Karl Marx (1818-1883). Kant taught that man was completely incapable of acquiring or comprehending any knowledge of reality. All was perception and opinion, according to Kant. According to Kant, there was no objective existence of a Creator or absolute truth.

Hegel’s major contribution was collectivism. He argued that the group, which he called the collective, had a primacy over the individual. The individual, said Hegel, had no reality apart from the group.

Marx boldly declared that God did not exist, that the world was composed of only matter. There was no Creator and man had no soul, according to Marx’s teachings. Marx’s belief in matter only led to his formation of the theory of dialectical materialism. Dialectical materialism teaches that there is nothing beyond matter, there are no absolutes, and that the way of the world is to constantly synthesize one’s old beliefs (thesis) with new ideas (antithesis). One would then abandon the old beliefs in favor of a new set of beliefs (synthesis) that was based primarily on the new and better beliefs that one had encountered.

We need not look any further than the modern educational system in the United States of America to see these ideas in living color, practiced on a daily basis. These ideas did not, however, find their way into the educational system by accident. No, it was quite intentional, and much of the work was done by John Dewey.

The most influential individual in American education in the last one hundred years is without question John Dewey. This is the same Dewey of Dewey Decimal System fame. His theories are still held in awe in schools of education at most universities. Any licensed teacher in the United States has, without a doubt, been well indoctrinated into the teachings, beliefs, and theories of John Dewey. Since disciples of Dewey are by far the dominant force in American education we would do well to take a closer look at a man with so much influence.

Far from being a neutral force in education, Dewey has contributed more to the Humanist takeover of American education than anyone else. Dewey was a leader and pioneer in the liberal, progressive education movement in the first half of the 20th century. He was an avowed atheist, an ardent evolutionist, and an unapologetic socialist.

Dewey was also a board member of the American Humanist Association and a signer of the 1933, Humanist Manifesto, which serves as sacred scripture for the Secular Humanist movement. He was, in fact, one of the leading pioneers of both Secular Humanism and the socialist movement in America.

He was always full of praise for Vladimir Lenin in Russia and felt that socialism was the future of America. Dewey believed that the ultimate goal of public education was to bring about a “state consciousness.” Dewey knew, however, that in order to get Americans to turn their backs on their belief in freedom and embrace socialism was to revolutionize the entire education system. The only practical way to do this, though, was to devalue in the eyes of Americans traditional education techniques and replace them with a system that concentrated on the beliefs and values of children. In his essay entitled “My Pedagogic Creed,” Dewey wrote:



I believe that the social life of the child is the basis of concentration, or correlation, in all his training and growth. . . I believe, therefore, that the true center of correlation on the school subjects is not science, not literature, nor history, nor geography, but the child’s social activities.[viii]



Dewey believed that evolutionary theories should be at the very core of the educational and pedagogical (teaching) paradigms. He held that truth is relative and that absolutes are confining, not admissible, and even harmful. He railed constantly against the need for God or moral absolutes, declaring that “There is no God and there is no soul. Hence, there are no needs for the props of traditional religion. With dogma and creed excluded, the immutable truth is also dead and buried. There is no room for fixed, natural laws or moral absolutes”[ix] He felt that any fixed constitution, rules, or standards would stand in the way of man’s social evolution. This of course was based on man’s biological evolution, his belief in the dialectic, and his reverence for the collective.

In Dewey’s vision of the new America, the State would be god, public schools would serve as the church, and teachers would be the preachers and prophets of this new religion. Serving as a pope of sorts in this burgeoning religion, Dewey commissioned public school teachers to spread the message of this new belief system with zeal. He gave them the vision that they were the founding fathers of a new era and a new advanced civilization. While envisioning this new faith, Dewey wrote:



Every teacher should realize the dignity of his calling; that he is a social servant set apart for the maintenance of a proper social order and the securing of the right social growth. . . In this way, the teacher is always a prophet of the true God and the usherer of the true kingdom of God.[x]



Up until that point, traditional education was based firmly on the foundation of the Scriptures. Students were trained with the idea that there were moral absolutes and absolute truth. Education, then, was a matter of drill, memorization of, training in, and discovery of the truths that God had already laid down as part of the universe.

Dewey talked further about his own religious beliefs in his book, A Common Faith. “He claimed that religion is basically an attempt to adjust to the difficulties of life and should therefore be freed from the outmoded ideas of ancient faiths, such as Christianity. Since the world changes through time, so must religion. And science must be the guide for any modern faith, for it alone is the gateway to reliable knowledge.”[xi] By applying his religion of Humanism, steeped in evolution and socialism, Dewey began the process of sterilizing the American education system from any Christian influence or philosophies.

A quick perusal of Dewey’s writings shows that he was motivated to replicate a Soviet-style education system in the United States. He said that Russia’s revolution was “a release of human powers on such an unprecedented scale that it is of incalculable significance not only for that country, but for the world. . . There is an enormous constructive effort taking place in the creation of a new collective mentality; a new morality I should call it.”[xii] He went on to say “That which distinguishes the Soviet schools. . . from the progressive schools of other countries. . . is precisely the conscious control of every education procedure by reference to a single and comprehensive social purpose.”[xiii]

Dewey criticized and attacked the traditional model of education. In response to fixed standards, rules of conduct, moral training, and a sense of conforming to those standards, Dewey proposed his own non-traditional view of education:



¨ Expression and cultivation of individuality (as opposed to imposition from above);

¨ Free activity (As opposed to external discipline);

¨ Learning through experience (as opposed to texts and teachers);

¨ Acquiring skills as a means of attaining ends that have direct vital appeal (as opposed to drill);

¨ Making the most of the opportunities of this present life (as opposed to preparation for a more or less remote future);

¨ Acquaintance with a changing world (as apposed to static aims and materials).[xiv]



As you read the list, most of it will probably seem rather familiar. It sounds like a mission statement from most public schools today:

Dewey recognized how valuable the classroom could be in initiating social changes. According to Dewey, “The first great step as far as subject-matter and method are concerned is to make sure of an educational system that informs students about the present state of society in a way that enables them to understand the conditions and forces at work. If only this result can be accomplished, students will be ready to take their own active part in aggressive participation in bringing about a new social order.”[xv]

Dewey’s philosophies took over American schools of education at colleges and universities like a wildfire. They are now so standard in schools of education that many educators do not even realize that many of these ideas were from John Dewey.

Humanists have now accepted and encouraged the idea of using teachers as adjusters of the social agenda as the standard course of things. In her book The Change Agents, Barbara Morris says that we no longer have schoolteachers; we now have social “change agents.”[xvi] The goal of schools is to redirect and “fix” the morals and values of the schoolchildren. The term that I often heard when I was teacher was “re-parenting.” The excuse often given is that parents have done such a poor job of parenting that schools must re-train the children. It never occurs to these people that it is not the business of the school to teach morals and values.

The schools have completed washed any trace of Jesus and Moses from the minds of the schoolchildren and replace them with John Dewey, Sigmund Freud, Abraham Maslow, Wilhelm Wundt, Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, Carl Sagan, and many others.

This concept of social brainwashing violates the very heart and soul of the 2nd Commandment of Exodus 20:4, which states that we shall not make any graven images. In other words, we should not be so presumptuous as to create our own idea of God and therefore our own rules and morals. In his book Ten words that will change a nation, Rob Schenk sums up this view of the 2nd commandment, saying, “This commandment, prohibiting the making of idols or ‘graven images,’ is aimed directly at this human predisposition for taking matters of right and wrong or ultimate moral authority, into our own hands. This is idolatry in its purest form. When a person chooses a lifestyle that violates the moral will of God . . . they erect an image that reflects their own nature rather than the nature of the One True God.”[xvii]



The Means to Get There



Another man whose philosophies have had an incredible impact on American education is Antonio Gramsci, the founder of the Italian Communist Party. Gramsci is certainly not as well known in American education circles as is Dewey, yet his teachings and philosophies have had nearly as much impact as Dewey’s. Gramsci was best known during his life for his ongoing argument with Russian communists. He was convinced their tactics were all wrong. He told them flat out that they were pursuing the communist revolution incorrectly. Rather than conquering the West through military or economic conquest, moral subversion would be the tactic that brought ultimate victory. They must deconstruct the culture of the west including a nation’s heritage, its morality, and its spiritual life.

While in prison in Italy, Gramsci laid out his plan for conquering America and converting the world voluntarily to Marxism in his nine-volume Prison Notebooks. “The heart of his strategy was the simple dictum that, in order to achieve a socialist victory, America’s faith in its existing moral and philosophical foundations and cultural institutions would have to be infiltrated and undermined. They would transform society’s collective mind from Christianity to Marxism gradually over a few generations. The war would be won by consensus, not force, and fought in the hearts and minds – not on the battlefield.”[xviii]

Larry Abraham, author of None Dare Call it Conspiracy, commented on Gramsci’s strategy, noting: He knew the West could be socialized through a combined overt/ covert undermining of religious beliefs and cultural values. This could be done with a ‘long march through the institutions’ by infiltrating the schools, the churches, the universities, the law, the arts, theater, literature, music, the news media, the courts, television, and the motion picture industry.”[xix]

Gramsci also embraced a technique that was formulated at the Frankfurt School, a German Communist Party school. This technique was called the “critical theory.” This is the practice of criticizing America and the West for every conceivable thing they do and blaming them for every problem in the world. It would charge the West with genocidal crimes against every civilization it had ever encountered. The vital component of this theory was to connect in the minds of the world this litany of crimes with our Christian beliefs.

Where Gramsci laid the foundational theory for overcoming the United States of America, the actual technique came from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel developed what has come to be known as the Hegelian dialectic. This was the specific technique used by the Chinese communists on the American POWs in Korea.

Hegel had been influenced heavily by the occult which led him to believe that distinctions of any kind were nothing more than illusion. This meant that universal truth does not exist. New truths are constantly being formed as an assumed truth (thesis) runs up against a new truth (antithesis). As the two “truths” collide, they merge into a new truth (synthesis). The synthesis then becomes the new thesis, and the cycle continues.

This Hegelian dialectic is played out everyday in American classrooms. It has become standard teaching technique and most well-meaning teachers have no idea of the roots or true purpose behind this mentally coercive technique. Teachers are trained to lead the class through a number of steps that will “clarify” the values of the children. American education heavyweight, Benjamin Bloom confirmed this admitting that the purpose of education and schools was to “change the thoughts, feelings, and actions of students.”[xx] According to Bloom a good teacher is one who possesses the ability to “attain affective objectives through challenging the students’ fixed beliefs and getting them to discuss issues.”[xxi]

The goal of the Hegelian technique is to reach a consensus. This new consensus is almost always at odds with the things that Christian students have been taught at home. Questions are asked in such a way that the emphasis is placed on the way the students feel about a topic. The concept of teaching facts takes a back seat to seeing things from everyone’s point of view and accepting all views and opinions as equally valid. The first rule of consensus is that no individual, group, or nation has access to absolute truth, and consequently, that no one has the right to impose his or her view on others. Suddenly, what kids have been taught at home or church doesn’t seem reasonable anymore. It all conflicts with what the teacher and the other students in the class are saying.

Met with new ideas and unable to challenge them effectively, the student begins to question and doubt what they have previously accepted as truth. The process continues with open-ended questions and the students are told that there are “no wrong answers.” Suddenly it is not a matter of believing something because it is true, it is a matter of things beings true because the student believes it. The exercises are designed to convince the student that there are no absolutes and that everything is relative. Once absolute truth is eliminated as a possibility, truth becomes whatever the group agrees that it is. Even more insidious is that once absolute truth has been removed, the student is defenseless against any foreign idea or philosophy introduced into the classroom. They no longer have any basis on which to object. The difficult part for parents and youth ministers is that most kids don’t actually realize that they have rejected moral absolutes. If asked, most will say that there is such a thing as objective truth. The reality is, however, they have been trained to think differently. Once they have rejected the concept of there being absolute truth, the student will question any absolute, prior established fact, or authority. They will be incapable of seeing the world and reasoning form a Christian viewpoint.

Syndicated columnist Thomas Sowell described the similarities between these teaching techniques and the practices of totalitarian governments in an article that appeared in Forbes magazine titled “Indoctrinating the Children.” He wrote:



The techniques of brainwashing developed in totalitarian countries are routinely used in psychological conditioning programs imposed on American school children. These include emotional shock and desensitization, psychological isolation from sources of support, stripping away defenses, manipulative cross-examination of the individual’s underlying moral values, and inducing acceptance of alternative values by psychological rather than rational means.[xxii]





Author and researcher Berit Kjos traced the development of these mind control techniques:



Through the decades, the strategies used to manipulate minds in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were developed, first at the Tavistock Clinic near London and later at Germany’s Frankfurt School (originally called Frankfurt Institute for Social Research). Their mind-bending methods soon spread to a rising number of psychosocial research centers in America. They were fine-tuned at Columbia, Harvard, Stanford, and other American universities, at our regional educational laboratories and at the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies.[xxiii]



These techniques, as effective as they may be would not have been accepted when they were first implemented if they would have been called “The Frankfurt Brainwashing Education System,” so the concepts and principles were taken and have been repackaged into very positive-sounding programs and teaching philosophies. Radio talk show host Marlin Maddoux says:



To hide the true nature of the psychological attacks, the educationists have wrapped very old philosophies and mind-manipulation techniques inside innocent-sounding names. So, whether it’s called Outcome-Based Education, Values Clarification, Behavior Modification, Higher Order Thinking Skills, Cooperative Learning, the Delphi Technique, Dialoguing to Consensus, or any number of other deceptive names, it is designed to alter the beliefs and values of children.[xxiv]



Many of these may sound familiar to you. Chances are pretty good that the school your child attends uses one or more of these programs or one that is very similar and based on the same philosophies. All of these educational programs, however, draw their principles and precepts from the effective, destructive, and preeminently dangerous Hegelian dialectic. Maddoux warns that the Hegelian dialectic is not just an innocent pedagogy but “is an assault of such proportions that it can bend the human mind just as effectively as a tyrant can brutalize the human body.” The real purpose of the Hegelian dialectic says Maddoux, “is to bring about a global mental breakdown! They call it a paradigm shift.”[xxv]

These educational practices are not just being passed around as theory in educational training schools; they are being used in the classrooms now, and have been used for the past forty years. Bev Eakman, an educator in North Carolina, was given at an in-service workshop a seven-point list of the values teachers should try to instill in their pupils. The seven points were:



· There is no right or wrong, only conditioned responses

· The collective good is more important than the individual

· Consensus is more important than principle

· Flexibility is more important than accomplishment

· Nothing is permanent except change

· All ethics are situational; there are no moral absolutes

· There are no perpetrators, only victims[xxvi]



Eakman describes this process as a type of cognitive dissonance. It is an attempt, she says to encourage students to internalize everything. Everything they learn, then, is aimed at an ethical outcome rather than objective facts. She says, “So cognitive dissonance is. . . like setting somebody up for a psychological fall. It plays with the mind by pitting various perceived ‘authorities’ against one another and exacerbating tensions. After a while, intellectual deliberations shut down, and emotions take over. Only the strongest-willed individuals can hold out--the ‘troublemakers.’”[xxvii]

As stated earlier, a majority of teachers have no idea that this is what they are doing. They are taught these techniques as being the most current in effective pedagogical practice. In many cases, they don’t even have to think about it at all; all they have to do is follow the lessons plans that come with most textbooks.

National educational programs like Goals 2000, Outcome Based Education, and No Child Left Behind all feed into the nationalizing of American education, which make it easier to control. In order to receive federal aid, local schools have to abide by the standards and curriculum dictated by these federally approved policies. These policies often reflect Humanist thinking but the communities must teach them regardless of their own standards. At times the roots of educational philosophies may be even more nefarious than just basic Humanistic thought. Much of the educational philosophy behind Goals 2000, for example, comes from the writings of Alice Bailey. Alice Bailey is a New Age Humanist who is open about the fact that she received much of her ideas not from research or original thought, but from her spirit guide, named Djwhal Khul. I can’t help here but think of 1 Timothy 4:1, which says that one of the activities of demons is to teach new doctrines.

This Humanist takeover of the school system began to really take hold in 1957 with the onset of large amounts of federal aid to education. Since then the control of schools has passed from local school boards and communities to the federal government.

The mother load hit for the Humanist takeover in 1979 with the establishment of the Department of Education. In many respects this completed the takeover by Humanists of America’s educational system. This is ironic, because the Supreme Court has consistently ruled since 1963 that religion is prohibited from being taught in schools. Yet, Humanism is a legal religion according to the Supreme Court (Torcaso v. Watkins, 1961). This means that in effect, America has established a State religion; that of Humanism, complete with a spot in the president’s cabinet.

The constant mantra of needing more money for education that is trotted out at every local, state, and national election has been pushed for by the National Education Association. (The NEA is completely controlled by the Humanist agenda and is one of the most pro-abortion, pro-homosexual agencies in the country.) This money has nothing to do with educating the youth of the country. It is all about building up the infrastructure of a nationally controlled educational paradigm. It is intended to train the next generation of Humanists. The cute little “Catch-22” that the Humanists have created is that if a politician even whispers the idea of cutting federal spending of education or eliminating the Department of Education, they are labeled anti-education child haters and they will not get elected.

John J. Dunphy, in an article titled “A Religion for a New Age,” that appeared in the The Humanist, drives home this idea of Humanists setting up our schools as churches of Humanism. He maintains that classroom teachers will be ministers of another type. They will use the classroom he says, to indoctrinate humanist values in whatever subject they teach.



The battle for humankind’s future must be waged and won in the public school classroom by teachers who correctly perceive their role as the proselytizers of a new faith; a religion of humanity that recognizes and respects the spark of what theologians call divinity in every human being. These teachers must embody the same selfless dedication as the most rabid fundamentalist preachers, for they will be ministers of another sort, utilizing a classroom instead of a pulpit to convey humanist values in whatever subject they teach, regardless of the educational level – preschool day care or large state university. The classroom must and will become an area of conflict between the old and the new – the rotting corpse of Christianity, together with its adjacent evils and misery and the new faith of Humanism, resplendent in its promise of a world in which the never-realized Christian idea of ‘Love they Neighbor’ will finally be achieved.[xxviii]



This religious, covert takeover of the classroom is especially dangerous when coupled with the false doctrine of separation of church and state. The Humanists will cry louder than anyone if this so-called doctrine is violated yet all the while they are setting up the foundations for their own state religion. They continue to attack Christianity but see no problem with instituting their own religion into schools.

Paul Blanshard demonstrates the belief that Christian worldview is a poison for which Humanist education is the antidote. He ominously points out:



I think that the most important factor moving us toward a secular society has been the educational factor. Our schools may not teach Johnny to read properly, but the fact that Johnny is in school until he is sixteen tends to lead toward the elimination of religious superstition. The average American child now acquires a high-school education, and this militates against Adam and Eve and all other myths of alleged history.[xxix]



In other words, give the Secular Humanists twelve good years, 180 days a school year, in their temples, and children will be too educated and too intellectual to believe in the mythology presented in the Bible. The schools, according to Blanshard and other Humanists, are the only institutions capable of determining the amount of religion children should be taught, and according to their determination that amount is equal to the number of World Series wins by the Chicago Cubs in the last fifty years (which is zero, by the way).

Charles Francis Potter, author of Humanism: A New Religion, and signer of the Humanist Manifesto really clarifies the situation for any Christian parent that cannot understand how a child that they have so diligently trained to be Godly can come out with such a worldly view of life. He admits, “Education is the most powerful ally of Humanism, and every American public school is a school of Humanism. What can the theistic Sunday Schools, meeting for an hour once a week, and teaching only a fraction of the children, do to stem the tide of a five-day program of humanistic teaching.”[xxx]

It is so pivotal to understand that last quotation, I recommend you go ahead and read it again (Even though you already read it in the last chapter as well. It is that important). Let it sink in. Folks, we are not sending our children to unbiased, objective institutions of learning. We are sending them to church five days a week. It is a church that views the world and everything in it quite differently than we do.

I don’t know of any Christian parent that would willingly send their children to a Muslim, Buddhist or Mormon school 180 days every year. We would have grave concerns over the information they were taught and the worldview they were absorbing. Yet, our public schools are no less religious. The primary difference is that Secular Humanism is a Godless religion and the religion taught is much more subtle and camouflage than is the overtly religious schools. The point, though, is that parents wouldn’t send their kids to these religious schools willingly, and if they had to for some reason, they would be very conscientious in knowing exactly what their children were learning. These parents would take great care in preparing their kids for the false things that they would be taught, and would ready their children for how to handle the onslaught of incorrect beliefs. These same parents that would shudder at the thought of sending their child to a Muslim school pack up Johnny or Susie and send them to the Secular Humanist temple each and every day of the school year without giving it a second thought. In my opinion, schools must be treated like a fireplace inside of a home. It can be useful for some things, but needs to be constantly watched and have a protective barrier around it so that it is not allowed to freely come into the home.



The Pillars of Secular Humanism



Let’s turn now to the precepts and ideas being taught at the temples of Secular Humanism, so that we can recognize them when they show up in our children’s textbooks, homework, or even their own way of thinking.

H

umanists have a remarkably well developed worldview based on their religious beliefs but they have a game plan that is just as well developed. In their book, Mind Siege, David Noebel and Tim LaHaye describe five basic pillars of the Secular Humanist faith.



Atheism



The foundation of all Humanistic thinking and belief is atheism. All doctrines and dogmas of the Humanist faith come from the belief that there is no God. They hold that anyone who does believe in God is hopefully caught in a trap of medieval mythology. Christians stand in the way of any hope of a Humanist state that has achieved the full potential of human growth, development, and evolution. The Bible says that the fool says that there is no God, yet the Humanists have turned this nugget of wisdom on its ear and claim that it is the fool who says there is a God.

This deification of man has been around since Satan first lied to Eve in the Garden of Eden. Since then man has continually embraced the hope that we could be like God and, logically did not need him. More recently this way of thinking burst forth again with philosophers like Descartes, Voltaire, Rousseau, Hegel, and Friederich Nietzsche. Nietzsche finally reached the conclusion, “God is dead.”

God, of course, knew of man’s proclivity to reject our creator and even predicted the continuance of this sad practice in Romans 1:18-25. Even though the existence of God is patently obvious, man has rejected God and decided for themselves who or what they should worship.

Corliss Lamont describes the atheistic under girding of Humanism:



First, Humanism believes in a naturalistic metaphysics or attitude toward the universe that considers all forms of the supernatural as myth; and the regards Nature as the totality of being and as a constantly changing system of matter and energy which exists independently of any mind or consciousness.



For Humanism the central concern is always the happiness of man in this existence, not in some fanciful never-never land beyond the grave; a happiness worthwhile as an end in itself and not subordinate to or dependent on a Supreme Deity, and invisible King ruling over the earth and the infinite cosmos.



Humanism believes that Nature itself constitutes the sum total or reality, that matter-energy and not mind is the foundation stuff of the universe, and that supernatural entities simply do no exist. This non-reality of the supernatural means, on the human level, that men do not possess supernatural and immortal souls; and on the level of the universe as a whole, that our cosmos does not possess a supernatural and external God.[xxxi]



The extent to which atheistic beliefs have come into vogue in the last several centuries is unprecedented in the history of the world but they are not really new. Man has always been able to look around at the wonder of the world and the universe and surmise that there must be some type of designer. Those who rejected the God of the Bible and wanted to make their own rules chose pagan beliefs. With the onset of so-called science, which has eliminated the need for the supernatural, men can now feel free to choose atheism. Atheism, then, is based on the same mindset as ancient pagans; it has just taken a slightly different form.

An acceptance of atheism changes everything about one’s worldview. With no God in the picture, man is here simply by chance. There are no moral absolutes. Man is free to choose for himself what is truth. This means that God did not hand down undeniable rights that were outlined in the Declaration of Independence. Laws, morals, and standards are all decided upon and granted by the state. A belief in atheism leads to lawlessness, immorality, and violence.

These ideas are constantly preached in our schools today. God has been removed from the schools, it has been deemed unconstitutional to talk about God in schools today. We cannot pray; we cannot even hang the Ten Commandments on the wall. God has been systematically removed from the education system. Atheistic philosophy has seeped into every area of our schools.

In history, we have taken out all references to our founding fathers as men of deeply religious faith. This conception that the founding fathers were not primarily rooted in a Biblical worldview is a flat out lie. It is revisionist history at its worst.

Science is no longer taught honestly in schools. Evolution is now taught. In most states you cannot even present evidence that questions evolutionary theories.

Psychology, sociology, and indeed the whole philosophy of education itself are based on evolutionary presuppositions. The theories that now dominate education are based on the assumption that we are nothing more than evolved animals. This does not have to be overtly stated very often, although it is, because it runs through the thinking of every area in education.



Evolution



Humanism is completely built on the theory of evolution. Evolutionary type theories are not new; they go all the way back to ancient Greece and even ancient Babylon.[xxxii] They were always intertwined with pagan religious beliefs. Erasmus Darwin came up with nearly every theory that his grandson would later purport to be his own. Charles Darwin did not discover evolution; it was simply repackaged and marketed by him. It leapt onto the world stage with his 1852 release, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection of The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.

Men around the world who were actively looking for ways to live without the constraints of God seized upon Darwin’s book as a scientific justification for how they wanted to live. Their desire to reject God came before their acceptance of evolution, not the other way around. It is vital to understand that.

Despite the fact that not one single theory of Darwin has been proven to be correct over 150 years after they were first presented, evolution is taught as fact in our schools. Darwinism is, in my opinion, the most pervasive and powerful influence in education today. It is everywhere. It is presented to our students as fact.

The truly dangerous thing about evolution, in my estimation, is this seeping influence that it has had on all other aspects of education. Most Christian youth will tell you immediately that they do not believe in evolution. We have taught them that much quite well. What they do not realize, and most Christian parents do not realize it either, is that although they have rejected the face value theory of evolution, they have unwittingly accepted many of the underlying philosophies and beliefs that have come from evolution based Humanism.



Amorality



The obvious result of evolution and atheism is eventual amorality. With the systematic destruction of the Biblical foundations of this country, has come the disappearance of morality. Evolution teaches that man is nothing more than an animal that is slightly higher evolved. Anything that smacks of Biblical morality has been under siege in this country. Not only are Biblical values no longer needed, they hold man back from his predestined course of evolutionary enlightenment. The Humanist magazine proudly announced that, “Darwin’s discovery of the principle of evolution sounded the death knell of the religious and moral values.”[xxxiii]

Freedom must exist for man to realize his full potential. Self-expression is one of the most highly touted and protected rights in the Humanist mind. Humanists call for total freedom in lifestyle, sexual expression, verbal expression, artistic expression, etc. No matter that this has resulted in rampant STD’s, out of wedlock pregnancies, and a society that is completely falling apart at the seams. Human expression is so important that it is of no consequence that it has resulted in the death of over 40 million unborn children in America. I am personally dumbfounded by the apathy that exists in large parts of the Christian community over this issue. Christians by the tens of thousands claim that Jesus is the Lord of their life and that they desire God’s ways to be their ways, and yet they flock in droves to support politicians that support issues like gay rights and abortion.

A former student of mine once made a very telling statement in response to a question of why they had no interest in pursuing a relationship with God. He replied, “I want to live how I want to live. I don’t want any God telling me what I can and cannot do.” He went on to say that even if evolution was proven to be wrong and that there was undeniable proof of the existence of God, he would still not want to be a Christian. He wants the freedom to express himself as he sees fit.

This philosophy of amorality has unleashed an unholy Pandora’s Box on our society. As Noebel and LaHaye point out, “This philosophy has opened the door to situation ethics, permissiveness, free love, sexually active youth, and a flock of code words for adultery, fornication, perversion, and abomination – all of which are simply sin. Students from junior high to college – the target of amoral teachings for the past five decades – have been encouraged toward gross immorality.”[xxxiv] I think they are exactly right in this statement except that I would add the fact that students in elementary schools have also been targets of this Humanistic philosophy.

There is no room in this new Humanist society for the absolutes of the Bible. The Ten Commandments, in their view, are not just outdated; they are the vilest of attacks on human autonomy. Paul Kurtz agrees with this when he says, “Short of harming others or compelling them to do likewise, individuals should be permitted to express their sexual proclivities and pursue their lifestyles as they desire.”[xxxv]

This attack on sexual attitudes is one of the fiercest for the Humanists. Mary Calderone, former president of the Sexuality, Information, and Education Council of the United States, (SIECUS) demonstrates the Humanist attitude towards sexuality, saying:



The adolescent years are, among other things, for learning how to integrate sex usefully and creatively in daily living. Therefore, we must accept that adolescent sexual experimentation is not just inevitable but actually necessary for normal development.



I advocate discussion of it, [premarital sex] so that young people know they have choices beginning with masturbation, of course, and petting to climax and mutual orgasm before moving on to intercourse.



An extramarital affair that’s really solid might have very good results.[xxxvi]



Students are routinely taught that the homosexual lifestyle is legitimate. The homosexual movement (which is different from the homosexual lifestyle) was generated by the Humanists as an attack on Christian morality. The Homosexual rights movement is a carefully crafted game plan intended to change the moral standards of our society. Humanists have used it so vociferously because it has struck a sympathetic cord with many Americans. It is now the horse they have chosen to ride in their race to bring down Christian morals. Once they can get societal acceptance for homosexuality, it is a matter of time, in the mind of the Humanist, before the rest of the Biblical moral standards in America crumble.

Corliss Lamont drives home this attack on Christian morals, arguing that the moral person will be obliged to “discard the outmoded ethics of the past . . . The merely good is the enemy of the better. The Humanist refuses to accept any Ten Commandments or other ethical precepts as immutable and universal laws never to be challenged or questioned. He bows down to no alleged Supreme moral authority either past or present.”[xxxvii]

This Humanist onslaught against traditional morality will not slow down now that they have made great inroads in much of our society. Their ultimate goal is for universal recognition. They must control the next generation and to do that they must control the minds of the young. Adolph Hitler understood this when he once remarked, that if he had control of the textbooks he would control the state.



Autonomous Man



One of the more curious beliefs of Humanists is that man is autonomous. That is, he is self-directed; he is his own god; and he is absolutely good by nature. The only thing that is keeping man from realizing the potential of his own god-like goodness is the harness put on him by society. It is society, the state that keeps man from becoming all he can be. This is why it is so evil in the mind of the Humanist to limit the free expression of another human being. You are in essence, committing blasphemy when you tell a Humanist that he cannot or should not do something that he desires to do.

Humanists believe that man is innately good. Where this goodness comes from, they never really explain. They also lack any evidence to demonstrate that man is good by nature. This does not deter them in this belief one bit. Jean-Jacques Rosseau, one of the champions of modern collegiate Humanists, maintained that if man were good by nature, then he would remain that way if he were free from any outside influences. These influences, in fact, are from the society not the individual.

Today’s schools are full of self-isms: Self-actualization, self-image, self-love, self-sufficiency, self-esteem, self-satisfaction, self-importance, and self-realization. They have eaten away at the demands of the soul made by the Bible and turned man’s focus entirely on himself. The Humanists have turned the center of meaning from soul to self. The height of their desires is to feel good about themselves. They have no concept of sin and the need for repentance and salvation. Lamont demonstrates this every-man-for-himself mentality that stresses feelings over responsibilities:



The watchword of Humanism is happiness for all humanity in this existence as contrasted with salvation for the individual soul in a future existence and the glorification of a supernatural Supreme Being. Humanism urges men to accept freely and joyously the great boon of life and to realize that life in its own right and for its own sake can be as beautiful and splendid as any dream of immortality.[xxxviii]



One technique used quite often by Humanists to lessen controversy over the materials being presented in schools is to switch the definitions of words. They will use words or terms that mean one thing to parents but something entirely new and different to the students. The Humanist usage of the word “democracy” is a good example of that. Watching the network news generally drives me nuts for many reasons but my pet peeve is the way they continually push that we are a democratic nation. Humanists have gotten everyone to believe that, all the while gently switching the definition. Most adults think of representative government and rule by the majority when they think of democracy. Never mind the fact that the founding fathers were very distrustful of democracy. They went to great lengths to ensure that we did not have a democracy. They built us a Republic, one that definitely has some democratic ideals but was decidedly not a democracy. Yet that is all we hear these days: Democracy, democracy, democracy. The new definition of democracy being taught in schools is that of autonomy. They equate autonomy with freedom. Democracy means total personal liberty. By teaching this to the next generation of voters, Humanists have dramatically switched the direction of our country.

The philosophy of Humanism also stresses permissiveness in child rearing. This comes from the belief that humans are intrinsically good and will realize their full potential if left to their own inner desires. These children, however, grow up to be selfish children with no manners, no values, and no morals. Noebel and LaHaye remark that children raised under this philosophy will “seek to get, rather than give; lust, rather than love; demand, rather than contribute. When those around him do the same, the outcome is predictable; dissension, hostility, and eventually open combat.”[xxxix]

These ideologies are everywhere you turn in modern education. Students are taught that having a positive self-image and high self-esteem is of the utmost importance, rather than the Biblical principles that we are all sinners and should humble ourselves before God. Students are taught to look out for themselves first, to be selfish.

Take a large group of young children, put them together in one school building, teach them that there are no absolute standards, that we all determine what is right for us, and then teach them that their happiness is the most important thing in their life. When you do all of that you get exactly the situation is schools are in today. They are centers of disrespect and violence rather than institutions of serious learning.



Globalism



The ultimate dream for the Humanist is to achieve utopia here on earth. This only makes sense because there is no heaven or promise of the afterlife for the Humanist. Their goal, then, is to create a virtual heaven on earth. Humanists agree that the only way to do this is through one world government. Humanists assume that their type of government, socialism, is good and that the bigger government is, the better. Their definition of democracy is fulfilled in individual autonomy that is available only in a socialist, Humanist controlled, government. Julian Huxley, former director of UNESCO, says, “The general philosophy of UNESCO should, it seems, be a scientific world humanism, global in extent and evolutionary in background. . . Thus the struggle for existence that underlies natural selection is increasingly replaced by conscious selection, a struggle between ideas and values in consciousness.”[xl] Lamont adds that, “A truly Humanist civilization must be a world civilization.”[xli]

Achieving this one world government necessitates total government control of the economy. Most Humanists agree that the quickest means to that end would be communism. According to Noebel and LaHaye, Lamont “demonstrates that a very important connection exists between Secular Humanism and communism, which few care to discuss. Humanism and communism are related: Humanism is the mother, communism the daughter; humanism is the root, communism the branch. Many of the ideas and beliefs that make up the communist worldview are similar to or identical with the humanist worldview.”[xlii]

The Humanists, long ago, identified the United Nations as the organization that could fulfill their dreams of a New World Order. They have infiltrated the UN to the highest positions and have virtually taken control of it. Three leading members of the American Humanism Association have been directors-general of three important UN organizations: Julian Huxley, UNESCO; Brock Chisholm, World Health Organization; and Lord Boyd Orr, UN Food and Agriculture Organization.

According to Claire Chambers:



Some of their leaders combined forces with leading advocates of population control and nationalized abortion, World Federalists, and others, in the formation of the American Movement for World Government. This group’s full-page advertisement in the New York Times of July 27, 1971, called for a “world federal government to be open at all times to all nations without right of secession,” with the power to curb overpopulation.[xliii]



The signers of this ad went on to call for the following amongst other things: an executive branch with the power to enforce world laws upon all individuals, the control of all weapons of mass destruction by the world government, and disarmament by all nations that would be controlled and enforced by a world police force. They declared that, “a federal world government must be established at the earliest possible moment by basic transformation of the UN or other reasonable means.”[xliv] Most Humanists consider their loyalty to a one-world government to supersede their loyalty as American citizens. Lamont refers to Humanism as the moral equivalent to world patriotism. In the Humanist Manifesto 2000, Paul Kurtz lays the cards on the table in calling for an immediate one world government: “We recommend an international system of taxation. . . This would not be a voluntary contribution but an actual tax.”[xlv] This tax, of course, would be used to fund the various UN organizations.

Noebel and LaHaye cite a pledge that is already being taught to some of America’s third grade children:



I pledge allegiance to world

To care for earth, sea and air

To honor every living thing

With peace and justice everywhere.[xlvi]



This pledge shows their allegiance to the idea of globalism. Note that they evidently “honor every living thing,” except for the unborn. None other than Walter Cronkite sums up the allegiance to globalism over Americanism in his call for a one world government when he says, “Of course, we Americans will have to give up some of our sovereignty.”[xlvii]



Conclusion



There are so many different ways and angles that Humanist thinking has seeped into our education system that it takes a truly alert parent to catch even some of the brainwashing propaganda. Be especially alert to the buzz words and phrases of Humanist education-speak such as: social justice, hate crime, sensitivity training, globalism, world citizenship, celebrate diversity, socialized medicine, universal healthcare, political correctness, homophobia, gay rights, feminism, no-fault divorce, tolerance, animal rights, progressive education, environmentalism, multi-culturalism, outcome based education, specieism, redistribution of wealth, alternative lifestyles, punished by rewards, effort grades, experiential learning, situational ethics, etc. The list could go on for a while.

The key for parents is to constantly be on guard against things that may seem harmless at first but are being used by Humanists to push their agenda. Allow me to give you a classic example. A big trend in education right now is ecology training. Students are trained to care about the environment, put Mother Nature first, and to participate in things like Earth Day. Could this possibly be bad, you ask? Have I gone off the deep end, spiraling into conspiracy theories that should be put next to the one about us never landing on the moon? Follow me for just a minute and I’ll explain. Most of this ecological training, which seems quite innocent is, in fact, the perfect arena to teach children many of the Humanist tenets. Through this area of education kids will be taught evolutionary theories of man, animal, and the environment. They are taught that man is just an animal and that it is our duty to care for animals as equals to man. Animals are elevated to a status that they were never intended be while man is devalued. They should have the same access to rights according to the Humanists. This is automatically under-girded by atheism. They can then be easily taught concepts of how important it is to stop those who harm the environment. This segues right into anti-business, anti-American government, pro-world government thinking. Furthermore, the kids are softly fed ideas about Mother Nature, the earth goddess Gaia, pantheism, and so on. Before they know it, they have accepted many precepts about how to view the world and the things in the world that are completely contrary to the Word of God.

So what should a parent do about all of this? How does all of this information matter practically? First, parents must be prepared to change the way they view the education of their children.

Far too many parents in our fellowships have done their very best in raising their children without the desired effect. They have gone to all the parenting workshops that were available. They had quiet times with their children and devotionals with the family every week. They prayed with and for their children regularly, and consistently and humbly sought advice from other parents. They held onto their belief that Proverbs 22:6 promised that if they trained their child in the way they should go that they wouldn’t stray from it.

Things did not, however, go according to plan. If we are honest with ourselves, too many teens in our fellowships have rejected discipleship of Jesus Christ all along, or after embracing it for a short time, have walked away, embracing the world instead. I simply don’t believe that most of these cases are caused by a bad heart. It is a result of not transforming the minds of our children according to the principle of Romans 12:1-2. If we are trying to teach children to be disciples of Jesus Christ, then the transformation of the mind is an absolute must. It is no mystery to me at all when children are allowed to learn how to think and view the world from their Secular Humanist schools with no deprogramming, and then they reject Christianity. The child who thinks as a Secular Humanist will find it virtually impossible to live consistently as a Christian for any length of time.

What happens with many of our kids is that we raise them in a Christian home, but we don’t properly prepare them. It is the same phenomenon as the kid that only shoots baskets in the driveway by himself. The first mistake many parents make is not training their children from the time they can understand language that there are people that want them to think and act differently from what God wants. As they grow older, they can be trained in the art of recognizing the worldviews and beliefs of those non-Christian influences (we will discuss this concept in detail in a later chapter.)

If all a parent ever teaches their child is to love and obey God, they are playing with fire. Those are wonderful and necessary elements, but it must go beyond that. I know too many parents who did that and then watched the painful sight of their beloved child walk away from the faith that was so dear to them. The foundation of Christianity certainly includes our love for God, but the Christian life is much broader than that. The Christian student must be taught a comprehensive Christian worldview that is applicable and relevant to every area of their life. If they are not, then disaster is right around the corner.

When a teen is not taught a relevant and comprehensive Christian worldview they will eventually encounter things through experience that they were not prepared to handle. New ways of thinking and viewing the world will be introduced that seem completely harmless to the unaware child. As we have already seen, these new worldviews are well thought out, they are intricate, and the methods of passing them onto children are devious and intentional.

Eventually the experiences of the child will not match up with a one-dimensional worldview that is not prepared to meet the world that they actually face. We will discuss this topic in greater detail in the next two chapters, but suffice it to say that, in time the student will abandon the worldview that does not answer their new experiences. They are being taught, after all, to accept whatever works for them at the time. The Secular Humanist worldview, although bankrupt and false, seems to be much more comprehensive and relevant than the shallow Christian worldview that most teens have.

When I grew up in a church environment, I saw a very different phenomenon from teens who chose to rebel against Christianity. There were two variables that accounted for the differences. One was that most of the kids in our church went to a private school. The second variable was that the worldview attack by the Humanists was not nearly as advanced as it is today. When kids in our church rejected Christianity, they did it violently. It was a rebellion that was usually born out of bitterness or hate for God or their parents. The rejection of Christ that I see from kids today seems much milder but is actually much more insidious and potentially permanent. The reason is the Humanist concept of relativism. Kids are taught to do whatever works for them at the time.

When they are younger teens, they are asked to study the Bible. They do, and the worldview of their parents and teen workers seems to work for them at the time. Usually the goal of the parents and youth workers is conversion not transformation. The soul is converted but the mind is never transformed. When kids come under attack from the world, the media, the friends, and most importantly, their school, their Christianity that has been built with hay and straw does not stand up to the test. So, they merely switch worldviews. This is generally not a conscious decision. They are usually not even aware of the switch, so subtle has been the indoctrination of the Humanist worldview. All the kids have really done, in their mind, is find what works for them at the time. It disappoints their parents, but the kids assume it is simply because they are choosing a different path that their parents don’t understand. After all, they have learned at school that one must find what is true for them at the time. At this particular time, they reason, Christianity no longer works, so it is simply discarded. There is no violent rebellion or animosity. For the teens it is an amicable parting of the ways. They often hold little if any ill will towards the church or their parents. They will even continue to go to church occasionally, especially when their parents ask. This is because they have been taught not to judge someone else’s truth. If Christianity works for their parents, that’s great. It just isn’t the child’s truth at that time.

So what are some practical things that parents can do? The first suggestion would be to take your child out of public school if at all possible. Homeschool is a wonderful option, but not all families can do that. Finding a good private school is a great second option. If neither of those choices is doable then the parent must ramp up their efforts to train their child to defend their mind against opposing worldviews, while teaching them a comprehensive and relevant Biblical worldview.

In the next chapter we will take an in-depth look at the relativity of the Secular Humanist worldview and how to effectively combat it. Following that, we will look at the concept of worldviews in more detail. The second half of the book will be a detailed consideration of a how a parent might go about giving their child an effective and consistent Biblical worldview.



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[i]John Stormer, None Dare Call it Treason (Florissant, Mo.: Liberty Bell Press, 1964), p. 94.

[ii] Dr. Fred Schwarz, You Can Trust the Communists (to Be Communists) (Long Beach, California: Christian Anti-Communism Crusade, 1972), p. 129.

[iii] Stormer, None Dare Call it Treason, p. 94.

[iv] Edward Hunter, Communist Psychological Warfare” (testimony before Committee on Un-American Activities, House of Representatives, Eighty-Fifth Congress, Second Session, Washington D.C., March 13, 1958).

[v] Ibid.

[vi] Marlin Maddoux, Public Education Against America (New Kensington, PA: Whitaker House, 2006), p. 105.

[vii] Ibid, p. 79.

[viii] John Dewey, “My Pedagogic Creed,” National Education Association Journal (May 1927), 134.

[ix] John Dewey, “Soul-Searching,” Teacher Magazine, September 1933, p. 33.

[x] Dewey, “My Pedagogic Creed” pp. 6, 15, 17.

[xi] LaHaye and Noebel, Mind Siege (Nashville, TN: Word, 2000), p. 114.

[xii] John Dewey, Impressions of Soviet Russia and the Revolutionary World (New York: New Republic, Inc., 1929), p. 4, 15, 57.

[xiii] Ibid, p. 61, 67.

[xiv] John Dewey, Education and the Social Order (New York: League for Industrial Democracy, 1934), p. 10.

[xv] Ibid, p. 10.

[xvi] Lahaye and Noebel, Mind Siege, p. 115.

[xvii] Rob Schenck, Ten Words That Will Change a Nation (Tulsa, OK: Albury, 1999), p. 30.

[xviii] Maddoux, Public Education Against America, p. 110.

[xix] Ibid., p. 110.

[xx] Benjamin Bloom, All Our Children Learning (New York: McGraw Hill, 1981), 180.

[xxi] David Krathwohl, Benjamin Bloom, and Bertram Massia, Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, The Classificaiton of Educational Goals, Handbook II: Affective Domain (New York: McKay Publishers, 1956), 55.

[xxii] Thomas Sowell, “Indoctrinating the Children,” Forbes, February 1, 1993, p. 65.

[xxiii] Berit Kjos, “Molding Minds Through Group Manipulation,” News With Views, September 15, 2002.

[xxiv] Maddoux, Public Education Against America, p. 136.

[xxv] Ibid.

[xxvi] B.K. Eakman, “EDUCATION: Bushwacking Johnny,” Chronicles Magazine, September 2002. http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/Chronicles/September2002/0902Eakman.html (July, 2006).

[xxvii] Ibid.

[xxviii] John J. Dunphy, “A Religion for a New Age,” The Humanist, January/February 1983, p. 26.

[xxix] Paul Blanshard, “Three Cheers For Our Secular State,” The Humanist, March/April 1976, p. 17.

[xxx] Potter, Humanism: A New Religion, p. 128.

[xxxi] Corliss Lamont, The Philosophy of Humanism (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co. 1977), p. 45.

[xxxii] Henry M. Morris, The Troubled Water of Evolution (San Diego: Creation-Life Publishers, 1974), p. 69-72.

[xxxiii] S. S. Chawla, “A Philosophical Journey to the West,” The Humanist (September/October 1964), p. 151.

[xxxiv] LaHaye and Noebel, Mind Siege, p. 77.

[xxxv] Paul Kurtz, Humanist Manifesto II (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1973), p. 18.

[xxxvi] LaHaye David Noebel, Mind Siege, p. 77.

[xxxvii] Lamont, The Philosophy of Humanism, p. 235.

[xxxviii] Ibid., p. 14.

[xxxix] LaHaye and Noebel, Mind Siege, p. 82.

[xl] Julian Huxley, “A New World Vision: Selections from a Controversial Document,” The Humanist (March/April 1979), p. 35.

[xli] Lamont, The Philosophy of Humanism, P. 281.

[xlii] LaHaye and Noebel, Mind Siege, p. 83.

[xliii] Claire Chambers, The SIECUS Circle (Belmont, MA: Western Islands, 1977), p. 87.

[xliv] Ibid., p. 69-70.

[xlv] Paul Kurtz, “Humanist Manifesto 2000: A Call for a New Planetary Humanism,” Free Inquiry (fall 1999), p. 8-9.

[xlvi] LaHaye and Noebel, Mind Siege, p. 85.

[xlvii] “Cronkite Champions World Government,” Washington Times (3 December 1999): A2. Taken from a speech by Walter Cronkite before the World Federalist Association at the United Nations, 19 October 1999.