Evolution II
Evolution
and Education
THE
PILGRIMS:
The essence of any revolution is that it
must turn a society ideologically, if not literally, upside down, hence the term
"Revolution." In any real revolution up becomes down, left becomes
right, right becomes wrong, good becomes evil, and evil becomes good. Society is
literally ripped off its foundations, plucked upside down, and replaced on a new
foundation which is the exact antithesis of the former. This newsletter has
consistently traced the foundations of this republic back to the Pilgrims. The
course of revolution in America must deal with the Pilgrims and the foundation
that Puritan New England laid for America. Therefore, it is not at all
surprising to discover that the Pilgrims are much maligned and misrepresented
these days. In an effort to reject our history and overthrow our beginnings, it
is not uncommon to allege that America started as a penal colony, and to accuse
the Pilgrims of actually being CRIMINALS. Less radical attacks on our
foundations infer that the Pilgrims were illiterate immigrants and the rejects
of European society. That such accusations are patently absurd history will lend
a healthy witness. The founders of New England were known for their moral rigor
and their uncompromising conviction to rule every detail of their lives by the
holy and righteous standards of a thrice-holy God. Not only did these men earn
for themselves the name "Puritan," but they were men of education,
wisdom and learning. They were the cream of a society that drove them to these
shores by persecution. Far from being illiterate vagrants, they soon established
a system of private Christian schools to teach their children the fear of the
Lord, the Word of God, and to inculcate into them that Christian culture that
was later to flourish so prominently on those shores. In 1650, they established
Harvard as a citadel of Christian scholarship to train their young men in the
Word of God and to produce a ministry for the churches that would be faithful to
Jesus Christ and the standards of the Reformation. They laid the foundations for
a system of private Christian education that was to produce that intelligent
citizenry at which De Tocqueville marvelled. De Tocqueville, that French scholar
who came to America to discover the genius of America and reported that "America
is great because America is good," also discovered that the strength of
America lay in a citizenry that was steeped in an understanding of truth. He
discovered that in the most remote frontier cabins, men could read and could
debate intelligently their Bible, their Constitution, and the issues facing
their government. Certainly that is a high tribute to the scholarship and the
educational system of our founders. They laid a foundation worthy of our
defense!
EDUCATION:
What is education? That is the question! In this issue of the Pilgrim, the
relationship between Evolution and Education will be established. If
evolutionary education is to be weighed in the balances and found wanting, the
standard of judgment must be the Word of God. The Bible says, "The fear
of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge." Without God's word, man can
know nothing. As Rushdoony has often pointed out, there is no such thing as
brute factuality or just plain facts. All things derive their meaning from God,
who created all things for His purposes. Therefore, all things derive their
meaning from their place in God's design and in God's purposes. All things must
be seen as part of God's eternal decree and as the actions of a personal God
fulfilling His will in history. Hence, the Scriptures can record Christ as
saying, "I am the Way, the Truth and the Life." Facts like
statistics can be made to say anything. Truth can only be found in Him who is
the Truth. As Solomon said, "…of making
many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh." According
to Solomon, human knowledge and brute facts without knowledge of God are an
exercise in futility, and he concluded that to fear God and keep His
commandments is the whole duty of man. The Apostle Paul similarly condemns such
education when he rebukes those that are “ever learning, and never able to
come to the knowledge of the truth."
Truly the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom! The public school system
with its denial of the Word of God cannot educate in spite of the billions of
dollars that it annually expends.
EVOLUTION:
As was brought out in the last
newsletter, EVOLUTION is another gospel. The Bible offers deliverance through
the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. The Bible teaches that man's problem is
heredity, original sin, and the corrupt and depraved nature that was transmitted
to him from Adam. The Bible teaches that "Ye
must be born again," receive a new nature, crucify the old nature, and
be conformed to the image of Christ. The evolutionary gospel teaches that man
can evolve into perfection. It teaches that the problem is the environment and
that the proper environment will evolve a perfect race of redeemed god-men.
Since evolution hinges on the environment, the latter must be totally controlled
to produce and evolve the new world order. If that control is to be total, it
must include control of the MIND. If that control is to be total, it must
include control of EDUCATION. Marx postulated as much when he called for free
education for all children in public schools as the 10th plank of the Communist
Manifesto. Marx's disciples have since then not only implemented this program,
but have made attendance compulsory as well.
SALVATION BY
EDUCATION:
Education has become the new American
Messiah. Private Christian schools had been clearly and firmly established on
the Scriptures. Public schools had from their inception in the 1850's been
established on a different foundation: that education itself, not Christ,
represented true Messiah. No longer was the fear of the Lord the beginning of
knowledge. No longer was Christ to be regarded as the Truth incarnate. In fact,
the schools were no longer even pretending to be a place where either knowledge
was imparted or where truth was to be taught. Knowledge and truth were no longer
the issue. The real issue now was evolution. The schoolhouse had now become the
place where evolutionary conditioning was to take place. Radical educators
became the high priests of this new religion. The schoolhouse was now a place of
controlled environment, where under careful guidance, one progressive generation
after another on the road to Utopia would be produced. Learning, truth, and
knowledge had become inconsequential. All that mattered was subjecting the child
from kindergarten on, by compulsory attendance laws if necessary, to as much
conditioning in a controlled educational environment as possible. The three R's,
reading, writing, and arithmetic, were on the way out, as well as academic
standards and discipline. Unstructured, undisciplined, upgraded education was
heralded as the wave of the future. Conditioning was the issue and education was
to be a social experience and not a study of truth. To justify such radical
utopian ideals and messianic hopes, the raw material of the system, the young
children, could hardly be considered to be tainted with original sin, much less
total depravity. Instead the children were to be considered as blank sheets of
white paper. The children were considered as totally the products of their
environment, and any future defects in them were to be attributed to a faulty
environment, a situation that the educators were seeking to remedy as fast as
they would be permitted to seize control of our children's environment. If they,
as the new priesthood, could just be permitted to write on that blank sheet of
paper and to mould and form and create our children according to their
blueprint, they would answer for a paradise regained. Well, they have had over
one hundred years to try, and the true nature of their product is increasingly
apparent. They have produced a generation of American youth rampant with drugs,
immorality, revolution, and blasphemy. They are graduating students who can
neither add nor subtract and can neither read nor write. But they are also
producing a generation of youth who are receptive as never before to the new
one-world order, and to an internationalist socialist state. They are producing
conditioned cogs, readily assimilable into the society of the future.
Here we can see, too, the
inevitability of both the Scope's monkey trials and the 1961 Supreme Court
decision to ban the Scriptures from the schools. Any system of education so
radically committed to evolutionary conditioning could not forever deny itself.
It, by its very nature, parents and elected school officials to the contrary,
had to teach evolution and force the issue in the Scope's monkey trials in
Tennessee. Similarly, such divergent faiths could not indefinitely coexist.
Again, the public schools could not deny themselves, and acting consistently
with their nature they cast the Bible out. First, because divine creation,
original sin and truth in Him who is the Truth are alien to the system, and,
secondly, that the environment in schools might no longer be tainted with the
virus of Christianity. Once having rid itself of these inconsistencies, the
public schools made rapid progress in turning out their product, the most
radicalized, deceived, degenerate, and deluded generation in history.
PRIVATE SCHOOLS:
In contrast with the above spiritual and
moral destruction of American youth, private Christian education made America
great. These schools were committed to standards, the standards of God's word.
They taught truth in light of Him who is the Truth. They imparted knowledge and
taught the three R's. They defended absolute standards of morality and truth,
imparted Christian culture, and taught history in the light of a sovereign God
dealing with His creation. They trained ministers and missionaries, and prepared
an intelligent citizenry to inhabit and maintain a Christian Republic. A
sterling example of the power and blessings of such education can be found in
Rev. John Witherspoon's Princeton. With only two professors, this little school
was indeed the salt of the earth, greatly influencing the Constitutional
Convention and producing one President, one Vice-President, ten cabinet
officers, twenty-one United States Senators, thirty-nine congressmen and twelve
governors for the new republic. Moral, spiritual, and academic discipline in
education produced men who built the republic into the greatest nation in
history.
Man has from time immemorial been plagued
with wars, famines, poverty, disease, and a host of other afflictions. Orthodox
Christianity views all of these as the inevitable consequences of life in a
sinful world and as God's righteous curse on a rebellious creation. Christianity
trusts in God's providence, obediently seeks the Lord's blessings, and places
its ultimate hope in the resurrection and the New Jerusalem. Christianity waits
for that day when the whole creation shall be redeemed through the atonement and
shed blood of Jesus the Messiah. However, today, man has found a new messiah:
EDUCATION. Is crime a problem? Education is the answer. At the outset of public
education, great claims were made that it would abolish criminality. Today, we
still hear that not capital punishment, but rather rehabilitation through
education is the answer. The criminal, after all, is not responsible, being
merely the product of his environment, and the guilty society that formed him
owes him a rehabilitation at tax payers'
expense. Are slums a blight on society? The answer is education. Quality
education will create a veritable Shangri-La, and if ghetto education is not
doing the job, then the students will be bused to Timbuktu and back, but
education is the answer. Is there war? Is there disease? Is there poverty?
Is there racism? The high priests of the public schools unanimously trot out
education as the messiah to answer all these ills and more. Salvation is now by
education; the school is now the church; educators are now the priests, and our
children are the kidnapped converts of this new religion.
THE PROPHETS:
Contrary to popular misconception, the
Old Testament prophets of Israel were not primarily concerned with the
prediction of future events. The prophets were characterized by their calls to
national repentance, their exposure of sin, their rebuke of all idolatry,
apostasy and unrighteousness, and their proclamations of the judgments of God.
An important facet of their ministry was to continually remind the people of
their history. Time and time again, they would remind the people how God had
brought them out of Egypt by many signs and wonders, and had fed them with manna
and had led them into a land flowing with milk and honey. Continually, the
people were brought into remembrance of the past blessings and judgments of God,
and called back to the worship of the true God, the God of their history, the
God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The prophets continually taught them the
lessons of their history that they might not be condemned to repeat them. The
cyclical nature of the book of Judges, cycling from apostasy and judgment
through repentance and deliverance, shows the price that the children of Israel
paid for forgetting the lessons of history.
Similarly,
preachers today should be reminding the people of their history. Americans
should be brought to remembrance of how the Lord brought the Pilgrims out of
persecution in England, and through many trials brought them and established
them on these shores and gave them a land flowing with milk and honey. Americans
must not be allowed to forget how God blessed the faith of our forefathers and
prospered them. Americans must remember how the faith of our forefathers from
Valley Forge to the Alamo was vindicated by victories sent by Almighty God.
Neither must we forget God's ever present judgments in this century on those who
deny Him, for God is not mocked. Our forefathers learned the lessons of history
well, and so must we if we are also to be blessed of God.
1984:
The Orwellian novel 1984 has some interesting insights
into the importance of history. The book pictures a society that is totally, and
I mean TOTALLY, controlled by a totalitarian socialist state. The state is ruled
by the Party headed up by Big Brother. The Party has some interesting slogans,
like WAR IS PEACE and FREEDOM IS SLAVERY—but the most interesting Party slogan
by far goes, "Who controls the past controls the future; who controls
the present controls the past." In other words, the lessons of history
dictate the decisions of the future. Men are guided in their future actions by
the wisdom, experience, and lessons of the past. He who controls the past can
thus effectively control the future. The prophets of Israel preached the lessons
of history in order to attempt to control the future of Israel and to call them
in repentance back to God. They preached the truths including the truth of
history, to call the people back to the true God. The Party, however, will use
its control of the present to rewrite history, and will thus control the past.
Thus the Party will control the
future and perpetuate itself forever, even as the Messianic Kingdom of Christ.
The chief character in the novel is one Winston Smith. Winston is a clerk in the
"Ministry of Truth." His job is to rewrite history. Among other
things, this includes constant revision of Party leaders' speeches, statistics,
and so forth, to make all Party predictions come true and give the Party an air
of omniscience. It also rewrites history to discredit all previous societies and
attribute an unbroken wave of progress and success to the Party, establishing
them undeniably and unquestionably as the wave of the future. All records,
newspapers, magazines, and so forth, are continually revised and reprinted as
previous statements vanish forever down the "Memory Hole." In a search
for objective truth Winston rebels, and is arrested by the "Thought
Police." As part of his brainwashing, he is taught the futility of
resisting the Party. His interrogator asks him: "Does the past exist
concretely in space?" "No." "Then where does
the past exist, if at all?" "In records. It is written down."
"In records and in the mind. In human memories." "In
memory. Very well then. We, the Party, control all records, and we control all
memories. Then we control the past, do we not?" Winston's search for
truth met with utter futility in the face of a Party that claimed the right to
manufacture truth and of a Party that as Christ, claimed to be truth. Winston
goes down in defeat and is reconstructed as another brainwashed cog in Big
Brother's system. Winston personifies the futility of searching for truth
outside of Christ. Christians cannot only cling to Christ but can rejoice that
on the great day of the Lord, the books shall be opened and all things shall be
made manifest and everything that is hid shall be brought to light. The past
exists, and every man shall be judged according to his works.
THE PUBLIC
SCHOOLS:
If public education represents evolutionary conditioning
in a controlled environment, the next question is, "Who controls that
environment?" As we shall see, the control of that controlled environment
is in itself pretty closely controlled. Starting off with locally elected school
boards financed by local property taxes, the control of education has
systematically been centralized first to the state and then to the federal
levels of government. Even today, school boards are still being involuntarily
regionalized and funded by state and federal subsidies with the attendant
controls. At each step of the way, however, radical educators claiming
omniscience over ignorant parents have been able to browbeat and blackmail
(teacher strikes are not uncommon) the authorities into submitting to their
demands and theories. Through such techniques as school accreditation, teacher
training schools, teacher certification, approved textbooks, the state has
established virtual control over what takes place in the classroom. While the
teachers are sensitized by "Sensitivity Training," the students are
confused by the "New Math," have their faith destroyed in Biology
class, their morals corrupted by Sex-Education, and are radicalized by a course
in "Problems of Democracy." THE CONDITIONING IS THOROUGH, EFFICIENT,
AND COMPLETE!!!
Another
facet of the Public Schools is that they are constantly changing and in a state
of flux. Truth does not change, and the "word of the Lord shall stand
forever," but evolution is a system based on change. The constant
parade of new textbooks is
indicative of this commitment to change. Whereas it might be admitted that
science does march on, the need for perennially new math texts is a little more
puzzling. Does two plus two no longer equal four? However, the history
department is where texts are seemingly obsolete before they have been read. Is
the past changing? Apparently so! As we shall see, history is being rewritten
"a la" 1984. As fast as our
children can be brainwashed in the latest advances of radical, un-American
thought, the textbooks must be rewritten to justify the new conclusions and to
discredit the old. Old texts are systematically burned as the truth continues to
be swallowed up in the "Memory Hole."
AMERICAN HISTORY:
We have already noted the revision of
American history as regards the Pilgrims at the beginning of this newsletter.
The destruction of our past continues from our very beginnings right up to
today's news. The events at Salem, Massachusetts have never been seen in the
light of Exodus 22:18, but have always been used to discredit the Christianity
of our forefathers. Similarly, the patriots of 1776 and of 1789 are viewed as a
group of greedy, self‑centered merchants setting up a capitalistic system
whereby they could enrich themselves at the expense of their fellow men. True to
Marx's "economic determinism," they are caricatured as doing all
things for the love of the almighty dollar. The heroic sacrifices of those who
in the Declaration of Independence, "pledged their lives, their fortunes,
and their sacred honor" are as long forgotten as Santayana's warning that
those who refuse to learn the lessons of history are condemned to repeat them.
T. R. Fehrenbach, in his book, Greatness To Spare, vindicates those brave
men who signed for us. All four signers from New York lost all their property,
had their estates destroyed by the British, and two of them lost their wives due
to British persecution. Speaking of other signers, Fehrenbach says…
This
retreat allowed the worn-out John Hart to come down from the icy hills. He went
immediately to his farm. He found his wife dead and buried, and all of his
children gone. His mills were burned, and his property despoiled. Hart never
found all of his family again; the children had been scattered by war and
captivity. Worn out by hardship, anxiety, and final tragedy, Hart soon died.
Whatever the interests of his country were, Hart did not live to see them
fulfilled, or to know whether his sacrifices had been in vain.
His fortune was gone, too. Stockton,
patriotically, had put all his silver and gold into Continental currency and
bills of credit. This money inflated into worthlessness in 1777. With his rich
estate in ruins, he now had to beg assistance from his neighbors, and put his
family on friends' charity. A short time after his release, he died, at the age
of fifty-one.
Hewes' health was poor before he signed
the Declaration, and his death, in 1779, was due to overwork in Congress. Hewes
died in Philadelphia at fifty, a lonely man, unmarried and apart from his
community of Friends.
The end of the Revolution found Hooper
sick and ruined financially. He was one of those patriots who never recovered
what he lost through public service. He moved away from Wilmington, and died in
1790.
At the end of the crisis, John Penn, who
had worked cooly, courageously, and effectively through the worst days,
surrendered his office and his powers. He returned to the practice of law. He
was never to regain his former affluence and standing. He had sacrificed
everything in the public service, and he died in obscurity in 1788.
They were men, and we
ignore their sacrifices at the peril of having to repeat them with perhaps less
successful results.
Similarly, the American
Civil War is distorted to provide a foundation for the revolutionary “Civil
Rights” movement, and the theological implications of that conflict
between a Unitarian North and a Calvinist South is long forgotten. In more
recent times, the Vietnam War has provided rich material for the revisionists.
Dr. Tom Dooley's best selling novels of communist terror and atrocities in then
French Indo-China have long since disappeared down the memory hole, as screaming
"MY-LAI" headlines proclaim Americans as the aggressors and
perpetrators of infamy. Most recently, the Watergate conspiracy continues to
crucify Richard Nixon as an evangelical Christian and a constitutional
conservative, and rewrites history by attributing all the immoral economic and
political debacles of that administration to our traditional form of government,
a Christian Republic.
The control of the present
is being used to control the past, and it is having a bearing on our future. As
history is being rewritten, we are losing our foundations. No society can lose
its foundations and continue to exist for very long. We are in the midst of a
revolution, and a new foundation is being prepared. The past is projecting into
the future, and all the lies about the first American Revolution are
guaranteeing another American Revolution.
THE
ANSWER:
"If the foundations be destroyed,
what can the righteous do?" (Ps. 11:3). Our foundations are being
destroyed, and the righteous are going to have to labor to rebuild them. We were
founded on the doctrine of CREATION by a sovereign, providential God, and now we
are reaping all the consequences of a belief in EVOLUTION. We were made great by
Christian Education, and now our children are being morally and spiritually
destroyed by evolutionary conditioning. The "Fear of the Lord"
and faith in Him who is Truth Incarnate has given way to faith in evolutionary
men and evolutionary science. We have sold our birthright and traded our
heritage and for such a mess of pottage. We must rebuild! We must reestablish
our faith in the God of Genesis who spake and it was so; and in the Christ of
Revelation who was, and who is, and who IS TO COME. As did the prophets of old,
we must constantly remind ourselves as a people of our history and of the God of
our forefathers, the God of the Pilgrims and the God of the men at Valley Forge.
Isaiah warns us, "Therefore my people are gone into captivity, because
they have no knowledge." We need knowledge, knowledge of our God,
knowledge of our history; we need the "Fear of the Lord which is the
beginning of knowledge." As Daniel counsels us, "The
people that do know their God shall be strong." As a nation, we have
called evil good, and good evil; we have put darkness for light and light for
darkness; we have put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter! We must rebuild. We
must fight the good fight of faith with faith in Him, through whom we are more
than conquerors. AMEN.
