As a child, I was told a fable about frogs turning into princes. When I went to school, they said this was science! I didn’t believe it then; I don’t believe it now. The apostle Paul warned that those who “turn their ears away from the truth” will “be turned aside to fables” (2 Tim 4:4) just like that.
In his book Seven Men Who Rule the World from the Grave, Dave Breese explains the far-reaching effects of believing men like Darwin, Marx, Dewey, and Freud, who attempted to remove God from the equation of life. He wasn’t needed, Darwin said, to explain “the origin of the species”—although he never even talked about origins!
Marx believed religion was “the opiate of the people” and asked, “Is God the sovereign or is man?” He chose man as god, leading directly to the suicide of Europe and the death of millions. Yet an Axios poll revealed that 4 in 10 Americans claim to prefer socialism over a free market.
John Dewey, “the most significant educational thinker of his era and, many would argue, of the 20th century,” (PBS Online) was co-author of the Humanist Manifesto which states: “Humanism asserts that the nature of the universe depicted by modern science makes unacceptable any supernatural or cosmic guarantees of human values.” Thus the battle to remove God from the classroom, inserting humanistic beliefs in His place.
According to the CDC, “A recent report from the National Center for Health Statistics found that the suicide death rate among persons aged 10–24 increased 56% from 2007 through 2017.” Do you wonder at this when young people are taught there’s no Designer behind the universe, so nothing has ultimate purpose?
Are you shocked at the demise of the traditional family? Sigmund Freud hung out his shingle on Easter Sunday, determined to strike a blow to belief in God, which he considered “comparable to a childhood neurosis.” The father of the sexual revolution that destroyed marriage, Freud also committed suicide.
We once believed that people “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” No more. You can’t expect the Creator to endow you with the right to kill your offspring, end your life, or defy His definition of marriage. Many powerful people today, like Stalin and Mao before them, are wanting to play God. It won’t end well.
Arthur Leff, Yale Law professor, gave a lecture titled “Unspeakable Ethics, Unnatural Law.” He confesses he doesn’t want a transcendent God; he wants to choose his own standard of right and wrong. But he states the problem:
“Either God exists or He does not, but if He does not, nothing and no one else can take His place.…If each person is a Godlet, there is no room for a valid society….
“It looks as if we are all we have. Given what we know about ourselves and each other, this is an extraordinarily unappetizing prospect…Neither reason, nor love, nor even terror, seems to have worked to make us ‘good,’ and worse than that, there is no reason why anything should.…As things now stand, everything is up for grabs.”
He concludes that, without a transcendent God, every effort at setting standards elicits the schoolyard taunt, “Says who?”
It’s true. “There is no one like the Lord our God.” (Ex 8:10)
Religion Page article by Jabe Nicholson first published in the Commercial Dispatch on Sunday, Oct 24, 2021.