“Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as ‘normal, natural and healthy.’ Infiltrate the churches and replace revealed religion with ‘social’ religion. Discredit the Bible and emphasise the need for intellectual maturity, which does not need a ‘religious crutch.’ Eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in the schools on the grounds that it violates the principle of ‘separation of church and state.’ Discredit the family as an institution, promote promiscuity and easy divorce. Emphasise the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents. Eliminate all laws governing obscenity by calling them ‘censorship’ and violation of free speech and press. Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in all media. Discredit the culture by degrading all forms of artistic expression. Promote ugliness, repulsive and meaningless art. Dominate the psychiatric profession and use mental health laws as a means of gaining coercive control over those who oppose our goals…”
These are just some of the 45 communist goals aimed at destroying the United States of America, as outlined in a book published in 1958 called “The Naked Communist” by researcher and former FBI agent Cleon Skousen. Although the footprint of political communism is smaller today than in the time the book was written, the threat is still large, and because it’s principles are so readily adopted by the liberal elite in western democracies, the question has to be asked, has communism just been rebranded and now thriving under the new banner of atheism?
“Where there is no (God given) vision, people perish.” (Proverbs 29:18)
Communism kills, as can be seen by the two despotisms of the last century that obliterated 6 million Jews in the Third Reich and 20 million in Stalin’s Russia, but so did both democracies and monarchies providing us two world wars during the most democratic century ever, slaughtering a total of 61 million individuals. With every form of government now indicted a second question needs to be asked, why is communism still allowed to thrive under the flag of democracy?
The two biggest movements on the rise in the world today side by side is secularism and Christianity. Secularism is a political or social philosophy that applies either indifference or rejection of all forms of religion and faiths. But Secularism’s system of doctrines – set of held beliefs – uncannily behave in exactly the same way as a faith directed towards God, with the only difference in this instance that faith and worship is directed towards the self, and so a third question needs to be answered; is secularism merely atheism?
If it sounds like we are herded toward only two choices, you’d be correct, considering the nail was put in the proverbial cross-coffin more than two thousand years ago by the most trustworthy of characters that ever lived, the perfect prophet that predicted the fall of a Jerusalem seventy years before it was sacked, Jesus Christ when he said; “Whoever is not with me, is against me, and whoever does not gather with me, scatters” (Matthew 12:30), indicating that there are just two positions to be held in this life, which he then summarised in the very next chapter in the parable of the wheat and the weeds. Secularism’s fence-sitting is therefore an illusion, and its indifference is dangerously pitted against the Almighty, and so it would appear that secularism is indeed just another form of atheism.
It is no secret, just as much as God loves the sinner but hates the sin, as do we, and while I am at war with the atheistic religion, I am not at war with its worshippers, who I count among some of my closest friends. Why then am I at war?
Because it’s a form of self harm.
The philosopher Charles Taylor in his book ‘A Secular Age’, traces the rise of secularism in the last 500 years to coin the rather unique phrase; “the imminent frame”, the view that the world is a completely natural order without any supernatural, what the French Isaac Newton Pierre-Simon Laplace called “a closed universe”. With this new ‘imminent frame’ the secular man became a “buffered self”, in other other words, as closed as the universe he regards.
Staggering but not surprising the secular person has journeyed from a humble beginning, because the world was bigger and the body had a soul, to an extreme self-sufficiency and on towards the prideful self we perceive today. With it came the claims that; ‘because there is no transcendent, supernatural order outside of me, it is I who determine what I am, who I will be and how I will live. I am the legislator of my own meaning.’ In short, the older Christian idea that we exist for God’s glory receded and was replaced by the belief that if God exists, He is there to nurture and sustain us. ‘I am no longer on God’s staff but He is on mine.’ As my atheist friend recently told me that if I was going to talk about God, the revelations about my personal relationship with Him has to be quarantined, and I have to talk about God in context of the world’s courtroom and play by its (secular) rules. So it has become evident that the ‘imminent frame’ deliberately rigs the game against God. What’s fair is foul this is not good sportsmanship.
It however does not change the fact that the Bible is right, that there are only two paths, two choices in this life. One leads to life everlasting when we believe that Jesus Christ is God’s Son, while all others – whether secularism, communism and atheism all forced to behave in exactly the same way within the imminent frame – will invariably lead to death.
So what do we do? Where do we go from here?
In 1863 the U.S. President Abraham Lincoln in his famous Gettysburg address, pointed out that the founding fathers “brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal”, this in the climate of the civil war where the first shot was fired by the confederates because they disagreed with that proposition that all men and women were equal, and yet, while the Declaration of Independence invoked God four times as the Giver of these inalienable rights, the constitution itself did not mention God at all. In fact slavery was specifically condoned because the government received a tax on the importation of slaves.
Lincoln went on, calling his times a time of testing asked the poignant question, “whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure?”, because the American people – and by application ourselves wherever we may be at present – got it, and get it wrong the first time around, that we believe we can have a constitution based on liberty while denying the rights of millions, and we think we can found a nation without God. (Needless to say it will take an equally great leader with the same humility to point out that America might have got it wrong with regards to the gun laws too.)
And so what Lincoln proposed was a second chance, a “new birth of freedom”, pitting ‘liberty’ at the start of his address, against ‘freedom’ at the end of his address, not in a search for synonyms but because while liberty remains political enfranchisement, freedom is something far more important, affecting every living person then, now and well into the future.
Lincoln, speaking through the ages urges that in order to achieve this new kind of freedom we, as a new people, a new nation under God, be born again, and that true freedom cannot be achieved if it does not come under God, else that nation should “perish.”
“Truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again.” (John 3:3).
Do we appreciate what a remarkable equalizer that is, for the fact that Jesus Christ admonished all, expecting both christian and atheist to be born again, and side by side be afforded a second beginning, a second chance to life everlasting.
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