All Episodes
Previous Next
June 28, 1996 - Bill Cooper
58:12
Leonard Peikoff #1
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Once upon a time, there was an old man.
He was an old man with a sword.
Once upon a time, there was an old man.
Oh, God. God.
You're listening to the Hour of the Time.
I'm William Cooper.
For all of you who are going to be at the Area 51 excursion, lecture, field trip, night watch, all kinds of good, interesting, fun things, and educational also, I might add, blow-your-mind type and educational also, I might add, blow-your-mind type stuff.
Thank you.
For all those of you who are going, we were going to send out packets to you with a map and something got all fouled up and we got busy and they did not get sent.
So I'm going to give you directions right now.
It's very easy.
You're going to Rachel, Nevada.
Rachel, Nevada.
It's on the maps.
When you get to Las Vegas, get a Nevada map and look for Rachel, Nevada.
It's about 135 miles North Northwest of Las Vegas.
To get there, take Highway 93 North out of Las Vegas.
That's Highway 93 North out of Las Vegas.
And not too long after you leave the city of North Las Vegas, watch for a sign.
You're going to have to get off the main freeway and make a left under the freeway and then stay on 93.
Stay on Highway 93.
All the way up until you get to Highway 375.
And it will go West.
Take Highway 375 West.
It may or may not be labeled as the Extraterrestrial Highway.
It has been so officially named.
However, I don't know if they put up signs or whatever.
Last time I saw it, it was just plain old Highway 375.
You want to take it West.
And you're going to go up over Hancock Summit down into and across the Tickaboo Valley over another little summit called Coyote Summit.
And when you come down the other side, you will see the little town of Rachel, Nevada on the left of the highway.
And the last time I was there, the last building on the left was the Little Alien, and that's where you're going.
The first lecture will begin at 1 p.m.
on the 4th of July.
1 p.m.
on the 4th of July, the first lecture series will begin.
The first meal will be served that night.
Supper on the 4th of July.
There will be breakfast and supper on the 5th.
Breakfast and supper on the 6th.
The last meal will be breakfast on the 7th, at which time everybody should be heading out to go back home, wherever it is that home is.
If you're flying into Las Vegas, you'll need to rent a car.
And I would advise that you rent a four-wheel drive vehicle, if you can afford it.
If not, just rent a good car and stay on the highways.
If you're in a four-wheel drive, then you'll be able to go to some interesting places off the highway, which Nevada is full of.
So, that's it.
93 North, out of Las Vegas.
Watch for the sign that tells you 93 North is going to split from the main highway.
Get on 93, stay on it all the way to highway 375, take highway 375 west Over Hancock Summit, across the Tickleboo Valley on the other side, up another little summit called Coyote Summit, and down the other side on the left, you will see the little town of Rachel, Nevada.
The last time I was there, the last building on the left was the little alien.
So, I hope to see you all there on the 4th, and you've got plenty of time to get there.
If you're a little bit late, that's okay.
Don't worry about it.
Tonight we're going to hear a speech by Leonard Pycock.
It doesn't matter where he did this speech or when he did it.
What matters, ladies and gentlemen, is what he says.
Pay very close attention.
And remember that while the subject matter of this speech is the religious right tonight, he is neither for the right conservative are for the left liberal.
He's not for either one of them, and I hope you get that message tonight.
So listen very carefully and enjoy this broadcast.
Thank you, Mr. Smith. Mr. Smith.
Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.
A specter haunting America, the specter of religion.
This, Oral and Karl Marx's literary stunt, is my theme tonight.
Where do I see religion?
The outstanding political fact of the 1980s, in my judgment, is the rise of the new right, and the penetration of the Republican Party under President Reagan.
The bulk of the New Right, as you know, consists of Protestant fundamentalists, typified by the moral majority.
These men are frequently aligned on basic issues with other religiously-oriented groups, including conservative Catholics of the William F. Buckley ilk and neoconservative Jewish intellectuals of the commentary magazine Variety.
All these groups observed the behavior of the New Left a while back and concluded, understandably enough, that the country was terrorist.
They saw the liberal idealization of drug hippies and nihilistic yippies.
They saw a proliferation of pornography, of sexual perversion, of noisy lint and power groups running to the Democrats to demand ever more outrageous handouts and quotas.
They heard the routine leftist deprecation of the United States and the routine counsel from a pre-Soviet Russia.
And they concluded, for good reason, that what the country was perishing from was a lack of values, of ethical absolutes, of morality.
Values, the left reported, are subjective.
No lifestyle and no country is better or worse than any other.
There is no absolute right or wrong anymore, they said, unless, the liberals added, you believe in some outmoded ideology like religions.
Precisely the new right of street life.
That is our whole point.
There are absolute truths and absolute values, they say, which are the key to the salvation of our great country.
But there is only one source of such values, not man or the earth or the human brain, but the Deity has revealed in Scripture.
the skepticism, decadence, and statism of the Democrats, or morality, absolutes, Americanism, and their only possible faith, religion, all-time geocrincy religion.
Here's Mr. Reagan in 1980, quote: "Religious America is awakening, perhaps just in time for In the struggle against totalitarian tyranny, traditional values based on religious morality are among our greatest strengths." Here's Jack Hammond, quote, "...religious views lie at the heart of our political system.
The inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are based on the belief that each individual is created by God and has a central value in His eyes.
Without a common belief in the one God who created us, there could be no freedom and no recourse if a majority were to seek to abrogate the rights of the minority." Unquote.
Or as Education Secretary Bennett sums up this viewpoint, quote, our values of the free people and the central values of the Judeo-Christian tradition are flesh of the flesh and blood of the blood, unquote.
Now, politicians in America have characteristically given less service to the platitudes of priority.
But the new right is different.
These men came to mean their religiosity, and they are dedicated to implementing their religious creeds politically.
They seek to make these creeds the governing factors in the realm of our personal beliefs, our art and literature, our clinics and hospitals, and the education of our youth.
Whatever else to say about him, Mr. Reagan has delivered handsomely on one of his campaign promises.
He has given the adherence of a rich a prominence in setting the national agenda that they have not had in this country for generations.
Let's define our subject for tonight.
It is the new Republican inspiration and the deeper questions it raises.
Is the New Right the answer to the New Left?
What is the relation between the Judeo-Christian tradition and the principles of Americanism?
Are Ronald Reagan and Jack Kemp, as their admirers declare, leading us to a new era of freedom and capitalism, or to something else?
In discussing these issues, I am not going to talk much about the New Right as such.
Its specific beliefs are widely known.
Instead, I want to examine the movement within a broader philosophical context.
I want to ask, what is religion?
And then, how does it function in the life of a nation, any nation, past or present?
To be sure, these are very abstract questions, but they are inescapable.
Only when we have considered them can we go on to judge the relations between a particular religion, such as Christianity, and a particular nation, such as America.
Let us begin, then, with the definition.
Let us ask, what is religion as such?
What is the essence common to all its varieties, Western and Oriental, which distinguishes the phenomenon from other cultural manifestations?
In a general way, we may answer religion involves a certain kind of outlook on the world and a consequent way of life.
In other words, religion is a type of philosophy.
And as such, a religion must include a view of knowledge, which is the subject matter of the branch of philosophy called epistemology, and it must include a view of reality, which is covered by metaphysics.
And then, on this foundation, a religion builds a view of values, and that is its essence, or morality.
So, the question becomes, what kind of philosophy constitutes a religion?
The Oxford English Dictionary defines religion as, "...a particular system of faith and worship." And goes on in part, I'll quote this part, "...recognition on the part of man of some higher unseen power as having control of his destiny and as being entitled to obedience, reverence, and worship." Unquote.
The fundamental concept here is faith.
Faith in this concept is belief in the absence of evidence.
This is the essential that distinguishes religion from science.
A scientist may believe in entities which he cannot observe, such as atoms or electrons, but he can do so only if he proves their existence logically by inferring from the things he doesn't know.
A religious man, however, believes in some higher unseen power which he cannot observe and cannot logically prove.
As the whole history of philosophy demonstrates, no study of the natural universe can warrant jumping outside it to a supernatural entity.
The five arguments for God offered by the greatest of all religious thinkers, Thomas Aquinas, are widely recognized by philosophers to be logically defective.
They have each been reputed many times, and they are the best arguments that have ever been offered on this subject.
Many philosophers indeed now go further.
They point out that God not only is an article of faith, but that this is essential to religion.
A God susceptible of truth, they argue, would actually wreck religion.
A god opens the human logic to scientific study, to rational understanding, they know.
But the god would have to be confinable, delimited, finite, amenable to human concept, obedient to scientific law, and thus incapable of irrelevance.
Such a thing would be merely one object among others within the natural world.
It would be merely another datum for the sciences, like some new kind of galaxy or cosmic ray, not the transcendent power running a universe of humanity's many works.
What religion rests on, they conclude, is a true god, i.e.
a God not of reason, but of faith.
If you want to concretize the idea of faith, I suggest that you visit, of all places, the campuses of the Ivy League.
If you want to concretize the idea of faith, I suggest that you visit, of all places, the campuses of the Ivy League, where, according to the New York Times, a religious revival will now occur.
Where, according to the New York Times, a religious revival will now occur.
When you find students visibly discussing proofs or struggling to reinterpret the ancient myths of the Bible into some kind of consistency with the teaching of the science, on the contrary, the students, like their parents, are insisting that the Bible be accepted like their parents, are insisting that the Bible be accepted as literal truth, whether it makes logical sense or not.
I quote from one campus religious official, quoting the Times, quote, "Students today are more reconciled to authority.
There is less need for students to sit on their own motorcycle, unquote.
In other words, exercise their own independent minds and judgments.
Why not?
They are content simply to believe.
At Columbia, for instance, a new student group gathers regularly on campus, not to analyze, but, quote, to sing, worship, and speak in tongues, unquote.
Here at the chapel at Columbia, quote, people are coming back to religion in a way that some of us once went to the counterculture, unquote.
Absolutely true.
And note what they are coming back to.
Not reason or logic, but faith.
Faith means the method of religion, the essence of it, epistemology.
And, as the Oxford English Dictionary states, to believe in some higher unseen power is the basic content of religion.
It's distinctive to a reality, it's metaphysical.
This higher power is not always conceived as a personal god.
Some religions construe it as an impersonal dimension of some kind.
The common denominator is the belief in the supernatural, in some entity, attribute, or force transcending and controlling this world in which we live.
According to religion, the supernatural power is the essence of the universe and the source of all values.
It is the realm of true reality and of absolute perfection.
By contrast, the world around us is viewed as only semi-real and as inherently imperfect, even corrupt, in any event metaphysically unimportant.
According to most religions, this life is a mere episode in the soul's journey to its ultimate fulfillment, which involves leaving behind earth the things in order to unite with Thee.
As a pamphlet issued by a Catholic information group expresses this point, man, quote, cannot achieve perfection or true happiness in his life, Your Honor.
He can only achieve this in the eternity of the next life after death.
Therefore, what a person has or lacks in terms of worldly possessions, privileges, or advantages is not important." End quote.
In New Delhi a few months ago, expressing his viewpoint, Pope John Paul II urged on the Indians alike of asceticism and renunciation.
Unquote.
In Quebec sometime earlier, he described, quote, the fascination the modern world feels for productivity, profit, efficiency, speed, and records of physical strength.
Unquote.
Too many men, he explained in Luxembourg, quote, consciously organize their way of life merely on the basis of the realities of this world's rebellious ease for God and the British.
Unquote.
We can bring it up to the latest evidence.
The evidence of which also involves faith.
Faith in God's command.
Virtue in this view is obedience.
It is not a matter of achieving your desires, whatever they may be, but of seeking to carry out God's.
It is not the pursuit of egoistic goals, whether rational or not, but the willingness to renounce your own goals in the service of the Lord.
In other words, what religion counsels is the ethics of self-transcendence, self-admonition, self-sacrifice.
What single attitude holds hands in the way of his ethics according to religious writings?
A sin of pride.
Why pride sin?
Because man is a purely metaphysically defective creature.
It's intellect is helpless in the crucial questions of life.
His will has no real power over his existence, which is ultimately controlled by God.
His body locks with all the temptations of the flesh.
In short, man is weak, ugly, and low, a typical product of the low, unreal world in which he lives.
Your proper attitude toward yourself, therefore, as to this world, should be a negative one.
For preachers that is you and I, honor means humility, self-tabstigation, even self-disgust.
So we can sum up so far.
Religion in essence means orienting one's existence around faith, God, and a life of service.
And correspondingly of downgrading or overly condemning four key elements, reason, nature, the self, and man.
You see, the religion can have the equation.
with morality, or values, or even philosophy as such.
It represents a specific kind of philosophy, with its own specific code of morality.
Now our question is, what effects does this kind of philosophy have on human life?
We don't have the answer by theoretical deduction, because Western history has been a succession of religious and unreligious periods.
And the modern world, including America, is a product of two of these theories, of Greco-Roman civilization and of medieval Christianity.
So, to enable us to understand America, let us first look at the historical evidence from these two periods.
Let us look at their views on religion and at the practical consequences of these views.
Then we will have no trouble grasping the faith and essence of the United States.
Ancient Greece was not a religious civilization, not on any of the counts we mention.
The gods of Mount Olympus were like a race of elder brothers to man.
Myths of this brotherhood brought unlimited power.
They were closer to E.T.
than to anything we would call God.
They did not create the universe, or shape its laws, or leave any message of revelations, or demand a life of sacrifice.
Nor, in fact, were they taken very seriously by the leading voices of the culture, such as Plato and Aristotle.
From start to finish, Greek thinkers recognized no sacred text, no insoluble priesthood, no intellectual force beyond the human mind.
In other words, they allowed no room for failure.
Systemologically, most were staunch individuals who expected each man to grasp the truth by his own power of observation and logical thought.
For details, I refer you to Aristotle, the preeminent representative of the Greek spirit.
Metaphysically, as a result, Greece was a secular culture.
Men generally dismissed or downplayed the supernatural.
Their energies were devoted to the joys and challenges of life.
There was a shadowy belief in immortality, but the dominant attitude to it was summed up by Homer, who had the killing to declare that he would rather be a slave on earth than quote, bear sway among all the dead at the party, unquote.
As to Greek ethics, it follows on his face.
All of the Greeks agree that virtue is egoist.
The purpose of morality in their view is to enable a man to achieve his own fulfillment, his own habits, by means of a proper development of his natural faculty, above all his cognitive faculty, his intellect.
And as to the Greek estimate of man, look at the statues of the Greek gods, made in image of human strength, human grace, human beauty.
And read Aristotle's account of the virtue, yes, the virtue of power.
I must add here that, in many ways, Plato was an exception to the general pure religion of the Greeks, but he was not dominant until much later.
When his period did take over, the Greeks, of course, by that fact, had already died out.
What place it was in the era of Christianity.
And the way that this election is speaking, where it's the exact opposite of Greece.
The leading philosophic spokesman of the time, Augustine, stated that faith was the basis of man's entire living life.
You know his famous aphorism, one must first believe in order that one may then know.
Now, the word reason is nothing but a handmaiden of theology.
It is mere adjunct of faith whose task is to clarify, as far as possible, the dogmas of religion.
What if the dogma cannot be clarified?
So much to better answer the earlier church father, Tertullian.
A truly religious man, he said, delights in warning his reason, because that shows his commitment to faith.
Dr. Chachulian's famous cancer, when asked about the dogma of God's self-sacrifice on the cross, credo quia absurdum.
I believe it because it is absurd.
As for the realm of physical nature, the medieval characteristics regarded it as a steady real haze.
A transitory stage in the divine plan and a troublesome one at that.
a delusion and a sneer, A delusion because men mistakes for reality, a smear because they are tempted by its lures to jeopardize their immortal souls.
What tempts them is the prospect of earthly pleasure.
What kind of light does the immortal soul require on earth?
Self-denial, obscenitism, the resolute shunning of his temptations.
But isn't it unfair to ask man to throw away his all enjoyment of life?
The medieval answer is, what else defends creatures who follow my original sin?
Creatures who are, in Augustine's words, close, sordid and crooked, ulcerous and despotic.
Now, what were the practical results in the ancient world and in the medieval of these two opposite approaches to life?
Greece created philosophy, logic, science, mathematics, and a magnificent man glorified art.
It gave us the base of modern civilization in every field.
It taught the West how to think.
In addition to its admirable ancient role, which built on the Greek intellectual thing, Greece indirectly gave us the spectacle of the rule of law and the first idea of man's rights.
This idea was originated by the pagan Stoics.
Politically, the ancients never conceived a society of full-fledged individual liberty.
No nation achieved that before the United States.
But the ancients did lay certain theoretical bases for the concept of liberty.
And in practice, both in some of the Greek city-states and in Republican Rome, large numbers of men of various kinds weren't yet comparatively free.
They were intolerably more free than their counterparts ever had been in the religious cultures of ancient Egypt and its villains.
Now, what was the practical result of the medieval approach?
The Dark Ages were dark on principle.
I have been taught, again, secular philosophy, science, art.
To regard all of it as an abomination to the essential science.
To deter science, in particular, as the lust of the eye.
In other words, unlike many Americans today, who drive the church into the Cadillac, or change their favorite reference on the VCR so as not to interrupt their attendant's praxis, The medieval sub-religion theories.
They proceeded to create a society that was anti-materialistic and anti-intellectualist.
And you know, I assume, have to remind you of the wives of the saints who were the heroes of the superior, including the men who raised only sheep, gall, and ashes, who wasted their thirst with laundry water, and slept with a rock for their pillow.
These were men resolously denied, defiant nature, the body, sex, pleasure, all the snares of this life, and they were canonized for us, as by the essence of religion they should have been.
The economic and social results of this code of values were inevitable. - Yeah.
Mass stagnation and abject poverty.
Ignorance and mass illiteracy.
Waves of inferiority that swept whole towns.
A life expectancy of the teens.
The world wants to see who laughs now, says the servant on the mound.
Well, they were pretty safe on this count.
They have precious little to laugh about this.
What about freedom in this era?
Yes.
That is the existence of the communal service, tied for life to His prodigal grounds, His noble overlord, and the all-encompassing decrees of the Church.
For if one is bound or closer to home, just several centuries forward, the American church, who were a medieval remnant transplanted to a virgin conscience, And who proceeded to establish a thorough-going theocratic dictatorship in colonial Massachusetts.
Why is it so?
It was necessitated, they said, by the very nature of their religion.
You are owned by God, they explained to any potential dissenter.
Therefore, you are a servant who must act as your creator through his falsehood decrees.
Besides, they said, you are innately trained, so a dictatorship of neglect is necessary to ride herd on your head.
To be supervised like all else by the elect.
And if all this makes you unhappy, then end up so long.
You're not supposed to pursue happiness in this life anyway.
In short, there can be no philosophic reach between thoughts and actions.
The consequence of the epistemology of religion is the politics of purity.
If you cannot reach the truth by your own mental powers, but must be obedient to a cognitive authority, then you are not your own master.
And you cannot guide your behavior by your own judgment either, but must be submissive in actions as well.
This is the reason why historically a blind man often pointed out faith and form...
Now, I want to acknowledge here that the early Christians did contribute some good ideas to the world, ideas that proved important to the cause of future freedom.
They must go to speak to the angels there, too.
In particular, the idea that man has value as an individual, that the individual soul is precious, is essentially a Christian legacy to the West.
Its first appearance was as a form of the idea that every man, despite original sin, is made in the image of God.
And, again, the pre-Christian notion that a certain group or nation has a monopoly on human value, while the rest of mankind are properly slaves or mere barbarians.
But notice one thing here.
This Christian idea by itself was historically impotent.
It did nothing to unshackle the church, or to stand the inquisition, or to turn the purest elders into conservatives.
Only when the religious approach lost its power, only when the idea of individual value was able to break free from its initial Christian context and become integrated into a rational, secular philosophy, only then did this kind of idea bear practical fruit, as we are now going to see.
Now let us ask what, or more exactly who, ended the Middle Ages?
My answer is Thomas Aquinas, who introduced Aristotle, and thereby reason, into medieval culture.
In the thirteenth century, Aquinas, for the first time in a millennium, reasserted in the West the basic pagan approach.
Reason, he said, in deliberate opposition to Augustine, Reason does not rest on faith.
It is a self-contained natural faculty which works on sense experience.
An existential task is not to clarify revelation, but rather, as Aristotle has said, to gain knowledge of this world.
Man, at finest to transpose righteousness, must use and obey reason.
Whatever one can prove by reason and logic, he said, is true.
Now, finest is self-taught, but he could prove the existence of God.
But he also thought that faith is often valuable as a supplemental reason.
But this is not always the nature of his revolution.
His was the charter of liberty, the moral and philosophical sanction which the West had desperately needed.
His message to mankind, as the whole ordeal of faith was in effect, is, all right, you don't have to sacrifice your life anymore, you can faith.
The result, in historical short order, was the revolt against the authority of the Church, the feudal breakup, the Renaissance.
Renaissance means rebirth, the rebirth of reasonable men to serve in this world.
Once again, after the pagan era, we see the rise of secular philosophy, natural science, man-glorified art, and the pursuit of earthly happiness.
It was a gradual, tortuous change.
Each century is becoming a little more worldly than the preceding, from Aquinas to the Renaissance to the Age of Reason to the climax and end of this development.
The 18th century is the Age of Enlightenment.
This was the age in which American Founding Fathers were educated and in which they created the United States.
The Enlightenment represented the triumph, or a short while anyway, of the pain in grief, and specifically of the Arab's genuine experience.
Its basic principle accordingly was the step for man's intellect and correspondingly the wholesale sniffle of faith in revelation.
Reason the only oracle of man, said Ethan Allen of Vermont, who spoke for his age and demanded unfettered free thought and in ridicule, the primitive contradictions of the Bible.
There is a brief quote from him written in 1784.
Quote, While we are under the tyranny of priests, it will ever be their interest to invalidate the law of nature and reason in order to establish systems incompatible therewith.
Unquote.
Elias Palmer is another American of the Enlightenment who wants to make it even more outspoken.
According to Christianity, he writes, God's, quote, It's supposed to be a fierce, revengeful tyrant, delighting in cruelty, punishing his creatures for the very sins which he caused them to commit, and creating numerous millions of immortal souls that could never have offended him for the express purpose of formenting them through all eternity.
The purpose of this kind of notion, he said elsewhere, quote, quote, "The grand object of all civil and religious tyrants has been to suppress all the elevated operations of the mind, to kill the energy of thought, and through this channel to subjugate the whole earth for their own special emoluments," unquote. and through this channel to subjugate the whole earth for Unquote.
quote, unimmigated, has hitherto been deemed a crime to face.
And, quote, he asserts that his last men have a chance, he goes on, because they have finally escaped from, quote, the law and doleful night of Christian rule, and have grasped, instead, the unlimited power of human reason, reason which is the glory of our nature, unquote. reason which is the glory of our nature, unquote.
So, Alan and Palmer are extreme representatives of the Enlightenment attitude, I grant you, but they are representative.
Theirs is the attitude which was new in the modern world, and which in a less inflammatory form was shared by all the founding fathers as their basic revolutionary premises.
Thank you.
Thomas Jefferson thinks the attitude more sedately, with less willful provocation to religion, but it is the same essential attitude.
Here is from a letter to a nephew of his, quote, Jeff's quote, "...fix reason firmly in her speech, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion, quenching with boldness even the existence of a God, because if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blind boldness of fear." Unquote.
Observe the philosophic priorities in this advice.
Reason comes first.
God is a derivative if you can prove it.
The absolute which must guide the human mind is the principle of peace.
Any other idea should be accepted must meet this test.
It is in this approach, in this fundamental rejection of faith, that the irreligion of the Enlightenment intellectual lies.
The consequence of this approach was the ageist rejection of all the other religious priorities.
Medi-physics, this world once again was regarded as real, as important, and as a realm, not of miracles, but of impersonal, natural love.
In ethics, success in this life became the dominant motive.
The veneration of asceticism perplexified in favor of each man's pursuit of happiness, his own happiness on earth, to be achieved by his own effort, by self-reliance and self-respect, meaning the self-made prosperity.
Can man really achieve fulfillment on earth?
Yes, the Enlightenment can.
Man has the means, the potent faculty of intellect necessary to achieve his goals and values.
Man may not get perfect, it was said at the time, but he is perfected.
He must be so because he is a rational animal.
Such were the watchwords of the period, not faith, God's servant, but reason, nature, happiness, man.
Thank you.
Many of the Founding Fathers, of course, continued to believe in God and to do so sincerely.
But it was a vestigial belief, a leftover from the past, which no longer shaped the essence of their faith.
God, so to speak, had been kicked upstairs by the Enlightenment.
It was now regarded as a detached spectator, who neither responds to prayer, nor offers revelations, nor demands immolations.
This sort of viewpoint is known as deism, and it cannot, properly speaking, be classified as a religion.
It is a stage in the atrophy of religion.
It is the step between Christianity and outright atheism.
is why the religious men have been enlightened, but worse up, were gambolized as he was penned by the deist atmosphere.
Here's the Reverend Peter Clough of Salem, Massachusetts, in 1739, quote, the former strictness in religion, that deal for the order and ordinances of the gospel, which is so much the glory of our fathers, is that deal for the order and ordinances of the gospel, which is so much the glory of our fathers, is very much abated, yet disrelished by too many, and the spirit of licentiousness and neutrality in religion, so opposite to the ways of God,
And here, 50 years later, is Reverend Charles Baggess of Springfield, Massachusetts.
The threat to divine religion, he says, is, quote, the indifference which prevails, and the ridicule.
Mankind, he warns, quote, are in great danger of being laughed out of religion, unquote.
This is true.
These creatures were not alarmist.
Their description of the enlightenment atmosphere is correct.
This was the intellectual context of the American Revolution.
Point for point, the Founding Fathers' argument for liberty was the exact counterpart of the Puritans' argument for dictatorship.
But in reverse, moving from the opposite starting point to the opposite conclusion.
Man, the Founding Fathers said, in essence, of course, is a large system, John Locke and others.
Man, they said, is a rational being.
No authority, humor.
Otherwise, therefore, can the man grind obedience from such a being.
Not in the realm of thought, nor, therefore, in the realm of action, either.
By his very nature, they said, man must be left free to exercise his reason and then to act accordingly.
In other words, on his own best rational judgment.
Because this world is of vital importance, the attitude, the goal of good action should be the pursuit of happiness.
Because the individual, not a supernatural power, is the creator of wealth, a man should have the right to private property, the right to keep and use his own products.
And because man is basically good to health, there is no need to leash him.
There is nothing to fear, and that is to treat a rational animal.
This inevitable was the American argument for man's inalienable rights.
It was the argument that reason demands reason.
And this is why the nation of individual liberty, which is what the United States was, could not have been founded in any philosophically different century.
It required what the Enlightenment offered, a rational, secular context.
When you look for the basic source of a historic idea, you must consider philosophic assumptions, not the superficial statements or errors that people may offer you.
Even the most well-meaning men can misidentify the intellectual roots of their own attitudes.
Regrettably, this in my judgment is what the Founding Fathers did in one crucial respect.
All men said Jefferson are jowed by their creator with certain unalienable writings, a statement that formally ties individual rights to the belief in God.
Despite Jefferson's eminence, however, his statement, along with his counter-cruiting loss, is intellectually unwarranted.
The doctrine of individual rights does not derive from or depends on the idea of God as man's creation.
It's derived from the very nature of man and the requirements of his mind and his survival.
In fact, as I have suggested, the concept of right is ultimately incompatible with the idea of the supernatural.
This is true not only logically, but also historically.
Through all the centuries of the Middle Ages, there was plenty of belief in a creator, but only when that belief And religion as a whole began to see that the idea of God as the author of individual rights emerged as a historical nation-shaking force.
What, then, deserves the credit for the new development?
The age-old belief or the new philosophy?
What is the real intellectual root and structure of human liberty, God or reason?
My answer is knowledge.
This completes the material on this side.
code of values and morality.
This, the new right, is correct.
But by all the evidence of philosophy and history, it is not rest on the values or ideas of religion.
On the contrary, it rests on their opposite.
This completes the material on this side. - Ladies and gentlemen, this tape is, well, I'm not exactly sure how long it is, But I am going to continue it until it runs out tonight.
And if it doesn't finish tonight, then we will, of course, continue on Monday night.
Now let me touch on a new point.
Some of you are probably... I think I need to... I'll know in just a second.
Here we go.
Okay.
If you'll be patient for just a couple seconds.
It should be coming up momentarily.
With the continuation of Leonard Peikoff.
Now let me touch on a new point.
Thank you.
Amen.
Some of you are probably wondering here, what about communism?
Isn't it a logical, scientific, atheistic philosophy, and yet doesn't it lead straight to totalitarianism?
The short answer to this is, communism is not an expression of logic or science, but the exact opposite.
Despite all its anti-religious posturings, communism is nothing but a modern derivative of religion.
It agrees with the essence of religion on every key issue, then merely gives that essence a new outward veneer or cover-up.
The Communists reject Aristotelian logic and Western science in favor of the so-called dialectic process.
Reality, they claim, is a stream of outright contradictions, which is beyond the power of bourgeois reason to understand.
The Communists deny the very existence of man's mind, claiming that human words and actions reflect nothing but the illogical, predetermined churnings of blind matter.
They do reject God, but they hasten to replace Him with a secular standard, society or the state, which they treat not as an aggregate of individuals, but as an unperceivable, omnipotent, supernatural organism, transcending and dwarfing all individuals.
Man, they say, is a mere social cog or asset whose duty is to sacrifice everything to and for his transcendent master, the state.
Above all, they say, no such cog has the right to think by and for himself.
Every man must accept the decrees of society's leaders.
He must accept them because that is the voice of society, whether he understands it or not.
In other words, Communism, fully as much as Tertullian, demands faith.
From its followers and subjects.
Faith in the literal religious sense of the term.
On every count, the conclusion is the same.
Communism is not a new rational philosophy.
It is a tired, slavishly imitative air of religion.
And this, by the way, is why, so far, communism cannot come to power in the West.
Unlike the Russians, we have not been steeped enough in religion.
In faith, sacrifice, humility, and therefore in servility, we are still, even now, too rational, too disworldly, and too individualistic to submit to naked tyranny.
In other words, we are still being protected by the fading remnants of our Enlightenment heritage.
But we will not be so for long if the new Reich has its way.
Philosophically, the New Right has the same fundamental ideas as the New Left.
Its religious zeal is merely a variant of irrationalism and the demand for self-sacrifice.
And therefore, it has to lead to the same kind of results in practice, namely, dictatorship.
Nor is this merely my theoretical deduction.
The New Rightists themselves tell it to you openly.
While claiming to be the defenders of Americanism, their distinctive political agenda is pure statism.
The outstanding example of this is their insistence that the state prohibit abortion, even in the first trimester.
A woman, in his view, has no right to her own body, or even the most consistent new right of add to her own life.
She should be made to sacrifice.
To sacrifice her desires, her life goal, but even her very existence, at the behest of the state, in the name of a mass of protoplasm, which is, at most, a potential human being, not an actual one.
Another example.
Men and women, the New Right tells us, should not be free to conduct their sexual or romantic lives in private, in accordance with their own choice and values.
The law should prohibit any sexual practices condemned by religion.
And children were told to be indoctrinated by state-mandated religion at school.
For instance, biology text should be rewritten under government tutelage to present the book of Genesis as a scientific theory on a par with or even superior to the theory of evolution.
And, of course, the ritual of prayer must be forced down the children's throats.
Is this not contrary to the Constitution, the state establishment of religion?
You may ask.
And of a controversial intellectual viewpoint?
Not at all, says Jack Campbell.
I quote from him.
If a prayer is said aloud, it need be no more than a general acknowledgment of the existence, power, authority, and love of God the Creator.
That's all.
Nothing controversial or indoctrinating about that.
And when the student finally do leave school, After all the indoctrination, can they then be trusted to deal with intellectual matters responsibly?
No, says the new right.
Adults, adults, should not be free to write, to publish, or to read according to their own judgment.
Literature should be censored by the state according to a religious standard of what is fitting as a Gainesville scene.
Is this a movement in behalf of Americanism and individual rights?
Is it even a movement in accordance with the principles of the Constitution?
I quote Mr. Kemp, quote, The Constitution establishes freedom for religion, not from it.
Unquote.
A sentiment which is shared explicitly by President Reagan and by the whole New Reich.
What then becomes of intellectual freedom?
Are meetings such as this evening's, for instance, Deprived of constitutional protection?
Because the viewpoint I am propounding certainly does not come under freedom for religion.
And what if one religious sect concludes that the statements of another are subversive of true religion?
Who then decides which, if either, should be struck down according to the standard of freedom for religion, not from it?
Can you predict the fate of free thought?
And of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, if Mr. Kemp and associates were to get their hands fully on the courts and the Congress?
What we are seeing is the medievalism of the Puritans over again, but without their excuse of ignorance.
We are seeing it on the part of modern Americans, who will live not before the Founding Fathers' heroic experiment in liberty, but after it.
The New Right is not the voice of Americanism.
It is the voice of thought control, attempting to take over in this country and pervert and undo the actual American Revolution.
But you may say, aren't these New Rightists at least champions of property rights and capitalism, as against the economic statism of the liberals?
To which I reply, no, they are not.
Capitalism is the separation of state and economics, a condition which none of our current politicians or pressured groups even dreams of advocating.
The new right, like all the rest on the political scene today, accepts the welfare-state-mixed economy created by the New Deal and affairs.
Our conservatives now merely haggle on the system's fringes about a particular regulation or handout they happen to dislike.
In this matter, the new right is moved solely by the power of tradition.
It does not want to achieve any change of basic course, but merely to slow down the march to socialism and free the economic status quo.
And even in regards to this highly limited goal, it is disarmed and useless.
If you want to know why, I refer you to the published first draft of the recent pastoral letter of the United States Catholic Bishops.
Men who are much more consistent and philosophical than anyone in the New Reich.
The bishops recommend a giant step in the direction of socialism.
They ask for a vast new government presence in our economic life, overseeing a vast new redistribution of wealth in order to aid the poor at home and abroad.
And they ask for it on a single basic ground.
Consistency with the teachings of Christianity.
Some of you may say here, but if the bishops are concerned with the poor, why don't they praise and recommend capitalism, the great historical engine of productivity which makes everyone richer?
If you think about it, however, you will see that valid as this point may be, the bishops cannot accept it.
Can they praise the profit motive while extolling selflessness?
Can they glorify the passion to own material property while declaring that worldly possessions are not important?
Can they demand that men practice the virtues of productiveness and long-range planning while upholding, as our model, the lilies of the field?
Can they endorse the self-assertive risk-taking of the entrepreneur while teaching that the meek shall inherit the earth?
Can they unleash the creative ingenuity of the human mind, which is the real source of material wealth, while elevating faith above reason?
The answers are obvious.
Regardless of the unthinking pretenses of the New Right, no religion!
Ladies and gentlemen, we'll continue this on Monday night.
▲
Export Selection