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Culture's Role in Evil
00:05:27
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| I go back and I talk about we need to understand where our founders came from, why they gave us what they gave us. | |
| They gave us a country that we needed to protect, but we also needed to engage. | |
| And what's most fearful to me is that a lot of Christians don't understand their own civics and their own biblical responsibilities to engage. | |
| You know, I think eventually, you know, we were going to, but I could use this opportunity now to kind of talk about a similar time in history, if I could. | |
| You know, empires have risen and fallen because good people failed to do the right things. | |
| In fact, Gandhi said, you know, evil rises when good men don't do the things they should be doing. | |
| Noah and Lot, you know, their time collapsed because good people abandoned the right things to do. | |
| There was a lady in 1961 who covered the Adolf Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. | |
| It was a Nazi work trial, and this young lady, Hannah Ardent, was a Jewish lady from Germany, a philosopher who wrote for the New Yorker, and she covered it, and she wrote an article on the banality of evil. | |
| Now, what did that mean? | |
| Well, to Hannah, it was the German people became seared, numb to what was going on around them. | |
| And what do I mean by that? | |
| Why did the German people, and especially the Jewish people, during the National Socialist era in the mid to late 30s, when they saw after Kristallnach in 1938, after the Germans started to gather all the Jews and cart them off to the concentration camps, why didn't the Germans rise up, especially the Jews, and say, why are you taking these people to concentration camps? | |
| And of course, then they put them to death. | |
| Why didn't you fight back? | |
| Why were the Jewish leaders helping the Nazis and giving their property to the Aryans? | |
| Why did this happen? | |
| Well, it happened before four things. | |
| One, the education system that the Nazis put in place transformed the thinking of the young people to believe in racism, anti-Semitism, in the things that the National Socialists embraced. | |
| And oh, by the way, John Dewey has done much the same to our public education establishment in this country. | |
| The second thing is that the culture promoted a disrespect, almost a hatred for certain elements in culture. | |
| Just look at our own culture. | |
| What does the media promote? | |
| They certainly don't like me. | |
| The media don't like Christians. | |
| Why? | |
| We convict their conscience. | |
| God's word isn't ambiguous about what is right and wrong. | |
| God says certain things are very wrong. | |
| And yet, we hear in our advertisements, we hear from the mouth of politicians, oh, you know, this isn't so bad. | |
| You know, well, the third point, and I think this is important, is that violence, the brown church on the Nazi era, these were young people who were respected. | |
| They would start to do little violent things against the Jews. | |
| And eventually, it became okay. | |
| Well, one violence led to another. | |
| They kind of seared their conscience. | |
| They were not aware of what they were necessarily doing because they weren't thinking. | |
| Their consciences had been blanked out. | |
| And we see the Antifa people today. | |
| We see other violence today, and it's targeted against people of conscience. | |
| And these are the types of issues of significance. | |
| So you have education, you have culture, and you have conscience and violence, but you also have the issue of authority and law. | |
| If the authority says to do this, then we elected them. | |
| Why shouldn't we do it? | |
| After all, they're the elected officials. | |
| They know best, right? | |
| You know, the German SS went and captured, took prisoner millions of Jews, put them in trains and hauled them off to concentration camps and put them to death. | |
| And what happened? | |
| The people of Germany started to call evil good. | |
| And they started to say, well, the government said this was okay, so we should do it. | |
| I see the exact same thing happening in our culture, Pastor. | |
| The same thing happened in the late 19th century to a certain degree, and it continued in the 20th. | |
| I see much the same in my culture today. | |
| I see it on Capitol Hill. | |
| Good people go to Capitol Hill, and they all of a sudden start to turn a very different direction. | |
| They turn a different direction, which endangers our future as a country. | |