News Intelligence Analysis
In the Beginning God Created an Open Society
(Guess Who’s Trying to Close It)
An Open Society Versus a Closed Society and Attributes of Both
By Katherine Yurica
July 21, 2006
It
is not our abilities that
define us; it is our choices that
show who we truly are.
J. K. Rowling
The Prologue
Now the serpent was more subtle than any
beast of the field…And he said unto the
woman, ‘Yea, hath God said, ‘Ye shall not
eat of every tree of the garden?’
And the woman said unto the serpent, “We may
eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden; but of
the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the
garden, God hath said, ‘Ye shall not eat of it,
neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.’”
And the serpent
said unto the woman, “Ye shall
not surely die; for God doth know that in the day
ye eat thereof,
then your eyes shall be opened and
ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.”
And when the woman saw that the tree was
good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes,
and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took
of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto
her husband with her; and he did eat.
Genesis 3:1-6 KJV
The Garden of Eden
In Genesis, the God of the Bible created an open society. We know this because God had the power to exclude the Serpent from the Garden of Eden, but God chose to allow the Serpent to stay along with his contrary voice and vision. It was a gamble God was willing to make. He simply rejected coercive power over his creation. In the end, it cost God everything he loved—including his only begotten son.
The Serpent not only chose to co-habit paradise with Adam and Eve but he devised a powerful challenge to God’s authority by lying about what God said, and by lying about God’s motives as well. The Serpent contradicted God’s clear statement that even to touch the forbidden fruit would bring death. The Serpent said, “Ye shall not surely die.” But God’s and the Serpent’s statements could not both be true. Here was the existential moment of the fledgling civilization. Adam and Eve had four choices:
1. They could have believed God’s word was the truth.
2. They could have believed the Serpent was speaking the truth. (And we know they opted for this solution.)
3. They could have accepted the responsibility to investigate, in order to determine the truth.
4. Or, perhaps the most intolerable: they could have lived with uncertainty by accepting both statements as true until proven otherwise at some future undetermined date, but this would have meant adopting or tolerating ambiguity in life, which automatically would remove any sense of infallibility or perfection they might have adopted about themselves.
Both of the first two options were undesirable from the point of view of maintaining an open society. They required no effort on the part of the first two humans—only blind faith. So the first two options would be correct for children—not adults, and as such could be considered authoritarian in nature.
From God’s perspective, he may have miscalculated the choices man would make. For he may have failed to see that man would actually choose an option that was against man’s best interests. He also may have failed to see that an open society inherently carries responsibilities that man might want to avoid at all costs. Man’s disinclinations made yielding to the Serpent’s argument extremely plausible. Consider the following: Authoritarian manipulators have three advantages:
1. They offer man the appearance of certainty, power and control: they have the psychological insight that man is influenced by any person who acts with assuredness. Truth tellers, on the other hand, often speak with humility and humility is always perceived as weakness by man.
2. They offer to lift the burden of responsibility from off the shoulders of man. The “leader” will carry that burden for us.
3. They eliminate the necessity for man to do the hard mental work of investigation. In other words, they exploit man’s tendency toward laziness.
These three authoritarian “services” reveal the inherent difficulties buried within the very structure of an open society: it becomes clearer that an open society carries within itself, the seeds of its own destruction. Only the society that is on guard day and night can preserve it’s open status. (“Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.” John Philpot Curran)
So faced with a grave contradiction, Adam and Eve failed to investigate; they simply listened to the last person that spoke to them. At the very least, they failed to establish a fairness doctrine for their world: They failed to get both sides of the story.
Consider the fact that Adam and Eve, as inhabitants of a free world in a garden of plenty, chose to rely upon the assurances of a lying trickster instead of taking up the responsibilities imposed upon intellectually capable people to distinguish between what is true and what is false through an investigation of the facts, which necessarily entailed giving God the opportunity to answer the Serpent’s false assertions. This story of the first archetypical humans is the story of the epistemological fall of man. It illustrates how a form of dementia[1] was introduced and accepted by mankind with far-reaching consequences. As I previously wrote in my essay, “What the Fundamentalists Won’t Tell You about the Bible”:
“Death entered the human race not because God punished his creation, but because it had to do with something fundamentally part of the universe he created. Think about it: He—God—is ultimate reality. A lie therefore contradicts reality and creates delusions....Delusions, falsity and superstitions separate us not only from God (ultimate reality) but from life and health! This is as true today as it was in the Garden of Eden.”[2]
Death is necessarily the natural offspring of lies with illness and dementia preceding it. As far as intellectual laziness is concerned, it can be summed up by an old saying,
“Following the easiest course is what makes rivers and men crooked.”
As a consequence of their choices, Adam and Eve were banished from Eden.[3]
But the story doesn’t end there. The problem Adam and Eve faced is similar to the problem facing all Americans today: While living in an open society, we, like the first society, are failing to take responsibility for the preservation of our open door. Like Adam and Eve, millions of Americans are choosing to believe the Serpent dementors,[4] who appear this time in the robes of clergymen who speak to huge congregations, and to vast television and radio audiences with smooth and sincere lies, urging Americans to refocus on essentially un-American and unbiblical religio-political doctrines and to simply ignore the contradictions between the Serpent’s statements and the statements God spoke in the Bible. Once again willful ignoration is being urged upon us. Once again it is being urged upon us by those who prefer a closed society—by those who refuse to allow the Truth the same opportunity to speak as Falsity has! We are witnessing a renewal of the primeval battle. For the unintended effect of God’s beautiful creation was that he created the psychological and intellectual environment in which evil could grow and even take over this world. To fully understand what happened and how it happened, we need to comprehend the differences between open and closed societies.
An Open Society Is Pluralistic
An open society is a society that honors and protects pluralism.[5] It’s a society with exciting variety: it’s sweet and sour pork, mash potatoes, apple pie, enchiladas, tacos, sushi, goulash, gravlux, pizza and spaghetti, croissants and French rolls, ice cream and cheese cake! It’s all the races, kindreds, nations and people from all over the world. It’s the polka and square dancing, it’s Serbian and Vietnamese; it’s Buddhists and Pentecostals, Baptists and Roman Catholics, Atheists, as well as Muslims—liberals as well as conservatives, progressives as well as regressives—all living together in harmony in one nation. In short, pluralism allows divergent views and opinions. And it is this latter quality that defines pluralism more than any thing else: It is the society that John Milton describes in Areopagitica, Milton’s famous speech on freedom of the press: Open societies allow “Truth and Falsity to grapple together in the open market place.” [6] Thus if Falsity writes a column, takes out an ad, or broadcasts a speech, the open society grants Truth the opportunity to answer, (but the reverse is also true: If Truth speaks—Falsity is granted the power to contradict it.) An open society gives equal time and space so that readers and listeners can make informed choices on matters that affect the entire society.
Note that there is one caution: an open society requires individuals—not a corporate power, nor an ecclesiastical power, nor the power of the state—to determine which is which. Often, those watching the struggle between the two grappling forces follow Adam and Eve’s example— and repeat the fall of man through their own laziness and failure to investigate to determine who is speaking rot, thus making themselves subject to the moving currents of the moment, and worse, to a form of dementia. For every lie we believe, we grow less healthy, our minds contain less reality, and we become more and more demented.[7]
A Closed Society Is Singular
A closed society, in contrast to an open one, is authoritarian in nature and it regards pluralism to be an enemy that must be defeated since a closed society seeks to impose a single blue print upon its citizens, that is, a single religion or ideology, a single weltanschauung (world view). A closed society shuts down all dissenting voices. Adults are reduced to children—actually to demented [8] children—children who are joyless. A closed society must necessarily rule by fear, for they need to create terror and a common enemy that unites the whole in order for their manipulation to work. However, it is a fundamental rule of power: “Those who lie hate those to whom they lie.”[9] Those skilled in coercive lies suck the joy out of their society like the dementors in J. K. Rowling’s famous novel.[10]
A closed society manipulates the truth. It resorts to misinformation, propaganda and to lies. In a closed society “truth” is dictated—it is predetermined. And what is called “Truth” may actually be false and what is labeled “false” by the government or corporate entities may be the truth. A closed society is quick to denounce truth-tellers as “liars.” In contrast, in an open society, each individual must make Truth his goal.
The closed society appeals to many people because they believe they are being fed truth by their sources of information. If they consume only “truth,” they reason, there is no need to do the hard work of discernment. Yet in America today, the opinions of such personalities as Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly and Ann Coulter often go unchallenged and pass for truth when their outpourings are habitually scornful and consist of mocking personal attacks that employ unmitigated falsehoods, which is, by the way, an intentional means of suppressing opposition. If we want to keep American society open, their voices must not be shut down—their words should, however, be investigated by each listener and reader and the open market place must allow the counter arguments to be heard. In fact, the open market place must remain open to all if an open society is to be preserved.[11]
A closed society has an additional vice, it ignores the rule of humility that requires us to acknowledge our fallibility and therefore to respect other views when we cannot know which view is best, for often, Truth may be obscured. On the other hand, a closed society teaches the doctrine of one’s own infallibility. It teaches the perfectibility of man—a particularly potent doctrine when wrapped in religious dogma—such as the “once saved—always saved” heresy. It teaches and reinforces the concept of certainty in opposition to humility. It seeks to export its doctrine around the globe—since it has cornered the market on truth. I intend to return to the advantages of fallibility below, but first, we need to see how God tried to make corrections.
Moses and How to Eliminate What Is False
It is not our part to master
all the tides of
the world, but to do what is in us for the
succour of those years wherein we are set,
uprooting the evil in the fields that we know,
so that those who live after may have clean
earth to till. What weather they shall have is
not ours to rule.
J. R. R. Tolkien, The Return of the King
If our mental health is dependent upon choosing between Truth and Falsity, how do we do it?
Following their expulsion from the Garden of Eden, mankind did not grasp the need to make Truth their goal in life. In fact, man made a right royal mess of things and the Bible tells us that God regretted that he made man and he grieved over it.[12] One is forced to see God as a victim of his own miscalculation at this point for God proceeded to destroy what he had created (all except one righteous family and a sampling of all the wonderful animals God had created). Then God started over and eventually after another series of missteps by man, God placed all of his hopes on one individual named Moses. God gave Moses the Law, which in a certain light was perhaps a desperate act to save mankind. It was another corrective measure. For it, at long last, forced reasoning to become elevated; for the first time, critical thinking would engage man’s mind on a societal level. God further inspired Moses and in two of the greatest passages in all literature (which must be read together as one), Moses wrote the definition of the “scientific method” more than three millenniums before modern man breathed the word, “science.”
In Deuteronomy 18:21-22 and Deuteronomy 13, Moses established the criteria for the demarcation between science and pseudo-science.[13] Moses carefully framed the criteria in precisely the negative terminology which characterizes the statements of Karl Popper, who was the distinguished professor of logic and scientific method at the London School of Economics.[14] If we paraphrase the text into modern language, Moses’ criteria reads:
1. When a scientist (or prophet) speaks in the name of Truth and makes a prediction or offers a statement, if the prediction does not come to pass or a statement does not prove true, that is a theory or statement that Truth has not given.
But what happens if the prediction does come to pass—should we accept the words of the man as Truth and follow him? Moses said “No!”
2. If a man claims to be speaking in the name of Truth and either insists that he is utilizing a valid scientific methodology or is a promoter of a new epistemology (a new way of obtaining knowledge) or that he is speaking for God, and he makes a prediction ostensibly as a test and it eventuates—before accepting the man’s epistemology, system, statements, or theory—one must critically investigate his methodology to determine the presence of false reasoning and errors. If they are found, the man and his theories must be rejected.
Thus the prophet’s (or scientist’s) predictions are subject to tests of refutation not confirmation; they are falsified by observation. The biblical literature also demands that the methodology of the prophet be examined!
In the words of Karl Popper, “Einstein consciously seeks for error elimination. He tries to kill his theories; he is consciously critical…” As I previously stated it:
“The pseudo-scientist, on the other hand, loves his theory above everything else. It is his baby. He raises it up, applauds it, and makes it the standard by which everything else should be measured or interpreted. It is his idol. He tries to save it from refutation at all costs. And because it is the theory first and truth second—a pseudo-science is wedded to such incorrigible bedfellows as falsehood, dogmatism, and delusion. This difference in attitudes marks the essential demarcation between science and pseudo-science. Karl Popper put to rest the myth of ‘invincibility’ of their results: ‘irrefutability is not a virtue of a theory as people often think, but a vice.’” [15]
It appears that God wanted us to see that in our thirst to “be right,” we had to search for what is wrong and make corrections in our thinking. In this process of elimination the recognition of our own errors is actually a God-send. As George Soros showed us fallibility:
“…opens the way to critical thinking and there is no limit to how far our understanding of reality may go. There is infinite scope for improvement not only in our thinking but in our society. Perfection eludes us; whatever design we choose, it is bound to be defective.”[16]
Then Mr. Soros gave us a profound definition of an open society:
“We must therefore content ourselves with the next best thing—a form of social organization that falls short of perfection but is open to improvement. That is the concept of the open society: a society open to improvement.”[17]
Mr. Soros’ definition succinctly implies all the attributes I have listed above for an open society, including pluralism and granting opportunities for opposition arguments. An open society values ideas and encourages and rewards their expression.
Indeed, a society open to improvement encourages curative actions and as we have seen, the God of the Bible showed mankind that he repeatedly employed corrective measures.[18] In fact, God is a self-correcting entity and it’s important to note: he made man in his own image.[19] The urge for improvement therefore is an intrinsic part of man’s nature. It cannot be eradicated or suppressed without endangering the future of civilization.
In fact, the adoption of the doctrine of man’s fallibility is at the heart and soul of Jesus’ message to mankind—one is ‘born again’ in practice, not once, but repeatedly in an ongoing cycle throughout life, for repentance means literally to “change one’s mind,” and correcting one’s perceptions is continuous. Living for truth is a way of life. As long as an individual thinks of himself as infallible—as perfect—he is separated from the very nature of God. His ego labors under an enormous burden in order to maintain the illusion of his perfection. As Scott Peck said, the evil cannot entertain any idea of imperfection of themselves. They run and hide from the knowledge of their own imperfection. They are forced to keep truth at a distance. “Mental health,” Peck wrote, “is an ongoing process of dedication to reality at all costs.”[20] Those “Christians” who pride themselves as being reborn yet fail to implement truth in their daily lives actually live in darkness and have never understood the emancipation of Christianity.[21]
How Our Open Society Is Being Converted into a Closed World
If we seriously think about
it, it probably makes
more sense to assume this is a naturally evil
world that has somehow been mysteriously
‘contaminated’ by goodness, rather than the
other way around. The mystery of goodness
is even greater than the mystery of evil.
Scott Peck
It appears that God’s efforts at saving mankind have all gone astray—even the Advent of God’s son has not succeeded as the ultimate corrective measure. For the fact of the matter is this: Jesus of the Bible revalidated pluralism by showing his disciples that no one should be treated as an outcast. Jesus’ view of society was completely open—he removed all restrictive barriers and made it clear that a sense of moral outrage at the behavior of so-called “sinners” was rooted in hypocrisy and evil. Consider the fact that he sat and ate with sinners, tax collectors, Samaritans and publicans. He allowed a woman street walker to wash his feet with her tears. Jesus was clearly a pluralist.[22]
And Jesus’ teachings were revolutionary. He showed us that sexual issues are a private matter and ought not to be the subject of public opprobrium. He allowed all manner of “sinners” to touch and be touched by him—this in a society that practiced severe discrimination and shunning! In his day, churchmen did not even speak to a prostitute, a Samaritan or a publican. Yet these ‘sinners’ were the very people Jesus called his “neighbors” and he loved them as he loved himself. Every right that Jesus had—he granted to his neighbors. He did not condemn. He did not throw a stone. He did not hold people who violated sexual mores up to public ridicule. But he did call the churchmen who pointed fingers of superiority at others, “hypocrites!” Significantly the Pharisees of Jesus day believed sexual moral issues were the most important issues of their day. They considered themselves to be the protectors of their society, but Jesus came to heal the sick, minister to the poor, clothe the naked and love those who were despised.
Today, the Pharisees have returned to power with a vengeance! As I write, the future of mankind—let alone the future of America—is at stake. The churches have turned militant once again. They now seek to rule, and Voldemort[23]—not Jesus is their god. The contrast could not be stronger: Voldemort seeks dominion and power. But Jesus urged us to love our neighbor—regardless of his political, religious, or ethnic background; regardless of his or her sex, sexual orientation, or religious affiliation. The very process of loving one’s neighbor as oneself establishes social equality—which is the very foundation of democracy.[24] Voldemort seeks to impose his will on others—Jesus rejects this road and asks us to love others.
In order to impose a single blue print upon a society like America, a political movement must be launched that would seek to control every elective office as well as the judiciary throughout the country. In addition, the conquering dementors would need to control all the sources of information. As I have shown in my essay, “The Despoiling of America,” that is the intent of the religious right and the so-called Neo-Conservatives. But first they had to create an enemy and develop a strategy to conquer that enemy.
The enemy for the Neo-Conservatives and their religious partners was and is something called “godless liberal humanists.” What they mean by it is that everyone who is not a member of the in-group—the religious-right “Christian group,” is unacceptable, whether others are Christian believers or not, they—that is we—are the enemies.[25]In fact, democracy itself is under siege.
As I have written in my essay, “Conquering by Stealth and Deception,”[26]
“[T]o get a sense of how revolutionary the political fight for power in the U.S. is, we need to look at a few quotes from what has been dubbed, “Paul Weyrich’s Teaching Manual,” the Free Congress Foundation’s strategic plan on how to gain control of the government of the U.S. Written by Eric Heubeck, and titled, “The Integration of Theory and Practice: A Program for the New Traditionalist Movement,” the document is no longer available at the Free Congress Foundation’s website for obvious reasons.”[27]
I have paraphrased four immoral principles of the movement which reveal their Machiavellian origins:
“1) Falsehoods are not only acceptable, they are a necessity. The corollary is: The masses will accept any lie if it is spoken with vigor, energy and dedication.
“2) It is necessary to be cast under the cloak of “goodness” whereas all opponents and their ideas must be cast as “evil.”
“3) Complete destruction of every opponent must be accomplished through unrelenting personal attacks.
“4) The creation of the appearance of overwhelming power and brutality is necessary in order to destroy the will of opponents to launch opposition of any kind.”[28]
These fundamental principles of domination are nothing short of evil. Allow me once again to show that the adoption of such methods by Republican Party elected officials and operatives is actually converting our open society into a closed world.
Creating the Enemy
Good religion teaches men
that politics
is the most important enterprise in the
eyes of God. Like Moses, Machiavelli
wants the law of his state to be seen,
and therefore obeyed, as divinely
ordered.
Michael Ledeen, Machiavelli
on
Modern Leadership
Tim LaHaye, author of the fictional Left Behind series is also the author of an earlier book, the vitriolic and poisoned Battle for the Mind. [29] In it, LaHaye created a new “evil” religion in America.
He wrote, “[T]he most dangerous religion in the world today—[is] humanism.”[30] This concept was shocking to me for I’d always thought that God was a humanist because of John 3:16: “For God so loved [humanity] that he gave his only begotten son…” And in fact, Christian Humanism does devote itself to human welfare, largely because that is the heart and soul of Jesus’ teachings. But this essential aspect of Christianity is an anathema to Tim LaHaye and dominionists and Battle for the Mind can be viewed as the declaration of war against Jesus’ love and concern for humanity—for the poor, the naked and helpless. For example, Joe Bageant offers these quotes that describe a very different Jesus:
“Jesus merely raised one hand a few inches and a yawning chasm opened in the earth, stretching far and wide enough to swallow all of them. They tumbled in, howling and screeching, but their wailing was soon quashed and all was silent when the earth closed itself again.”
-- From Glorious Appearing by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins
“The best thing about the Left Behind books is the way the non-Christians get their guts pulled out by God.”
-- 15-year old fundamentalist fan of the Left Behind series
Undaunted by the Jesus of the Bible, Tim LaHaye repeatedly sells the idea that even secular humanism is a religion[31] that is unacceptable and incompatible with his brand of “Christianity.” In his effort to create an enemy to Christianity, he described humanists as people who “become obsessed with the idea that they render a service for humanity by stamping out Christianity…”[32] (Yet he admits that humanists make up only six percent of the population.)[33] But as I pointed out in my essay, “Outing Creeping Dominionism,” he states that “over 50 percent of our legislators are either committed humanists or are severely influenced in their thinking by the false theories of humanism.”[34]
But if humanism is a religion as LaHaye insists, he digs a trap for himself when he states emphatically:
“No humanist is qualified to hold any governmental office in America” from “United States senator, congressman, cabinet member, State Department employee, or any other position…” [35]
By making it clear that no humanist is qualified to hold any office in America, he violates one of the most basic prohibitions in the Constitution.[36]There simply is no reconciliation between his exclusionary thinking and the Constitution of the United States. Article VI, which reads in pertinent part:
“…no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.”
LaHaye makes it clear that candidates for office must meet his criteria—his test—he says only those who have a “true Christian consensus” are qualified to hold office.[37]
And what is a “true Christian consensus” to Tim LaHaye? It is only “Christians” of a certain kind—those who endorse laissez-faire capitalism, those who believe in the horrendous doctrine of the survival of the fittest—(nothing less than social Darwinism), and those who fearfully believe homosexuality is a learned behavior that makes their sons and daughters potential victims. LaHaye put it this way: children “with no predisposition toward [homosexuality] can be led into it by a homosexual teacher, particularly before puberty.”[38] In other words, the so-called “Christian consensus” appeals only to those who believe that homosexuality is like a contagious disease, so all homosexuals should be permanently quarantined. These people must be among the most prejudiced people on the planet. Equally appalling is the appeal to those who believe the false doctrine that abortion is a sin and is murder in the Bible[39]—clearly—only those who are ignorant, fearful and pliable need apply to this heretical distortion of Christianity.
Like Joseph McCarthy before him, LaHaye labeled the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Organization of Women, the Urban League and others as “humanist organizations,”[40] the modern day equivalent to “communist organizations.”
What is at stake is control and power. Tim LaHaye and the religious right intend to take over every elective office in the United States. They said so. And just the statement alone is a complete disregard of the Constitution. Although I have quoted this passage several times, allow me to place it here for those of my readers who never heard it before. Tim LaHaye outlined the plan to take over America on Pat Robertson’s 700 Club show on September 25, 1985:
“Suppose that every Bible believing church—all 110,000—decided to…raise up one person to run for public office and win… If every church in the next ten years did that, we would have more Christians in office than there are positions…there are only 97,000 elective offices.”
As James Madison said in Federalist Paper 47:
“The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary in the same hands, whether of one, a few or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”
The War against Pluralism
On two days in 1985, Pat Robertson appeared on his 700 Club television show to contrast what he considered to be the failed example of the ancient Greeks[41] and to describe not only America’s lack of unity but to define the term “pluralism.” He said:
“You see where we’re going if we continue humanism. There is no absolute, there is no standard, and when that happens you have what is laughingly called pluralism. One thinker said, ‘Pluralism is a euphemism to describe a transition from one orthodoxy to another.’” (September 19, 1985.)
The next day, Robertson continued talking about the nation and asked rhetorically:
“Why don’t we agree? … Why don’t we pray together that God will touch the hearts of the people that there might be unity?”
Then Robertson provided the key ingredient of a new religio-political blueprint:
“We advocate the Bible as the best thing to unify around, the great moral law of God. That we would say, ‘This is it!’” (September 20, 1985.)
This theme has been expressed even more emphatically by others. For example Randall Terry, head of Operation Rescue, addressed an audience in Fort Wayne, Indiana on April 15, 1993:
“Our goal is a Christian Nation….We have a Biblical duty, we are called by God to conquer this country. We don’t want equal time. We don’t want Pluralism. We want theocracy. Theocracy means God rules.”[42]
To get a flavor of a recent event, people attending a “Reclaim America” conference in Florida in February, 2005, received material written by James Kennedy. The material revealed not only how the idea of controlling America has spread, but how seriously the Dominionists take their new role: Kennedy says:
“Our job is to reclaim America for Christ, whatever the cost,” Kennedy says. “As the vice regents of God, we are to exercise godly dominion and influence over our neighborhoods, our schools, our government, our literature and arts, our sports arenas, our entertainment media, our news media, our scientific endeavors — in short, over every aspect and institution of human society.” [43]
Pat Robertson and the other leaders of dominion politics are all too willing to offer the portions of the Bible to which they subscribe and to which they ask Americans to pay attention. Like many false prophets before them, it’s an easy thing to clip out 99 percent of the Bible and build a religio-political philosophy on their one percent and say, “This is it!” But in so doing they make a lie of the scriptures.
But how can Robertson and LaHaye and the hundreds of other followers and promoters of this scheme succeed? I think it is because American churchgoers are ignorant of what is and what isn’t in the Bible.
In fact, in America only a scant few have ever read the Bible from cover to cover. As Bill McKibben pointed out in his essay, “The Christian Paradox: How a faithful nation gets Jesus wrong,” three out of every four Americans believe that the Bible teaches that ‘God helps those who help themselves.’ In fact, neither the phrase nor the sentiment it expresses is from the Bible, it’s from Benjamin Franklin.[44] McKibben sites a poll that shows “only 40 percent of Americans can name more than four of the Ten Commandments, and a scant half can cite any of the four authors of the Gospels. Twelve percent believe Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife.”[45]
So America’s churchgoers are content to allow their “pastors” to offer a total revisionist interpretation of the biblical literature they know nothing about. They, like Adam and Eve, have handed over their responsibilities to evil men who are trying to remake America into their own greed-induced image: and you can be sure that it is a closed society they aspire to—the only kind that allows men to totally dominate. And you can be sure those pastors ignore what Jesus said:
“No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.” Matthew 6:24.
between what is right and what is easy.”
J. K. Rowling
Reference Notes