TPW #11 | What is Secular Humanism? Part 2

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Part 2 of a 2 part series on Secular Humanism as a worldview and how Christians must understand and confront it.

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TPW #14 | Every Man's Battles - Sexual Immorality, Pride, Selfishness - Part 3

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Paul warns that evil men and imposters will grow worse and worse deceiving one another and being deceived.
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The reason Paul told Timothy that was because he needed to be ready to spend the balance of his life in uninterrupted warfare for the truth.
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The most dangerous people alive today are always, always, always ordained ministers.
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They're the most dangerous people in the world, especially the ones that people think are Christians, who will sell you theological poison to the damnation of your soul.
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Folks, I just want to warn you about something. Every heretic in the entire history of the church, without exception, has taught their heresy in the name of being faithful to Scripture.
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That was the day of judgment. That is the day of final salvation brought back in time and applied to us once for all at the moment of our effectual calling when we repent and believe in our unity to Christ.
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Welcome to the Protestant Witness. This is Pastor Patrick Hines. This is episode number 11. This is part 2 of the series on secularism, secular humanism.
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I'm going to talk about the Enlightenment and how that affected the way that people think today in the
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West and how to evaluate that biblically. But mostly, historically, where does this come from and why has it been so deadly to our culture?
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The Enlightenment has jokingly been called by some Reformed and Christian theologians the
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Endarkenment because it was the self -conscious moving away of society from the
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Bible and man trying to figure out the world without divine revelation. But I hope you find this helpful.
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This was an evening service from a little while back, but I wanted to put this up on the
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Protestant Witness. This is part 2 of secular humanism. Well, thank you for all coming back this evening.
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Please take your Bibles and turn to 1 Corinthians chapter 1. We're going to have two scripture readings this evening.
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1 Corinthians chapter 1 verses 18 through 31 is our first scripture reading and then we're going to look at Romans 2 and just read that.
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This evening's message is really more of a historical overview of the roots of secularism, and I think that this material, as much as it is difficult for me because as I was putting all this material together, this isn't really an exposition of a text of scripture per se, but I feel like this is so important for us to understand the world that we live in, our nation that we live in today, that it's just vitally important that we know some of this historical information.
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But these two passages are key to this as well. So 1 Corinthians chapter 1 verses 18 through 31.
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This is God's Word. For the word of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.
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For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise and the cleverness of the clever I will set aside.
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Where is the wise man? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?
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For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not come to know God, God was well pleased to the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe.
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For indeed Jews ask for signs and Greeks search for wisdom, but we preach
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Christ crucified to Jews a stumbling block and to Gentiles foolishness. But to those who are the called, both
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Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men and the weakness of God is stronger than men.
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For consider your calling brethren that there were not many wise according to the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, but God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise and God has chosen the weak things of the world to shame the things which are strong and the base things of the world and the despised
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God has chosen the things that are not so that he may nullify the things that are so that no man may boast before God.
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But by his doing you are in Christ Jesus who became to us wisdom from God and righteousness and sanctification and redemption so that just as it is written let him who boasts boast in the
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Lord. And then if you'll turn to Romans chapter 2 back to the left there just a few pages in your
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Bible. Romans 2 12 through 16 and then we'll pray. Romans 2 12 through 16
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Romans chapter 2 verses 12 to 16.
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This is God's word for all who have sinned without the law will also perish without the law and all who have sinned under the law will be judged by the law for it is not the heroes of the law who are just before God but the doers of the law will be justified for when
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Gentiles who do not have the law do instinctively the things of the law. These not having the law are a law to themselves in that they show the work of the law written in their hearts.
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Their conscience bearing witness and their thoughts alternately accusing or else defending them on the day when according to my gospel
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God will judge the secrets of men through Christ Jesus. May God bless the reading of his infallible word.
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Let's pray, please. Heavenly Father, thank you for the opportunity to gather again here together this evening and we do pray that you would bless our study of this all important topic.
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It truly is the most dominant and most important non -Christian worldview that we have contact with and where we live in our country.
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We pray you would help us to see and understand its diabolical and un -Christian roots, its devastating consequences for the past two or three hundred years.
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And we pray that you would equip us to with confidence understand how to meet people in this secular humanist religion and be faithful witnesses for the gospel of Jesus Christ to them.
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We ask in Jesus name. Amen. There is a new very aggressive religion at work in our country today called secular humanism.
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Such headlines in the news as these 100 ,000 atheists are unbaptized.
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California school bans all Christian books and inter -varsity de -recognized at California State University are becoming more and more common.
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Such headlines could be multiplied. But why are these things happening in our culture? It's because of the religion of secular humanism.
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Now it is extremely difficult to identify all of the manifestations of this very aggressive anti -Christian religion.
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They come in the form of atheists and agnostics, rationalists, empiricists, skeptics and deists.
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But the tie that binds them all together is their disallowance of God being involved in the world or in the affairs of men.
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Secular humanism is one of the fastest growing worldviews in the West today. There's a sense in which all forms of non -Christianity, however, are fundamentally humanistic in their basic outlook on life.
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Man either embraces with love the law word revelation of God in scripture or man in his own authority is his own
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God, ultimately speaking. Within the realm of secular humanism, however, you could list the following subgroups, which are more or less sort of like denominations within the broader religion of secular humanism.
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There's rationalism. That's a belief that all human opinions and actions should be based on reason and knowledge as opposed to religious belief or emotional response.
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There's also empiricism. Empiricism is the philosophical theory that all ideas are derived from some form of experience, be it internal or external.
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This theory posits that this is the sole foundation of true knowledge. It developed in the 17th and 18th centuries and is expounded in particular by John Locke, Francis Bacon, and especially
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David Hume. Another religious denomination of secular humanism would be agnosticism, the view that truth values of metaphysical claims, in other words, anything that goes beyond the material world, such as the existence of God, are either unknown or, in fact, cannot be known at all.
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Then there's just plain old atheism, the view that rejects or disbelieves the existence of God or gods.
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And then there's nihilism. Nihilism is the rejection of all religious and moral principles.
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So what we want to understand this evening, what I want to really try to bring forward to you, is the history of secular humanism.
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How did our country get to where it is today? Why is it that the vast majority of your neighbors, co -workers, fellow students that you went to school with, and everyone else are really, for the most part, disinterested in spiritual matters and really just don't care that much whether or not
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God exists? Why is it that so many people have the attitude of the young man I shared the gospel with in my freshman dorm when
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I was at Ohio University? I shared the gospel with this young guy. I remember his reaction so shocked me.
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I asked him, what do you think is going to happen to you when you die? And his reaction was laughter, followed by, well, up or down,
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I guess, followed by more laughter. I just was stymied by that. Really?
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Is that funny? Heaven or hell, an eternity of bliss or agony? And yet that's the attitude of most of the people that we know today that are outside of the church.
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Basically, when it comes to the history of secular humanism, it really starts in the Garden of Eden. It starts with the rejection of the authority of God.
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But basically, anyone who rejects the existence of God as a secular humanist, anyone who would allow for the existence of a
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God, but refuses to believe that this being is interested in the world that we live in is also, for all intents and purposes, a secular humanist or has at least been deeply influenced by secular humanism.
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So in this sense, as I said, secular humanism is as old as Adam's rebellion in the Garden of Eden itself.
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We know from Scripture that there were people, even in Israel, who said there is no
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God. They're quoted in the Psalms in two different places. I believe it's Psalm 53 and Psalm 14.
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The fool has said in his heart there is no God. David and the psalm writers had met such people who said there is no
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God. We weren't delivered from Egypt. It's all mythology. There are people who said that, even them. And the Scripture calls them fools.
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History gives us numerous examples of individuals who rejected the existence of God and the existence of anything other than matter.
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But secular humanism really began to push more into the mainstream of human thought in the 17th century.
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That would be the 1600s. You have the Protestant Reformation takes place in the 16th century.
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That's the 1500s. That not only liberated Europe from the bondage of Roman Catholicism, but it also, sadly, ignited over 100 years of religious wars that culminated in what was known as the
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Thirty Years' War from 1618 to 1648. The church historian
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Bruce Shelley describes this unbelievable period of combat in the following words. Please listen closely to this quote.
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From 1562 to 1598, France suffered a series of civil wars between Roman Catholics and French Calvinists or Huguenots.
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When both parties reached the point of utter fatigue, they agreed to a territorial compromise in the
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Royal Edict of Nantes in 1598. The Huguenots gained religious freedom and political control of certain parts of the country while Roman Catholicism remained the official religion of the realm and in the greater portion of the nation.
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In a similar way, between 1560 and 1618, in the Netherlands, the strongly
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Dutch Calvinists fought a war of independence from Catholic Spain and won.
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In the southern territories, however, the area that we call Belgium, the people remained Catholic and did not gain their independence from Spain until much later.
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All these conflicts were a bloody prelude to the last and most devastating of the so -called wars of religion, the
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Thirty Years' War from 1618 to 1648. I still remember listening to Dr.
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James, my church history professor in seminary, describing this war and its unbelievable savagery and the devastation that it brought to Europe.
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He said there were cities, big cities, large cities became ghost towns. There were so many dead people.
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It utterly annihilated agriculture, the economies of entire nations in Europe, the
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Thirty Years' War did. Bruce Shelley continues, this conflict began primarily as a religious struggle with political overtones and ended as a barbarous political power struggle with religious overtones.
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In the final years of the conflict, religion faded into insignificance. For the most part,
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France and Spain, both nominally Catholic, struggled for political advantages in the Rhineland, that's a portion of Germany.
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When the swords fell silent, Germany lay ravaged. Ferdinand's dream of a revival of imperial authority was gone and in its place were 300 independent states.
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Out of sheer futility, the religious zeal of Catholics and Calvinists cooled and men began to question the territorial idea.
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Denominationalism became an alternative. The terms of peace called the Peace of Westphalia, you need to know that phrase, the
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Peace of Westphalia in 1648, reflect the passing of an entire age of thought.
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Calvinism joined Lutheranism and Catholicism as a recognized expression of the
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Christian faith. Princes, if they chose, could for the time allow Protestants and Catholics to exist within their territories and the
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Pope was excluded from any interference in the religious affairs of Germany. Naturally, Pope Innocent X condemned the treaty, but both
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Catholics and Protestants ignored his protests. After more than a thousand years, the state was free to transact its business as though the
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Pope did not exist, end quote. The Thirty Years' War ended with that treaty, the
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Peace of Westphalia, 1648. Historians of thought typically mark that year as the end of the age of faith.
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If you pick up almost any volume written by Christians or non -Christians alike on world history, you will read about the age of faith.
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When does the age of faith end? 1648, the Peace of Westphalia at the end of the
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Thirty Years' War, that's the end of the age of faith. And what begins in 1648? The age of reason, aka the
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Enlightenment. The age of reason or the Enlightenment is typically bookended with another date that you need to know, 1789.
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What happens in 1789? That's the storming of the Bastille and the launching of the French Revolution, which is the most significant event in the history of the world after the fall of the
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Roman Empire. Why is this such a significant event? Why is the French Revolution so important for us to understand in order to understand why our country today is the way that it is?
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Because of its vicious dechristianization policy, the French Revolution's introduction of the thought crime to Europe, its introduction of an absolutely ruthless, cold -hearted, murderous, and brutal version of state terror.
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All of the horrific Enlightenment ideals and the delusions of men like Jean -Jacques Rousseau were now being applied to politics and the results were catastrophic.
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When men cut themselves loose from the Bible and tried to figure out the world around them without God, the end result was they set the whole world on fire.
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And you see, the way that my church history professor described this to us in seminary was he said, the children that were born to the parents that were fighting the
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Thirty Years' War, when they came of age and looked at Europe and saw that the whole place was destroyed because of these religious wars, all of them grew up and said, we have had enough of Christianity.
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No more. We don't care about this Catholic -Protestant nonsense. Look at what it's done. It's blown up the whole continent.
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We're going to figure things out for ourselves. And what did they do in response to figuring out for themselves? They blew it up 100 ,000 times worse.
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Tens of thousands of perfectly innocent people were beheaded in the French Revolution by a system of paranoia that was so barbaric and horrifying that in my estimation,
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France to this day and the rest of Europe has literally never recovered from it. Their collective abandonment of God's word and that continent has left them annihilated.
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World War I, 1914 to 1918, left 10 million soldiers dead and four monarchies destroyed.
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In their foolishness, after that war ended, they called it the war to end all wars and they never thought that humans would fight again.
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Little do they know that 21 years later, another conflagration would begin that would take the lives of six times more people.
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More than 60 million people died in World War II in battles, invasions, massacres and gas chambers.
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Now, why do I share all of this in a sermon? Because the ideas which plunged Europe into a bloodbath for the last 250 years are coming into our country stronger and stronger with every passing month.
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They continue to grow and gain ground here in this country. And now our country has murdered more than 65 million unborn children.
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The French hater of Christianity, Voltaire, once they were loosed from scripture,
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Voltaire publicly enjoyed things such as cross -dressing and every other form of vile sexual immorality, homosexuality, you name it, they were doing it.
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That always goes with secularism. What have we seen in our country in the last 50 years? As we become more godless, what do you see the rise of?
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Death, bloodshed, selfishness, sexual filth, perversion being paraded in the streets.
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The very same things that destroyed Europe are beginning to destroy us now. Wherever you find secular humanism, there you will find totalitarian governments, innocent bloodshed, oppression, poverty, misery, gender confusion, perversion, homosexuality, the murder of unborn children and every other form of evil and a hatred of everything that is good and beautiful in the world, in the family and in life by the society.
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As I said, the historian Bruce Shelley has written a marvelous book called Church History in Plain Language, which is now in its fourth edition.
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Many years ago, I read the first edition and I'll never forget how much I learned from that section that he calls the age of reason and revival.
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I was shocked to find out what the origins of the society that I lived in really were, why people were what they were in my experience, why it was that almost every person
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I ever tried to share the gospel with, in all the years I was a computer programmer, in the four different companies I worked for, there was almost uniform indifference to the things of God.
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Nobody cares. You have an eternal soul that will go somewhere for eternity. Don't you care? People don't care.
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They don't care. No interest. That section, the age of reason and revival, is the section on the enlightenment, the grand revolt against Christianity and the
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Bible, and that section of Shelley's history has four chapters in it. The very first chapter in that section is called
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Aiming at the Foundations. The Cult of Reason. That chapter by itself is worth the price of the book.
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You should get the book and read that chapter to your children and discuss it. Read it to them every day for a week and discuss it.
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If you want to understand why people are so disinterested in spiritual matters in America today, you need to understand the enlightenment and what happened in that.
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For us who know Christ and have had the blessing of being raised, even if we were raised in nominally
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Christian households, the idea that people would not care about or even be concerned about spiritual and eternal matters at all is difficult for many of us to fathom.
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But disinterest in spiritual things can be traced back to this time period, and we would all do well to understand it and to understand what is profoundly wrong about it.
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One of the books that we had to read in seminary about the Reformation was Roland Bainton's biography of Martin Luther, called
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Here I Stand, and the opening chapters of that book, he describes the intellectual climate of Europe on the eve of the
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Reformation. At that time, everybody was concerned about their eternal destiny.
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It was the preoccupation of what everybody did all the way through their lives. Everyone was always thinking about what's going to happen to me when
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I die. And Bainton paints that picture so well, it's almost like you're in a time machine, and you go back into this ancient world where everybody was concerned about spiritual things, and now today we live in a culture and a society that's not concerned about those things at all.
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Bruce Shelley said this, quote, The age of the Reformation proved again that faith and power are a potent brew.
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As long as Christians had access to power, they used it to compel uniformity to the truth, Catholic, Lutheran, or Reformed.
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So men died for their faith, tens of thousands of them, until something general but very deep in man awoke to revolt.
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And then he goes into the Enlightenment, the age of reason. Listen, we call that revolt the age of reason, or as some prefer, the
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Enlightenment, when, as Charles Williams put it, National interests and mental relaxations combined to exclude metaphysics from culture.
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What does that mean? To exclude metaphysics from culture, to simply put ideas of God, souls, afterlife, judgment, no concern any longer.
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No concern to us any longer. We've seen what that did to our world. We're not interested in it anymore. Shelley continues,
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The spirit of the age of reason was nothing less than an intellectual revolution, a whole new way of looking at God, the world, and oneself.
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It was the birth of secularism. The Middle Ages and the
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Reformation were centuries of faith in the sense that reason served faith. The mind obeyed authority.
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To a Catholic, it was church authority. To a Protestant, biblical authority. But in either case,
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God's word came first, not man's thoughts. Man's basic concern in this life was his preparation for the next.
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The age of reason rejected that. In place of faith, it set reason.
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Man's primary concern was not the next life, but happiness and fulfillment in this world.
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That's what the word secular means. Concerned only with this world. No concern about death, the afterlife.
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We don't care. You start talking to people about heaven and hell and angels and demons and judgment before the throne of God and everything else on the cross, and people laugh that off.
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Why? The Enlightenment. Because they are secular in their thinking. They have embraced the spirit of this movement, this age.
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As I said, primary to man's concerns is happiness and fulfillment in this world.
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And the mind of man, rather than faith, was the best guide to happiness, not emotions or myths or superstitions.
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Shelley continues. The spirit and purpose of the Enlightenment were eloquently expressed by one of its spokesmen,
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Baron von Holbach, who wrote this. Now listen to this paragraph. This was written during the age of Enlightenment.
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During 1648 to 1789. You tell me if this does not capture almost every person you know today that's not a
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Christian. Listen, quote. Let us endeavor to disperse those clouds of ignorance, those mists of darkness which impede man on his journey, which prevent his marching through life with a firm and steady step.
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Let us try to inspire him with respect for his reason, with an inextinguishable love of truth so that he may learn to know himself and no longer be duped by an imagination that has been led astray by authority, so that he may learn to base his morals on his own nature, on his own wants, on the real advantage of society, so that he may learn to pursue his true happiness by promoting that of others, in short, so that he may become a virtuous and rational being who cannot fail to become happy.
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End quote. What is the purpose of your life? To do whatever you want. Remember the saying in the 70s and 80s,
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I got to be me. I got to be me. That is secular humanism right there. The Enlightenment project failed badly.
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When the man -centered ideas of the Enlightenment impacted theology, it destroyed confidence in scripture.
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Entire generations of seminary students had their faith wrecked by the rise of German hierarchical scholarship, which tried to analyze the form and content of the
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Bible using atheistic presuppositions and anti -supernatural biases. Why is the
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ELCA what it is? Why is the PCUSA what it is? Why was the Southern Church seduced to liberalism?
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The Enlightenment. Because of the age of reason, so -called.
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Why did entire generations turn their back on God, turn their back on the Bible, turn their back on the faith?
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Entire generations of seminary students come out not believing anything, and their church is completely liberal now?
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The Enlightenment. The result was catastrophic for the church. The giants of Old Princeton, God bless those men,
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Warfield, Machen, the Hodges, they responded to the German hierocriticism, but the damage was already done.
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In fact, one of the historians of Old Princeton wrote in his chronicle of what happened at Old Princeton, how it became liberal.
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They said when they carted Warfield out after his funeral, it was as if the spirit of the seminary was gone.
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When Warfield died, the place was seduced to liberalism within a very short time. Just so you know exactly what
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I'm talking about, what do I mean by German hierocriticism? That's something you need to know about too. Here's a good working definition of hierocriticism, and folks, as I said, you need to know this because if your young people go to universities anywhere, their professors, if they comment at all on the
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Bible, they will take as gospel truth everything the German hierocritical scholars have ever said in the 19th century.
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They will simply accept it as gospel truth. Here's what hierocriticism is, quote, the study of the literary methods and sources discernible in a text, especially as applied to biblical writings, end quote.
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Let me give you a practical application of this. I remember learning about what's called the documentary hypothesis when
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I was in seminary. That's the idea that the Pentateuch was not written by Moses, but was written by at least four different authors.
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And in fact, one person I read said it was written by 12 different people. The book of Isaiah is said to have at least two different authors and sometimes even three authors.
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In some scholarly works, I remember reading men who would refer to Deutero -Isaiah and Trito -Isaiah.
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And I remember thinking, who is Deutero -Isaiah? Who is Trito -Isaiah? Well, that's the findings of German hierocritical scholarship.
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And you look at, well, why do you think that there are multiple authors? Well, because there's differences in the style of the Hebrew. I would simply ask you, when you've written at different times in your life, has there been sort of different styles of what you've written?
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Does that mean that you are multiple people or anything like that? It's liberalism on steroids, folks, is what it is.
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At the time, I didn't know what they meant by those titles, but they were just accepting as facts the naturalistic, atheistic findings of higher criticism.
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A lot of that stuff has been discredited by good Christian scholarship. And as I said, it was ably answered by old
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Princeton at the time. But unbelievers and institutions of a higher learning will accept
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German hierocritical scholarship as undisputed fact. Where did such things as believing the
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Pentateuch had 12 authors come from? Secular humanism, traceable back to the Enlightenment. I'd like to give you the names of three individuals who were once upon a time seminary students whose faith was ruined by German hierocritical scholarship traceable back to the
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Enlightenment. Friedrich Nietzsche was at one time a seminary student. His faith was destroyed by German hierocritical scholarship.
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Charles Darwin, you ever heard of that guy? Joseph Stalin was at one time a seminary student who had the entire
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Gospel of John committed to memory. His faith was ruined by German hierocritical scholarship and evolutionary thinking.
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So, folks, these aren't just skeletons smoldering in Northern Europe somewhere. This stuff has affected the very cultural milieu into which all of us live and move and breathe.
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Day in and day out, these are the things that have influenced the way people around you think. There is much more historically that can and ought to be discussed regarding the
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Enlightenment and its profound influence on the Western world, but it is the grandfather of the secular humanist aggressive religious ideology that wants to silence
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Christianity in our culture today. Why is abortion legal? Why is gay marriage legal?
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Why is the family in shambles in this country? Why is sexual immorality on the rise?
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Why is marriage on the rocks and the church languishing and almost entirely absent in terms of its influence in our country?
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Secular humanism. And as I've said, the presuppositions and the worldviews that gave rise to that have deeply influenced churchmen for decades, for decades.
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As I mentioned, remember Finney? One historian of Christian theology called
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Finney's version of Christianity religious humanism because it really is. It is a religious version of the same thing that the
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Enlightenment was saying, a totally naturalistic understanding of everything, salvation, conversion, revival, all of it.
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I mentioned to you the French Revolution being perhaps the most significant event in Western history after the fall of the
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Roman Empire. One of the most important documents that was produced by the French revolutionaries was called
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Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. And that document's aim was to make all people equal under the law.
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Article 4 of that document is crucial. Listen to the way that it reads, quote, this is
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Article 4 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man from the French Revolution, quote, no corporate body, no individual may exercise any authority that does not expressly emanate from it.
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Liberty consists in being able to do anything that does not harm others.
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Thus, the exercise of the natural rights of every man has no bounds other than those that ensure to the other members of society, the enjoyment of these same rights.
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Isn't that so absurd? So what if my desires conflict with someone else's, then what do you do?
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I guess you would fight and try to behead the other guy. That's basically what they did. And they say this in closing, these bounds may be determined only by law, end quote.
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Of course, that begs the question, the law based on what? The key to notice here is the source of these rights.
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What is the source of human rights? Other humans. What's the source of rights? It's not
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God. It's not revelation. It's other people. Our American Declaration of Independence has its own flaws, of course, but by contrast, it says we hold these truths to be self -evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator, although that's probably not the
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Christian God necessarily, but at least he's mentioned with certain unalienable rights that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, end quote.
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Where do our rights come from in our Declaration of Independence, our creator at least? What we need to understand about our situation in our country is this, and folks, this is very, very important.
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Please remember this. Europe and the United Kingdom are much farther advanced than we are in America in terms of their slide into total secularism.
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They are much farther along in the process than we are. You know why we're not as far as they are?
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Because of revivals that God has brought here. God has stopped us from going so fast into total secularization by bringing revival through Edwards, through Whitfield, through great ministers and preachers.
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God has blessed this nation so much, and it's so sad to see us going the very direction that annihilated that whole continent, but we are well on our way to full secularization now.
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The church is exploding in Korea and parts of Africa. We praise God for that, but in America, it's dying, and in Europe and the
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UK are almost completely dead and are presently being overrun by Islam, if for no other reason, because Muslims actually have kids.
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The birth rate in Europe and America is below replacement. We are dying as a culture. We are dying now. Ideas have consequences, folks, and I hope that this historical survey has helped a little bit.
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I regularly put out copies of Bruce Shelley's book, Church History in Plain Language. Get a copy of that.
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Read the chapters on the Enlightenment. It will blow your mind how much of an influence that has on the people you sit across from in cubicles at work.
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They think the way that movement taught them to think. It's an excellent book, and if you want to study church and world history and look at the way the church has interacted with and been affected by these movements, that's a great place to start.
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Another individual who is very important for us to remember and to understand his impact is Charles Darwin.
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Now, we all know who he was, and we all know the books that he wrote, but I want you to just listen to a few things that you might not know about him.
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He was the right man at the right time to give perhaps the greatest push forward of all to outright secular humanism in the world around him.
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He was the right man at the right time with the right ideas that really lunged that forward into the mainstream.
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At the time that Darwin published The Origin of Species, there were two other guys I'm sure you've heard of, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who were also ideologues living in England at the time,
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German ideologues. Karl Marx and Engels were already writing extensively books on history and economics and pushing their diabolical, state -deifying, atheistic, communist ideas when
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The Origin of Species was published in 1859. Karl Marx was one of the first people to get a copy of that book and read it, and he wrote a letter to Engels, and he said, quote,
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Darwin, whom I have been reading, is splendid. This is the view of natural history that best fits our political ideas, end quote.
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Darwin's impact on secularization was staggering. I have a friend who did missionary work in China for quite some time, and he was told again and again by Chinese people in his dialogues with them, they would simply say,
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I believe in Darwin. What do you believe? Do you believe in God? Do you believe in this? Do you believe in that?
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They would just say, I believe in Darwin. Bodie, Hodge, and Patterson wrote this, quote, not only did
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Darwinian evolution become the skeptic's mechanism and cudgel for denying God's existence, social
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Darwinism justified much of the 20th century's eugenics atrocities. If you don't know what the word eugenics means, you need to look that up and learn about eugenics.
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It's one of the dirtiest little secrets in American history. Many people don't realize this, but Margaret Sanger, Margaret Sanger, the founder of the
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American Birth Control League, also known today as Planned Parenthood, she, in the 1930s, remember
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World War II starts in 1939, in the 1930s, Margaret Sanger is publishing articles in her periodical,
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The American Birth Control Review, by Nazi eugenicists. Those ideas were picked up by the
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United States government, and there are people today in America who were forcibly sterilized by our government because they were feeble -minded, because they were human weeds, because they didn't want their
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DNA to be passed on to future generations. In fact, one of the chief justices of the
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United States said, in one of his famous court decisions, said, quote, three generations of imbeciles is enough, end quote, ordering the sterilization of a person.
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Margaret Sanger said this, as an advocate of birth control, I wish to point out that the unbalance between the birth rate of the unfit and the fit, admittedly, the greatest present menace to civilization, you hear what she's saying?
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The fact that we allow people who are feeble -minded, they're not very smart, they've got birth defects, the fact that we allow them to reproduce more than us fit and intelligent people is the greatest menace to civilization.
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Margaret Sanger hated black people. That's why you find these
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Planned Parenthood clinics where? In black neighborhoods. They hate those people. She called them human weeds that need to be exterminated.
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Isn't it amazing that the only black president we ever had is a champion of who? Planned Parenthood, Murder Incorporated, an organization dedicated to the extermination of his own skin color.
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Of course, we don't even believe in race, do we? The Bible doesn't teach such a thing. Sanger goes on, in this matter, the example of the inferior classes, the fertility of the feeble -minded, the mentally defective, the poverty -stricken classes should not be held up for emulation.
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On the contrary, the most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over -fertility of the mentally and physically defective.
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Because of her ideas and because of papers published by Nazi eugenicists in this country, we started a program of eugenics and forcibly sterilized people in this nation.
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Adolf Hitler said this, quote, the law of selection justifies this incessant struggle by allowing the survival of the fittest.
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Christianity is a rebellion against natural law, a protest against nature. Taken to its logical extreme,
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Christianity would mean the systematic cultivation of the human failure, end quote.
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It was a well -documented fact in Nazi propaganda. They would show videos of people who are mentally disabled and physically deformed, and they would say things like, we have sinned against the laws of nature by allowing these human weeds to live.
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That's secularism applied to politics. What do you think? What do you think of the Enlightenment? Well, what do you think of its results?
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Pretty impressive, isn't it? Set the whole world on fire, oceans of innocent blood spilled.
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Planned Parenthood, World War II, the French Revolution, the Holocaust, the guillotine.
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What are these things? These are the brainchildren of secular humanism and its unprecedented revival and forward progress in the last three centuries to our day right now.
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Ideas have consequences. Do you see why we have to be equipped to answer these challenges and especially their alleged scientific pretensions?
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We have to be able to answer this stuff. I've had a brainchild of my own lately to offer to our entire church throughout the school year, perhaps, a biblical
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Christian theology worldview academy where we'd meet twice a month for an hour for either teaching or interaction to watch a
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DVD from some of the many great groups out there that are meeting the challenges of secular humanism head on, go through study questions, get ourselves equipped, get our children equipped so that they have the army they need to withstand the tsunami of secularism and all sorts of other things that we could do to better equip ourselves to interact with our culture and to equip our children against the avalanche and tsunami of secularism that they will be up against throughout their lives in this country.
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If we don't think that these ideas are going to come at our covenant children and try to infect them and get them to think this way, then we are out of our minds.
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It's the milieu that we swim in every day. How do we engage the worldview of secular humanism?
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How do we engage it? By recognizing immediately that it rests upon two completely fallacious foundations.
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One is nature. We are animals formed by purposeless, unintelligent, physical and chemical materialistic evolutionary forces which never had us in mind.
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That's what the worldview teaches. Now the fact is, animals live in a way that no secular humanist, if they were honest, would want to live.
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Animals are the epitome of selfishness. They kill each other so they can survive.
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Sometimes they care for their young, but some species frequently eat their young. Or their mates for nourishment or to promote the spread of their own genes.
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Certainly no animal cares about the environment. Locusts don't worry about the damage they do to the planet when they eat everything that they can swarm.
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The animal mentality is simple. Want and take. That's the first foundation of secular humanism.
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And that's what the Declaration of the Rights of Man said in the French Revolution. The second faulty foundation is the idea of, quote -unquote, common values.
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This is where the wheels really fall off the train here. They recognize the need for universal morality, but they're without a foundation for any such thing.
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They will claim that whatever doesn't cause harm to someone is permissible. They will claim that whatever promotes the greatest common good is best, but of course that raises the question, what do you mean by good?
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They will create laws that come from their God -informed conscience while refusing to admit that it's
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God -informed. The fatal flaw with all of this is, of course, what? Laws are not made of matter, folks.
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Laws are not made of matter, and neither are all of the concepts by which laws are written. Secular humanism is its own worst enemy.
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They've tried to codify their ever -changing beliefs into various manifestos. The first humanist manifesto was written in 1933, and it stated the following.
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The self -existence of the universe, evolutionary processes, the rejection of supernaturally revealed morality, looking to human reason and natural cause to understand the world, and a rejection of old attitudes of worship and prayer.
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Later, 40 years later, in 1973, another humanist manifesto was written. You can read these on the internet.
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They're not very long, and they're very interesting to read. In 1973, Humanist Manifesto 2 came out.
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It advocates a little bit more extreme than in 1933. We had slouched much further toward Gomorrah by the 70s.
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It advocates the right to birth control, divorce, and abortion, as well as speaking out against weapons of mass destruction and any notion of judgment or need for salvation.
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Isn't that amazing? We're for abortion, but we're against weapons of mass destruction. How does that fit together?
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Dismantling secular humanism is very easy. You see, secular humanists cannot assert that murder, rape, child abuse, or anything is actually wrong.
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Never allow anyone who's a secular humanist to use the words right or wrong with you. Always call them out.
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If someone's talking to you about abortion or about anything else, if they just, in passing, say, well, I think it's right that women should be given their rights and their rights should be protected.
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You need to train yourself to respond to that by always saying the same thing. I understand why I, as a Christian, would say that women should have their rights.
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I don't understand why you do, though. I don't understand why you're saying that. I, as a Christian, I have a foundation.
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I have a standard by which I can call something right or wrong. You don't. From where you're standing, we're just atoms banging around.
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We're just atoms banging around. Atoms banging around have no moral significance at all. All that secular humanists can assert, please hear me, the only thing that they can tell you is their personal preference, nothing more.
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Personal preference, nothing more. If all we are is atoms banging around, there is no objective right or wrong.
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So they can't speak of anything as being good, evil, right or wrong. So don't give them the right to those words and concepts.
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Those are Christian ideas. But the key to witnessing not only to a secular humanist, but to everyone, is their conscience.
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That's why I read Romans 2 at the beginning. Yes, answer the arguments and defeat them.
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And that's what I'd like us as a church to do more that kind of stuff, like meet and talk about theology and talk about meeting secular humanism and answering the quote -unquote scientific pretensions.
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But the key is addressing their sin problem. Use the law questions about lying, lust, hate, and blasphemy.
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Our point of contact with everyone, no matter what they hold to be true, is the fact that they're still in God's image and have the law written on their hearts.
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And no matter how loudly someone tells you they're a secular humanist, they can't escape from the fact that they're still in God's image.
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And they still know his law. There's a very important passage of scripture. Again, let's look at it again.
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If you still have your Bibles, Romans 2, 12 -16, just look at it again in closing here. No matter who you talk to, whether they're
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Athenian idolaters on the Areopagus, or pagan Babylonians, or idol worshippers in Thessalonica that Paul witnessed through, or in Corinth, or anywhere else, or the people that you work with, this passage is still true of every person that you meet.
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Look at verse 12 of Romans 2. For as many as have sinned without law will also perish without law, meaning people who never had the
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Bible in their possession, never had the written law of God in their possession, and as many as have sinned in the law will be judged by the law.
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What's his point? Whether you have the written law or not, you're guilty before God. Verse 13. For not the hearers of the law are just in the sight of God, but the doers of the law will be justified.
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Why does he say that? Because many of the Jewish people thought that just by knowing the law, by hearing it, that that made them right with God.
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And Paul's point is it's not just hearing it. You have to do it. And his whole point in Romans is there's nobody anywhere that does that.
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Verse 14. Here's the key. For when Gentiles who do not have the law, meaning they don't possess
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Bibles, they don't have access to the Old Testament, when Gentiles who don't have the law by nature do the things in the law, these, although not having the law, are a law to themselves.
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Okay, now stop there for a moment. No matter how far gone a culture has ever been, people have always known murder is wrong.
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Adultery is wrong. Stealing people's stuff is wrong. Everybody knows that.
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Verse 15. Who show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and between themselves, their thoughts accusing or else excusing them in the day when
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God will judge the secrets of men by Jesus Christ, according to my gospel. No matter what people say, we know that this is true of them, that they have the law written on their hearts and that their conscience is either accusing or excusing them when they do things.
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People are in a constant battle with their own consciences. People can say as loud as they want that there is no
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God, but in their heart of hearts, they still know that they offend him every day. God's law is constantly testifying against everyone you meet, or they excuse their behavior in their hearts by suppressing it.
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But the fact is, men cannot help but morally analyze their own conduct. I hope you remember that.
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Everyone you know, no matter what they say, when they have their quiet moments, they will morally analyze themselves.
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They will think about what they do and the fact that it's displeasing to God, even if they won't own that that God is their
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God. And the law of God that is on their hearts will constantly cause them to be troubled. This is the place where we can be used of God to alert people to this.
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Ask people about lying, about lust, about hate, about blasphemy. Remember the young guy at the orthodontist office?
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I asked him some of those law questions. Have you ever told a lie? Yeah. How many? Countless.
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What is someone who tells countless lies? A liar? You ever had lustful thoughts?
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Yes. Jesus said the same as adultery. So you're a lying adulterer. You really think you're going to get to heaven? If God exists and there is a heaven in hell, you think you're going to get into heaven?
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That's the point of contact with secular humanists. I don't care how many of these ideas they embrace. They still are what
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God says they are. They still have that law written on their hearts. They still have the echo of God in them in his image.
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God's word teaches that his law is on their hearts and that it does speak to them. Our point of contact with every human being we know that doesn't know
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Christ is that they are what God's word says they are. Active suppressors of the truth who know they violate
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God's law every day because of their conscience. And may God use us to speak the truth and love to all the secular humanists that we have the opportunity to speak to.
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Let's pray. Father in heaven, thank you again for giving us your word. And we do pray that you would help us to understand how powerful and far -reaching the ideas of the revolt against the age of faith, the revolt against the authority of scripture that took place long ago, how the reverberations of that are in every person around us today, in our culture here in America.
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Help us understand it, that we might meet it head on with love and grace and with the truth of the gospel.