TPW 73 The Georgia Guidestones, a Manifesto of Atheism, a Biblical Response

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May 1, 2019

00:02: Welcome to the
00:12: Cross and Witness, this is Pastor Patrick Hines here at Grinnell Heights Presbyterian Church in lovely
00:18: Kingsport, Tennessee. And today I'm going to do a program on the
00:24: Georgia Guidestones. My father sent me a link to an article about this and was curious, you know, my take on it.
00:33: I'd never heard of this before. This was a monument in Georgia that was set up back in, let's see, looking at the,
00:41: I read a few articles about this and then the Wikipedia article, I know Wikipedia is not always the greatest source of anything, but it's actually accurate and it looks like it's a fairly good summary.
00:53: But I read several other articles about it and I just wanted to go through some of this.
00:59: It's basically kind of like a new Ten Commandments sort of thing from sort of a secularist perspective.
01:07: And my father asked me about this and, you know, what's your take on this? So I thought
01:12: I would go ahead and do a program because I think this is important that people know about things like this and kind of hear what is the secular agenda, you know, all about?
01:24: What are they trying to push and promote and everything else? So it's basically kind of like a
01:30: Ten Commandments from a completely secularist point of view. So just let me give you a little background here.
01:36: It's a monument. It kind of looks a little bit like Stonehenge. I mean, these are huge slabs of rock here.
01:44: It's granite. The Georgia Guidestones are a granite monument erected in 1980 in Elba County, Georgia in the
01:51: United States. A set of ten guidelines is inscribed on the structure in eight modern languages and a shorter message is inscribed at the top of the structure in four ancient language scripts.
02:01: The monument stands at an approximate elevation of 750 feet, about 90 miles east of Atlanta, 45 miles from Athens, Georgia, and nine miles north of the city of Elberton.
02:15: Now, who is responsible for this? Well, a fellow named
02:20: Robert C. Christian, that's a pseudonym, I wonder why he picked the last name Christian.
02:29: He approached the Elberton Granite Finishing Company on behalf of a small group of loyal Americans and commissioned the structure.
02:37: Christian explained that the stones would function as a compass, calendar, and clock and should be capable of withstanding catastrophic events.
02:44: Joe Fendley of Elberton Granite assumed that Christian was a nut and attempted to discourage him by giving him a quote several times higher than any project the company had taken, explaining that the guidestones would require additional tools and consultants.
03:00: Christian accepted the quote. When arranging payment, Christian explained that he represented a group which had been planning the guidestones for 20 years and which intended to remain anonymous.
03:11: So Robert C. Christian, a guy, that's not his real name, delivered a scale model of the guidestones and ten pages of specifications.
03:20: The five acre land was apparently purchased by Christian on October 1st, 1979 from the farm owner
03:27: Wayne Mullinex, okay, and it goes on from there. And so these monuments went up and they've been defaced numerous times, vandalized by different groups because people don't like what they say, but I think that these ten statements, these kind of ten commandments, the new ten commandments they put out here, are fascinating to read that that far back in 1979, 1980, people were already thinking like this.
03:54: And so I wanted to go through each of these, but before I do that though,
04:00: I wanted to just make one comment here. Yoko Ono, Yoko Ono has praised the
04:10: Georgia Guidestones. She praised the inscribed messages as, quote, a stirring call to rational thinking, end quote.
04:18: While Wired stated that unspecified opponents have labeled them as the ten commandments of the Antichrist.
04:25: But I just want to point out, Yoko Ono, the widow of the late
04:31: John Lennon from the Beatles, Yoko Ono is a very odd character.
04:39: And someone forwarded me a link to a YouTube video of Yoko Ono who is taking up art.
04:46: I don't know that you would call this singing, but she thinks that there is some kind of aesthetic value to what she's doing.
04:57: Let me just play a little sample here of, this is Yoko Ono doing art at an art show.
05:04: And it's just for your listening pleasure, just listen to Yoko Ono. And people are standing around in this video looking at her kind of like, and they're all holding up their phones taking video.
05:39: And you think, you know, only in a secular culture do you have the death of beauty.
05:48: And that is nigh unto demonic. And that goes on for three minutes and 25 seconds.
05:55: But Yoko Ono, Yoko Ono likes the inscribed message on the
06:01: Georgia Guidestones and says it's a stirring call to rational thinking. I'm not sure
06:07: I would call what she's doing here a stirring call to beautiful music or beautiful art or beauty at all.
06:15: But that's what Yoko Ono is. Fast forward here a little bit. Let's see. A little bit further.
06:28: Yeah. So anyway, so there's an individual who has praised, praised the
06:34: Georgia Guidestones for their stirring call to rational thinking, rational thinking.
06:40: So let's go through each of these. There's 10 of them listed here. And I wanted to talk about each of these from a
06:45: Christian worldview perspective. Let's talk about what the Georgia Guidestones, how they are attempting to guide,
06:54: I guess, future generations or something after the apocalypse or the zombies come or something. This is supposed to help guide us, guide humanity into the future.
07:04: The first commandment here, the first thing listed, the first Guidestone principle here, maintain humanity, excuse me, under 500 million in perpetual balance with nature.
07:19: Maintain humanity under 500 million in perpetual balance with nature.
07:26: That is so typical of secular thinking. The secularists really do think that the earth would just be a lot better if there were, if there were a lot fewer people, if there were a lot fewer people.
07:40: Now that is in direct contradiction to what the scripture teaches us.
07:46: The scriptures teach us what? Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it. I mean, there are huge, huge, huge swaths of the earth where no people have lived.
07:58: It's completely overgrown and overrun with animals, with dangerous wild animals and everything else. A lot of the earth has not been subdued and dominion has not been taken over it by humanity.
08:09: And I think that the secularists, because they look at the earth and they look at the universe,
08:15: I mean, the earth itself is a giant fluke. It's a giant accident. It's just a coincidence that there's a finely balanced ecosystem here on this planet and there's a water cycle and there's seasonal cycles and everything works real well for us to be very comfortable here.
08:33: And because they see that as pure coincidence, it could be very easily broken.
08:39: And you see, as a Christian, I don't look at the earth like that. The earth is not this fragile thing that we can easily break.
08:45: Now we're not to abuse the earth either, but to say that there should never be more than 500 million human beings,
08:52: I mean, how many human beings are in the world right now? What is it, like about eight or nine billion human beings exist on planet earth right now?
08:58: So you're talking about one twentieth. So 19 out of 20 human beings.
09:06: It would be better if they were gone, if they just weren't here. That is a secular way of thinking, because if you do not believe the earth was designed by God for man to thrive and to live here and to be comfortable here, yeah, you're going to think that it'd be better if there were a lot fewer people.
09:22: And certainly someone like me, who has 10 kids, would be looked at as out of his mind. But I still believe what the word of God teaches, that we are to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and that children are a blessing.
09:35: Is it a challenge having more children? Oh sure, sure. There's a lot of challenges that come with it.
09:42: But I wouldn't trade that for anything in the world, nothing. But maintain humanity under 500 million in perpetual balance with nature.
09:50: So I guess they must think that we're 20 times out of balance, because we have a lot more than 500 million people on the earth.
09:58: Second one, guide reproduction wisely, improving fitness and diversity.
10:06: That's called eugenics, and that's Darwinism applied to the social sphere.
10:14: It is one of the most abominable and horrific facts out there, but I believe it's because of the in utero fetal testing that they can do now, through amniocentesis, they can tell if a child's got something like Down syndrome or a genetic disorder.
10:31: I think it's 9 out of 10, 9 out of 10 babies diagnosed with Down syndrome are aborted.
10:38: We really, we've embraced this idea of eugenics, good breeding, that we need to encourage healthy people to reproduce and have kids, and we need to sterilize everybody else.
10:51: It's a little known fact that there were forced sterilizations that took place in the United States.
10:57: Many people do not know that Margaret Sanger, back in the 1930s when she was publishing the
11:04: American Birth Control Review, the American Birth Control League, that's what Planned Parenthood was originally called.
11:11: And she published the papers in her periodical of Nazi eugenicists, and American eugenicists too.
11:21: So this idea of good breeding, of only allowing people who are healthy and aren't sick and don't have genetic disorders to reproduce, that's something that happened here.
11:32: There are people alive in America today, I believe, who were forcibly sterilized by the United States government.
11:37: It's a dirty little secret. But eugenics, the idea of only allowing certain people to have kids.
11:44: Now there were quotations from Francis Crick and Jacques Monod a long time ago where they said that very kind of thing.
11:54: They were saying that we envision a time when the government will determine what people have children and what children are born.
12:06: That's what this is talking about. Guide reproduction wisely, improving fitness and diversity.
12:14: And so it's pretty amazing. It's pretty amazing to hear that sort of thing just engraved in stone.
12:22: But if you're an evolutionist, Darwinist, why not? Why not? Guide reproduction wisely, excuse me, improving fitness and diversity.
12:33: I'm going to get a cough drop because I am coughing today. Thirdly, unite humanity with a living new language.
12:43: You know, the reason that God had to confuse human languages is because men refused to spread out.
12:53: They wanted to unite and all be in the same place and they built the Tower of Babel and God said, no,
13:01: I told you to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth, to spread out. Take dominion over the earth.
13:07: Not to all stay in one place and build and to make a name for yourselves. And that's what Genesis 11 tells us, which people were fascinated with themselves and they wanted to make a tower that reached up to heaven.
13:18: They wanted to make a name for themselves, lest we be scattered over the earth. But God told them to scatter over the earth.
13:25: So the diversity of languages is something that God did as a judgment on humanity so that we would do what we were supposed to do, which was to spread out and take dominion over everything in the earth.
13:38: So this has been tried before. There was a language called Esperanto. Esperanto is a language that I believe
13:46: Joseph Stalin liked it and tried to learn it, but it was a new language intended to be easy to learn and everything else, but it never really took hold anywhere.
13:57: Unite humanity with a living language, right? People want everything to be united, centralized.
14:03: And God is just the opposite. With God it's no, be independent, spread out over the earth.
14:10: Fourth, rule passion, faith, tradition, and all things with tempered reason.
14:17: Now that's the first statement, that's the first of these guidestone commandments that is completely meaningless.
14:26: What is tempered reason? What is tempered reason? What does that even mean? Tempered based on what?
14:34: Rule passion. What's passion? What does that mean? Rule passion, faith, tradition, and all things with tempered reason.
14:41: I would maintain that the concept of reason does not have any meaning in a secular or atheist or naturalist, materialist worldview.
14:52: Reason is based on faith. Reason is based upon a whole slew of assumptions that cannot be justified in an atheistic outlook on life.
15:03: So, what is that? What is commandment number four even saying? One person's guess is as good as anyone else's because it's completely arbitrary.
15:11: It's not based on anything that's actually rooted in something that's fixed. What is tempered reason? Whatever you say it is,
15:17: I guess. Fifthly, protect people and nations with fair laws and just courts.
15:27: What does fair mean? What does fair mean? Well, commandments one and two, maintain humanity under 500 million, guide reproduction wisely.
15:35: Obviously, these people would have no qualms whatsoever sterilizing the mentally handicapped and the infirm, aborting babies that are not wanted.
15:46: So, evidently, that's fair and that's just. You see, the words fair and just have no meaning objectively in an atheist outlook on life.
15:59: In an atheist universe, those words do not have any meaning because there is no standard by which to call something unfair.
16:08: There's no standard by which to say something is just or unjust. Fair laws and just courts.
16:14: The very best you can come up with would be completely arbitrary. Whatever you happen to think today and whatever the cultural consensus is today, that's quote unquote fair and just.
16:25: They're speaking of those terms as if they actually mean something. They're speaking of fair and just as if that actually has an understood meaning that is agreed upon by all people everywhere and that is not the case.
16:37: That is not the case. And so there's another statement that, given the underlying secularist worldview here, neither of those statements have any meaning.
16:47: Rule, passion, faith, tradition, and all things with tempered reason. What is reason and how is it tempered without any standard of reason?
16:53: That statement is meaningless. Protect people and nations with fair and just. Fair laws and just courts.
16:59: What does fair and just mean? Nothing in an atheist or secularist outlook on life. We're just evolved bags of biological goo.
17:08: And when one bag of biological goo bumps into another bag and forgets to say excuse me, is that fair or unfair, just or unjust?
17:15: Totally meaningless. Atoms banging around have no ethical or moral significance whatsoever and therefore nothing that they do can be labeled fair or unfair, just or unjust.
17:27: Sixth commandment here. Let all nations rule internally, resolving external disputes in a world court.
17:34: Let all nations rule internally, resolving external disputes in a world court. Yeah, that'll work.
17:41: Someone should have told that to Adolf Hitler and to the Kaiser. Someone should have told that to imperialistic forms of communism as they entered other nations and tried to subdue them and brought about wars in Korea and Vietnam and Afghanistan and everything else.
17:57: Hey guys, just resolve your external disputes in a world court. And I'm sure saying that to them,
18:05: I'll say, here's how we resolve disputes and they'll roll tanks in and blow you up. How naive is that?
18:12: Not only that, but also disputes, resolve them in a court that assumes that there's laws by which disputes can be resolved.
18:22: That there's canons of justice and injustice by which something can be resolved or even talked about. But in the absence of a foundation for any of those terms to mean anything, what does it mean?
18:33: Rule internally, resolving external disputes in a world court. That's not going to work as long as you have ruthless people that are willing to be imperialistic and to expand their borders at gunpoint or at the tip of a nuclear warhead.
18:47: That's not going to work. Not only that, but from a
18:53: Christian perspective, the only way that the nations of the world will actually become peaceful is if they're regenerated.
19:01: Is if they're born again from heaven. If they come to know Jesus Christ and find their contentment in him, then human beings will be able to live peacefully.
19:08: Not John Lennon's Imagine. I remember the music video for that on VH1 when
19:14: I was a kid, him and Yoko holding hands and walking. Imagine there's no heaven, no hell below us, above us only sky.
19:20: Imagine all the people living for today. You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one, yadda yadda yadda.
19:28: No religion too, no possessions, etc. etc. Doesn't work. It doesn't work.
19:34: Okay, seven. Avoid petty laws and useless officials. But you see, in a secular outlook on life, where people are not self -governing because they don't know
19:46: God, they need the government to govern them. I mean, I think it was Ben Franklin who said, either be governed by God, or by God you'll be governed.
19:57: Meaning, if you're not able to take care of yourself, if you don't have a sense of personal responsibility and self -control, and you're not going to kill people or do drugs or look at porn or ruin your marriage and your family or beat your kids or be a terrible, horrible person, you're going to have the government to take care of you.
20:16: The government's going to have to take care of you. What I've taught my children, and the principles that I live by, the biblical worldview, is when it comes to the civil government, basically my attitude is, just leave me alone.
20:27: I don't need you. I don't need you to give me health care. I don't need you to feed me. I don't need you to clothe me. I don't need you to take care of me.
20:33: I don't need, certainly, don't need you to educate my kids. So just leave me alone.
20:38: Okay? I'm perfectly fine without you. Only thing I need you to do is protect my life, protect my property, okay? And make sure that the
20:44: Christian church is able to carry on the work of ministry in a godly and peaceful fashion. That's all we need you to do.
20:51: That's all we need you to do. And I'm in favor of a head tax to do that. Every family in the country, every single family in the country should pay 20 bucks a year.
21:00: 20 bucks a year for government. That's all we need. We don't need to pay 30, 40, 50 percent of our salaries to the government for all these programs and everything else.
21:08: People need to learn to take responsibility for themselves. They don't need universal health care. Health care is not a right. Health care is a privilege.
21:15: Health care is a privilege that you have to pay for. That's one of the reasons health care is good in the United States, is it's not universal.
21:22: It's competitive. That's why people come here to have surgery and they don't go to North Korea. Because they don't have anything like that there.
21:30: Okay. Avoid petty laws and useless officials. I'm actually all in favor of that one. Petty laws and useless officials.
21:38: Be governed by the Ten Commandments or you're going to be governed by the Ten Billion Commandments. Seriously. Okay. Eight.
21:47: Balance personal rights with social duties. Balance personal rights with social duties.
21:54: Again, terms are being used there that don't have any meaning given the secular underpinnings of the
22:01: Guidestones. Balance personal rights. What is a right? What is a right?
22:08: Who determines what our rights are? Could you list some rights? Obviously the unborn don't have a right to life, so your understanding of what rights are are real different from mine.
22:18: So what are personal rights and where do they come from? Social duties. What duties do we have?
22:25: If I'm a bag of evolved pond slime, what duties do I have? None. They're completely arbitrary.
22:32: No, no, no. You're supposed to do this. You're supposed to be nice. What does nice mean? You're supposed to love people. What does love mean? All these terms are left hanging in outer space, and nobody knows what they mean unless you have a
22:41: Christian and biblical world and life view that roots them to divine revelation. If you don't have a fixed and unchanging body of divinely revealed truth, the words don't mean anything.
22:52: What does wisely mean? What does tempered reason mean? What does fair laws and just courts mean?
23:00: What does fair and just mean? Resolving external disputes based on what canons of justice and injustice?
23:06: Petty laws and useless officials? What is a useful versus a useless official? Personal rights with social duties.
23:13: What are rights and what are duties? These terms don't mean anything. In fact, they only mean something within the
23:18: Christian context. Number nine. This is my favorite one. Pride is truth, beauty, love, seeking harmony with the infinite.
23:33: That is Theobabble. That means nothing. What is truth? I don't know. What's beauty?
23:39: Is beauty someone throwing paint against a wall? Is beauty what we just listened to from Yoko?
23:46: Is that beauty? A lot of people think it is. Or is beauty something like a Chopin nocturne?
23:52: Or Mozart's Requiem? Or a Beethoven's Ninth Symphony or the Second Movement of the Seventh Symphony? Isn't that what beauty really is?
24:00: Isn't beauty an objective thing based on something? What is love? What is love?
24:06: Love is self -giving. Love does not seek its own. Love would never abort a baby. What is love?
24:13: Harmony? What does harmony mean? What does harmony mean? And then tenthly, finally.
24:18: Finally, be not a cancer on the earth. Be not a cancer on the earth.
24:29: What does that mean? Be not a cancer on the earth. Leave room for nature. Leave room for nature.
24:36: It's just repeated. Be not a cancer on the earth. Leave room for nature. Leave room for nature. That kind of bookends the ten things there with maintain humanity under 500 million and perpetual balance with nature.
24:50: You see, once again, if you have a secularist understanding of man, his origin, you're going to see the earth as this delicate, fragile thing that could so easily be upset and ruined and that's why all the yammering about global warming and everything else and we've got to have fewer people and et cetera.
25:09: We're going to destroy the world and everything else. Be not a cancer on the earth. That's the way the secular mindset thinks.
25:15: That's why they don't have kids. That's why they hate children. They really do think that the world is just better without people in it, without human beings in it.
25:23: That it just kind of needs to be left alone. There needs to be very, very, very few people in it. But the scriptures tell us to be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth and subdue it.
25:31: And that's the biblical way of looking at life and the world. So here you have a secularist understanding of the ten commandments.
25:43: This is out there in English, Spanish, Swahili, Hindi, Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese, and Russian.
25:51: And it's also got some interesting astronomical features, the actual stones themselves. But, you know, just once again
25:57: I want to point out that Yoko Ono said it's a stirring call to rational thinking. Rationality doesn't make any sense at all unless God exists.
26:10: Rationality does not have a foundation upon which it can be justified if there is no
26:15: God. If there is no governing providence, then everything necessary to be rational is rendered arbitrary including laws of logic, the inductive principle, science, morality, human dignity.
26:27: None of those things make any sense. The uniformity of nature. None of that stuff makes any sense. And so there you go.
26:34: There's the Georgia Guidestones. I told my dad I would do this. And so Dad, I hope that this was somewhat helpful to you.
26:41: It just shows the bankruptcy of a secular outlook on life. It can't offer any kind of rational foundation for any of the statements that it makes.
26:49: The comments that are made there, the statements made there, are utterly meaningless. So anyway, thanks for watching or listening.
27:00: This is Pastor Patrick Hines of Bridwell Heights Presbyterian Church located at 108 Bridwell Heights Road in Kingsport, Tennessee.
27:07: And you've been listening to the Protestant Witness Podcast. Please feel free to join us for worship any
27:12: Sunday morning at 11 a .m. sharp where we open the Word of God together, sing His praises, and rejoice in the
27:17: Gospel of our risen Lord. You can find us on the web at www .bridwellheightspca
27:23: .org. And may the Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make His face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you.