Homeward bound

I am finishing a new article to post tomorrow. In the meantime, here’s an old piece on what heaven will be like:

I find it endlessly fascinating to think about how the earth is modeled after God’s home in the third heaven, and what God created down here replicates the environment of His heaven.

“We have the right to believe that in heaven are the same kinds of things we see on earth,” says Jordan, “and that we can understand the things that are up there by looking at the things down here because God has revealed these things to us; He’s told us, ‘That’s how things are there!’

“What you got to get is that the things up there were the originals. We hang onto something down here and say, ‘That’s the original,’ but, no, it’s a COPY! The original book was up there. When He made the things down here, He made them in the image of what He made up there.”

*****

Colossians 1:16 plainly states, “For by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him.”

Jordan explains, “In other words, if you can understand the created world here, that gives you the capacity to understand the invisible world out there. We can understand things that we cannot see by looking at things we can see because God created the things we can see according to the pattern of the things we can’t see. You gotta get that!

“God patterned what He created in His creation after some things in the spirit world, and the things you see around you didn’t just come willy-nilly out of nowhere. They were created according to something in the invisible realm.

“Do you know what a throne is? Thrones, dominions, principalities and powers are realms of governmental authority. Notice He uses exactly the same terms to describe the things in the heavens as He does for the things in the earth. He says, ‘I created these things in both realms.’

“The idea in Romans 1 is, if you want to understand the things you can’t see, look at the things you can see. Because God created what you can’t see in the same identical pattern to the things He created in the realm you can see.

*****

In Isaiah 63:15 (“Look down from heaven, and behold from the habitation of thy holiness and of thy glory”), God is actually being invited to look down on Israel from His habitation. The Bible makes clear there are three literal heavens and God lives and dwells in a city on a planet called the third heaven.

The atmosphere around the earth where the birds fly is called ‘the open firmament of heaven’ and represents the first heaven (Gen. 1:20). The heaven where the stars are—outer space—makes up the second heaven.

II Corinthians 5 assures that the moment a Believer dies, his/her soul leaves the body and goes immediately into the presence of the Lord in God’s third heaven, which is where Jesus Christ is.

“When we say so-and-so died and went to heaven, we don’t mean he’s on Jupiter or Pluto or Saturn or out in the Milky Way somewhere,” says Jordan. “We mean he’s in the city where God lives. He’s on that city New Jerusalem where God dwells and has His habitation. It’s where the verse in Isaiah 63, or Moses in Deuteronomy 26, or Solomon in I Kings 8, talks about ‘thy habitation.’

*****

When Paul says, “For we know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building of God, an house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens,” he’s saying that in our new glorified body we will function in the second and third heavens.

“Between death and the resurrection, we’re not just going to be stuck out in outer space in the second heaven,” explains Jordan. “Our function as the Body of Christ is to take over and rule the government of the second heaven for Him, but we’re also going to have access to the third heaven—the city where God is. In fact, that’s really going to be home.

“Imagine the idea of God’s home being your home! A bunch of heathen, idol-worshipping pagan Gentiles like you and me being invited to go home and sit down at the table with God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit and have Him say, ‘Here’s the key—the door’s always open to you.’

*****

In John 1, Jesus tells Nathanael the day’s going to come in the kingdom where he’ll be able to see the angels ascending and descending on the Son of man, and that the angelic host leaves out of New Jerusalem and goes into the heavens with diplomatic instructions for the government of the heavens.

Jordan says, “There’s going to be a diplomatic force going back and forth with constant communication between the second and third heaven. You and I are going to be part of that and I plan to get some R & R and go see the city.

“It’s exciting to me to see how God has fixed it so Believers who are just willing to believe little simple things in the Bible can have a hope that’s enhanced. It’s not just some mystical, intangible, inscrutable thing I can’t know about in some spiritual state. That’s what all the pagans believe.

“It’s not some nirvana that just sort of comes over you like a yoga trance and you’re just there. No, it’s a real place. It’s tangible. It’s made out of material that’s different from the earth but the earth is made in a pattern after the heaven and it’s wonderful to see these things.”

*****

Jesus Christ, in talking to the Samaritan woman in John 4:24, informs, “God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth.”

Jordan explains, “That’s a great statement about who God is. He’s a spirit; He’s not material. He’s not made out of Carbon-14 like we are. He’s eternal and He’s always existed.

“When God made creation, He made it in a way to manifest Himself to creation, and in order to do that, He made a location. He made a place in the creation that He created in order to demonstrate to His creation who He is. In fact, He actually created creation for the purpose of doing that. He created you and me—His creatures—for Him to have fellowship with. He created man so He could have a creature in the earth He could commune with and who could go out and be His representative.

*****

As Jordan points out, man’s the only creature on the face of the earth God made who doesn’t have his own naturally grown clothes.

“Psalm 104 says, ‘Bless the Lord, thou art clothed with honor and majesty.’ Notice that He’s got on clothes. Isn’t that interesting? God has a doctrine of clothing and it’s not the fashion of the world; it’s the fashion of heaven.

“God wears a coat of many colors. It’s an original design. God fixed it so we would be like Him because He wears a garment, and we’re going to see that everybody in His heaven has on garments.”

*****

In the Bible, the universe is described as a tent for God to dwell in. Hebrews 8:1-5 indicates that the tabernacle that Moses built in the wilderness was made as an exact replica of this tent. God gave Moses the exact measurements, dimensions and features to scale of the tabernacle He pitched in the heavens.

“When I draw you a picture of what the universe looks like, I use the tent that God dwells in and you draw it in the shape of the tabernacle in the wilderness,” explains Jordan. “In fact, you guys that are good with math, if the scale is right and the verses mean what they say, and the tabernacle in the wilderness is a scale model of the universe, you can figure out literally the shape and size of the present universe with its ends and bounds and borders by the measurements back there.”

In regards to what Job 22:14 reveals (“Thick clouds are a covering to him, that he seeth not; and he walketh in the circuit of heaven”), Jordan asks, “Do you know the shape of the city that God lives in? It’s not a mistake that the earth is round. This planet is made like the planet where His city is. Think about that! Psalm 19:6-7 talks about the same thing; about Him out walking in His circuit.

*****

Speaking of the upcoming millennial kingdom when God will bring His city down to earth, Hebrews 12:22 states, “But ye are come unto mount Sion, and unto the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to an innumerable company of angels.”

Jordan explains, “One day God’s going to bring down that third heaven and put it on this planet and the reason the earth is such a special planet in all the universe--there’s not another planet just like it—is because it’s the place that God originally made when He made His heaven and then created the universe; He made a place in that universe where He was going to put His city.

*****

In Ezekiel 40, when Ezekiel looks into the millennial kingdom and begins to see where Jesus Christ has come back and set up His city in that territory in Israel, he says he sees the “frame of the city.”

Jordan says, “That’s stuff’s hidden now, it’s not there, there’s going to have to be a lot of topographical changes to manifest it. When the Flood came, all that stuff over there got broken up, but in the millennium that stuff’s gonna reappear. It’s already there.

“When God’s building the earth, He’s planning a place where He’s going to bring that house down and sit in. The third heaven’s gonna come to visit! His city’s coming down!

“Moses, when he describes that kingdom and the blessings in that kingdom, says in Deuteronomy 11:21, ‘That your days may be multiplied, and the days of your children, in the land which the LORD sware unto your fathers to give them, as the days of heaven upon the earth.’

“When the goal is reached in the kingdom, it’s going to be as the days of heaven on earth. That tells me that when the days of heaven are done down here, they’re not going to be invisible, intangible, spirit state and unreal; they’re going to real, material, literal days on a literal planet that’s just like the earth.”

Mores without moorings

With the advent of the Internet, now most anybody can trace their family roots. But in I Timothy 1:4, the Apostle Paul warns, “Neither give heed to fables and endless genealogies.”

Of this verse, Bible scholar C.R. Stam once wrote, “While there are some in our day who are very proud of their ancestry, and have coats of arms displayed in their homes, the average Christian probably has never had his family tree traced back very far.

"But in Paul’s day genealogies were very important, even among believers. One’s family relationships meant a great deal. If you were a second cousin to Christ or even a third cousin to Peter you ‘had it made.’ You might be crude, or stupid, or even wicked, but all this was overlooked: you were closely related to Christ Himself or to the Apostle Peter and all were ready to give you audience.”

*****

Regarding the current national debate over the very definition of marriage and parents, Jordan reminded:

“The problem is the role of fathers has just been totally decimated, and the war on fatherhood has been waged with such devastating force that, I tell you, our culture has sentenced the next three to four generations to a disastrous tragedy upon tragedy. The Bible talks about the sins of the fathers being visited on the third and fourth generations. When you raise a wicked generation of fathers, it takes 3-4 generations to root out the evil that’s produced in a culture, and you’re going to have generation upon generation of tragedy.”

Jewish historian Josephus observes, “Now it was Nimrod who excited them to such an affront and contempt of God. He was the grandson of Ham, the son of Noah, a bold man, and of great strength of hand. He persuaded them not to ascribe it to God, as if it was through His means they were happy, but to believe that it was their own courage which procured that happiness. He also gradually changed the government into tyranny seeing no other way of turning men from the fear of God, but to bring them into a constant dependence on his power…”

*****

“You know the nature of adolescents—‘If mom and dad do it this way, I’m going to do it that way,’ so they produce this tremendous cultural revolution,” explains Jordan. “And though the children have grown up, they still have the taste of children because the whole of society has been changed and picked up like a rising tide from its moorings and set adrift.”

Isaiah 3 documents a time in Israel’s history when the Jews were in a similar kind of situation we are today, culturally, and there’s a strong statement by Isaiah about what happens to a people in that situation:

[1] For, behold, the Lord, the LORD of hosts, doth take away from Jerusalem and from Judah the stay and the staff, the whole stay of bread, and the whole stay of water,
[2] The mighty man, and the man of war, the judge, and the prophet, and the prudent, and the ancient,
[3] The captain of fifty, and the honourable man, and the counseller, and the cunning artificer, and the eloquent orator.
[4] And I will give children to be their princes, and babes shall rule over them.
[5] And the people shall be oppressed, every one by another, and every one by his neighbour: the child shall behave himself proudly against the ancient, and the base against the honourable.

*****

Jordan explains, "God is directly intervening in the life of this nation to bring about disaster that they had contracted to receive if they rebelled against--morally and spiritually--His (Mosaic) covenant. So He’s sending it to them.

“Notice what he says. The first thing they lose is prosperity. They’re going to lose the store that they have--the bread, the water, the basic elements of life. They’re going to lose their economic prosperity. They’re going to begin to be in want.

 

“God is going to take the blessing away from them and their enemies are going to surround them and take them captive and they’re going to go up into that 5^th course of captivity in Leviticus 6 and they’re going to be taken away.

“Famine is going to come on them. Economic disaster is going to befall them. They’re going to lose their leaders. The mighty men, the leaders of the nation. They’re going to look around and there aren’t going to be any statesmen to lead them in the political and economic realm and in their institutions. They’re going to be adrift.

“Their military is going to be decimated. Disarmament is going to be the idea of the day. The judges are going to be so corrupt that they’re going to corrupt the law to the point that when you need them you’re not going to be able to depend on the legal system of the day.

*****

“The prophet and the preachers are going to be prophesying lies. Jeremiah said the ‘people prophesy lies and the people love it so.’

“You see, the basic institutions of their society are just going to be decimated. ‘The prudent and the ancient.’ Prudence is the ability to make good decisions and their government is going to be in a situation where there aren’t going to be men and women in government who have the capacity to make good judgments and decisions about things.

“The ‘captain of fifty’ is going to go right down through the structure. It’s not just going to be the people at the top; it’s going to be the people that come down through the structure of government in society. The honorable men.

“They go out in their culture and they look for somebody that they can trust. Somebody in government, somebody in leadership; somebody in public position in the church and in education and in the government that they can say, ‘There’s somebody who can tell me the truth. There’s somebody who’s decent and honorable that I can trust what they say.’ Those people are going to be gone!

“The counselor. That’s somebody who gives you good advice. You’re not going to get good advice. Not just bad decisions but there’s nobody there to tell you what you ought to do! That’s not going to be found anywhere in their institutions and government society anymore!

*****

“ ‘A cunning artificer.’ That’s the artist. And the oracle. The real true artist, whether it’s with painting or music or words, the real true artists are going to be gone! And all that’s going to be left is the filth. When I read down through that I think, ‘You read that and you say Wow, somebody’s been reading the Chicago Tribune, the Sun-Times and the US News and World Report! Somebody’s been listening to NBC, CBS, CNN, ABC!’

“But this is Isaiah, 750 years before Christ. It really sounds similar! ‘And I will give children to be their princes and babies shall rule over them.’ That’s what Robert Bork called those ‘wave of savages who must be civilized’ by their parents and by their schools and churches.

“What’s happening are the people who have been charged with civilizing the children and the babies, and bringing them in and teaching them the traditions of the culture they’re in so they would know how to live, and teaching them in their history of who they were as a nation and what God’s purpose for them was, in Israel’s case.

“Those people have lost their moorings and there’s no one there to do that. And the impact of that absence is when, every year, this new generation of kids that come on the scene, there’s no one there to give it to them! So they’re set adrift and they’re left to their own devises.

 

"The adults have lost the strength of character, the will, the backbone. There’s no one there to tell the child, ‘NO! You can’t do that! NO, this is wrong!’ There’s no one left to give them the directions and teach them what’s right and wrong.”

(new article tomorrow)

Driven by carnal desire for 'hidden' knowledge

Sorry for the delay on new article. I will have it ready tomorrow. I am working more than expected (including over the weekends) but very grateful for the added income. In the meantime, here’s an article posted to my old website that correlates with the last entry here on Oprah's "energy":

In Manhattan, I lived only a few blocks west of the Scientology “embassy” on 48^th Street. I’d often pass cult members standing out on the sidewalk, smoking cigarettes. They always seem to be dressed in dark navy slacks--or skirts if the women chose-- and white cotton dress shirts.

I remember one Saturday night I found myself in step behind two Scientologists making their way down Eighth Avenue through thick pedestrian traffic. I could see they were repeatedly snickering among themselves and I thought, “Listen for what they’re saying.” I couldn’t make out much of it, but the general gist was something like, “Yeah, people just aren’t open to our ‘higher truth.’ They’re blinded, only interested in basic survival.”

This is exactly what New Agers in general believe: “We’re enlightened; you’re not. You’re in bondage to a lower plane of existence, mentally enslaved by whatever religion and/or philosophy you were raised in as children. You haven’t developed your sensitivity and spiritual acuity to move beyond the superficial.”

*****

Probably the top calling-card Bible phrase of the New Age Movement is, “The kingdom of God is within you,” adapted from Luke 17:21. Of course, it is taken completely out of context with no biblical literacy in its application.

As Bible teacher Keith Blades writes in an article on his website www.enjoythebible.org,  “You could probably get rich if you were given a dime for every time someone brings up (this verse) in connection with questioning whether the ‘kingdom of God/kingdom of heaven’ spoken about in God’s program with Israel is really the literal and physical establishment of God’s kingdom on this earth.

“And for those who do not merely question this, but are determined to deny the literal, physical reality and nature of that kingdom in favor of a spiritual ‘in-the-heart’ type reigning of God, these verses are a stronghold. Since the Lord says that ‘the kingdom of God is within you,’ then the argument is that it cannot be a literal, physical, external kingdom, but only a spiritual one in men’s hearts.”

The reality is there are dozens upon dozens of passages in the Bible making explicit reference to the literal, physical nature of God’s kingdom on earth. In this particular verse from Luke, Jesus Christ is addressing the unbelieving Pharisees who were enemies of God. They had refused to look at the evidence surrounding them for three-plus years that demonstrated the climactic stage of Israel’s program had arrived—exactly as foretold by the Old Testament prophets.

*****

A kingdom verse you likely won’t hear a New Ager quote is Matt. 13:19: “When any one heareth the word of the kingdom, and understandeth it not, then cometh the wicked one, and catcheth away that which was sown in his heart. This is he which received seed by the way side.”

Blades explains, “All the proofs for the reality of the coming of ‘the kingdom of God,’ (if the Pharisees of Luke 17 had honestly sought any proofs), were in their own hearts. They had been placed there over the course of the previous three-plus years by the effectual working of both ‘the gospel of the kingdom’ and the signs of it.

“That therefore is the place where they needed to be looking to see the reality of the kingdom being ‘at hand.’ They needed to honestly deal with what had been placed in their hearts by ‘the gospel of the kingdom’ and its signs. Hence, the Lord said to them, ‘for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.’ ”

*****

Scientologists say reality is relative. Of course, this type of hokum plays big to those who are frightened by the world and its instability and yet don’t want the security God offers through belief in His Son. Instead, they like the notion that they are God. That way they don’t have to be accountable to anyone and are free to do whatever they deem right. There’s nothing new at all to this delusional doctrine of Satan’s.

As Gail Riplinger writes in her 1993 book New Age Bible Versions, “Eve became the first ‘moralist,’ as she chose to decide what is good and what is evil. Rebels, like Eve and Lucifer seek ‘the good’. . .God spoke these words (‘Ye shall not do after all the things that we do here this day, every man whatsoever is right in his own eyes.’ Deut. 12:8) because the heathen perennially chose their mores over the laws of God.

“ ‘Taoists maintain morals are relative.’ The Hindu Bhagavad Gita ‘teaches the supremacy of freedom over morality.’ Its dialogue between Arjuna and Krishna concludes: ‘There can be no absolute moral values because all things are changing, evolving. A particular moral value represents only a particular perspective offered by a particular time at a particular level of evolution.’

“From the bushmen to the bookmen like Boehm, Blake, Nietzsche, Heidigger and Sartre, man rejects the mandates of God for a man-made morality. A confederacy of educators, carrying Einstein’s ‘Theory of Relativity’ banner, have captured today’s students. In a national religious survey, half of the college students polled affirmed that: ‘Truth is basically relative; what is right and true for you might not be right and true for me.’ ”

*****

Out of people’s deep-seated loneliness and misery—heightened by their separation from God as non-believers—they try to escape from themselves through knowledge, through different forms of belief and through identification with a “special” group. This explains the appeal of cults like the Church of Scientology.

Riplinger writes, “The carnal spirit of Gnosticism, that is, the desire for hidden knowledge others do not have, is prevalent in the New Age and the church. New Agers try to get a word from ‘God’ through some ‘hidden’ wisdom from ‘far off’ gurus living ‘beyond the sea’. Christians search for the ‘hidden’ meaning of a word in Greek lexicons from ‘far off’ Egyptian manuscripts from ‘beyond the sea’.”

In another passage, she notes, “New Ager Vera Alder say of the ‘New’ world religion: ‘It is likely that a new kind of religion will develop in which man will discover and work out his own sermons for himself’. . .Seth, an entity now being channeled in New Age circles echoes: ‘There is no authority superior to the guidance of a person’s inner self.’

“This wizard ‘peeps’ as cultists and textual scholars ‘mutter’ the same monotonous declamation. Hare Krishna devotees listen to see if a Bible version has a ‘ring of truth.’ Hort (the Bible revisionist behind the corrupt modern versions) used his ‘instinctive’ powers to determine if a verse had a ‘ring of genuineness.’

“J.B. Phillips touts the reader of his forward to the NASB Interlinear Greek-English New Testament to ‘try to make his own translation,’ looking for The Ring of Truth (the title of his autobiography). Westcott (the other Bible revisionist from the late 1800s) recommends using your ‘intuitive powers’ as a sounding board. . .

“Westcott thinks Plato has a clear source of ‘truth,’ which for us is ‘blurred and dim.’ He writes that this ‘truth’ stems from Plato’s, ‘. . . communion with a divine and super-sensuous world. . . [with] those beings who occupy a middle place between God and man. . . [A]ll fellowship which exists between heaven and earth is realized through this intermediate order. . . These spirits are many and manifold’. . .

“One of Plato’s most well-known philosophies is his concept of ‘the Idea’ wherein the outside form of things merely veils ‘the idea,’ which alone is real. Westcott expresses this Eastern and Gnostic world view saying, ‘There is. . . a serious danger in the prevailing spirit of realism which leads us to dwell on the outside form, the dress of things, to the neglect of ‘ideas’ which are half-veiled. . . Eternal life is. . .the potential fulfillment of the ‘idea’ of humanity.’

“The TV mini-series The Power of Myth ‘programmed’ potential New Agers with Plato’s concept of ‘the idea’. Joseph Campbell, its author, also wrote Hero with a Thousand Faces. Both try to popularize Westcott’s Platonic idea that, as Westcott says, God appears, ‘not in one form, but in many.’ [Buddha, Krishna, Mary]

“If you missed the mini-series reruns, your college psychology class will present the same concept under the guise of Carl Jung’s ‘archetypes’ welling up from the ‘universal unconsciousness’. ”

What's the frequency, Oprah?

Human viewpoint says movement is always good and upward; that it’s simply the “evolutionary cycle.” The attitude is science—or the human ability to cognitively design and think about what’s going on—is the obvious guide to progress and the Holy Bible is only a hindrance.

Last night I tuned into David Letterman for five minutes or so, curious to see who his guest would be given he only has a few more shows before his retirement. It was good old Oprah.

Of course, Winfrey could not help but give some version of her usual New Age spiel about how the good circumstances in your life boil down to the “energy” you put into the world.

*****

As you might remember from Oprah’s own talk show, she has a long-standing cadre of gurus who’ve helped make her more “intelligized” than the vast majority of us, especially those of us backward enough to still rely on any archaic biblical understanding of God.

Two of her favorite teachers, with their religion branded “The Secret,” are James Arthur Ray and the Rev. Dr. Michael Beckwith, co-founder of the Association for Global New Thought.

According to Rev. Beckwith, “Science tells us that everything is energy, and so your thoughts are energy. Your body, your cash, your car—everything you think is solid, if you put it under a high-powered microscope, it's just a field of energy and a rate of vibration. And so are we. So if you think you're this meat suit running around, you have to think again.”

“One way to describe this energy is by comparing it to radio waves--the frequency you give out through your thoughts and your emotions is what you have a tendency to manifest in your life. Whether those thoughts and emotions are conscious or unconscious, it doesn't matter.

“This means that if you are sending out the same negative energy over and over—whether thoughts or feelings—you will attract like energy back to you. James says that when bad things happen, people might ask, ‘Oh, God, why me?’ ‘Because it IS you,’ he says.”

*****

On one of Oprah’s old shows lauding “The Secret,” a woman in the audience asked if its emphasis on putting “your faith in yourself,” conflicted with faith in God.

Beckwith responded, "[Jesus] said, 'Pray believing that ye have that ye may receive.' That's ‘The Secret’ in a nutshell. Pray believing and feeling and sensing that you already have it, and then you're available to receive it.

“ ‘The Secret’ isn't about contradicting religion—it supports it. It actually goes underneath the culture and explains to you the sacred laws that these wonderful teachers have brought to us.

“ 'The Secret' is about supporting the great spiritual traditions in a more modern form. It really is just putting Christianity, Judaism, all the great teachings into a current vernacular.”

*****

When the woman in the audience said she believed in heaven and hell and expressed concerned that “ 'The Secret's' promotion of free will and personal choice imply that you do not face a final judgment,” the response from Ray was that she look at concepts of heaven, hell and judgment ‘in a different way.’

He answered, "Jesus the Christ said the kingdom of heaven is within. He didn't say it was out there somewhere—[he said] within. And so is it possible to consider that the kingdom of hell is within as well?”

Beckwith confirmed, “The kingdom of God is actually in us, and what comes out of your mouth, what you think about, how you express—you're either participating in the realm of ever-expanding good or you're cutting yourself off from the realm.”

(new article tomorrow)

Truth 'drowned in sea of irrelevance'

Years ago a friend recommended the 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, by Neil Postman, as a “must-read” for my journalistic understanding.

In an absolutely astonishing on-the-money-for-2015 foreword, Postman compares the fear of George Orwell’s 1984 coming true with the reality of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World being the real outcome.

“Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing,” he writes. “Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history.

“As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one.

“Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism.

“Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.

“Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy.

“As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny ‘failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.’

“In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.”

*****

Toward the end of the book, Postman revisits this theme with, “In the Huxleyan prophecy, Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice. We watch him, by ours. There is no need for wardens or gates or Ministries of Truth.

“When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.”

*****

Here’s just a smattering of other great quotes from Postman’s book:

·         “The clearest way to see through a culture is to attend to its tools for conversation.”

     

·          “Exposition is a mode of thought, a method of learning, and a means of expression. Almost all of the characteristics we associate with mature discourse were amplified by typography, which has the strongest possible bias toward exposition: a sophisticated ability to think conceptually, deductively and sequentially; a high valuation of reason and order; an abhorrence of contradiction; a large capacity for detachment and objectivity; and a tolerance for delayed response.”

·         “Moreover, we have seen enough by now to know that technological changes in our modes of communication are even more ideology-laden than changes in our modes of transportation. Introduce the alphabet to a culture and you change its cognitive habits, its social relations, its notions of community, history and religion. Introduce the printing press with movable type, and you do the same. Introduce speed-of-light transmission of images and you make a cultural revolution. Without a vote. Without polemics. Without guerrilla resistance. Here is ideology, pure if not serene. Here is ideology without words, and all the more powerful for their absence. All that is required to make it stick is a population that devoutly believes in the inevitability of progress. And in this sense, all Americans are Marxists, for we believe nothing if not that history is moving us toward some preordained paradise and that technology is the force behind that movement.”

 

     ·         “The line-by-line, sequential, continuous form of the printed page slowly began to lose its resonance as a metaphor of how knowledge was to be acquired and how the world was to be understood. "Knowing" the facts took on a new meaning, for it did not imply that one understood implications, background, or connections. Telegraphic discourse permitted no time for historical perspectives and gave no priority to the qualitative. To the telegraph, intelligence meant knowing of lots of things, not knowing about them.”
 
     

 

·         “To engage the written word means to follow a line of thought, which requires considerable powers of classifying, inference-making and reasoning. It means to uncover lies, confusions, and overgeneralizations, to detect abuses of logic and common sense. It also means to weigh ideas, to compare and contrast assertions, to connect one generalization to another. To accomplish this, one must achieve a certain distance from the words themselves, which is, in fact, encouraged by the isolated and impersonal text. That is why a good reader does not cheer an apt sentence or pause to applaud even an inspired paragraph. Analytic thought is too busy for that, and too detached.”

 ·         “In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, print put forward a definition of intelligence that gave priority to the objective, rational use of the mind and at the same time encouraged forms of public discourse with serious, logically ordered content. It is no accident that the Age of Reason was coexistent with that growth of a print culture, first in Europe and then in America.”

 

·         “Everything in our background has prepared us to know and resist a prison when the gates begin to close around us . . . But what if there are no cries of anguish to be heard? Who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements? To whom do we complain, and when, and in what tone of voice, when serious discourse dissolves into giggles? What is the antidote to a culture's being drained by laughter?”

 

·         “The reader must come armed, in a serious state of intellectual readiness. This is not easy because he comes to the text alone. In reading, one's responses are isolated, one's intellect thrown back on its own resources. To be confronted by the cold abstractions of printed sentences is to look upon language bare, without the assistance of either beauty or community. Thus, reading is by its nature a serious business. It is also, of course, an essentially rational activity.”

 

·         “...there must be a sequence to learning, that perseverance and a certain measure of perspiration are indispensable, that individual pleasures must frequently be submerged in the interests of group cohesion, and that learning to be critical and to think conceptually and rigorously do not come easily to the young but are hard-fought victories.”

 

·         “It is not necessary to conceal anything from a public insensible to contradiction and narcotized by technological diversions.”

·         “What the advertiser needs to know is not what is right about the product but what is wrong about the buyer.”

 

·         “If politics is like show business, then the idea is not to pursue excellence, clarity or honesty but to appear as if you are, which is another matter altogether.”

 

·         “Marx understood well that the press was not merely a machine but a structure for discourse,   which both rules out and insists upon certain kinds of content and, inevitably, a certain kind of audience.”

You can't make this stuff up, folks

Some preachers say you shouldn’t pay attention to the news; it just gets you worked up and can be detrimental to spiritual growth. As a newspaper and magazine journalist by trade (starting with my high school newspaper in the early ’80s), I don’t agree.

You can forever hear from the pulpit about how bad things are getting around the world, your country and in your hometown, but there’s something about reading direct, up-close and personal accounts and correlations to it that help make it really real in your everyday consciousness and brings you under conviction in some way that honors Christ and compels you to “fight the good fight.”

*****

In my onetime Chicago neighborhood of Edgewater, I lived on the same stretch of Sheridan Road as a very prominent Jewish synagogue, Emanuel Congregation. I passed it on a near-daily basis and even parked smackdab around it many times as a steady customer of The Metropolis Café on Granville Avenue near Sheridan.

Monday’s Chicago Sun-Times had a glowing tribute article about “the celebrated Edgewater leader who turned 99 years old last week,” Emanuel’s revered rabbi emeritus Herman Schaalman, who was the senior rabbi of the congregation for 32 years, from 1956 to 1988.

Schaalman is newly retired this year from his 58-year-old position as adjunct professor of Judaism at world-renowned Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, a 160-year old institution on Sheridan Road in Evanston that represents the first Methodist seminary in the Midwest.

He was interviewed by the paper from his lakefront condo, having just “returned from a trip downtown to pay his final respects to a friend, Cardinal Frances George” and “retaining a childlike amazement about all that surrounds him, from the purple-and-gold tulips in a vase on his dinner table to Lake Michigan glittering beyond his balcony’s glass doors.”

He was quoted in the third paragraph confirming, “God is simply an idea that humans have created because they are overwhelmed by something for which there is no answer.”

The next several paragraphs informed, “On the possibility of life after death: ‘I think death is the end.’

“To be fair, Schaalman’s views represent an evolution informed by his extensive readings of the Torah, scientific literature and his understanding of life and the Holocaust.

“ ‘I said to myself, there must have been billions of prayers said every day by millions of people who were in these [Nazi] camps,’ Schaalman said. ‘Nothing happened. Not a single answer. Not a single rescue. No response from whatever we thought God to be.’ ”

*****

Schaalman, who assured that his mind is “clearer than it ever was,” credits his “total revolution in theology, my whole religious life,” in part to the fact he doesn’t have the “immediate, continuous responsibility for a group of people.”

At Emanuel, where they are currently “planning a birthday gala for the retired rabbi and his wife, Lotte, who recently turned 100,” Senior Rabbi Michael Zedek called Schaalman a “remarkable guy” who “defies the stereotype that old people tend to live in the past,” according to the Sun-Times.

“He’s not a creature of nostalgia,” Zedek boasted. “I’ve never seen that in him — ever. He is always looking ahead.”

The article went on to quote Schaalman, who recently finished a book about quantum theory, saying, “There is so much mystery. Why am I alive? What makes my body? . . . How come there is a sun, a moon, an Earth and billions of galaxies?”

Deaf, dumb and Dewey-eyed America

Given the big response I got from my April 15 post, entitled “Where tyranny comes from,” I thought it would be helpful to publish again this piece from my old website LisaLeland.com (I will have a new article tomorrow):

If you want a single name for who’s to blame in the dumbing down of America, John Dewey (1859-1952) gets my vote.

Dewey, a liberal humanist and the man behind the Dewey Decimal System, is recognized as the “Father of the Progressive Education Movement.” He first gained dominance in America’s public school systems and universities in the 1950s and took over everything by the early ’70s.

“The fundamental dogma of this movement is probably best defined as a mixture of collectivist (i. e., socialistic, even Marxist) political theory and Freudian/Jungian psychology,” writes Sam Weaver for the website www.renewamerica.us. “The goal of the progressive education movement was (and remains today) to subvert American founding ideas and principles and to replace them with secular and collectivist directives and ‘values.’ It was (and is) a permissive, ‘Unitarian Universalist’ approach to education.”

Dewey, contributor to the original Humanist Manifesto who wholeheartedly embraced relativism and the New Agers’ global government, was once quoted saying, “Faith in the prayer-hearing God is an unproved and outmoded faith. There is no God and there is no soul. Hence, there are no needs for the props of traditional religion. With dogma and creed excluded, then immutable truth is dead and buried. There is no room for fixed, natural law or moral absolutes."

As Weaver further reports, “(Dewey) was highly influential in the establishment of the modern National Education Association (NEA), and he all but single-handedly set the ultra-liberal standard to which the NEA adheres to this day.

“[Incidentally, with the blessing of the U. S. Department of Education, established in 1979 during the Carter Administration, the NEA has become one of the most — if not the most — powerful forces for shaping the hearts and minds of America's youth.] Dewey refined and established curricula at New York's Columbia University Teacher's College for the express purpose of bringing about "social progress and reform."

”Many today idolize John Dewey as a great thinker and an icon of public education. Increasingly, however, clear-thinking ‘regular folks’ — especially those trapped in inner-city public schools or those who have children who must attend these schools — are beginning to see the dreadfully destructive force of his ‘progressive,’ permissive, ‘touchy-feely’ approach to indoctrination . ..er, pardon me, ‘education.’ "

*****

Here’s what my pastor, Richard Jordan, had to say about Dewey’s disastrous influence on America in a sermon the other week:

“The problem in the government school system, folks, is not that they don’t have enough money. The problem is they’re using a flawed system of education that started with John Dewey in the first half of the last century.

“Dewey’s idea was to use the school as a socialization vehicle and he knew he couldn’t just come into a school and say, ‘Now we don’t need to teach grammar, we need to teach this Gestalt-type kind of a thing,’ so what he did was go after the college professors, determining, ‘I’m going to teach the teachers who teach the teachers.’

“He realized he could start at the top and control that. That’s why it is today that the university campuses of America are the last bastion of Marxism on the face of the planet outside of Communist China, and it isn’t even that strong there.

“I’ve been to former Communist countries. I’ve sat with former Communist officials in Eastern Europe and talked to them about their Communism and most of them had no real commitment to it. I’m talking about people who can speak five to seven languages and were diplomats and representatives of the country. You talked to them and they said, ‘Well, we were idealistic. We wanted to serve people and that was the tool that was placed in our hand, but it was flawed.’

“It doesn’t work and they’ve abandoned it for something else—not necessarily something better, or more workable, like you’d hope for, but they abandoned it nonetheless.

“You say, ‘Well why is it in the American university campuses?’ Because there was this concerted effort to do that and it wasn’t challenged. The revisionist histories and so forth—the multiculturalism that says every culture is equal to another and there’s no absolute and there’s no one that’s exactly right—all go back to Dewey. He had this conviction and he promulgated it among the elitists and it’s come down to your children’s classrooms.

“It’s not the teachers; it’s the methodology they’re following to get you there. It’s the basic rudiments of the thing that’s the problem. By the way, that’s where the Christian school movement came from in the late ’60s, early ’70s. A host of Christian people began to realize what the problem was and they said, ‘We don’t want that!’

“And now all across America you have private Christian schools, and since the late ’70s and early ’80s, the home-school movement took off and that’s a whole other horse of a different race, and a different issue, but it’s all been an attempt to try to teach Johnny to read and Mary to count and it has nothing to do with money spent. You know that in Christian schools they don’t spend nearly the money the government schools do. But you get a much different kind of result in that thing.”