February 23, 2008
The Materialist Faith of Communism, Socialism, and LiberalismBy
Linda KimballFor over eighty-five years, America has been incrementally conquered by the same madness-inducing demon of hatred and violence that earlier took over Russia, China, Germany, and Italy. Rabbi Aryeh Spiro concurs,
"There is a madness in today's liberal thinking. It insists on policies that tie our hands to defend ourselves while given free reign to the jihadists intent on killing us. It is dangerous because it is becoming the law, and thinking of the land in the western world. (
Liberal Madness is Deadly (1/24/08)
This demon is embodied in "enlightened" Liberals and the West's transnational "elite," both of which are deeply infected by materialistic Communism (Cultural Marxism) and the delusion that the true enemy of America is always on the Right. Having rejected God and the religious heritage of our civilization, they embrace instead a new order of beliefs of which Communism and Socialism are logical expressions. A new world order is what they seek, but in order that it can emerge, the existing culture must be completely destroyed.
And what is Communism? Using the former Soviet Union as an example, Frank Meyers describes it as, "The state form taken by a materialist faith determined to rule the world." Communism or scientific materialism is "the final synthesis of all heretical tendencies that have pervaded Western civilization for many centuries." It is materialist scientism, of which,
"Communism is the culminating hubris of the Promethean man who reaches out for the world and means to remake creation. It is scientism gone political." (The Conservative Intellectual Movement, pp. 251-252)
We are All Materialists Now
"An age of science is necessarily an age of materialism," declared Hugh Elliot early last century, "Ours is a scientific age, and it may be said with truth that we are all materialists now." (Darwin Day in America, John G. West, xiv)
Materialist faith, or scientific materialism, has virtually displaced America's founding Judeo-Christian worldview with the result that materialism is now the operative assumption for much of our government, culture, politics, and law. Materialist operatives now control every public institution in the United States. According to the inner logic of materialist faith, "we the people" are nothing but socially-constructed atomized robots which can presumably be deconstructed and melted into an atomized mass. Toward both this goal and to raise up an army of street thugs who will destroy our culture, materialist change-agents use our education system to subvert and convert the minds of our youth. Should they succeed in thoroughly corrupting them and in turning their hearts to hate, this generation of children may become the next Khmer Rouge, who at Pol Pot's order murdered nearly two-million people, including their own families.
America is founded on the Judeo-Christian creation model. Materialist faith rises or falls on the assumptions of metaphysical materialism and evolution.
Materialism belongs to the family of Naturalism, which refers to the view that nature (or matter) is the Ultimate Substance of which the universe and all life are made, thus "all is one." C. S. Lewis describes naturalism as a box with its top sealed tightly closed in order to keep out God and the supernatural realm. The ancient Ionians, Babylonians, Egyptians, and Aztecs were, for example, naturalists. In this view there is but one realm (the material or natural) as opposed to Judeo-Christianity's creation model with its two interacting realms: natural and supernatural.
There are two basic kinds of Naturalism: materialism (i.e., Communism) and pantheism (i.e., Nazism and New Age Spiritual Communism). The two kinds differ chiefly about whether the First Cause or Absolute Substance is nonliving, non-intelligence bearing matter or an unknowing, unknowable, amoral mind. However, both kinds are united by their rejection of the transcendent, personal God and the supernatural realm and by their acceptance of some form of evolution, which serves as an impersonal, mechanical process of development.
Birth of Scientific Materialism: A Brief Historical Overview
As will be shown by the following overview, scientific materialism is not founded on empirical science, as has been its deceptive claim, but rather on metaphysics.
In the main, modern materialism originated in the metaphysics of the ancient Ionians and Stoics during the sixth century BC. However, it was the Atomists (Leucippus/Democritus, 460-357 BC; Epicurus, 342-270 BC; and Lucretius, 96-55 BC) who methodically developed materialism.
Forged in a furnace of narcissism, envy, and contempt, Atomism was from its inception an antihuman abomination which in later years, would attract those who enjoy the control and domination of others. Atomism set all things in ceaseless, purposeless motion by reducing everything---including man, his soul, and even his thoughts---to mindless atoms perpetually colliding with each other in a void. Man was reduced to a soulless, mindless machine that could only ‘see' a tree because the tree emitted atoms which entered machine-man's eyes and implanted themselves onto his brain. This view has changed very little:
"We are descended from robots, and composed of robots..." --Daniel C. Dennett, Kinds of Minds
Plato and Aristotle were the most forceful and compelling critics of Atomism. In Book X of Laws, Plato indicts the Atomists for reversing the natural order, which they did by placing dead matter before Nous (mind/soul), and for the reductionism that sets everything in motion and reduces man to a machine. Plato foresees only misery, social disintegration and ultimately, "the ruin of both states and families" should Atomism become the accepted view.
Though Christianity reared a mighty barrier against Atomism, it would be resurrected--- along with the hylozoism of the Ionians and Stoics---during the Renaissance by among others, pantheist Giordano Bruno and the heretic Paracelsus, an alchemist described by C.S. Lewis as a magician in his book, The Abolition of Man.
Hylozoism (Greek hyle=nature; zoe-life) is the doctrine according to which all of nature's bodies (i.e., sun, earth, moon, trees, man) possess life, mind, soul, and even divinity. By infusing Atomism with Ionian hylozoism, what might be called materialzoism was invented by Bruno, Paracelsus, and others. In short, dead matter was not just brought to life but deified.
The Franco-Germanic Enlightenment
With "God dead" and the source of man's humanity (mind/soul) expropriated by materialists and conferred upon "dead matter," a rush to discover the key that unlocks the mystery to life and mind was ignited which in later years unleashed unspeakable evil. For in believing that without a doubt, they now possessed the gnosis (secret knowledge) to not only design a utopia but create a New Man with a reprogrammed mind and conscience, Nazi and Soviet scientists performed sadistic experiments on living human beings. It was of these later scientific materialists that C.S. Lewis wrote his book, "The Abolition of Man." Even now, wrote Lewis, the process to "abolish Man goes on apace among Communists and Democrats (and) Fascists." The methods, said Lewis, may at first differ in brutality. But "enlightened" materialists from scientists to philosophers to academe and to political leaders mean, in the long run, "Just the same as the Nazis..." The West and America are to be destroyed and "mankind to be cut out in some fresh shape at the will" of scientific materialists who Lewis calls the Conditioners and Innovators. These people, noted Lewis, are no longer men, for they have stepped out into the void.
Among the horde of Prometheans who set out to discover the animating-power of machine-man was Giovanni Aldini, who performed macabre experiments on decapitated oxes, horses, lambs, and -- once he had overcome his repugnance, on humans. For his experiments, he procured the freshest specimens possible by placing himself "under the scaffold, near the axe of justice..." Believing that some type of electricity was the source of machine-mans animation, Aldini applied electricity to various parts of decapitated human heads. This produced "the most horrid grimaces (but the) action of the eyelids was exceedingly striking." Aldini rationalized his repugnant experiments by saying that only the "unenlightened part of mankind (will be) apt to entertain a prejudice..." (Darwin Day in America, p. 15)
Yet more power-crazed Prometheans emerged. Julien de la Mettrie (1709-51), Paul Henri Thiery, and Baron D'Holbach (1723-89) all agreed that the mind is the property of dead matter and man nothing but a machine. La Mettrie speculated that machine-mans rational life is entirely determined by physical causes that run the gamut from raw meat, to climate, blood circulation, and gender. Genetic inheritance, posits la Mettrie, causes machine-man to commit crime. This view casts parents into the role of "first cause" and would later manifest itself in the belief that State ‘experts,' or Hillary's "village" experts should have control of children. (ibid, pp. 16-18)
Pierre Simon Laplace (1749-1827) viewed scientific materialism as not only the pursuit of God-like omniscience but of the Holy Grail itself---power to create a New Man. If an intelligence could grasp "at a given instant...all the forces by which nature is animated" proclaimed Laplace, it could devise a mathematical formula that would predict everything that would ever happen, and "nothing would be uncertain, and the future, like the past, would be open to its eyes." Scientists should reduce everything in the universe to mechanical laws that could be expressed in terms of mathematics, advised Laplace, for the promise of such knowledge was incredible power...even over life and mind itself. (ibid, p. 20)
Herbert Spencer, Fechner, Lotze, Wundt, and pantheist Ernst Haeckel, inventer of the scientism dictum---ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny---all agreed that life and mind are properties of dead matter. Haeckel moreover imagined ether to be the primitive life-making substance which, as was the case with the primitive fire of the Stoics, changed one part of itself into inert mass while the other part became the active principle, spirit. Today, many scientists routinely resort to Haeckel's postulate without ever inquiring into its pantheist implications.
Haeckel would later write, "Pantheism teaches that God and the world are one...pantheism is...an advanced conception of nature (and) a polite form of atheism." The truth of pantheism, confessed Haeckel, "lies in its destruction of the dualist antithesis of God..." The godless world system being constructed, said Haeckel, "substantially agrees with the monism or pantheism of the modern scientist." (Monism, Ernst Haeckel, www.pantheist.net/)
During the century to follow, Charles Darwin (1809-82) would help spread materialism to the masses. As Stephen Jay Gould argues, "Darwin applied a consistent philosophy of materialism to his interpretation of nature, "and "the ground of all existence; mind, spirit, and God (are reduced to) neural complexity." (ibid, p. 41)
According to Darwin, natural selection and the laws of heredity acting on matter produced mind, morality, and civilization. By describing how deified natural mechanisms caused the complexity of life to emerge from deified matter, Darwin helped transform materialism from a fantastically bizarre tale told by power-mad Prometheans on the fringe of society to a hallowed scientism principle enshrined and worshipped by modern scientism and ‘enlightened' Westerners.
It was during this time that Social Darwinism, Progressivism, Socialism, Communism (Cultural Marxism, New Left), Nazism, and Secular Humanism were developed out of metaphysical materialism. Classical Liberalism on the other hand, was subverted and corrupted by the materialist faith into what is now known as modern Liberalism. Of these, Communism (Marx and Engel's dialectical materialism), is considered to be the most highly developed philosophy of materialism. It rests on three fundamental metaphysical presuppositions:
1. Deified Matter: The Ultimate Substance which, though non-living, non-intelligent, and non-conscious, nevertheless somehow possesses the emergent properties of life, mind, consciousness, and soul.
2. Evolution: Since Marxist dialectic requires a theory with clashes (thesis and antithesis) and leaps (synthesis), Marxists have all but abandoned Darwinism and instead have embraced punctuated equilibrium. "Many people confound dialectic with the theory of evolution," noted G. Plekhanov. "Dialectic is, in fact, a theory of evolution. But it differs profoundly from the vulgar (Darwinian) theory of evolution." (Fundamental Problems of Marxism, 1929, p. 145)
3. Spontaneous Generation: An offshoot of specifically Darwinian thought accepted unreservedly by Marxists as their dialectic requires a strictly materialist explanation for the origin of life from dead matter. In the words of M.A. Leonov: "Marxist philosophical materialism remains beyond all doubt that at some time or other in the remote past, life must have arisen from non-living matter." (Outline of Dialectical Materialism, 1948, p. 494)
In a modified version of the Stoic conception of the earth as a living organism possessed of its own soul, neo-pantheist dialectical materialism declares that earth is "one entire organism...its organs the various races and nations of men." Not only is the earth alive and evolving upward on evolution's magical escalator, but so too are history and society, for they also are living entities in a continuous state of motion. And man? In a modified conception of Atomism's extremely dehumanizing view of man, dialectical materialism states that man is nothing but "a colonial aggregation of cells," and to "consider him an individual would be an error." Man---the aggregate of cells--- is nothing but an extension of society, history, and earth. (Russian Textbook on Psychopolitics, Chapter II: The Constitution of Man as a Political Organism)
Death of America?
Modern materialist states began by rejecting God and denying objective standards of right and wrong. They threw out sanctity of life and demonically reduced man to matter in motion. The end case, in every instance, was to place absolute power over "atomized masses" into the hands of psychopaths and autocratic states to be wielded without restraint or mercy.
Of all religions, the materialist faith has been by far the bloodiest. In his book, Death by Government, R.J. Rummel comprehensively details the roughly 170 million people murdered by materialist governments during the 20th century. From 1917 to its collapse in 1991, the Soviet Union liquidated about 62 million. During Mao Tse-tung's reign, 35,236,000 were murdered. Hitler's Nazi's killed 21 million. Even at its mildest, as is thus far the case here in America, there is a steady level of confiscation, corruption, fraud, and stifling of freedoms and free speech. For the first time ever, Americans are afraid of saying certain words. Parents fear disciplining their own children. More ominously, materialists in control of America (i.e., ACLU, activist judges) have rejected God and thrown out both sanctity of life and objective standards. "We the people" have been reduced to atomized beings. Totalitarianism and genocide loom just over our horizon.
As early as 1926, President Calvin Coolidge was aware of and deeply concerned by the insidious spread scientific materialism in America. As he knew, Americans are free only because of the Judeo-Christian foundation laid by the country's founders. In a speech he delivered in Philadelphia, July 5, 1926 to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, Coolidge tried to call American's back to their Judeo-Christian heritage. He told Americans that the Declaration's principles of liberty arise from man's God-given inalienable rights. And these are found, said Coolidge, "in the texts, the sermons, and the writings of the early colonial clergy..." The clergy preached equality "because they believed in the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man." Sanctity of life, the right to self-defense, and all the rest of our individual liberties were justified "by the text that we are all created in the divine image, all partakers of the divine spirit." God's children therefore, have no "superiors;" there are no modern-day "divine rights kings" who possess "any right to rule...over them." Americans are free to choose their own leaders.
The Declaration, continued Coolidge, is "a great spiritual document." Its principles are not material but spiritual. "Equality, liberty, popular sovereignty, the rights of man---these are not elements we can see and touch. They are ideals (whose) source and roots (are) in religious convictions. They belong to the unseen world."
President Coolidge cautioned Americans that, "unless the faith of the Americans in these religious convictions is to endure, the principles of our Declaration will perish. We can not continue to enjoy the result if we abandon the cause."
Coolidge ended his speech with a stark warning, "We must not sink into a pagan materialism..." (Back Fired, William Federer, pp. 269-271)
Yet, believing they are "enlightened" and "scientific," maddened Liberals and Transnational "elites" are leading America over the Gadarene Cliff.
Linda Kimball is a member of the MoveOff organization and a New Media Alliance member.Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/02/the_materialist_faith_of_commu.html at February 24, 2008 - 11:30:16 PM EST
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