The Judeo-Christian Ethos

Nelson Hultberg

Christmas season usually generates reflection on the spiritual / philosophical side of life for many of us. What follows pays reverence to the profound importance of our Judeo-Christian heritage to America and Western civilization. It is based on an excerpt from my book, The Golden Mean: Libertarian Politics, Conservative Values.

 

The message will antagonize many of the modern intelligentsia. But the evidence is overwhelming that their collectivist-materialist-secularist paradigm (with its dictum of moral relativism) is grievously false. I think it is fair to declare our civilization today to be undergoing a crisis of immense proportion, and I think it is equally fair to declare that the crisis stems from the compulsive materialism and secularism of our culture. If the Middle Ages glorified the spiritual aspect of life at the expense of the material, then our era has now enshrined the material at the expense of the spiritual.

    

The 20th century - in its acquiescence to scientism, immediacy, superficiality, statist aggrandizement, and endless material gratification - lost the great benchmarks of heroism and virtue that historic Christendom holds to be the true pillars of progress and proportion. By forsaking the spiritual side of our existence and its philosophical ground in natural law, the thinkers of modernity have hoped to unify mankind under the aegis of a technocratic and managed world bureaucracy of scientifically indoctrinated happiness. As if multi-faceted men and women, with all their diversified peculiarities, aptitudes and ambitions, will react in the manner of inanimate chemicals and thus can be molded into a socio-economic paradise through pervasive state coercion and planning.

    

The dream of the 20th century collectivists (a result of hubris unchained) was hideous in origin, and consequently the end product of such a dream has been the tragic erosion of the three pillars of civilization: objective morality, family solidarity, and ordered freedom. In abandoning the great religious tradition of our civilization, we have cut asunder the majestic unifier of life and with it all hope for true progress, harmony, and happiness.

 

The Golden Age of Freedom

 

For example, consider the early years of our country. Political philosopher, Frank Meyer, described them with the following: "Where has there ever been a society at once so noble and so free as the American Republic in the first half century of its existence?"

 

This nobility actually extends further, for the first 125 years of our nation (1789-1913) were history's golden age of freedom. The values of a chivalrous and heroic existence were still predominant in men's lives. The moral capital of a still Christianized West had not yet been expended. The concept of man being capable of becoming a great and noble soul through acceptance of a God-centered universe was what gave to this era its magnificence.

    

There were flaws, of course - the disastrous contradiction of slavery in the South for one, the restricted role of women for another. But for the most part, America of this period exemplified a way of life that strived mightily to approach a noble existence. And such an existence was the result of the value structure that sprang from the Judeo-Christian ethos. It did not come from materialism or relativism or egoism or any of the modern idols. It came from visions of the Transcendent and the glorification of man as something more than a consuming animal, from the knowledge that men have moral duties as well as political rights, that there is such a thing called "truth," and that the rightful life will now and forever be sustained only through man's capacity to choose what is heroic and honorable, elemental and enduring.

   

Our culture today has abandoned such guiding principles in favor of false rights and lessened duties, a relativistic concept of good and evil, and the base conception of man as nothing but an economic groveler consisting of predetermined matter in motion devoid of choice. The tyrannizing of our society is the result.

    

If we are to restore an enduring vitality to our way of life, we must then reinstate the great spiritual truths that gave us birth. We must find our way back to the beginning vision of America where the doctrine of traditional individualism resides upon the foundation of Judeo-Christian brotherhood.

    

When implemented into a political system, such a vision offers man the chance to find happiness and goodness through adherence to natural law and to grow as tall as he can dream. It praises his strengths, his accomplishments, and the nobility of his volitional concern for others because these attributes are grounded in reason and thousands of years of historical experience. They coincide with the characteristics of man's basic nature, and their exaltation supports the needs of a peaceful, ordered, honorable society. Such a philosophy tempers the egoistic core of man with the concept of reverence for life and its Creator, while holding up to him the great ideal: a man of independence, purpose, courage, and integrity, plus compassion and concern for one's fellows.

       

The Tyrannical Legacy

 

Reinstilling such a philosophy will not be easy, for the collectivist intelligentsia, so caught up in the ideologies of Jean Jacques Rousseau, Auguste Comte, and Karl Marx, has succeeded in thoroughly bastardizing the Judeo-Christian ethos and its foundation of natural law. It is this trio of philosophers that, more than any others, laid the groundwork for the downfall of the Lockean-Burkean blend of freedom, virtue, and order that animated the Founding Fathers.

       

Today's collectivist intellectuals have learned their lessons from many philosophers of the past, but the above trio has been the most influential because of its banishment of the moral prescriptions of religion and its substitution of revolutionary egalitarianism for the rational individualism of Aristotle, Aquinas, Locke, Smith and Jefferson.

 

Using the creed of Rousseau and his progeny, today's intellectuals have distorted the Judeo-Christian ethos and its libertarian-conservative political order, denigrating its verities, emaciating its spirit, and worst of all, secularizing its creed of "love thy neighbor" into a totally selfless doctrine of altruism wrapped up in the rigid determinisms of our age and the pseudo-scientific theories of the collectivist elite.

 

Compounding this problem is the fact that religion is now thought of as something derived solely from superstition and inappropriate to not only modern times but to reality itself. As a result of this debasement and man's naive faith in the power of science to establish a material paradise on earth devoid of stringency and struggle, there has taken place a gradual erosion of the West and its natural law foundation.

 

If America and the West are to be saved, however, spiritual-philosophical balance must win out. Balance is the ideal, and this is man's great quest, the search for the ideal. The Enlightenment vision of the Founding Fathers integrated with Judeo-Christianity offers hope for just such a balance. But what has to be done is to rid both the modern Academy and the modern Church of their tragic obeisance to statism which has made them partners to tyranny.

 

The ideas of Rousseau, Comte, and Marx must be rejected. This will restore the vigor, the immutability, and the assertive exaltation of heroic virtue that Western life was at one time all about. Then men will return to this great code of living once it has become again the rock of stability and sanity. And America will be able to once more get about the job of demonstrating the true gospels of life to the world - personal independence, productive work, and good will toward all men.

 

 

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Nelson Hultberg is a freelance writer in Dallas, Texas and the Director of Americans for a Free Republic www.afr.org. A graduate of Beloit College in Wisconsin, his articles have appeared in such publications as The American Conservative, Insight, Liberty, The Freeman, The Dallas Morning News, and the San Antonio Express-News, as well as on numerous Internet sites. He is the author of The Golden Mean: Libertarian Politics, Conservative Values. Email: NelsonHultberg@afr.org

Muslim Immigration: Boon or Bane?

Nelson Hultberg

Should it be permissible to freely choose who we like and dislike in life? To disparage certain religions because of their irrationality? To feel uncomfortable around two males kissing in public? To want to live among one's own kind in regards to intelligence, values and cultural mores?

 

No, it is no longer permissible to think the above thoughts, partake in the above actions, and adhere to the above values in society today. The Political Correct Monster rules modern Americans like Hitler swayed German youth. It is the socio-cultural regimentation arm of the State. It is one of the most powerful tools of modern tyranny.

 

As Aldous Huxley warned decades ago, schoolteachers under a totalitarian state become instruments to teach the young to love their servitude. Learning ceases to be about truth and freedom. It becomes propaganda needed to administer the ruling ideology of the nation's military-banking-corporate combine.

 

Today's ruling ideology in America and the West is "liberalism," sometimes known as collectivism or statism. It has, over the past 100 years, seeped insidiously into America like heroin invades a ghetto to decimate all coherence and health among its inhabitants. Liberalism is death to sanity, to freedom, to vibrant culture and a meaningful life. Yet it rules our choices and the dreams of our children with a vice grip. It begins its hold over their minds in kindergarten to poison them with its rancidity.

 

The Ideology of Multiculturalism

 

Liberalism's latest ideological ploy is multiculturalism, which teaches that countries who do not maintain extensive cultural diversity are morally wrong and must be corrected - by persuasion if possible, but by massive government coercion if necessary. A just nation must incorporate all cultures, languages, mores, and values, all levels of life. High class, educated immigrants are not to be favored. We must open our borders to all of humanity even though such laxity will permit terrorists, drug lords, primitives, Jihadists, fascists, zealots, budding tyrants, and germ infested lowlifes to find their way into our society to spread their venom.

 

Such is the irrationality and ultimate denouement of liberalism. What does this mean for us? It means that Paris is coming to America. It's merely a matter of time before the carnage and Islamist terrorism of France become regular travesties in America, for we have adopted the same philosophical principles of the French intellectuals, only in a modified form, which will merely destroy us at a slower pace, but nevertheless destroy us. We have embraced the "god of multiculturalism" that liberals worship like beggars of the Ganges worship fat statues.

People think philosophy is only for the ivory tower. On the contrary; it is the fundamental root of what kind of society we become. France is disintegrating because of the irrational Marxist philosophy upon which she has built her culture, her political system, and her economy. We will be no different.

 

There are millions of immigrants clamoring to get into America. Are we to bow to liberalism's demands and obliviously admit them all, thus opening up our heartland towns and neighborhoods to the destruction that comes from people who cannot appreciate the requisites of freedom because the most powerful motive in their lives, their religion, preaches theocracy and political totalitarianism? In other words, are we to remain oblivious to the Islamist extremism that is a major sector of Islam?

 

Our authorities insist that Islam should not be condemned for it is, like all religions, possessed of moderates and radicals many of whom take things to the extreme and preach violence. Not so. The radicals of Christianity who preach violence comprise less than ½% of the religion because Jesus preached peace to all men. Islam's violent radicals (the Islamists) comprise 10% of their religion because Muhammad preached violence toward the West.

 

What's dangerous, however, is that a large number of the 90% "peaceful Muslims" are indifferent to and often sympathetic to the Islamist radicals who preach violence and promise that Jihad will revive the glories of earlier centuries. In polls around the world, 27% of Muslims feel this way. So radical, violent Islamism is far more potent than the 10% share of the religion it commands. http://www.clarionproject.org/analysis/new-poll-muslim-countries-finds-large-support-terrorists#

 

Moreover, Christian theologians revere free will and reason (handed down by Aristotle and Aquinas). Islam's theologians denounce free will and reason as apostasy. See my article, Roots of Islamic Fanaticism.

 

We in the West must gather our senses about us and defend our cultures. And if we are to do so, we must challenge the philosophical poison of multiculturalism that today's quislings in our academy and government promote. We must restore the rational immigration policy of "national origins" that prevailed in America prior to Ted Kennedy's Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.

 

Our pre-1965 "national origins" immigration policy permitted our authorities to pick and choose who would be allowed to enter the country. It chose in favor of those immigrants whose cultures and mores resembled ours. Thus it primarily chose European immigrants. This allowed for cultural stability to be integrated with freedom throughout the country.

In those days before liberal egalitarianism came to suffocate free Western societies, everyone understood that there were high and low cultures, high and low religions because there were high and low classes of humans. This was viewed as simple "common sense."

 

Groupies for Statism

 

Today, however, all this has been lost. The overwhelming majority of Americans quiver in face of the egalitarian PC monster. Their natural courage and individualism have been stripped from them in the schools making them into dutiful groupies for the State desirous only of doing the bidding of its fanatical overlords and PC grotesques. Independence of thought and standing apart from the herd are no longer upheld as the honorable responsibilities of American citizens.

 

Consequently we are told by our President that we must allow tens of thousands of Muslim refugees to enter America and invade our neighborhoods with their theocratic idiocies and primitivism. Hillary and other liberals are demanding that we expand the number to 50,000 and even 100,000. We are told that our government authorities will screen all Muslim refugees admitted, that we will be safe if only we listen to their "wisdom and experience."

 

Yet there are no cooperative agencies in Syria for background checks of their refugees. Thus it is impossible to safely screen tens of thousands of Muslims and guarantee that no terrorists lurk among them. This is conveniently explained away with sophistry and lies.

 

Moreover scores of Muslims like Syed Farook and his wife, the instigators of the recent San Bernardino massacre, along with U.S. Army Major Nadal Hassan, the deranged officer who killed 13 people at Fort Hood, are already lurking in America because of indiscriminately open borders. They are susceptible to radical Islamist conversion because Muhammad calls repeatedly and emphatically for violence against the West throughout the Koran. Yet this is smirked at with contempt by White House spokesmen, and the PC media refuse to press the issue.

 

For verification of this, see the website, Islam: The Politically Incorrect Truth, which cites 109 verses in the Koran that preach war and violence against the West. This is not a religion of peace. http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/quran/023-violence.htm

 

Thirty Governors have voiced objections to settling Syrian refugees in their states. But Washington will overrule such rebellious common sense and stuff the Syrians wherever the Feds wish. If necessary, tanks and armored troops will accompany them. This is the insanity of false ideology, the insanity of liberalism. It drives decent men to suspend rational thought and turn on their own kind.

 

Horrific race and religious wars are coming to America. Beware, it's only a matter of time. Big Brother is obsessed with building an egalitarian, multicultural society of every ethnic and religious group the world has to offer, no matter how primitive and irrational they are.


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Nelson Hultberg is a freelance writer in Dallas, Texas and the Director of Americans for a Free Republic www.afr.org. A graduate of Beloit College in Wisconsin, his articles have appeared in such publications as The American Conservative, Insight, Liberty, The Freeman, The Dallas Morning News, and the San Antonio Express-News, as well as on numerous Internet sites. He is the author of The Golden Mean: Libertarian Politics, Conservative Values. Email: NelsonHultberg@afr.org