Modernism, Humanism, Progressivism are all terms for philosophies born in the 19th century starting with the French Revolution, which have abandoned centuries of Christianity, replacing God with the rationality of human beings. In these philosophies humans are looked upon as being able to control everything in their lives without dependence upon any moral concepts of Christianity (1)
Europe by now has been thoroughly de-Christianized; America is on its way.(2) Along with replacing God by human intelligence and reason, government was seen to be the vehicle through which humans can make progress in the world. This means big government. Education is taken over by the state. Without God, however, human beings are prone to all kinds of mischief; one has only to look at the two great World wars of unbelievable destruction and the nature of “progress” of communism all over the world which has dehumanized multiple societies.
In the United States, modernism was introduced in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Starting with the election of the progressive democrat Woodrow Wilson in 1912, the Democratic Party starting aligning itself with progressivism. Had it not been for Wilson’s mental illness in the last years of his tenure he would have successfully transformed the United States into a statist nation in which government had complete control over the lives of its citizens. (3)
In the 1920’s, Margaret Sanger, one of the 50 most influential progressives of the first part of the Twentieth Century, was one of the foremost promoters of eugenics, the “purification” of society by eliminating its weak strains such as, Sanger believed, people of African decent (4). She founded Planned Parenthood, in great part to hide her eugenics intent by promoting abortion as a way of dealing with the so-called overpopulation problem (5); it is not accidental that most Planned Parent clinics came to be in areas of economic depression where blacks predominated. (6)
It seems that the author of “How Children Learn”, reviewed in a previous post, believes in the exclusive power of Science and Modernism because of his inability to identify an “external” source so necessary for successful learning. The external source is in fact present because it is one of many of God’s gifts to humanity; freely given to all who recognize God’s existence as a Person totally separate from the universe he created, including human beings; in opposition to the pantheistic idea of humanists who believe only that God is the World and the World is God. (7)
Today we cannot even mention the name of God in so many venues; the so-called separation of church and state is a faulty interpretation of the first amendment (8) and cripples the idea of God as a Person who has created us and desires to help his human creatures in their course through life. This crippling effect has led to a view of life where anything goes; in addition, we are responsible to no-one nor any law of nature. This is all a result of modernistic ideas that we don’t need God.
References:
(3) http://www.examiner.com/article/the-progressives-sordid-history-of-internment-camps Article by Anthony Martin on history of Progressivism during President Wilson’s terms and now.
(4) http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/nvp/consistent/peterson.html Abortion, A Liberal Cause? Paragraph 2
(5) http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/nvp/consistent/peterson.html Abortion, A Liberal Cause? Paragraph 8
(7) Pantheism is the belief that everything composes an all-encompassing, immanent God, or that the universe (or nature) is identical with divinity. Pantheists thus do not believe in a personal or anthropomorphic god. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
No comments:
Post a Comment