WILL LOVE CONQUER ALL?

 A battered woman was encouraged to return to her husband with the advice that, “Love conquers all.” However, she was found dead several months later.

Perhaps love will not conquer all. One woman suggested that the wife simply had failed to love completely enough. In other words, the fault was hers and not the batterer’s.

On another occasion, a young professional woman confidently informed me that if we truly practiced love, we would not need the police or even the military. Love would overcome the hardest of hearts. No reminders of serial killers, Hitler, Genghis Khan, or Stalin would convince her otherwise. It seemed that she was convinced that, because love has meant so much to her, it can cure everything. One size fits all.

Well, if it is as simple as that, why hasn’t the “love message caught on?” Why are there still wars and criminals? She was convinced that greed and corruption had undermined attempts at loving. However, I didn’t get to ask her my next question: “Why hadn’t love overcome the ‘greed and corruption?’”

The youth, especially, are convinced that the answer is simple – love. However, even adults believe this way. Just today, I read:

• The Bishop of Stockholm has proposed a church in her diocese remove all signs of the cross and put down markings showing the direction to Mecca for the benefit of Muslim worshippers. 

It is not that she is unaware of the problems. In the same article, Chief Superintendent Torsten Elofsson illustrated that the red carpet need not be rolled out for the Muslims. On their own, they are making themselves quite comfortable in Sweden:

• “Years ago you could go with two officers, no problem. Now you have to send four officers and two cars – if the fire brigade want to go, they have to take a police escort. They throw stones and try to stop the fireman from putting out fires.

• “They sabotage the police cars. You can’t leave them unguarded – when you come back to it you find the windows smashed and the tires deflated. It isn’t quite a no-go zone, but we have had to develop special routines to go there”

Politicians are very aware of these disturbing facts. However, they have managed to convince themselves that love will overcome. Just make the Muslims feel accepted and loved, and they will reciprocate with love. Never mind that we find no examples of this in the Western world or even throughout history. Faith in the power of love seems to be impervious to any evidence.

We now treat our children with “unconditional positive regard.” Schools refuse to do anything that might bruise their self-image or feelings. Shame, let alone corporal punishment, is entirely rejected in favor of love – the carrot without the stick. However, as many have reported, we are raising a generation of heathen. Disciplinary problems are accelerating.

From where did this emphasis on love come? Not from the Romans and the Greeks. Historian Rodney Stark commented that their love was very limited:

·       “Classical philosophy regarded mercy and pity as pathological emotions—defects of character to be avoided by all rational men. Since mercy involves providing unearned help or relief, it was contrary to justice.”

Love and mercy has been a central theme of the Christian Church. The Christian theologian Tertullian (200AD) claimed that:

·       “We Christians have everything in common except our wives. It is our care of the helpless, our practice of lovingkindness that brands us in the eyes of many of our opponents. ‘Look,’ they say, “how much they love one another.’”

Aristides of Athens added:

·       “If the brethren have among them a man in need and they have not abundant resources, they fast for a day or two so as to provide the needy man with the necessary food!”

Even the pagans commented on Christian love. Lucian (190 AD) observed:

·       “The earnestness with which people of this religion help one another in their needs is incredible. They spare themselves nothing for this end.”

Emperor Julian, an opponent of Christianity:

·       “Ordered the creation of hospices saying, ‘It would be shameful, when the Jews have no beggars, when the impious Galileans feed our own people along with their own, that ours should be seen to lack the help we owe them.’” (How Christianity Conquered the World)

Julian was not alone in noticing Christian love. The Western world has become convinced of the primacy of love.

From where did the emphasis on love among Christians come? Jesus, in concert with the teachings of the Hebrew Bible (Lev. 19:17-18), taught:

·       Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that?  And if you greet only your brothers, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? (Matthew 5:44-48)

However, Jesus also taught that love had to be accompanied by wisdom and discernment. In the same Sermon, He warned that love had its limitations:

·       "Do not give dogs what is sacred; do not throw your pearls to pigs. If you do, they may trample them under their feet, and then turn and tear you to pieces.” (Matthew 7:6)

There were times when love would not conquer all, when the disciples would have to pack up their pearls and move on:

·       If anyone will not welcome you or listen to your words, shake the dust off your feet when you leave that home or town. I tell you the truth, it will be more bearable for Sodom and Gomorrah on the day of judgment than for that town. I am sending you out like sheep among wolves. Therefore be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves. (Matthew 10:14-16)

His disciples would have to be “shrewd” about giving their riches. They would have to exercise discernment, because love would not overcome all obstacles.

The disciples were not to naively “hang in there” with indulgent love, expecting that it would conquer all. Instead, they had to be mindful of the dangers:

·           Then He [Jesus] charged them, saying, "Take heed, beware of the leaven [teachings] of the Pharisees and the leaven of Herod." (Mark 8:15)

Jesus didn’t instruct his disciples to merely befriend and love the Pharisees until they’d come around to the truth. Instead, there were people from whom they would have to flee, because love would not prevail with them:

·           "Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves. (Matthew 7:15)

The New Testament often acknowledges that love will not conquer all. In such cases, the believer is counseled to depart (Rom. 16:17; 2 Tim. 3:5-6; 2 Thess. 3:14; 2 John 1:10-12).

Love is powerful, but it must be guided by wisdom. When it is not, it becomes indulgence and enablement. Secular culture has embraced the idea of love but not its accompanying and necessary wisdom. This has brought upon the West the fruits of decay and destruction.

The Consequence of Ideas: Materialism

 

We live and die according to our ideas and beliefs. Materialism – the belief that man is no more than a sophisticated bio-chemical machine – imposes costs. Historian Robert Royal, along with many others, has written about these costs:

• The materialist view of the person – combined with the notion that humans, as material beings, can be reshaped into the New Man of the Communist dream merely by a change of their social conditions, a view still widespread today – is a falsehood that inevitably leads to awful consequences… By most credible estimates, Communist countries killed about a hundred million people in the twentieth century. (The God that did not Fail, 247)

Although atheist-Communist apologists want to ascribe these horrors to the alleged insanity of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot, the evidence shows that they were merely being faithful to their materialistic vision of humanity. If we are no more than animals or machines, we can be used and manipulated as such in order to achieve their “utopian” dream.

Materialism places a sword in the hands of the oppressor. This worldview mitigates the horrors of genocide and all forms of coercion. After all, machines that fail to perform their prescribed roles are thrown on the junk-heap.

Evolution has also bequeathed this materialistic sword to society. If man is just another animal, he can be treated as such. Even the evolutionist, Karl Giberson, admits to the power of this idea to shape human society:

• “[Evolutionist] Ernst Haeckel nudged the racism of the Third Reich along its malignant road by suggesting that …”You must draw [a line] between the most highly developed civilized people on the one hand and the crudest primitive people on the other and unite the latter with animals.”(Saving Darwin: How to be a Christian and Believe in Evolution,76)

• “How shocking it is today to acknowledge that virtually every educated person in the Western culture at the time …shared Haeckel’s ideas. Countless atrocities around the globe were rationalized by the belief that superior races were improving the planet by exterminating defective elements…there can be little doubt that such viewpoints muted voices that would otherwise have been raised in protest.”

• “The Holocaust would have happened with or without Charles Darwin. There can be no doubt however, that the Nazi campaign against the Jews was assisted via rhetoric and rationalization with arguments from social Darwinism. (79)”

The idea that we a just another member of the animal kingdom can lead to some troubling suggestions:

• Back in 2006, award winning Univ. of Texas evolutionary ecologist, Dr Eric R. Pianka, publicly stated that the use of an airborne Ebola was necessary to kill off 90 percent of the world’s population, that war and famine wasn’t sufficient to get the job done. 

Sadly, Planka is not alone in this assessment of the relative value of human beings. Perhaps even more troubling, if we are just another animal, there is no good reason not to exercise population control. Then, who will live and who will die? Well, it depends on who you know and how valuable you are to society! You better strive to be well-liked!

We are what We Think: The Case of Communism/Atheism

If we are what we think, then our mental diet is critical. Increasingly, we are finding that a steady porn-diet exerts a powerful influence. One commentator writes:

• Among males, exposure to pornography is associated with addictive behaviors traced to the release of chemicals in the brain, stimulating arousal and excitement. In the larger context, pornography is also associated with an exaggerated masculinity, negative attitudes toward women, and relational breakdowns due to unrealistic sexual expectations.

Serial killers have had notoriously poor mental diets. Ted Bundy’s diet was fed by massive doses of hard-porn. Before his execution, he commented about the effects of his “education”:

• Then I learned that all moral judgments are ‘value judgments,’ that all value judgments are subjective, and that none can be proved to be either ‘right’ or ‘wrong’…I discovered that to become truly free, truly unfettered, I had to become truly uninhibited. And I quickly discovered that the greatest obstacle to my freedom, the greatest block and limitation to it, consists in the insupportable value judgment that I was bound to respect the rights of others. I asked myself, who were these ‘others?’ Other human beings with human rights? Why is it more wrong to kill a human animal than any other animal, a pig or a sheep or a steer? Is your life more to you than a hog’s life to a hog? Why should I be willing to sacrifice my pleasure more for the one than for the other? Surely, you would not, in this age of scientific enlightenment, declare that God or nature has marked some pleasures as ‘moral’ or ‘good’ and others as ‘immoral’ or ‘bad’? In any case, let me assure you, my dear young lady, that there is absolutely no comparison between the pleasure I might take in eating ham and the pleasure I anticipate in raping and murdering you. That is the honest conclusion to which my education has led me – after the most conscientious examination of my spontaneous and uninhibited self. (Christian Research Journal, Vol 33, No 2, 2010, 32)

In contrast to this, Western culture has become broadly anti-intellectual. Feelings and experiences, not thinking, are given the place of honor in social gatherings. However, what we believe determines what we do. Even our experiences, as important as they might be, require some form of mental interpretation before they are able to provide guidance.

Once we fail to appreciate the power of ideas and convictions, we fail to understand the flow of human history. According to Wikipedia, University of Oklahoma political scientist Allen D. Hertzke writes that:

• “The collapse of the religious impulse among the educated classes in Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century, he [historian Paul Johnson] argues, left a vacuum that was filled by politicians wielding power under the banner of totalitarian ideologies – whether 'blood and soil' Fascism or atheistic Communism. Thus the attempt to live without God made idols of politics and produced the century's 'gangster statesmen' – Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot – whose 'unappeasable appetite for controlling mankind' unleashed unimaginable horrors.”

The influence of our beliefs is incontestable:

• Daniel Goldhagen argues that 20th century Communist regimes "have killed more people than any other regime type." Other scholars in the fields of Communist studies and genocide studies, such as Steven Rosefielde, Benjamin Valentino, and R.J. Rummel, have come to similar conclusions. Rosefielde states that it is possible the "Red Holocaust" killed more non-combatants than "Ha Shoah" and "Japan's Asian holocaust" combined, and "was at least as heinous, given the singularity of Hitler's genocide.

Estimates of how many Communism has exterminated usually center around 100 – 150 million non-combatants. How could something that had such an idealistic façade, something that had attracted so many intelligent and idealistic people, have produced such horrors? The Russian writer and Nobel laureate, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, offered the following explanation:

• “Over a half century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of old people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: 'Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened.' Since then I have spend well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: 'Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened.'” (Conservapedia)

Without the belief in God, restraint is removed in favor of promoting our agendas. Can we equate communism with atheism? Vox Day claims that this equation is undeniable:

• “Apparently it was just an amazing coincidence that every Communist of historical note publicly declared his atheism … .there have been twenty-eight countries in world history that can be confirmed to have been ruled by regimes with avowed atheists at the helm … These twenty-eight historical regimes have been ruled by eighty-nine atheists, of whom more than half have engaged in democidal acts of the sort committed by Stalin and Mao …

• The total body count for the ninety years between 1917 and 2007 is approximately 148 million dead at the bloody hands of fifty-two atheists, three times more than all the human beings killed by war, civil war, and individual crime in the entire twentieth century combined.

• The historical record of collective atheism is thus 182,716 times worse on an annual basis than Christianity’s worst and most infamous misdeed, the Spanish Inquisition. It is not only Stalin and Mao who were so murderously inclined, they were merely the worst of the whole Hell-bound lot.

• Is a 58 percent chance that an atheist leader will murder a noticeable percentage of the population over which he rules sufficient evidence that atheism does, in fact, provide a systematic influence to do bad things? If that is not deemed to be conclusive, how about the fact that the average atheist crime against humanity is 18.3 million percent worse than the very worst depredation committed by Christians, even though atheists have had less than one-twentieth the number of opportunities with which to commit them. If one considers the statistically significant size of the historical atheist set and contrasts it with the fact that not one in a thousand religious leaders have committed similarly large-scale atrocities, it is impossible to conclude otherwise, even if we do not yet understand exactly why this should be the case. Once might be an accident, even twice could be coincidence, but fifty-two incidents in ninety years reeks of causation!” (Conservapedia)

Is it really so difficult to explain? Employing Machiavellian logic – the ends justify whatever means - the atheists believed that any form of terror was permissible if it advanced their communist revolution:

• "Violence in itself is not evil. It depends on what its purpose is. In the hands of Socialists, it is a progressive force." Boris N. Ponomarev - Communist Party Secretary.

• "The energy and mass nature of terror must be encouraged." V.I. Lenin.

• "The capitalists will supply us with the materials and the technology which we lack. They will restore our defense industry, which we need for our future victorious attacks upon our suppliers." V.I.Lenin. 

• "The struggle between world proletariat and bourgeoisie will continue until the final victory of Communism on a world scale." F. Rhyzhenko "peaceful Coexistence and the Class Struggle", Pravda, 22 August, 1973.

• "Marxist-Leninists decisively reject the assertions of certain bourgeois theoreticians who consider nuclear missile war unjust from any point of view." General Major A.S. Milovidov and Dr Ye A. Zhdanov, in 'Questions of Philosophy', a Soviet Journal, 1980.

• "... on the Communist side, nuclear war will be lawful and just ... the natural right and sacred duty of progressive mankind to destroy imperialism . . . It will resolve not just specific limited interests but a crucial historical problem, one that affects the fate of all mankind." Colonel B.A. Byely in Marxism-Leninism on War and Army.

These troubling statements are perfectly understandable from the perspective of The Heart, Mind and Soul of COMMUNISM by Dr. Schwarz:

• “The Communists have always been perfectly frank on this subject. Beginning with the Communist Manifesto, which says, ‘We openly declare that our ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions,’ the identical sentiment has been repeated ad-nauseam in all the writings of the Communist hierarchy and in official pronouncements of the Comintern and the Cominform. They categorically reject any suggestion that the transition from Capitalism to Socialism can be by the peaceful pathway of reform. One of the principal epithets of abuse in a somewhat extensive vocabulary is the word "reformist," a term of ridicule and contempt. Scientific law [in the socialist concept of science] has written that the change-over must be both revolutionary and violent. This is determined both from their philosophy of dialectical materialism and from a fake evaluation of the economic forces in society. To use a Marxian analogy: ‘Force is the midwife to deliver the socialist order from the womb of a decadent Capitalism’ ... Lenin, the founder of Bolshevism, and thus of Fascism, substituted the idea that the revolution was to result from the scientific planning and execution of the party, which was the class-conscious vanguard of the Proletariat. He replaced the idea of spontaneity with the idea of planned conspiracy. Every party member became a disciplined conspirator dedicated to the goal of the overthrow of the government by force and violence.”

Our beliefs are like a horse’s bridle, guiding us to the left of the right. Why was the Apostle Paul a man of peace? Why didn’t he rail against his oppressors and seek revenge? He didn’t have to resort to unethical means, because he knew his Savior:

• That [serving Christ] is why I am suffering [persecution] as I am. Yet I am not ashamed, because I know whom I have believed, and am convinced that he is able to guard what I have entrusted to him for that day. (2 Tim. 1:12)

He knew that if he was to be deprived of everything, even life, he was deprived of absolutely nothing. Instead, he remained confident:

• We also believe and therefore speak, because we know that the one who raised the Lord Jesus from the dead will also raise us with Jesus and present us with you in his presence. (2 Cor. 4:13-14)

Without such knowledge, we would become desperate and resort to any means to provide for and avenge ourselves. However, our Lord has assured us:

• "But a time is coming, and has come, when you will be scattered, each to his own home. You will leave me all alone. Yet I am not alone, for my Father is with me. I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world." (John 16:32-33)

Jesus taught us that, in order to have peace, we need to know and believe certain truths. Without such knowledge, we will not be able to continue in peace.

Totalitarianism, Hate Speech and Social Disintegration

In totalitarian Stalinist USSR, criticism of the regime was not tolerated. It represented a threat to the communist revolution and would be addressed with violence or a permanent stay the Gulag. In a sense, criticism of the regime was regarded as “hate speech.”

Remarkably, our re-definition of “hate speech” has a strong totalitarian fragrance. According to Wikipedia:

• In law, hate speech [now] is any speech, gesture or conduct, writing, or display which is forbidden because it may incite violence or prejudicial action against or by a protected individual or group, or because it disparages or intimidates a protected individual or group. The law may identify a protected individual or a protected group by race, gender, ethnicity, disability, nationality, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, or other characteristic.

Stalin might have gladly used this definition to justify his prohibition of free speech. After all, criticism – “hate speech” - threatened the welfare of all the citizens of the USSR and certainly would “incite violence.”

Interestingly, absent from Wikipedia’s modern re-definition are the elements that we had previously associated with hate. Here’s how Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary defines “hate”:

• “An intense hostility or aversion usually derived from fear…extreme dislike or antipathy…loathing…”

The Wikipedia understanding means that if you express your legitimate concerns - loving concerns - about an action of a “protected individual or group,” you can find yourself in hot legal water if they claim that you had offended them. It doesn’t matter at all if you had been motivated by love for the “protected individual.” It might not even matter it you in fact offended the “protected individual.” If they simply say you offended them, you can be charged with a “hate crime.” Even if you make an innocent off-color joke, you can find your job threatened.

Consequently, joking with a “protected individual” can land you a lawsuit. Even an inquiry can create offense – “any speech, gesture or conduct, writing, or display [which may] incite violence.”

The law is now being construed to protect the ones who least need it – the ones most prone to act-out with violence. The lesson: demonstrate that you are willing to act outrageously and the law will now coddle you and enable you to be rewarded for anti-social, violent behavior!

Clearly, this will not create a better society. Instead, it creates imbalance, social disparities, and alienation and concentrates power in the hands of the “protected individual or group” – any bully who wants to claim that he has been offended.

This is not to say that certain forms of discrimination shouldn’t be proscribed. For instance, we shouldn’t tolerate racial discrimination in hiring or housing. Such “intolerance” doesn’t come with a high price tag – a sacrifice of needful individual liberties. Instead, we, as a society, have everything to gain by legislating against racial intolerance.

However, passing laws against “any speech, gesture or conduct, writing, or display [which may] incite violence” is an entirely different matter. Instead of protecting human beings, these laws are designed to protect behaviors and lifestyles, and their cost is astronomical – a significant move towards totalitarianism and the institution of secularly- favored behaviors and speech, in effect, a State-supported religion, promoting certain values and speech and forbidding others. While the law should criminalize racial intolerance, it shouldn’t allow the “protected individual” to throw loud and disruptive parties every night, such that anyone who protests against them is charged with “hate speech” and “inciting violence.” Race and behavior should not be equated!

There is little difference between what is happening here and the blasphemy laws in Muslim nations, where no criticism of Islam is tolerated. Islam is the “protected group.” Islam therefore controls the media, the universities, influential jobs and the government.

Oddly, some of these same nations hope to meld a common national identity – a common glue - among their citizens. The moderate Islamic nation of Malaysia is one of them. However, some years ago, a study conducted by the University of Malaysia found that Muslims, Christians and Hindus students hardly associated.

Ironically, they were surprised by their finding. Clearly, the favored status of Islam had created deep divisions, penetrating into the core of interpersonal relationships. After all, who wants to risk a friendship with someone who has a favored status and has the power to accuse you of “blasphemy” and have you thrown into jail. And what “protected individual” will condescend to associate with one beneath his social status? Besides, ones legally-assigned social position largely determines ones worldview and a greatly attenuates the possible areas of common understanding. Such disparities can only lead to social disintegration.

Western “blasphemy laws” do the same by conferring greater power and privileges on certain “protected individuals or groups.” The creation of inequality bodes poorly for our future.