"Anti-Nonsense Alerts" Also Held What I Saved From The Old Homepage

This example had been one of the longest-kept articles on the "Empowered For Freedom" site, an essay which had gone through several revisions after its debut somewhere around maybe mid-1997.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


*** THE GREAT EITHER-OR

Suppose that a helicopter is carrying you into a country completely unknown to you. While still high in the air, you see below you a gigantic pile of ruins: a great stone structure newly demolished, the dust of its collapse only now settling. Tiny human figures are swarming over the rubble, but you are too far away to see their faces or get any impression of their emotions.

The pilot of your helicopter tells you, "That place was a horrible prison, a dungeon of tyranny and injustice. Those people you see are the prisoners, now liberated from an undeserved confinement. The destruction of their prison was the best thing that could have happened to them; now they're free!" But the copilot immediately contradicts him: "Nonsense! That structure was a fortress, which protected those people from their enemies; it also contained the only modern hospital in a five- hundred-mile radius. Having that refuge didn't mean that those people were prisoners---and losing it is a frightful disaster for them!"

Your pilot and copilot cannot both be equally right. The only way to know which of their explanations, if either, is more accurate, is to land the helicopter and investigate more closely. The "Empowered For Freedom" site is here to help you investigate.

If that unknown country is the U.S.A., the demolished structure is that general consensus on Biblical doctrine and morality which sustained our country from its founding until sometime this century. We say "sometime," because the spiritual structure of the U.S.A. was not shattered at a single stroke; rather, it was eroded and undermined. Many citizens nowadays will tell you that this Judeo-Christian consensus was a prison, unnaturally restraining people, and that Americans are better off without it. But we, and many others of both sexes and all races, maintain that it was our fortress, indeed the very foundation of American law and liberty; and that unless it is rebuilt, our individual freedoms are doomed to be lost. Both views cannot be equally true. Either a cruel dungeon, or a saving shelter; it's in your best interests to determine which it was.

Before anyone objects that this choice is too simplistic, let me show one of the complications myself: what I call a "three-sided dualism." The Biblical worldview has always had two major classes of competition: the belief in false gods, and the belief in no gods. Insofar as these two rivals of the truth are also rivals to each other, each will have its own take on the wrecking of the fortress--actually confusing the other falsehood with the Biblical view! Thusly:

A worshipper of false gods--for instance, your standard-model California New Age occultist--may regard Christianity and scientific materialism as allies to each other--strange news to the Christian and the materialist!---because the Christian and the materialist both use organized logic, and both reject the idea of casting magic spells. The occultist, therefore, will believe that he/she beholds the wreckage of atheistic science right alongside the rubble of Christianity in the demolished edifice, and consider it good riddance to both. Meanwhile, the atheist-materialist believes that the Christian and the occultist are more allied to each other than either is to science--because, of course, the Christian and the occultist both believe in supernatural powers at which the materialist scoffs. The materialist, therefore, sees the ruined fortress as the tomb of two supernatural approaches that are both long outdated and worthless.

It is, however, the Christian who actually stands farther removed from the atheist and the pagan than either of those is from the other...because no two false beliefs can be so profoundly separate from each other as all falsehoods are separate from truth. Any Christian adequately educated in history understands that materialism and counterfeit supernaturalism both helped break up the foundations of America's traditional worldview. So, when Christians try to rebuild a morally upright society, although we need not be so hostile to non-Christian involvement as Nehemiah was to the non-Jews who pretended to offer help in rebuilding Jerusalem (intending to sabotage the work), we must deal with non-Christians having a distorted understanding of what it was that collapsed, and what needs to be rebuilt.

To any non-Christian supernaturalist who reads this, I would say: if you've come this far without quitting the site in a huff, you probably are not someone who consciously desires to sabotage truth. Still, you need to be getting spiritual guidance from the right source--the Word of God--if your good intentions are ever to produce genuinely good results. And to the scientific materialist who's made it to this paragraph, I would say: if you even hope to achieve _material_ good in this life, you'd better work on your intellectual honesty. By this I mean that the materialist dismisses every form of faith held by the recognizably religious--yet the materialist himself/herself also operates on faith: faith in whatever scientific theory is in fashion at the moment.

For my part, I did not become a Christian without first considering the merits both of materialism and of occultism. As you continue through our website, I hope that by God's grace Mary and I will be able to show you that the Christian agenda for society is viable and beneficial--because Christianity itself is true and reasonable, not a thing of empty fantasy. So land your helicopter, and get down to digging for the evidence of what I say. In reality, those whose hearts are in Heaven are those who also do the best job of getting down to earth.