The latest idiotic-but-pretending-to-be-clever
bumper sticker I've seen reads: "UH, THE FOUNDING
FATHERS WERE LIBERAL EXTREMISTS; SORRY TO RAIN
ON YOUR PARADE." This is a fine example of "He
who gets to define the terms, wins the argument."
Or perhaps better to say, "He who gets away with
obscuring the definitions of terms can flatter
himself that he has won the argument."
America's Founding Fathers were liberal extremists
only relative to the starting point of monarchy.
An oppressive king being at the right-wing end of
the spectrum, breaking free of his power could be
considered a move to the "left." But in spite of
the myth of all the Founders being Deists (a myth
more than adequately exploded by the research of
David Barton and his Wallbuilders organization),
no informed person can consider them to be liberal
extremists in the sense which that label bears
TODAY. George Washington did not cross the Delaware
to abort babies, nor endure the winter at Valley
Forge in order to build a gay bath-house there.
But odds are the composer of that bumper sticker
doesn't even believe what it says himself; he
just wants to throw conservatives and patriots
into confusion. Doubtless next week he'll be
back to condemning Washington and Jefferson for
having owned slaves. That's much like the liberal
extremists who pretend to care about the Jewish
people's welfare only long enough to pillory Mel
Gibson; the same lefties will soon be back at
their pastime of rooting for Muslim terrorists
to destroy Israel.
Speaking of the Muslim terrorists, I continue to
pray AGAINST their evil plans. I get so tired of
wimpy, smarmy prayers for "peeeeeace"...in which
those who pray are so often assuming that the
whole silly quarrel only started by accident,
and both sides can be reasoned with. No, both
sides CAN'T be reasoned with; I'm sorry to rain
on THAT neo-hippie parade. Only three outcomes
can occur with Islamist fanatics: (1) they get
their way, (2) they repent of their sins and
submit to the REAL God through Jesus Christ, or
(3) they are deprived of their power to do harm
--via death, disarming or detention. I pray for
the side of civilization to WIN the war.
Sunday, December 2, 2007
Saturday, December 1, 2007
15 July 2006: The Subject Of Joshua (Heavy!!)
Some Ground That Christians Should
Have Been Defending Long Before Now
God, I pray that there will still be _time_ for such
a message as this to be seen and considered, before
the malice of tyrants in Iran, Syria and elsewhere
brings on such widespread violence as will drown out
all calm discussion. Amen.
Very early in my Christian life, I went sometimes
to a highly liberal mainline-denominational church,
because for awhile I was dating the daughter of its
music minister. At a Bible study there, the teacher
began saying that the Jehovah's Witnesses were not
a genuine Christian denomination. For a moment, I
dared to hope that he was going to defend Biblical
orthodoxy. Silly rabbit. I found out my mistake
when I heard what he gave as the _grounds_ for
disapproving of the J.W.'s. It had nothing to do
with their denial of the Deity of Jesus, nor with
their claim that only they have the real gospel,
and least of all with their refusal to show loyalty
to America. What gave this Congregationalist teacher
a red flag was the belief of J.W.'s that Jehovah
had really ordered the Israelites to kill the
people in Jericho and other Canaanite cities.
This, he said, could not be the God worshipped
by Christians!
Some of you will remember an article I wrote
about people drawing spiritual dividing lines
in the wrong place. This teacher had drawn a
line which placed every believer in full inspiration
of Scripture on the same side as a fraudulent cult.
It was this incident which prompted me to compose
one of my earlier songs. I called it "JOSHUAPHOBIA."
I'm not sure it ever got performed for an audience;
it was definitely strong meat, not fill-my-cup-and-
make-me-whole sweetness. I don't think a complete
copy survives now; but I can remember the melody
and some of the words. I don't have the means of
sending music online, but the lyrics of "JOSHUAPHOBIA"
began thus:
Twentieth-century liberal man, how you condescend
To a proven friend of God Almighty!
Joshua seems to embarrass you much; "Primitive," you say;
You regard his way as quite untidy.
Even as an infant Christian in the early 1970's, I
was able to recognize an irony to which the liberal
teacher probably was oblivious. His church was one
which never missed a chance to insist that this or
that passage in the Old Testament was only symbolic,
not literal fact. If he had simply assumed the account
of killing the Canaanites to be _another_ symbolic
whatsit that never actually happened, there would
be nothing to be angry about, because the mass
executions never actually happened. On the other
hand, if I had brought this up to him, he might
have said, "Well, of course that didn't happen,
since it's all symbolic. What I dislike about
the Jehovah's Witnesses is that they _imagine_
God would order people to kill others."
I can see his reasoning. A God Who saw no need
to bother giving a reliable factual record of
His dealings with creation probably also would
not bother insisting on any societal moral
standards for whose repeated violation a wicked
society might have to be destroyed as a corporate
entity. Still, my song was trying to encompass
the whole issue of God's authority in such a
way as to answer this very attitude. The next
part of the words I remember says:
What do you think that it means to be God? Has He not the right,
As well as the might, to punish evil?
Look in Leviticus, chapter eighteen; you'll see God was just
To feel great disgust with Canaan's people.
Of course, you might be out of luck if you look
for that chapter in a Gideon Bible. Homosexual
actor Ian McKellen is said to be in the habit
of ripping out the pages of Leviticus he doesn't
like when he stays at hotels with Gideon Bibles.
That provides another irony. Christians will
sometimes hold book-burnings, in which the only
books being burned are ones voluntarily handed
over for burning by their owners; this was done
once in Ephesus, as I recall. But Christian-
bashers choose to believe that this is the exact
same thing as Nazi book-burnings, although the
Nazis were burning books taken by force from
their owners. McKellen sounds as if he would
join in such an accusation against Christians;
and yet he is willing to deface a Bible which
does NOT belong to him. The hard left never
tires of practicing double standards...which
is why it is conservative student newspapers,
and ONLY conservative ones, which routinely
get stolen and destroyed on many big university
campuses in America.
Unfortunately, Christians do get tired--tired
of having to defend doctrines which are distasteful
to many hearers. We'd rather just preach our five-
hundredth sermon on unconditional love--that can't
alienate anyone! So, over the decades since I wrote
"JOSHUAPHOBIA," there seem to have been fewer and
fewer pastors bothering to explain why God could
have had reasons to order those pagan cities wiped
out. And the less the effort is made, the less
the effort _can_ be made; that is, it becomes
harder and harder to get people to listen to the
harsher part of the truth. Yet there are modifying
elements in the story told by the Book of Joshua.
For those who do not demand that God practice
infant damnation, there is a crucial piece of
solace with regard to the small Canaanite children
who were killed. As I wrote--
Don't you believe there's a Heaven?
Well, that's where God brought those babies!
So, will you stop treating Yahweh
As if He'd gone mad with rabies?
Moreover, that same Book of Leviticus makes
references to non-Israelites being allowed to
join in serving the true God and in enjoying
His favor. So there was a way out, and some
Canaanites availed themselves of it. Note that
when later portions of the Old Testament speak
of the trouble caused by the remaining Canaanites,
they mean the Canaanites who had _not_ genuinely
accepted the Lordship of the true God.
It's important to realize that God's order for
extermination was not an open-ended policy. He
ordered the destruction of one civilization
which had become extraordinarily evil, and whose
continued presence would make it frightfully
difficult for the Israelites to perform their
function as the training camp and laboratory
of human-divine relations. God _never_ told His
people to expand the extermination beyond the
Promised Land. Thus, what He commanded was not
at all the same thing as when radical Islam
labels the WHOLE non-Muslim world as Dar al-Harb,
"The House Of War," meaning that all non-Muslims
_everywhere_ are fair game to be killed or
enslaved. In this perilous time, when Christian-
bashers love to draw a false dividing line
placing Christians on the same side as Al-Qaeda,
the true distinction must be made.
Of course, that Congregationalist teacher would
be quick to say, "But it's all so simple! We can
make the distinction by proclaiming that our God
of love would never want anyone to be killed for
any reason whatsoever, not even in one place at
one time." This, however, can only be done by
denying that the Old Testament is a reliable
history; and if we make this concession, what
is to prevent the New Testament from being
likewise dismissed?
I suppose we can say we are distinguishable from
the Islamists if we accept having a God Who never
said anything and won't do anything. But when
the Christian faith is NOT distinguishable from
Mister Rogers' Neighborhood...when we have nothing
more to say than "Be nice"...we will have no means
of inspiring discipline, fortitude or self-sacrifice.
Pacifistic Christian love is designed to win over
individuals, and it _is_ winning over millions of
individuals, including Muslims; but when whole
Muslim nations are applying their full power to
an effort to annihilate Israel and points west,
the sterner virtues will have to be remembered,
or there won't BE enough sweet peacemakers left
alive TO have any substantial impact with
Christian love.
So we need an authoritative standard, a God Who
_does_ call some things right and others wrong,
and Who _does_ let us know what He wants. If
you don't think that the Bible truthfully conveys
this, you are free to make up your own religion,
as Charles Taze Russell did in founding the J.W.'s
and as Dan Brown is doing with "The DaVinci Code."
But those of us who believe in the Jesus for Whose
honor the Apostles accepted martyrdom (and their
martyrdom was not about murdering the innocent
as terrorist "martyrs" do) need to be teaching
God's Word. God's _WHOLE_ Word, not only the
happy and convenient parts.
You know what? I don't believe that Joshua found
it fun to kill people. He was given a thing to
do which has not been demanded of us, and I am
thankful it has not been. But at a certain time
and place--if the Bible is not a fairytale--it
_was_ nonetheless commanded. If God is the giver
of life, He has the right to say when each human
life should end. If we say that He is only allowed
to give commands which are not upsetting to think
about, we are actually saying that He is not
allowed to give commands. This, in turn, will
mean that no man is allowed to say that his
actions were ordered by God, which leaves Joshua
to be despised by well-dressed scholars who never
had a life-and-death issue to cope with.
"JOSHUAPHOBIA" ended with these words, in which
"him" refers to Joshua:
I won't apologize for him,
Since none of your scorn is due him.
If you reach Heaven at all, friend,
YOU will apologize TO him!
Because the nature and implications of God's
authority have _not_ been adequately taught, a
false dividing line has been drawn which may be
impossible to erase; it may still be there,
confusing people, until Jesus Himself returns
to destroy the Antichrist regime. This line,
existing in the minds of secular humanists
everywhere, places _everyone_ who says there
is a dependable source of divine revelation in
the same zone as Osama bin-Ladin. If it is not
already too late, we have to try to reposition
that line. The true choice is not between the
always-wrong idea of divine authority and the
wonderful freedom of having no rules or standards;
it's between having the RIGHT standards and
having FALSE ones.
Muslim terrorists and Muslim dictators are going
to do enormous harm in this world; it has already
begun. But they will not be the last word in evil.
Right now, Muslim terrorists are drawing a line
which groups Christians, Jews and atheists all
together on the infidel side; but the cold-blooded
reptiles of materialistic totalitarianism (borrowing
New Age mysticism for a little religious camouflage
as it suits them) will have their day to draw their
own line. That line will put Christians, Jews,
civilized Muslims, and anyone else who believes
in a transcendent moral authority, together in
a classification as backward primitives who are
blocking the glorious progress of evolution.
Psychotic criminals who delude themselves about
hearing from God will be viewed as typical
specimens of the disease called faith.
What are we to do? Certainly, we are NOT to give
up witnessing to people about God's love. But if
we make this love into empty calories, with no
principles or expectations, we are abdicating
our obligation to give the _whole_ counsel of
God. That's what has been increasingly occurring
for years now, and it has resulted in Christendom
being put on the defensive--"defensive scarce,"
to use John Milton's phrase. Joshua was able to
go on the attack; but for Christians today, the
most we can do in many theaters of action is to
slow down the loss of territory.
This trend will not be cured by saying that our
God never had any right to possess that territory
in the first place. If we let ourselves agree
with the secular world that God's Word is _not_
authoritative and reliable, and that the moral
truths contained there are only opinions, we are
doing the opposite from John Paul Jones: we ARE
surrendering without ever having begun to fight.
There's always another complication. I'm afraid
that some supposed Christians will say, "That's
right, we need to stand firm on the Bible's clear
commands that the United States must unilaterally
disarm, that private ownership of property must
be abolished, that the status of marriage must be
given to homosexual and incestuous couples or
threesomes, that the federal government must be
able to overrule parents in all questions of
child-raising, and that abortion and euthanasia
are to be made into sacraments." But I've
touched on that angle in past writings, and
may do so again another time. I pray there
still IS time.
Yours for Jesus and America,
Joseph Richard Ravitts
Have Been Defending Long Before Now
God, I pray that there will still be _time_ for such
a message as this to be seen and considered, before
the malice of tyrants in Iran, Syria and elsewhere
brings on such widespread violence as will drown out
all calm discussion. Amen.
Very early in my Christian life, I went sometimes
to a highly liberal mainline-denominational church,
because for awhile I was dating the daughter of its
music minister. At a Bible study there, the teacher
began saying that the Jehovah's Witnesses were not
a genuine Christian denomination. For a moment, I
dared to hope that he was going to defend Biblical
orthodoxy. Silly rabbit. I found out my mistake
when I heard what he gave as the _grounds_ for
disapproving of the J.W.'s. It had nothing to do
with their denial of the Deity of Jesus, nor with
their claim that only they have the real gospel,
and least of all with their refusal to show loyalty
to America. What gave this Congregationalist teacher
a red flag was the belief of J.W.'s that Jehovah
had really ordered the Israelites to kill the
people in Jericho and other Canaanite cities.
This, he said, could not be the God worshipped
by Christians!
Some of you will remember an article I wrote
about people drawing spiritual dividing lines
in the wrong place. This teacher had drawn a
line which placed every believer in full inspiration
of Scripture on the same side as a fraudulent cult.
It was this incident which prompted me to compose
one of my earlier songs. I called it "JOSHUAPHOBIA."
I'm not sure it ever got performed for an audience;
it was definitely strong meat, not fill-my-cup-and-
make-me-whole sweetness. I don't think a complete
copy survives now; but I can remember the melody
and some of the words. I don't have the means of
sending music online, but the lyrics of "JOSHUAPHOBIA"
began thus:
Twentieth-century liberal man, how you condescend
To a proven friend of God Almighty!
Joshua seems to embarrass you much; "Primitive," you say;
You regard his way as quite untidy.
Even as an infant Christian in the early 1970's, I
was able to recognize an irony to which the liberal
teacher probably was oblivious. His church was one
which never missed a chance to insist that this or
that passage in the Old Testament was only symbolic,
not literal fact. If he had simply assumed the account
of killing the Canaanites to be _another_ symbolic
whatsit that never actually happened, there would
be nothing to be angry about, because the mass
executions never actually happened. On the other
hand, if I had brought this up to him, he might
have said, "Well, of course that didn't happen,
since it's all symbolic. What I dislike about
the Jehovah's Witnesses is that they _imagine_
God would order people to kill others."
I can see his reasoning. A God Who saw no need
to bother giving a reliable factual record of
His dealings with creation probably also would
not bother insisting on any societal moral
standards for whose repeated violation a wicked
society might have to be destroyed as a corporate
entity. Still, my song was trying to encompass
the whole issue of God's authority in such a
way as to answer this very attitude. The next
part of the words I remember says:
What do you think that it means to be God? Has He not the right,
As well as the might, to punish evil?
Look in Leviticus, chapter eighteen; you'll see God was just
To feel great disgust with Canaan's people.
Of course, you might be out of luck if you look
for that chapter in a Gideon Bible. Homosexual
actor Ian McKellen is said to be in the habit
of ripping out the pages of Leviticus he doesn't
like when he stays at hotels with Gideon Bibles.
That provides another irony. Christians will
sometimes hold book-burnings, in which the only
books being burned are ones voluntarily handed
over for burning by their owners; this was done
once in Ephesus, as I recall. But Christian-
bashers choose to believe that this is the exact
same thing as Nazi book-burnings, although the
Nazis were burning books taken by force from
their owners. McKellen sounds as if he would
join in such an accusation against Christians;
and yet he is willing to deface a Bible which
does NOT belong to him. The hard left never
tires of practicing double standards...which
is why it is conservative student newspapers,
and ONLY conservative ones, which routinely
get stolen and destroyed on many big university
campuses in America.
Unfortunately, Christians do get tired--tired
of having to defend doctrines which are distasteful
to many hearers. We'd rather just preach our five-
hundredth sermon on unconditional love--that can't
alienate anyone! So, over the decades since I wrote
"JOSHUAPHOBIA," there seem to have been fewer and
fewer pastors bothering to explain why God could
have had reasons to order those pagan cities wiped
out. And the less the effort is made, the less
the effort _can_ be made; that is, it becomes
harder and harder to get people to listen to the
harsher part of the truth. Yet there are modifying
elements in the story told by the Book of Joshua.
For those who do not demand that God practice
infant damnation, there is a crucial piece of
solace with regard to the small Canaanite children
who were killed. As I wrote--
Don't you believe there's a Heaven?
Well, that's where God brought those babies!
So, will you stop treating Yahweh
As if He'd gone mad with rabies?
Moreover, that same Book of Leviticus makes
references to non-Israelites being allowed to
join in serving the true God and in enjoying
His favor. So there was a way out, and some
Canaanites availed themselves of it. Note that
when later portions of the Old Testament speak
of the trouble caused by the remaining Canaanites,
they mean the Canaanites who had _not_ genuinely
accepted the Lordship of the true God.
It's important to realize that God's order for
extermination was not an open-ended policy. He
ordered the destruction of one civilization
which had become extraordinarily evil, and whose
continued presence would make it frightfully
difficult for the Israelites to perform their
function as the training camp and laboratory
of human-divine relations. God _never_ told His
people to expand the extermination beyond the
Promised Land. Thus, what He commanded was not
at all the same thing as when radical Islam
labels the WHOLE non-Muslim world as Dar al-Harb,
"The House Of War," meaning that all non-Muslims
_everywhere_ are fair game to be killed or
enslaved. In this perilous time, when Christian-
bashers love to draw a false dividing line
placing Christians on the same side as Al-Qaeda,
the true distinction must be made.
Of course, that Congregationalist teacher would
be quick to say, "But it's all so simple! We can
make the distinction by proclaiming that our God
of love would never want anyone to be killed for
any reason whatsoever, not even in one place at
one time." This, however, can only be done by
denying that the Old Testament is a reliable
history; and if we make this concession, what
is to prevent the New Testament from being
likewise dismissed?
I suppose we can say we are distinguishable from
the Islamists if we accept having a God Who never
said anything and won't do anything. But when
the Christian faith is NOT distinguishable from
Mister Rogers' Neighborhood...when we have nothing
more to say than "Be nice"...we will have no means
of inspiring discipline, fortitude or self-sacrifice.
Pacifistic Christian love is designed to win over
individuals, and it _is_ winning over millions of
individuals, including Muslims; but when whole
Muslim nations are applying their full power to
an effort to annihilate Israel and points west,
the sterner virtues will have to be remembered,
or there won't BE enough sweet peacemakers left
alive TO have any substantial impact with
Christian love.
So we need an authoritative standard, a God Who
_does_ call some things right and others wrong,
and Who _does_ let us know what He wants. If
you don't think that the Bible truthfully conveys
this, you are free to make up your own religion,
as Charles Taze Russell did in founding the J.W.'s
and as Dan Brown is doing with "The DaVinci Code."
But those of us who believe in the Jesus for Whose
honor the Apostles accepted martyrdom (and their
martyrdom was not about murdering the innocent
as terrorist "martyrs" do) need to be teaching
God's Word. God's _WHOLE_ Word, not only the
happy and convenient parts.
You know what? I don't believe that Joshua found
it fun to kill people. He was given a thing to
do which has not been demanded of us, and I am
thankful it has not been. But at a certain time
and place--if the Bible is not a fairytale--it
_was_ nonetheless commanded. If God is the giver
of life, He has the right to say when each human
life should end. If we say that He is only allowed
to give commands which are not upsetting to think
about, we are actually saying that He is not
allowed to give commands. This, in turn, will
mean that no man is allowed to say that his
actions were ordered by God, which leaves Joshua
to be despised by well-dressed scholars who never
had a life-and-death issue to cope with.
"JOSHUAPHOBIA" ended with these words, in which
"him" refers to Joshua:
I won't apologize for him,
Since none of your scorn is due him.
If you reach Heaven at all, friend,
YOU will apologize TO him!
Because the nature and implications of God's
authority have _not_ been adequately taught, a
false dividing line has been drawn which may be
impossible to erase; it may still be there,
confusing people, until Jesus Himself returns
to destroy the Antichrist regime. This line,
existing in the minds of secular humanists
everywhere, places _everyone_ who says there
is a dependable source of divine revelation in
the same zone as Osama bin-Ladin. If it is not
already too late, we have to try to reposition
that line. The true choice is not between the
always-wrong idea of divine authority and the
wonderful freedom of having no rules or standards;
it's between having the RIGHT standards and
having FALSE ones.
Muslim terrorists and Muslim dictators are going
to do enormous harm in this world; it has already
begun. But they will not be the last word in evil.
Right now, Muslim terrorists are drawing a line
which groups Christians, Jews and atheists all
together on the infidel side; but the cold-blooded
reptiles of materialistic totalitarianism (borrowing
New Age mysticism for a little religious camouflage
as it suits them) will have their day to draw their
own line. That line will put Christians, Jews,
civilized Muslims, and anyone else who believes
in a transcendent moral authority, together in
a classification as backward primitives who are
blocking the glorious progress of evolution.
Psychotic criminals who delude themselves about
hearing from God will be viewed as typical
specimens of the disease called faith.
What are we to do? Certainly, we are NOT to give
up witnessing to people about God's love. But if
we make this love into empty calories, with no
principles or expectations, we are abdicating
our obligation to give the _whole_ counsel of
God. That's what has been increasingly occurring
for years now, and it has resulted in Christendom
being put on the defensive--"defensive scarce,"
to use John Milton's phrase. Joshua was able to
go on the attack; but for Christians today, the
most we can do in many theaters of action is to
slow down the loss of territory.
This trend will not be cured by saying that our
God never had any right to possess that territory
in the first place. If we let ourselves agree
with the secular world that God's Word is _not_
authoritative and reliable, and that the moral
truths contained there are only opinions, we are
doing the opposite from John Paul Jones: we ARE
surrendering without ever having begun to fight.
There's always another complication. I'm afraid
that some supposed Christians will say, "That's
right, we need to stand firm on the Bible's clear
commands that the United States must unilaterally
disarm, that private ownership of property must
be abolished, that the status of marriage must be
given to homosexual and incestuous couples or
threesomes, that the federal government must be
able to overrule parents in all questions of
child-raising, and that abortion and euthanasia
are to be made into sacraments." But I've
touched on that angle in past writings, and
may do so again another time. I pray there
still IS time.
Yours for Jesus and America,
Joseph Richard Ravitts
Sharing A Little Friendly Theology
During my Navy career, I became friends with a Chinese-born Christian lady also serving in the U.S. Navy. When she told me about her upbringing under Communist repression, I realized something you rarely hear from the pulpits. While it's true that long-term persecution strengthens the backbone of the church, it also deprives Christians of chances to learn "solid-meat" doctrine. My friend's faith in Jesus was very genuine, but by no fault of hers she was woefully shallow in Scriptural knowledge. In December of 2004, she told me how she had been approached by supposed Christians who said odd things, so I promised to write for her some explanations of spiritual issues that had come up. Here is what I wrote:
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
Before discussing what men say, let's look at
what God says--or didn't say.
In ancient times, most cultures had a pretty
poor idea of life after death. Mythologies
like the Egyptian variety based their version
of Paradise not on the justice and mercy of
a good, loving and just God, but on the same
system of social rank and privilege that existed
on Earth. If you were a prince or princess, you
could expect endless parties after death; if
you were a peasant, your soul got tossed away
in some corner.
This, of course, was one of the many things which
the real God set out to correct in His long process
of teaching the human race. The Egyptians, among
whom the tribes of Israel had lived, were obsessed
with life after death but ignorant of the true
giver of life; so God took exactly the opposite
approach, making His people concentrate their
attention on Him while scarcely even thinking
about what came after death.
In the Old Testament as originally written in
Hebrew, the next world is described simply by a
Hebrew word whose meaning translates as "the pit."
There is almost no description of anything after
death in the Old Testament --only just enough to
show that the soul does not simply cease to exist,
plus very small hints that the righteous soul is
better off in eternity than the wicked one. It
would not be much use to say "Good people go to
Heaven"--if you were talking to persons who had
no idea at all WHAT IS good. So God spent centuries
teaching what is good.
The later Old Testament books, particularly Daniel,
do begin to suggest God's judgment after death. And
in what is called the "Intertestamental period"
(meaning the time between the writing of the Book
of Malachi which completes the Old Testament, and
the coming of Jesus), Jewish people grew more and
more convinced that there was a definite Heaven to
go to and a Hell to avoid. Jesus, in His parable
of "Lazarus and the Rich Man," confirmed this
separation of good from evil in the next life.
From some of what Jesus said, and from the bits
of information in the Old Testament, it seems
that before Jesus died and rose again, although
God's children did have a better situation after
dying than other souls had, they were not yet
in what we usually think of when we say "Heaven."
It seems that there were upper and lower sections
of "the pit," with saved souls at peace in the
upper section, but possibly not yet directly
seeing God.
Then, when Jesus entered "the pit" and came out
again, it is commonly believed that all souls
that were saved from sin were allowed to come
out with Him and enter "actual" Heaven. The
Apostle Paul, writing years after Jesus rose
from the dead, said that "to be absent from
the body is to be present with the Lord." This
leaves the evil souls in the "lower pit," which
is more or less the kind of place we mean when
we say "Hell." But as things get better for
God's people, it seems that things get worse
for the wicked. Near the end of the Book of
Revelation, it says that all whose names are
not written in the Book of Life will be thrown
into a sort of super-hell described as "the
lake of fire." The only hint of an optimistic
note in this part is that it does NOT say,
"Everyone at this judgment is automatically
left out of the Book of Life, and is thrown
into the lake of fire," although that is what
the Calvinists want to believe it means. Instead,
it says that IF any person's name is not in
Jesus' heavenly book, that person is doomed.
As for however many souls are saved, it seems
that before Jesus returns to Earth all these
people will enjoy a very happy existence--but
without physical bodies such as we have now.
Then, once Jesus does return, all of His
followers--both those who have died, and
those who are still in earthly life when He
comes back--will receive new bodies. These
bodies will be physically real--but they will
not prevent us from living our spiritual life
in Heaven, because our new bodies will be
indestructible, with more strength and power
than we can imagine, and filled with spiritual
life. To put it in traditional Chinese terms,
you might say that our new bodies will have a
supply of chi that never runs out. Also, a
whole new planet Earth will eventually be created,
where there will never be pollution or any other
bad thing; for all purposes, this new Earth will
be a "department" of Heaven.
So there are four situations after death which we
can find in the Bible: good and better, bad and worse.
This, of course, really means only two destinations:
lost or saved. If anyone insists that they "know"
the truth of eternity in greater detail than this,
be careful not to accept what they say without
investigation. Some people's "extra" ideas are
only silly, while others are harmful mistakes or
even outright lies.
Among ideas that are in any way Christian, the
most famous "extra" idea is Purgatory, which
Catholics believe in. Their idea is that the
same gradual correction process about which I
spoke to you is often still unfinished when a
Christian dies, so that more still has to be
done even after death. In Catholic belief, any
soul who is in Purgatory will finally
arrive in Heaven, but will have to go through
some sort of "disciplinary action" first. This
idea is NOT Biblical. The closest thing to a
Bible passage actually supporting it is where
the Apostle Paul writes about our work from
our earthly life being "tested by fire," with
worthless things we did being burned away; but
it does not clearly state that WE will be burned
in the process. I am personally angry at the
Catholic church for insisting on believing in
Purgatory --because it caused Mary, with her
Catholic background, to be needlessly afraid
that she would have to undergo still more
suffering after her suffering from cancer
ended with her physical death.
Since you said that you heard someone speak
about "levels," I have to wonder if you heard
a Mormon speaking. Mormons, to put a complicated
religion in very simple terms, believe in at
least two separate Heavens--the best one for
Mormons, and the still-heavenly-but-not-quite-
as-wonderful one for decent non-Mormons. There's
a lot more to it than that; but it's enough for
you to know that Mormonism is NOT Christianity,
no matter what Mormons themselves tell you.
They just have too many beliefs that go against
clear statements of the Bible. Just to pick one
false belief, the Mormons believe that God the
Father has a physical body like a man; but God
the Father told Jeremiah that He is a spirit
Who "fills Heaven and Earth."
Avoid the Mormons, who are also called "Latter-Day
Saints." The reason they call themselves this is
that their founder, Joseph Smith (I hate his having
the same first name as I have), claimed that all
other churches existing in his time were completely
false; claimed that the "real" church had been lost
for many centuries; and claimed that his new church
and only his new church would bring the "real"
faith back in latter times. So, although Mormons
demand that we accept them, they started out by
rejecting us. And if they were right about "real"
Christianity being completely lost for so many
centuries, that would mean that God didn't care
enough about us to make sure that the truth was
not lost!
Don't let yourself worry much about the little
details of what people think Heaven will be like.
What really counts is knowing what kind of personality
GOD has, and seeing that this personality is just
what you want to have keeping you company forever
and ever.
Yours in Jesus,
Joseph
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
Before discussing what men say, let's look at
what God says--or didn't say.
In ancient times, most cultures had a pretty
poor idea of life after death. Mythologies
like the Egyptian variety based their version
of Paradise not on the justice and mercy of
a good, loving and just God, but on the same
system of social rank and privilege that existed
on Earth. If you were a prince or princess, you
could expect endless parties after death; if
you were a peasant, your soul got tossed away
in some corner.
This, of course, was one of the many things which
the real God set out to correct in His long process
of teaching the human race. The Egyptians, among
whom the tribes of Israel had lived, were obsessed
with life after death but ignorant of the true
giver of life; so God took exactly the opposite
approach, making His people concentrate their
attention on Him while scarcely even thinking
about what came after death.
In the Old Testament as originally written in
Hebrew, the next world is described simply by a
Hebrew word whose meaning translates as "the pit."
There is almost no description of anything after
death in the Old Testament --only just enough to
show that the soul does not simply cease to exist,
plus very small hints that the righteous soul is
better off in eternity than the wicked one. It
would not be much use to say "Good people go to
Heaven"--if you were talking to persons who had
no idea at all WHAT IS good. So God spent centuries
teaching what is good.
The later Old Testament books, particularly Daniel,
do begin to suggest God's judgment after death. And
in what is called the "Intertestamental period"
(meaning the time between the writing of the Book
of Malachi which completes the Old Testament, and
the coming of Jesus), Jewish people grew more and
more convinced that there was a definite Heaven to
go to and a Hell to avoid. Jesus, in His parable
of "Lazarus and the Rich Man," confirmed this
separation of good from evil in the next life.
From some of what Jesus said, and from the bits
of information in the Old Testament, it seems
that before Jesus died and rose again, although
God's children did have a better situation after
dying than other souls had, they were not yet
in what we usually think of when we say "Heaven."
It seems that there were upper and lower sections
of "the pit," with saved souls at peace in the
upper section, but possibly not yet directly
seeing God.
Then, when Jesus entered "the pit" and came out
again, it is commonly believed that all souls
that were saved from sin were allowed to come
out with Him and enter "actual" Heaven. The
Apostle Paul, writing years after Jesus rose
from the dead, said that "to be absent from
the body is to be present with the Lord." This
leaves the evil souls in the "lower pit," which
is more or less the kind of place we mean when
we say "Hell." But as things get better for
God's people, it seems that things get worse
for the wicked. Near the end of the Book of
Revelation, it says that all whose names are
not written in the Book of Life will be thrown
into a sort of super-hell described as "the
lake of fire." The only hint of an optimistic
note in this part is that it does NOT say,
"Everyone at this judgment is automatically
left out of the Book of Life, and is thrown
into the lake of fire," although that is what
the Calvinists want to believe it means. Instead,
it says that IF any person's name is not in
Jesus' heavenly book, that person is doomed.
As for however many souls are saved, it seems
that before Jesus returns to Earth all these
people will enjoy a very happy existence--but
without physical bodies such as we have now.
Then, once Jesus does return, all of His
followers--both those who have died, and
those who are still in earthly life when He
comes back--will receive new bodies. These
bodies will be physically real--but they will
not prevent us from living our spiritual life
in Heaven, because our new bodies will be
indestructible, with more strength and power
than we can imagine, and filled with spiritual
life. To put it in traditional Chinese terms,
you might say that our new bodies will have a
supply of chi that never runs out. Also, a
whole new planet Earth will eventually be created,
where there will never be pollution or any other
bad thing; for all purposes, this new Earth will
be a "department" of Heaven.
So there are four situations after death which we
can find in the Bible: good and better, bad and worse.
This, of course, really means only two destinations:
lost or saved. If anyone insists that they "know"
the truth of eternity in greater detail than this,
be careful not to accept what they say without
investigation. Some people's "extra" ideas are
only silly, while others are harmful mistakes or
even outright lies.
Among ideas that are in any way Christian, the
most famous "extra" idea is Purgatory, which
Catholics believe in. Their idea is that the
same gradual correction process about which I
spoke to you is often still unfinished when a
Christian dies, so that more still has to be
done even after death. In Catholic belief, any
soul who is in Purgatory will finally
arrive in Heaven, but will have to go through
some sort of "disciplinary action" first. This
idea is NOT Biblical. The closest thing to a
Bible passage actually supporting it is where
the Apostle Paul writes about our work from
our earthly life being "tested by fire," with
worthless things we did being burned away; but
it does not clearly state that WE will be burned
in the process. I am personally angry at the
Catholic church for insisting on believing in
Purgatory --because it caused Mary, with her
Catholic background, to be needlessly afraid
that she would have to undergo still more
suffering after her suffering from cancer
ended with her physical death.
Since you said that you heard someone speak
about "levels," I have to wonder if you heard
a Mormon speaking. Mormons, to put a complicated
religion in very simple terms, believe in at
least two separate Heavens--the best one for
Mormons, and the still-heavenly-but-not-quite-
as-wonderful one for decent non-Mormons. There's
a lot more to it than that; but it's enough for
you to know that Mormonism is NOT Christianity,
no matter what Mormons themselves tell you.
They just have too many beliefs that go against
clear statements of the Bible. Just to pick one
false belief, the Mormons believe that God the
Father has a physical body like a man; but God
the Father told Jeremiah that He is a spirit
Who "fills Heaven and Earth."
Avoid the Mormons, who are also called "Latter-Day
Saints." The reason they call themselves this is
that their founder, Joseph Smith (I hate his having
the same first name as I have), claimed that all
other churches existing in his time were completely
false; claimed that the "real" church had been lost
for many centuries; and claimed that his new church
and only his new church would bring the "real"
faith back in latter times. So, although Mormons
demand that we accept them, they started out by
rejecting us. And if they were right about "real"
Christianity being completely lost for so many
centuries, that would mean that God didn't care
enough about us to make sure that the truth was
not lost!
Don't let yourself worry much about the little
details of what people think Heaven will be like.
What really counts is knowing what kind of personality
GOD has, and seeing that this personality is just
what you want to have keeping you company forever
and ever.
Yours in Jesus,
Joseph
In A Lighter Vein, Something From June 2007
IF I CAN'T BEAT THE REVISIONISTS
OF SCRIPTURE, WHY NOT JOIN THEM?
Okay, here is an atheistic humanist's version of The Lord's Prayer:
Nobody's Father, who aren't in Heaven,
Who cares what your name is?
It's our collective that comes,
And evolution's will is done.
We'll take the bread from the bakers and redistribute it.
We'll forgive ourselves for trespassing,
Delivering ourselves from having to call anything evil
--Except, of course, a belief in the Creator;
And ours is the Party, forever.
Now, here's the radical-Muslim terrorist's version:
Our Allah, who parks suicide bombers in harems,
Hatred be thine aim.
Thy killing come, thy mullahs' will be done,
In London, Washington and Bangkok as it is in Tehran.
Give us this day some Jews and Christians, dead.
Forgive no infidel for anything,
But let us kill children, and others who are defenseless.
Lead us not into the temptation to quit being evil,
For thine is the contract to be powerfully gory
With anyone we don't like, Amen.
This one's for the sort of wimpy churchgoers who don't have the
spine even to argue verbally against the previous two groups:
Somebody's Parent-figure, who might be in Heaven,
We're still discussing whether we can hallow your name,
Since any talk of your kingdom coming
Might offend someone.
Give us this day our daily pablum;
Don't give us discipleship classes,
Because that might turn someone against us.
Lead us into equivocation,
So we can appease evil;
Then we'll have enough self-esteem to say that you have glory,
Some of the time.
If I made up what gay-marriage activists might do with the Lord's
Prayer, any parody I had the stomach to invent would probably still
be LESS disgusting than what they might actually say. So, to conclude,
here's a version that might be used by the new-model New Age space
cadets who will be trying to fill the spiritual power vacuum once the
Muslim terrorists are finally defeated:
Our Earth-Mother, who distorts the concept of Heaven,
Thou canst be called by any name.
Thy karma come,
And our wits be dumbed down,
Emerging in a syncretist Heaven.
Give us more ways to delay repenting;
And redefine our trespasses,
So we don't feel indebted to grace.
Lead us into reincarnation,
And let us change the Word to please people.
For thine is revision, calling Scripture just a story,
Till there's never an Amen.
OF SCRIPTURE, WHY NOT JOIN THEM?
Okay, here is an atheistic humanist's version of The Lord's Prayer:
Nobody's Father, who aren't in Heaven,
Who cares what your name is?
It's our collective that comes,
And evolution's will is done.
We'll take the bread from the bakers and redistribute it.
We'll forgive ourselves for trespassing,
Delivering ourselves from having to call anything evil
--Except, of course, a belief in the Creator;
And ours is the Party, forever.
Now, here's the radical-Muslim terrorist's version:
Our Allah, who parks suicide bombers in harems,
Hatred be thine aim.
Thy killing come, thy mullahs' will be done,
In London, Washington and Bangkok as it is in Tehran.
Give us this day some Jews and Christians, dead.
Forgive no infidel for anything,
But let us kill children, and others who are defenseless.
Lead us not into the temptation to quit being evil,
For thine is the contract to be powerfully gory
With anyone we don't like, Amen.
This one's for the sort of wimpy churchgoers who don't have the
spine even to argue verbally against the previous two groups:
Somebody's Parent-figure, who might be in Heaven,
We're still discussing whether we can hallow your name,
Since any talk of your kingdom coming
Might offend someone.
Give us this day our daily pablum;
Don't give us discipleship classes,
Because that might turn someone against us.
Lead us into equivocation,
So we can appease evil;
Then we'll have enough self-esteem to say that you have glory,
Some of the time.
If I made up what gay-marriage activists might do with the Lord's
Prayer, any parody I had the stomach to invent would probably still
be LESS disgusting than what they might actually say. So, to conclude,
here's a version that might be used by the new-model New Age space
cadets who will be trying to fill the spiritual power vacuum once the
Muslim terrorists are finally defeated:
Our Earth-Mother, who distorts the concept of Heaven,
Thou canst be called by any name.
Thy karma come,
And our wits be dumbed down,
Emerging in a syncretist Heaven.
Give us more ways to delay repenting;
And redefine our trespasses,
So we don't feel indebted to grace.
Lead us into reincarnation,
And let us change the Word to please people.
For thine is revision, calling Scripture just a story,
Till there's never an Amen.
Selecting one more at random while I'm archiving
FROM 30 APRIL 2006--
ANYBODY SEE WHERE DIOGENES' LANTERN WENT?
The movie "UNITED 93" is out now, celebrating the
courage of hijacked airline passengers who went down
fighting against their murderers, and succeeded so far as
to prevent their plane from hitting Washington. I want
very much to believe the most heroic interpretation of
this event--the more so since lying down passively and
letting terrorists have their way has a marvellous record
of accomplishing no good at all.
Sadly, at this very time there are more and more clues
piling up to the effect that events on 11 September 2001
may have been very different than loyal Americans have
believed. It's being said that the passengers on Flight 93
should not have been able to reach anyone on the ground
by telephone at the time they were thought to have done
so; that plane wreckage found at the Pentagon did not
match the airplane type that was supposed to have hit
there; that video footage of the second plane striking
the World Trade Center suggests it was a military
transport jet posing as an airliner; and that the steel
in those towers could not have melted from jet-fuel
flames unless additionally damaged by explosives.
The hard left is getting louder and more explicit in
its accusations that George Bush did not merely fail to
prevent the 9-11 attacks, but rather that HE ORDERED
THEM HIMSELF, intentionally murdering American
citizens in order to give himself an excuse to wage wars
of aggression and conquest for his own gain. And it's
hard to deny this possibility, since it would not be the
first time a Republican administration staged a fake
enemy attack to stir Americans to war. I have in mind
the Tonkin Gulf incident, in which North Vietnamese
forces were supposed to have attacked the U.S. Navy,
leading to our active combatant involvement in the
Vietnam War. It was later found that no such attack
had even happened; it was a fabrication, carried out
under the presidency of the Republican Lyndon J--
Hey, wait a minute!
Dang, Johnson was a Democrat, wasn't he?
Well, I won't go too far pointing out things like the
way the Democratic Clinton administration allowed a
heavily slanted reporting of conflict in Yugoslavia to
make it look as if all the fault there was on the part of
the Serbs, causing us to side with Albanian Muslims
who did and still do have terrorist connections. (There
are politically-correct films being made, nonsensically,
about the threat of _Serbian_ terrorists.) None of that
erases the doubts about 9-11. I confess I _don't_ know
what the truth is about the current allegations. If all
the evidence exists which is being said to exist, this
would make it impossible to believe that the standard
story is all true. On the other hand, there could still be
many possible explanations; it would not be instantly
proven that Mr. Bush willfully murdered his own people
just to gain geopolitical advantages which his evil oil-
company friends are supposed to have gained for him
already anyway.
So let's consider some things which I _do_ know to
be true, and whose truth cannot be changed by ANY
of the plausible explanations of 9-11.
The Communists who achieved the armed conquest
of South Vietnam never had any moral qualms about
torturing and murdering defenseless noncombatants
in large numbers, for fun. They were doing it _long_
before the Tonkin Gulf incident was fabricated. As for
Muslim terrorists, they were not only doing the same
thing before any American government falsified any
incidents--they were doing it before any American
government even existed. With regard to both sets of
predatory evildoers, even if we believe the VERY worst
explanation of American actions that any evidence can
support, the predators remain predators, who would
be preying on the innocent even if they had not been
made the object of someone's cynical manipulation.
Much of the impetus for the present accusations
against Mr. Bush comes from a generalized, visceral
feeling in people's minds, that America's prosperity
_must_ somehow have been stolen rather than earned;
that ANY use of American armed force to support our
interests _must_ be an act of wicked imperialism. But
to give credit where credit is due, some of our _enemies_
have had the honesty to judge us more kindly than that.
Remember the British actor Michael Caine? Back
during the Vietnam War, he appeared on an American
TV show and said that we should regard the Viet Cong
as being like our Colonial patriots in the Revolutionary
War. There is no uncertainty about this; I myself was
watching and listening as he said it. Thus, we can be
fairly confident that he would not commit any fraud
or deception in _favor_ of American action against
Communists. Well, many years later, Michael Caine
found himself in Vietnam to film a remake of "THE
QUIET AMERICAN." Coming back from this trip,
he told reporters that Communist Vietnamese officials
had told him something interesting. The Communists
had admitted to him that THEY KNEW that America
had NOT been trying to conquer and possess Vietnam
as a colony--only supporting the opposite side in the
war. In other words, the Communists themselves had
admitted to Caine that all the hippie-era talk about
the "Amerikan empire"--talk which Hanoi had gladly
exploited to its advantage--had been false.
Goodness, could it be that FOES of America and
of its armed forces might have been dishonest??
I still don't know all the facts about 11 September
2001. I don't want painful truth to be swept under any
rug, even if its exposure will cause much I have believed
in to be proven false. But I do know that none of it can
disprove certain basic facts, like the fact that hard-
line Islamists ARE aggressive warmongers who do NOT
need to be "provoked" to be aggressive. Even if it were
proven that Mr. Bush personally planned the whole
9-11 assault, this would not change the fact that Islam
has been imposing its will by violence ever since the
lifetime of Muhammad himself.
Note that last phrase. The Spanish Inquisition, and
other events which are harped on to indict Christianity,
could not occur until enough time had passed for the
original intent of Christianity to be altered. But Islam
was producing violence from the very _start_ of its
existence--because, although of course not every
Muslim is a violent person, the doctrinal foundation
of Islam contains a built-in warrant for advancing
that religion by armed compulsion.
Whatever turns out to be true about the 9-11
attacks--and for the record, I do _not_ believe that
Mr. Bush purposely killed American citizens--it won't
change the fact that Islamic fascism is waging a war
against freedom and civilization. I dread the prospect
of Americans deciding: "Since our leaders are suspect,
that makes Al-Qaeda's leaders innocent, so we must
appease them and let them have their way worldwide."
The movie "UNITED 93" may not be as true as I
like to think it is; but I know that the other movie,
"V FOR VENDETTA" is absolutely _absurd_ in its
trumped-up concern about a _Christian_ tyranny
being the great threat to liberty. God help us if the
public follows ridiculous p.c. red herrings, while
giving up on the effort to halt the REAL menace.
I never swore any oath to keep Republican leaders
immune from investigation; but I sure did swear an
oath to defend the existence of the United States. It
remains true that Islamofascism is an actual threat
to us, not a fictional one. Not even all the EEE-vil
oil corporations combined have the power to falsify
the total historical record of Muslim imperialism
and repressiveness. That repressiveness is genuine,
and will still have to be dealt with no matter what
we find out about our domestic politics.
YOURS FOR JESUS AND AMERICA,
JOSEPH RICHARD RAVITTS
===================================
After I originally wrote and distributed the above
column, a friend informed me that "Popular Mechanics"
had published an extensive rebuttal to all claims
that the 9-11 attacks were in any way faked.
ANYBODY SEE WHERE DIOGENES' LANTERN WENT?
The movie "UNITED 93" is out now, celebrating the
courage of hijacked airline passengers who went down
fighting against their murderers, and succeeded so far as
to prevent their plane from hitting Washington. I want
very much to believe the most heroic interpretation of
this event--the more so since lying down passively and
letting terrorists have their way has a marvellous record
of accomplishing no good at all.
Sadly, at this very time there are more and more clues
piling up to the effect that events on 11 September 2001
may have been very different than loyal Americans have
believed. It's being said that the passengers on Flight 93
should not have been able to reach anyone on the ground
by telephone at the time they were thought to have done
so; that plane wreckage found at the Pentagon did not
match the airplane type that was supposed to have hit
there; that video footage of the second plane striking
the World Trade Center suggests it was a military
transport jet posing as an airliner; and that the steel
in those towers could not have melted from jet-fuel
flames unless additionally damaged by explosives.
The hard left is getting louder and more explicit in
its accusations that George Bush did not merely fail to
prevent the 9-11 attacks, but rather that HE ORDERED
THEM HIMSELF, intentionally murdering American
citizens in order to give himself an excuse to wage wars
of aggression and conquest for his own gain. And it's
hard to deny this possibility, since it would not be the
first time a Republican administration staged a fake
enemy attack to stir Americans to war. I have in mind
the Tonkin Gulf incident, in which North Vietnamese
forces were supposed to have attacked the U.S. Navy,
leading to our active combatant involvement in the
Vietnam War. It was later found that no such attack
had even happened; it was a fabrication, carried out
under the presidency of the Republican Lyndon J--
Hey, wait a minute!
Dang, Johnson was a Democrat, wasn't he?
Well, I won't go too far pointing out things like the
way the Democratic Clinton administration allowed a
heavily slanted reporting of conflict in Yugoslavia to
make it look as if all the fault there was on the part of
the Serbs, causing us to side with Albanian Muslims
who did and still do have terrorist connections. (There
are politically-correct films being made, nonsensically,
about the threat of _Serbian_ terrorists.) None of that
erases the doubts about 9-11. I confess I _don't_ know
what the truth is about the current allegations. If all
the evidence exists which is being said to exist, this
would make it impossible to believe that the standard
story is all true. On the other hand, there could still be
many possible explanations; it would not be instantly
proven that Mr. Bush willfully murdered his own people
just to gain geopolitical advantages which his evil oil-
company friends are supposed to have gained for him
already anyway.
So let's consider some things which I _do_ know to
be true, and whose truth cannot be changed by ANY
of the plausible explanations of 9-11.
The Communists who achieved the armed conquest
of South Vietnam never had any moral qualms about
torturing and murdering defenseless noncombatants
in large numbers, for fun. They were doing it _long_
before the Tonkin Gulf incident was fabricated. As for
Muslim terrorists, they were not only doing the same
thing before any American government falsified any
incidents--they were doing it before any American
government even existed. With regard to both sets of
predatory evildoers, even if we believe the VERY worst
explanation of American actions that any evidence can
support, the predators remain predators, who would
be preying on the innocent even if they had not been
made the object of someone's cynical manipulation.
Much of the impetus for the present accusations
against Mr. Bush comes from a generalized, visceral
feeling in people's minds, that America's prosperity
_must_ somehow have been stolen rather than earned;
that ANY use of American armed force to support our
interests _must_ be an act of wicked imperialism. But
to give credit where credit is due, some of our _enemies_
have had the honesty to judge us more kindly than that.
Remember the British actor Michael Caine? Back
during the Vietnam War, he appeared on an American
TV show and said that we should regard the Viet Cong
as being like our Colonial patriots in the Revolutionary
War. There is no uncertainty about this; I myself was
watching and listening as he said it. Thus, we can be
fairly confident that he would not commit any fraud
or deception in _favor_ of American action against
Communists. Well, many years later, Michael Caine
found himself in Vietnam to film a remake of "THE
QUIET AMERICAN." Coming back from this trip,
he told reporters that Communist Vietnamese officials
had told him something interesting. The Communists
had admitted to him that THEY KNEW that America
had NOT been trying to conquer and possess Vietnam
as a colony--only supporting the opposite side in the
war. In other words, the Communists themselves had
admitted to Caine that all the hippie-era talk about
the "Amerikan empire"--talk which Hanoi had gladly
exploited to its advantage--had been false.
Goodness, could it be that FOES of America and
of its armed forces might have been dishonest??
I still don't know all the facts about 11 September
2001. I don't want painful truth to be swept under any
rug, even if its exposure will cause much I have believed
in to be proven false. But I do know that none of it can
disprove certain basic facts, like the fact that hard-
line Islamists ARE aggressive warmongers who do NOT
need to be "provoked" to be aggressive. Even if it were
proven that Mr. Bush personally planned the whole
9-11 assault, this would not change the fact that Islam
has been imposing its will by violence ever since the
lifetime of Muhammad himself.
Note that last phrase. The Spanish Inquisition, and
other events which are harped on to indict Christianity,
could not occur until enough time had passed for the
original intent of Christianity to be altered. But Islam
was producing violence from the very _start_ of its
existence--because, although of course not every
Muslim is a violent person, the doctrinal foundation
of Islam contains a built-in warrant for advancing
that religion by armed compulsion.
Whatever turns out to be true about the 9-11
attacks--and for the record, I do _not_ believe that
Mr. Bush purposely killed American citizens--it won't
change the fact that Islamic fascism is waging a war
against freedom and civilization. I dread the prospect
of Americans deciding: "Since our leaders are suspect,
that makes Al-Qaeda's leaders innocent, so we must
appease them and let them have their way worldwide."
The movie "UNITED 93" may not be as true as I
like to think it is; but I know that the other movie,
"V FOR VENDETTA" is absolutely _absurd_ in its
trumped-up concern about a _Christian_ tyranny
being the great threat to liberty. God help us if the
public follows ridiculous p.c. red herrings, while
giving up on the effort to halt the REAL menace.
I never swore any oath to keep Republican leaders
immune from investigation; but I sure did swear an
oath to defend the existence of the United States. It
remains true that Islamofascism is an actual threat
to us, not a fictional one. Not even all the EEE-vil
oil corporations combined have the power to falsify
the total historical record of Muslim imperialism
and repressiveness. That repressiveness is genuine,
and will still have to be dealt with no matter what
we find out about our domestic politics.
YOURS FOR JESUS AND AMERICA,
JOSEPH RICHARD RAVITTS
===================================
After I originally wrote and distributed the above
column, a friend informed me that "Popular Mechanics"
had published an extensive rebuttal to all claims
that the 9-11 attacks were in any way faked.
These date farther back, to January 2002
I am a great admirer of Alan Keyes; Mary and I once
heard him speak in person about his experiences at
the United Nations. During that brief, blessed period
when Dr. Keyes had his own TV talk show, I twice had
occasion to write to him...
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
Dear Alan:
My wife and I met you once in California, and we
voted for you in the last Republican primary. Your
new program is the first thing we have ever made
a special point to watch on MSNBC. (Let me also
applaud you for your pro-life insights given on
James Dobson's radio program "Focus On The Family.")
The following concerns your Wednesday night show
on capital punishment.
I am not a very adamant advocate of capital
punishment, but my reservations are based on the
danger of executing innocent persons, and on the
hope that a criminal might repent of his crimes
and be saved from Hell if given time...NOT on
any silly idea that murderers don't _deserve_ to
be punished in proportion to their offense. And
there is great merit in your argument about
preserving the force of the law.
I'm afraid that women did not score high for good
sense on the broadcast in question. To address the
most obvious foolishness first, Jane Henderson was
simply grossly wrong to say that executing murderers
"brings us down to their level." If she can't see the
obvious difference between the innocent victim and
the guilty murderer, how on Earth can she sort out
_any_ moral distinctions?
Ms. Henderson's reliance on cliche was also to be
seen in her claim that executing terrorists "only
makes martyrs of them." The self-pitying, self-
adoring mentality of the terrorist will fabricate
martyrdom out of any defeat or setback. The only
way to be _sure_ of not creating any fake martyrdom
for terrorists is to yield to all their demands,
to give away the store and surrender the whole
world to them.
Top honors for cliche-dependency go to the phone
caller "Mariam," with her all-too-typical reliance
on the blindly over-broadened application of "Thou
shalt not kill." You properly told her that the verb
in the commandment (ratsah) means "murder," NOT all
taking of life without any distinction. If you had
had more time, it would have been appropriate to
explain to Mariam that this word is rare in the
Old Testament, used only to describe criminal
homicide and private blood-revenge.
My gentlest criticism, but still a serious criticism,
goes to student Abbi Crutchfield. She deserves credit
for acknowledging the moral authority of God, and for
noting that His judgment is supreme; but her view of
the roots of human evil shows that her education has
been sadly contaminated by fashionable political
correctness. She said that the ultimate and
foundational element of evil is hatred. As you
already know (but just didn't have the time to
explain to Abbi), that is totally false.
Not all evil is hatred, and not all hatred is evil.
Psalm 97 tells us that "The LORD loves those who hate
evil." Those who do evil may or may not feel hatred;
when they do feel hatred, the wrongness is not in
the emotion, but in the fact that they hate unjustly;
they hate persons who do not deserve their hatred.
The true core of evil is self-centeredness. The
Devil did not begin to go wrong by suddenly hating
God for no reason; he went wrong by loving himself
too much, which derivatively led to a hatred of
God because he envied God's superiority.
Abbi's view that prison is always a sufficient
penalty for crime fails to take adequate account
of sinful human nature. Many murderers are depraved
predators who feel a sick delight in having power
over persons weaker than themselves. For monsters
of this type, sending them to a prison where they
can torment and sodomize weaker prisoners is almost
a reward. Because of these monsters, prison often
ironically becomes _more_ of a punishment for less-
vicious convicts than it is for the most vicious.
There are some souls who simply have chosen to wipe
out their own conscience in the course of enjoying
the deaths of others; by their stubborn refusal to
repent, they forfeit all right to demand that
society let them live on to continue preying on
the weak.
European nations flatter themselves as being better
than America, just because they don't execute murderers;
but for those punishments that do exist in European law,
the protections for the accused are far less than in our
legal system. So which is the greater injustice: to put
a real murderer to death after giving him exhaustive due
process--or "merely" to imprison a man who was falsely
accused of murder, having wrongly convicted him through
a judicial system that has no presumption of innocence?
You will agree that the answer to that is obvious--and
is not favorable to Europe's Napoleonic legal systems.
Thank you, Alan, for setting a high standard in moral
discussion. We've had more than enough of those who
assume the audience to be stupid; even though some
who participate in dialogue with you frankly are not
very bright, you at least offer them the opportunity
to rise to higher levels of understanding.
Yours in Christ,
Joseph Ravitts
* * * * * * * * * * * *
I WROTE THIS IN RESPONSE TO THE PROGRAM IN
WHICH DR. KEYES AND HIS GUESTS COMPARED THE
HARRY POTTER STORIES TO "LORD OF THE RINGS"...
Dear Alan,
I'm beginning this letter before your fantasy-
discussion broadcast is even finished. Entertainment
does influence people. Politically-correct
Hollywooders deny this truth when it suits them to
do so; but just try making a movie in which gays are
shown as villains, and then see if they'll agree that
entertainment is harmless!
All favorable statements about "The Lord of the Rings"
are well-deserved. Mr. Tolkien, a believer in Jesus
Christ, put up a firewall around his story to prevent
it from prompting people to seek occult powers: the
story is long ago in a made-up land, and the
supernatural powers are connected with types of
beings that obviously don't exist in our world.
This frees us to enjoy all the instructive
elements of which Connie Neal spoke. But Ms. Neal
absolutely misses the boat when she extends equal
approval to Ms. Rowling's writings. Harry Potter
is seen as existing in our world--which inevitably
gives the message that, if we were offered a chance
to obtain magic powers (even, perhaps, by means of
a certain ring??), there would be nothing wrong
with grabbing the chance. And, as you indicate,
that would be insisting on a power in ourselves,
independently from God.
Everybody who defends the Harry Potter stories
repeats the same refrain--that as long as it has
ANY concept of good defeating evil, there can't
be anything wrong with it. But no Christian can get
by with seeing only horizontal moral relationships;
the vertical relationship with God is crucial, and
indeed even defines the horizontal dimension. The
Hebrew slaves in Egypt had a valid horizontal moral
grievance against the Pharaoh who held them in
bondage; but resorting to false gods for liberation
would not have been "just as good" as relying on
the real God. It makes a difference to everything
whether your solutions to Earthly problems are based
on eternal truth or not.
In the group-discussion section, Chris Dunn continued
the failure to see the point. He said that parents
should be protecting their children from drugs and
crime instead of worrying about witchcraft. But
those who actually deal with youth crime and youth
addictions know that these phenomena often are
closely connected with occult experiences.
I expected clearer thinking from Mona Charen, but
she only showed again that failure to acknowledge
the whole truth about God leads to confusion about
mortal life. She gave no place to the Lord Jesus,
and therefore ipso facto she could not get the
whole picture clear. It is _N_O_T_ enough to say
that a book says you should be good and oppose
evil--notwhen the _means_ offered for achieving
good are inherently wrong. Harry Potter's wizardry
is _N_O_T_ in any way to be likened to the miracles
of Biblical saints. The saints did all they did in
conscious obedience to God's authority (not just
an empty abstraction of deity, either, but the
actual God); in contrast, Harry Potter seeks
autonomous power, not answering to the Creator
for anything. Harry's pursuit of "good" ends has
no more ties to God than did the Narnian dwarf
Nikabrik, who was prepared to bring back the
White Witch if only she would help him against
King Miraz.
Perhaps it will bring the matter of horizontal
and vertical relationships closer to home if I
point out a very tangible expression of wrong
metaphysical ideas. Abortionists are now using
fake spirituality to deceive the conscience of
girls at abortion clinics; they tell the girls
that the aborted baby will simply be reincarnated,
and so will not lose anything by having been killed.
No, God is _N_O_T_ magic. Magic allows for multiple
magicians, but there can only be one God. Magic
allows for frivolous and even vicious uses; but
God is never frivolous, and He never allows His
supernatural power to be co-opted by created beings
for evil. (Remember, for instance, "Your silver
perish with you, because you thought the gift of
God could be purchased with money!") Any hypothetical
supernatural power that is equally susceptible to
good and evil use is just not the same as God's
power. Remember that, in "The Lord of the Rings,"
the evil Ring tries to deceive its potential users
that it can be made to serve good purposes; but
that's a lie. God has nothing to gain by erasing
the distinction between His power and witchcraft;
it is the real-life equivalent of Sauron who has
a vested interest in creating that misunderstanding.
No, I do not expect that children who accept Harry
Potter will begin performing bloody ritual murders
under a full moon; but I guarantee you that children
who are deceived by Harry Potter will thereby be far
less capable of ever combatting or even recognizing
the deeper evil that does lead to such crimes.
Yours in Christ,
Joseph Ravitts
heard him speak in person about his experiences at
the United Nations. During that brief, blessed period
when Dr. Keyes had his own TV talk show, I twice had
occasion to write to him...
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
Dear Alan:
My wife and I met you once in California, and we
voted for you in the last Republican primary. Your
new program is the first thing we have ever made
a special point to watch on MSNBC. (Let me also
applaud you for your pro-life insights given on
James Dobson's radio program "Focus On The Family.")
The following concerns your Wednesday night show
on capital punishment.
I am not a very adamant advocate of capital
punishment, but my reservations are based on the
danger of executing innocent persons, and on the
hope that a criminal might repent of his crimes
and be saved from Hell if given time...NOT on
any silly idea that murderers don't _deserve_ to
be punished in proportion to their offense. And
there is great merit in your argument about
preserving the force of the law.
I'm afraid that women did not score high for good
sense on the broadcast in question. To address the
most obvious foolishness first, Jane Henderson was
simply grossly wrong to say that executing murderers
"brings us down to their level." If she can't see the
obvious difference between the innocent victim and
the guilty murderer, how on Earth can she sort out
_any_ moral distinctions?
Ms. Henderson's reliance on cliche was also to be
seen in her claim that executing terrorists "only
makes martyrs of them." The self-pitying, self-
adoring mentality of the terrorist will fabricate
martyrdom out of any defeat or setback. The only
way to be _sure_ of not creating any fake martyrdom
for terrorists is to yield to all their demands,
to give away the store and surrender the whole
world to them.
Top honors for cliche-dependency go to the phone
caller "Mariam," with her all-too-typical reliance
on the blindly over-broadened application of "Thou
shalt not kill." You properly told her that the verb
in the commandment (ratsah) means "murder," NOT all
taking of life without any distinction. If you had
had more time, it would have been appropriate to
explain to Mariam that this word is rare in the
Old Testament, used only to describe criminal
homicide and private blood-revenge.
My gentlest criticism, but still a serious criticism,
goes to student Abbi Crutchfield. She deserves credit
for acknowledging the moral authority of God, and for
noting that His judgment is supreme; but her view of
the roots of human evil shows that her education has
been sadly contaminated by fashionable political
correctness. She said that the ultimate and
foundational element of evil is hatred. As you
already know (but just didn't have the time to
explain to Abbi), that is totally false.
Not all evil is hatred, and not all hatred is evil.
Psalm 97 tells us that "The LORD loves those who hate
evil." Those who do evil may or may not feel hatred;
when they do feel hatred, the wrongness is not in
the emotion, but in the fact that they hate unjustly;
they hate persons who do not deserve their hatred.
The true core of evil is self-centeredness. The
Devil did not begin to go wrong by suddenly hating
God for no reason; he went wrong by loving himself
too much, which derivatively led to a hatred of
God because he envied God's superiority.
Abbi's view that prison is always a sufficient
penalty for crime fails to take adequate account
of sinful human nature. Many murderers are depraved
predators who feel a sick delight in having power
over persons weaker than themselves. For monsters
of this type, sending them to a prison where they
can torment and sodomize weaker prisoners is almost
a reward. Because of these monsters, prison often
ironically becomes _more_ of a punishment for less-
vicious convicts than it is for the most vicious.
There are some souls who simply have chosen to wipe
out their own conscience in the course of enjoying
the deaths of others; by their stubborn refusal to
repent, they forfeit all right to demand that
society let them live on to continue preying on
the weak.
European nations flatter themselves as being better
than America, just because they don't execute murderers;
but for those punishments that do exist in European law,
the protections for the accused are far less than in our
legal system. So which is the greater injustice: to put
a real murderer to death after giving him exhaustive due
process--or "merely" to imprison a man who was falsely
accused of murder, having wrongly convicted him through
a judicial system that has no presumption of innocence?
You will agree that the answer to that is obvious--and
is not favorable to Europe's Napoleonic legal systems.
Thank you, Alan, for setting a high standard in moral
discussion. We've had more than enough of those who
assume the audience to be stupid; even though some
who participate in dialogue with you frankly are not
very bright, you at least offer them the opportunity
to rise to higher levels of understanding.
Yours in Christ,
Joseph Ravitts
* * * * * * * * * * * *
I WROTE THIS IN RESPONSE TO THE PROGRAM IN
WHICH DR. KEYES AND HIS GUESTS COMPARED THE
HARRY POTTER STORIES TO "LORD OF THE RINGS"...
Dear Alan,
I'm beginning this letter before your fantasy-
discussion broadcast is even finished. Entertainment
does influence people. Politically-correct
Hollywooders deny this truth when it suits them to
do so; but just try making a movie in which gays are
shown as villains, and then see if they'll agree that
entertainment is harmless!
All favorable statements about "The Lord of the Rings"
are well-deserved. Mr. Tolkien, a believer in Jesus
Christ, put up a firewall around his story to prevent
it from prompting people to seek occult powers: the
story is long ago in a made-up land, and the
supernatural powers are connected with types of
beings that obviously don't exist in our world.
This frees us to enjoy all the instructive
elements of which Connie Neal spoke. But Ms. Neal
absolutely misses the boat when she extends equal
approval to Ms. Rowling's writings. Harry Potter
is seen as existing in our world--which inevitably
gives the message that, if we were offered a chance
to obtain magic powers (even, perhaps, by means of
a certain ring??), there would be nothing wrong
with grabbing the chance. And, as you indicate,
that would be insisting on a power in ourselves,
independently from God.
Everybody who defends the Harry Potter stories
repeats the same refrain--that as long as it has
ANY concept of good defeating evil, there can't
be anything wrong with it. But no Christian can get
by with seeing only horizontal moral relationships;
the vertical relationship with God is crucial, and
indeed even defines the horizontal dimension. The
Hebrew slaves in Egypt had a valid horizontal moral
grievance against the Pharaoh who held them in
bondage; but resorting to false gods for liberation
would not have been "just as good" as relying on
the real God. It makes a difference to everything
whether your solutions to Earthly problems are based
on eternal truth or not.
In the group-discussion section, Chris Dunn continued
the failure to see the point. He said that parents
should be protecting their children from drugs and
crime instead of worrying about witchcraft. But
those who actually deal with youth crime and youth
addictions know that these phenomena often are
closely connected with occult experiences.
I expected clearer thinking from Mona Charen, but
she only showed again that failure to acknowledge
the whole truth about God leads to confusion about
mortal life. She gave no place to the Lord Jesus,
and therefore ipso facto she could not get the
whole picture clear. It is _N_O_T_ enough to say
that a book says you should be good and oppose
evil--notwhen the _means_ offered for achieving
good are inherently wrong. Harry Potter's wizardry
is _N_O_T_ in any way to be likened to the miracles
of Biblical saints. The saints did all they did in
conscious obedience to God's authority (not just
an empty abstraction of deity, either, but the
actual God); in contrast, Harry Potter seeks
autonomous power, not answering to the Creator
for anything. Harry's pursuit of "good" ends has
no more ties to God than did the Narnian dwarf
Nikabrik, who was prepared to bring back the
White Witch if only she would help him against
King Miraz.
Perhaps it will bring the matter of horizontal
and vertical relationships closer to home if I
point out a very tangible expression of wrong
metaphysical ideas. Abortionists are now using
fake spirituality to deceive the conscience of
girls at abortion clinics; they tell the girls
that the aborted baby will simply be reincarnated,
and so will not lose anything by having been killed.
No, God is _N_O_T_ magic. Magic allows for multiple
magicians, but there can only be one God. Magic
allows for frivolous and even vicious uses; but
God is never frivolous, and He never allows His
supernatural power to be co-opted by created beings
for evil. (Remember, for instance, "Your silver
perish with you, because you thought the gift of
God could be purchased with money!") Any hypothetical
supernatural power that is equally susceptible to
good and evil use is just not the same as God's
power. Remember that, in "The Lord of the Rings,"
the evil Ring tries to deceive its potential users
that it can be made to serve good purposes; but
that's a lie. God has nothing to gain by erasing
the distinction between His power and witchcraft;
it is the real-life equivalent of Sauron who has
a vested interest in creating that misunderstanding.
No, I do not expect that children who accept Harry
Potter will begin performing bloody ritual murders
under a full moon; but I guarantee you that children
who are deceived by Harry Potter will thereby be far
less capable of ever combatting or even recognizing
the deeper evil that does lead to such crimes.
Yours in Christ,
Joseph Ravitts
Saving another essay, this one from October 2006
THREE AND A HALF KINDS OF HORROR
I John 4 assures us that perfect love casts out fear. In
Hebrews 2 we read that Jesus frees us from the bondage
of the fear of death. Both of these promises come up
often in my prayers in these perilous times. It may be
edifying to discuss what ARE the fears from which we
need liberation. Christians hear plenty about the supreme
fear of having to face God's wrath for our sins; and about
rather trivial fears, like a fear of social embarrassment.
But there's a vast wilderness of other apprehensions and
anxieties, which often gets less attention than either the
greatest or the smallest fears. The Halloween season
seems like a suitable time to explore this ground a bit.
Lon Chaney Senior, the first superstar of scary movies, once
tried to illustrate the essence of horror thusly: if you saw
a circus clown standing at your front door in the middle of
the night, without explanation of what he was doing there,
it would be creepy. A clown is no more able or likely to
harm you than any other man is, but the situation would
give such a sense of things being out of place as to be
alarming. It would suggest that something was wrong with
the world. Before horror movies degenerated into mere
physical bloodbaths with victims being mowed down like
grass, it was really this sense of things moving outside the
normal that gave us those delightful shudders.
In a way, fears oriented to the state of the universe
are a testimony to our being made in the image of God.
We fear a derangement of the universe because we have
some concept of how the universe SHOULD be--which
means that there is more to us than mere animal desires
for comfort and an animal fear of dying. Folktales have
always been a device to process our fears, both crude
fears and relatively noble fears; and the invention of
motion pictures broadened the folktale audience.
The "big three" of old-time horror cinema were Count
Dracula, bringing the rest of the vampires with him; the
Wolfman, bringing the rest of the werewolves with him;
and Frankenstein, bringing the rest of the mad scientists
with him. Each story type carried a different flavor of
dread, all of them extending beyond characters merely
being afraid of being killed. Each type had a different
way of upsetting the natural order--a different clown
to stand outside your door at midnight.
Doctor Frankenstein stood for man himself upsetting the
natural order, arrogantly presuming that his wisdom can
command all the forces of creation. In the greatest mad-
scientist stories ("Dr. Jekkyl and Mr. Hyde" falls into this
category too), the scientist does not set out _wanting_ to
produce harmful results, but his experiment gets out of
his control. The very _absence_ of supernatural elements
in most mad-scientist stories enhances their brand of
horror; it says that we're on our own, with no grounds to
hope for divine intervention that could remedy our blunders.
A great many recent scientific advances, as they affect
health care and the environment, invite comparison to
the story of Doctor Frankenstein; but people disagree
about _which_ activities of science deserve the reproach,
and this article has no space to sort out their positions.
Dracula stood for something almost exactly opposite
to Frankenstein. Where Doctor Frankenstein probed
_outward_ into the unknown, Dracula embodied evil
breaking _into_ our normal world. He represented a
dark force alien to us, intruding upon us as a predator.
Where Frankenstein caused harm by mistake, Dracula
caused harm very much on purpose, with a gigantic
egotism and selfishness that _should_ be repugnant to
us. I say "should," but increasing numbers of horror
fans wish that they could BE vampires and enjoy the
power to victimize others--an attitude that would have
been unthinkable to classic horror actors like Boris
Karloff, who were highly decent people in real life.
The growing prevalence of movies in which vampires
_cannot_ be driven off by anything associated with
God (the "Blade" movies take this attitude, although
the comic series they came from said that vampires
_could_ be held off with a cross) attests to the wish
of many fans that they could be vampires themselves
...AND be immune to any divine counterforce. This
may be motivated by the wish to escape from having
to answer to God for sin; but the same wish could also
arise from a pessimistic fear that God won't help us
against evil, so that we'd better try to join evil, the
way Saruman sold out to Sauron in "Lord of the Rings."
(The classic horror stories of author H.P. Lovecraft
seem to have been motivated by the same desire to
offer appeasement-worship to evil.)
Okay, so far we've got the fear of our own plans
going disastrously wrong; and we've got the fear of a
diabolical power which so insolently defies God as to
make some of us think our only hope is to placate
it by identifying with it. But for purposes of a fairly
short essay, I think the third archetype of cinematic
horror is actually the most fascinating: the Wolfman.
Larry Talbot, the title character of the film so named,
offers a wealth of material for theological discussion;
but first, let's consider the "mood" of werewolf stories.
Both mad scientists and vampires retain something of
human personality; thus, it could in some cases be
possible to reason with them, to offer them something,
to talk them out of killing and destroying. (Even the
monster created by Frankenstein, in the original book,
was no grunting goon, but an intelligent being, who
would never have become a menace if his inventor
had handled him wisely.) But who can negotiate with
a werewolf while he's in his animal form? Werewolves
(for those who are not wishing to BE them) represent
our fear of chaos, of utter lawlessness. They have no
sophisticated agenda; they merely kill without mercy.
We may be able to destroy them or confine them,
but we can make no treaties with them. If werewolves
really existed, they would be a powerful argument for
a cosmos which has no pity on its inhabitants.
But the werewolf theme can venture in two differing
directions, which is why I titled this essay "Three And
A Half Kinds Of Horror." What I am about to describe
can also occur in mad-scientist or vampire stories, but
I believe it is best understood with werewolves.
The really old folk stories of werewolves or other
"skin-changing" monsters, predating the movies, tend
to depict the monsters as unabashedly evil. They have
complete control over their transformation; they turn
into beasts because they _want_ to, and kill innocent
people because they enjoy it. Several centuries ago
in France, there were some insane men who believed
they were werewolves, and who murdered children
for fun. These men found out too late, courtesy of
angry mobs, that they could be killed _without_ the
use of silver bullets. But speaking of insanity: the
advent of motion pictures roughly coincided with
the advent of Freudian psychiatry. Thus, when the
Wolfman was put on the silver screen, he was at the
same time put on a therapist's couch, so to speak.
Cinematic lycanthropy is a disease, transmitted to
anyone who survives being bitten by a werewolf, not
a premeditated choice to do evil. In "The Wolfman,"
protagonist Larry Talbot is thus bitten, by a werewolf
that is changed all the way to wolf-shape rather than
a still-humanoid shape; the attacking monster fails to
finish him, because he kills it by striking it with a
silver-headed cane; but the curse has been passed to
him. Thereafter, Talbot becomes the Wolfman each
full-moon night, and kills people--entirely contrary
to his good and decent character as a human. When
he is the Wolfman, he loses his own personality, and
afterward he wakes up confused about what happened.
Only gradually does he come to understand. Thus
we have the already-mentioned fear of mindless
violence for all the potential victims; but for Talbot
there is another fear: the loss of humanity, the loss
of reason, the loss of control over his own actions.
All through the movie--and in the sequels, when he
is brought back despite being killed before--the hero
is tragically tormented with guilt.
Larry Talbot's ordeal _could_ have been handled as
a parallel to the Apostle Paul's experience of doing
evil that he didn't really want to do; but the scriptwriter
of "The Wolfman" intentionally dismissed the hope of
grace, as shown by the rhyme the irritating old Gypsy
woman recites: "Even a man who is pure in heart and
says his prayers by night / Can become a wolf when
the wolfbane blooms and the moon is full and bright."
At the end of the series, in a pleasant surprise, Talbot
_does_ get cured of being a werewolf, survives an
encounter with Frankenstein's Monster despite losing
his own super-powers, and even gets the girl. (This
was in the film "House of Dracula;" the Big Three
monsters appeared in each other's movies more than
once in the old Universal Pictures era.) But his cure
is the work of a scientist, not of God.
Working a guilt-obscuring psychotherapeutic view
into horror stories produces an odd spiritual hybrid.
Larry Talbot is dramatically remorseful over all the
murders he commits as the Wolfman, so much so that
it's easy to feel toward him the sympathy we feel
for a criminal who sincerely repents and receives
Jesus as Savior. But at the same time, he's juggling
the implications of his werewolf curse having been
caused without his consent, so that it's not "really"
his fault. Some of us, I'm afraid, would probably like
to be admired for our noble confessions of guilt...but
still go on doing the things we're acting remorseful
about. It's also possible to forget that some truly
uncontrollable urges did not START as uncontrollable
urges. An alcoholic cannot rid himself of the craving
...but there was one point in time when HE CHOSE to
start drinking.
If I were in Larry Talbot's situation, as soon as I
realized what was happening, I would arrange to have
a deep, smooth-sided pit excavated--one from which
even a werewolf could not escape. Then I would have
myself lowered into it shortly before the next full
moon, and make sure there were witnesses watching to
see what happened when the moon rose. With me thus
confined, no innocent person would be in danger, and
efforts could get underway to find a cure for me. If
Larry Talbot had been _entirely_ serious about not
wanting to harm the innocent, he should have done
the same thing. (Indeed, the character of Oz in the
"Buffy the Vampire Slayer" series did come up with
a similar way to keep himself from killing people.)
Without failing to realize that some things _are_ out
of a person's control, we should beware of using a
sense of "uncontrollability" as a blanket excuse for
such sins as we ARE able to restrain ourselves from.
There is a real monster out to get us: the one who
used to be an angel of light, and can still appear to
be one. Satan is in some ways like Dracula; the very
name "Dracula" means approximately "Lesser Devil."
Satan would like some of us to become like mad
scientists, others of us to become like werewolves...
and the rest of us to tremble in helpless fear. But
even some horror movies have acknowledged that there
is a power greater than Satan's; in fact, Bram Stoker's
actual novel "Dracula" testified to the ultimate
superiority of God over all dark powers, and some of
the Hammer Films Dracula movies made it clear that God
intervened to help the good guys. Rather than try to
appease the forces of evil by joining them, we should
be calling on the Name of Jesus Christ, Who crushed
the Serpent under His feet.
-- Joseph Richard Ravitts
I John 4 assures us that perfect love casts out fear. In
Hebrews 2 we read that Jesus frees us from the bondage
of the fear of death. Both of these promises come up
often in my prayers in these perilous times. It may be
edifying to discuss what ARE the fears from which we
need liberation. Christians hear plenty about the supreme
fear of having to face God's wrath for our sins; and about
rather trivial fears, like a fear of social embarrassment.
But there's a vast wilderness of other apprehensions and
anxieties, which often gets less attention than either the
greatest or the smallest fears. The Halloween season
seems like a suitable time to explore this ground a bit.
Lon Chaney Senior, the first superstar of scary movies, once
tried to illustrate the essence of horror thusly: if you saw
a circus clown standing at your front door in the middle of
the night, without explanation of what he was doing there,
it would be creepy. A clown is no more able or likely to
harm you than any other man is, but the situation would
give such a sense of things being out of place as to be
alarming. It would suggest that something was wrong with
the world. Before horror movies degenerated into mere
physical bloodbaths with victims being mowed down like
grass, it was really this sense of things moving outside the
normal that gave us those delightful shudders.
In a way, fears oriented to the state of the universe
are a testimony to our being made in the image of God.
We fear a derangement of the universe because we have
some concept of how the universe SHOULD be--which
means that there is more to us than mere animal desires
for comfort and an animal fear of dying. Folktales have
always been a device to process our fears, both crude
fears and relatively noble fears; and the invention of
motion pictures broadened the folktale audience.
The "big three" of old-time horror cinema were Count
Dracula, bringing the rest of the vampires with him; the
Wolfman, bringing the rest of the werewolves with him;
and Frankenstein, bringing the rest of the mad scientists
with him. Each story type carried a different flavor of
dread, all of them extending beyond characters merely
being afraid of being killed. Each type had a different
way of upsetting the natural order--a different clown
to stand outside your door at midnight.
Doctor Frankenstein stood for man himself upsetting the
natural order, arrogantly presuming that his wisdom can
command all the forces of creation. In the greatest mad-
scientist stories ("Dr. Jekkyl and Mr. Hyde" falls into this
category too), the scientist does not set out _wanting_ to
produce harmful results, but his experiment gets out of
his control. The very _absence_ of supernatural elements
in most mad-scientist stories enhances their brand of
horror; it says that we're on our own, with no grounds to
hope for divine intervention that could remedy our blunders.
A great many recent scientific advances, as they affect
health care and the environment, invite comparison to
the story of Doctor Frankenstein; but people disagree
about _which_ activities of science deserve the reproach,
and this article has no space to sort out their positions.
Dracula stood for something almost exactly opposite
to Frankenstein. Where Doctor Frankenstein probed
_outward_ into the unknown, Dracula embodied evil
breaking _into_ our normal world. He represented a
dark force alien to us, intruding upon us as a predator.
Where Frankenstein caused harm by mistake, Dracula
caused harm very much on purpose, with a gigantic
egotism and selfishness that _should_ be repugnant to
us. I say "should," but increasing numbers of horror
fans wish that they could BE vampires and enjoy the
power to victimize others--an attitude that would have
been unthinkable to classic horror actors like Boris
Karloff, who were highly decent people in real life.
The growing prevalence of movies in which vampires
_cannot_ be driven off by anything associated with
God (the "Blade" movies take this attitude, although
the comic series they came from said that vampires
_could_ be held off with a cross) attests to the wish
of many fans that they could be vampires themselves
...AND be immune to any divine counterforce. This
may be motivated by the wish to escape from having
to answer to God for sin; but the same wish could also
arise from a pessimistic fear that God won't help us
against evil, so that we'd better try to join evil, the
way Saruman sold out to Sauron in "Lord of the Rings."
(The classic horror stories of author H.P. Lovecraft
seem to have been motivated by the same desire to
offer appeasement-worship to evil.)
Okay, so far we've got the fear of our own plans
going disastrously wrong; and we've got the fear of a
diabolical power which so insolently defies God as to
make some of us think our only hope is to placate
it by identifying with it. But for purposes of a fairly
short essay, I think the third archetype of cinematic
horror is actually the most fascinating: the Wolfman.
Larry Talbot, the title character of the film so named,
offers a wealth of material for theological discussion;
but first, let's consider the "mood" of werewolf stories.
Both mad scientists and vampires retain something of
human personality; thus, it could in some cases be
possible to reason with them, to offer them something,
to talk them out of killing and destroying. (Even the
monster created by Frankenstein, in the original book,
was no grunting goon, but an intelligent being, who
would never have become a menace if his inventor
had handled him wisely.) But who can negotiate with
a werewolf while he's in his animal form? Werewolves
(for those who are not wishing to BE them) represent
our fear of chaos, of utter lawlessness. They have no
sophisticated agenda; they merely kill without mercy.
We may be able to destroy them or confine them,
but we can make no treaties with them. If werewolves
really existed, they would be a powerful argument for
a cosmos which has no pity on its inhabitants.
But the werewolf theme can venture in two differing
directions, which is why I titled this essay "Three And
A Half Kinds Of Horror." What I am about to describe
can also occur in mad-scientist or vampire stories, but
I believe it is best understood with werewolves.
The really old folk stories of werewolves or other
"skin-changing" monsters, predating the movies, tend
to depict the monsters as unabashedly evil. They have
complete control over their transformation; they turn
into beasts because they _want_ to, and kill innocent
people because they enjoy it. Several centuries ago
in France, there were some insane men who believed
they were werewolves, and who murdered children
for fun. These men found out too late, courtesy of
angry mobs, that they could be killed _without_ the
use of silver bullets. But speaking of insanity: the
advent of motion pictures roughly coincided with
the advent of Freudian psychiatry. Thus, when the
Wolfman was put on the silver screen, he was at the
same time put on a therapist's couch, so to speak.
Cinematic lycanthropy is a disease, transmitted to
anyone who survives being bitten by a werewolf, not
a premeditated choice to do evil. In "The Wolfman,"
protagonist Larry Talbot is thus bitten, by a werewolf
that is changed all the way to wolf-shape rather than
a still-humanoid shape; the attacking monster fails to
finish him, because he kills it by striking it with a
silver-headed cane; but the curse has been passed to
him. Thereafter, Talbot becomes the Wolfman each
full-moon night, and kills people--entirely contrary
to his good and decent character as a human. When
he is the Wolfman, he loses his own personality, and
afterward he wakes up confused about what happened.
Only gradually does he come to understand. Thus
we have the already-mentioned fear of mindless
violence for all the potential victims; but for Talbot
there is another fear: the loss of humanity, the loss
of reason, the loss of control over his own actions.
All through the movie--and in the sequels, when he
is brought back despite being killed before--the hero
is tragically tormented with guilt.
Larry Talbot's ordeal _could_ have been handled as
a parallel to the Apostle Paul's experience of doing
evil that he didn't really want to do; but the scriptwriter
of "The Wolfman" intentionally dismissed the hope of
grace, as shown by the rhyme the irritating old Gypsy
woman recites: "Even a man who is pure in heart and
says his prayers by night / Can become a wolf when
the wolfbane blooms and the moon is full and bright."
At the end of the series, in a pleasant surprise, Talbot
_does_ get cured of being a werewolf, survives an
encounter with Frankenstein's Monster despite losing
his own super-powers, and even gets the girl. (This
was in the film "House of Dracula;" the Big Three
monsters appeared in each other's movies more than
once in the old Universal Pictures era.) But his cure
is the work of a scientist, not of God.
Working a guilt-obscuring psychotherapeutic view
into horror stories produces an odd spiritual hybrid.
Larry Talbot is dramatically remorseful over all the
murders he commits as the Wolfman, so much so that
it's easy to feel toward him the sympathy we feel
for a criminal who sincerely repents and receives
Jesus as Savior. But at the same time, he's juggling
the implications of his werewolf curse having been
caused without his consent, so that it's not "really"
his fault. Some of us, I'm afraid, would probably like
to be admired for our noble confessions of guilt...but
still go on doing the things we're acting remorseful
about. It's also possible to forget that some truly
uncontrollable urges did not START as uncontrollable
urges. An alcoholic cannot rid himself of the craving
...but there was one point in time when HE CHOSE to
start drinking.
If I were in Larry Talbot's situation, as soon as I
realized what was happening, I would arrange to have
a deep, smooth-sided pit excavated--one from which
even a werewolf could not escape. Then I would have
myself lowered into it shortly before the next full
moon, and make sure there were witnesses watching to
see what happened when the moon rose. With me thus
confined, no innocent person would be in danger, and
efforts could get underway to find a cure for me. If
Larry Talbot had been _entirely_ serious about not
wanting to harm the innocent, he should have done
the same thing. (Indeed, the character of Oz in the
"Buffy the Vampire Slayer" series did come up with
a similar way to keep himself from killing people.)
Without failing to realize that some things _are_ out
of a person's control, we should beware of using a
sense of "uncontrollability" as a blanket excuse for
such sins as we ARE able to restrain ourselves from.
There is a real monster out to get us: the one who
used to be an angel of light, and can still appear to
be one. Satan is in some ways like Dracula; the very
name "Dracula" means approximately "Lesser Devil."
Satan would like some of us to become like mad
scientists, others of us to become like werewolves...
and the rest of us to tremble in helpless fear. But
even some horror movies have acknowledged that there
is a power greater than Satan's; in fact, Bram Stoker's
actual novel "Dracula" testified to the ultimate
superiority of God over all dark powers, and some of
the Hammer Films Dracula movies made it clear that God
intervened to help the good guys. Rather than try to
appease the forces of evil by joining them, we should
be calling on the Name of Jesus Christ, Who crushed
the Serpent under His feet.
-- Joseph Richard Ravitts
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)