Defanging The Atheist Tiger - Volume Seventeen

Audio Lectures by Father Thomas Hopko - The Autonomous Orthodox Metropolia

Written Observation by Fr Symeon Elias  - The Autocephalous Ukrainian Orthodox Church in the U.S.A.

 "Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite." President Dwight Eisenhower's Farewell Address to the Nation, Jan. 17, 1961.

Aug 09, 2010

Darwin and Christianity - Part 16:  Faith and Knowledge, Reason and Revelation

The center of Father Tom's teaching and indeed the Patristic Tradition, which is another way of saying, “The Apostolic Tradition,” which is another way of saying the correct grasp of the Bible, is Christo-Centric, not Theist, or Christo-monistic. This is a wonderful point. Orthodox Christians bore the world talking about the Holy Trinity. However, they do so because any blurring of the truth of the Holy Trinity, although the concept of “God” may be perfectly preserved (even the Muslims have a concept of God), the Ikon of The Father, The Son and the Holy Spirit is distorted. Then Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit are distorted, their reality and power in the perceptions and experience of the victims of the distortion, weakened or destroyed. The gnostic fantasies concerning Jesus Christ in the non-trinitarian cult of Mormonism for instance, destroy who and what Jesus truly is. The heretical anti-christ fantasies concerning Jesus Christ in Islam also destroy who and what Jesus truly is. And of course Christo-monism, (Jesus only) destroys the reality of the God who is wholly-other, transcendent, and the power and work of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, the Lord of all Life.

In this section Father Tom states clearly what is true, that a miracle is not a disruption of nature. It may be a disruption of fallen and corrupted nature, but not nature as it was intended to be. I wish Father Tom had used the word “Dominion” that is the power and authority to govern or control. If memory serves the only mention of dominion was in regards to Adam and God giving humankind dominion over the earth and all her creatures.

In all of the ways that humankind is the “victim” of the material, that is, victim of catastrophes, earthquakes, storms, tornadoes, hurricanes, death by exposure to the elements, death by wild animal, death by disease, even death by peaceful old age, etc. All these things represent the corrupted natural order, not the natural order as it was created to be. In the natural order as it was meant to be, mankind was given dominion to use and care for everything upon the earth. Today, those truly bound to the New Creation in Christ Jesus are allow to exercise dominion over some aspects, some instances, of the corrupted natural order. The expression and operation of this dominion, operated by the faithful is the only reason the world survives and the struggle continues. Remove the faith-filled from this planet for even a moment and this world would announce a reign of peace, and in a very short period of time it would devolve into a place of pure hell with nothing good to recommend it, nothing good to blunt the evil. It is an absolute fact that those who are being restored to the proper nature, the uncorrupted nature, radiate goodness in the lives and community around them, to a degree and level they themselves never realize.

This is not to say that the “appearance of peace” doesn't arise in slave-holding States. It does. That peace is always deception. The old soviet union had almost no officially recognized anarchistic crime. The United States on the other hand in the same period was filled with it. During the 20^th century there were approximately one-hundred fifty thousand murders in the U.S. The order demanded in the Soviet Union would never tolerate this. However, the old Soviet Union slaughtered in excess of fifty million of its own people in its six decades of existence. And this does not include those millions incarcerated in so-called re-education camps, labor camps and isolated cities in harsh climates, cut off from the rest of the world. In those same decades the number of dead at the hands of the states in the U.S., including those executed for murder, numbered around two thousand. During that time the federal government did not have the right to execute, except for treason and there were only three executions for treason.

Let us try to see the enormity of this: 

From 1608 until 1976, the grand total of people executed by authority in the U.S. Was 14,463. And from 1976 until 2010 the number was 1,405, so roughly sixteen thousand in our entire history, including the colonial period. You say, “Oh but what about the American Indian genocide? So, let us add the number of American Indians killed by the settlers and the Federal Army. “Despite the lack of precise data on the Native American population in 1492, in the book 'American Indian Holocaust and Survival', Russell Thornton estimates there were over 2 million American Indians in the US in 1492, and, in the beginning of the 20th century, this population was reduced to only 125,000 – 150,000. In other words, a total of 1.85 million Native Americans were killed between the 15th and the 19th centuries"  “nearly 500,000 killed during each century.” This is a wildly radical number, since over that period of time there was massive assimilation of American Indian populations into the “white, Hispanic and black American communities. So the reduction of Indian population wasn't all by murder. But let us take Thorton's figure 1.85 million from 1608 A.D. -1900AD. Let us assume that the sixteen thousand executions are included in that number. Four centuries = 462,500 per century, which equals 46,250 per decade. Now as I say, I think this figure is grossly exaggerated, but let us compare that grossly exaggerated number to the number killed in each decade in the old Soviet Union. The conservative estimate is fifty-five million in six decades. That equals 9,166,666 per decade. That means that even including the numbers from the American Indian genocide, the U.S. Governments, State and Federal, killed .0005 percent the number of people killed by the Atheist – Evolutionists of the Soviet Union in the same period. We didn't kill one percent as many, or a quarter percent as many, but five ten-thousandth of one percent as many. 

The ONLY reason this is so, is because of the numbers of people present in our society still holding morality derived from a belief in a higher power, a belief in a paradigm where one is judged by their “actions” in the flesh, call it karma, or the God who is a person and a judge.

The last 70 years in particular have seen an assault on this history by the “secular humanists.” And indeed an assault on the culture, religions and faith that made this history possible. The Secular Humanists in fact operate from a paradigm that is post human, viewing humans who are not productive as sub-human and not worthy of food. Now I want to be very careful, since millions have been sacrificed upon the evolutionist idea that some are “sub-human” not worthy of the dignity of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness, that is the innate right of Humans. If we state that the human as we know him is corrupted, removed from the reality of his “true nature” or only holding part of that reality as is the Orthodox Christian understanding (that is what the “fall of mankind” teaches) then we are corrupted, a fallen humanity. Even in this state we are not sub-human, but wounded humans, wounded as it were by sin and relegated to suffer mortality, just as the beasts. But through all of time, humans via the power of cognition have understood themselves to be, something more than beasts. Humans innately have understood that they hold powers of perception of the spiritual world and indeed are part of that spiritual world via the spirit that animates the dust that is their physical body. When you remove that spiritual reality from the definition of what it is to be human, you make of the human creature something that is sub-human, one could say even post-human, not human at all in the true sense. When humans remove that spiritual understanding of themselves humans become post-human, sub-human, non-human, something certainly that is less than mere wounded and corrupt humanity. And ultimately that is the boundary of the argument between evolutionists and Orthodox Christians. Are we merely matter, a slave to biology and D.N.A. - or are we something more? Just on the history stated above, which paradigm holds better possibility for the survival of humankind?

If every human killed by U.S. Forces in her wars during the same Soviet period were added to the mix, and you decided to count all of those deaths as “unjust” and “murder” and this includes the United States' use of two Atomic Bombs in World War II, the number would increase to less than five million, including our own losses. If we do the math and add it to the numbers killed each decade in the same period (the previous state and federal average) we would have a grand total of roughly 5.5 million. Were we to compare that to the numbers unjustly killed by the Soviet state it would be one percent. The reason I am pointing this out is that the tens of millions killed by Atheist-Darwinists are written off as having nothing to do with either atheism or Darwinism and this is NOT the fact. Further, the American educational establishment has been on a campaign to paint OUR history as evil and violent, as if OUR country is an aggressor and as if our Judeo-Christian culture is genocidal! The premise is purely insane, and we tolerate it. We dutifully turn our children over to them to be indoctrinated into this lying paradigm.

We cannot treat Darwinism and Evolutionism in general (when it has moved from legitimate science, to the realm of ideology) as “natural science."  I know that Father Tom was being kind, trying to spark the mind of some so indoctrinated. Yet, he has treated "natural science" as a whole, as legitimate throughout these “musings” as he calls them. Natural science has its place, and we should learn everything we possibly can about the nature of Being, all aspects of it, as Father Tom has suggested. We should learn everything we possibly can about the nature of Being, all aspects of it, even as Michael Cremo has suggested from his Hindu perspective, this is right. But we have to admit, and the atheistic Darwinists have to own up to their own history and the fact that their science, though holding many true facts, has degenerated into anti-human ideology. It is a post-human ideology, which is deadly to the innate rights of the human, and deadly to the survival of the species. In short one cannot be anti-God, at least anti-the true Christian God and not be anti-human as well. History tells us and “secular humanism” has demonstrated this well.

Often we hear the common refrain that “religion” is the most deadly force on earth, and some Christians try to argue against this truth. It is a losing argument. When one understands that religion is an ideology, then religion is indeed deadly. The first time I encountered the phrase, "the sickness of religion" is was so relieved that someone else "got it." Then I was deeply humbled to realize that I only partly understood the reality of religious sickness. 

An ideology requires faith and a certain form of worship reflected in action taken on the tenants of the ideology. I stands to reason the the fellow who co-wrote the Darwin's paper to the scientific establishment quickly became a socialist, and suggested the confiscation of all land by the Government. Such action taken by atheistic-Darwinists has cost lives in excess of 150 million people in the 20^th century alone. By comparison, if you count the numbers of people killed by Christianity for the last two thousand years, the number would be less than one half million and we would be including all the numbers killed in the crusades, in the inquisitions, in the wars of Christians against Christians, burned as witches, burned as heretics, in the purging of the old believers and sectarians in Russia, (prior to the Russian revolution) and the numbers killed by Jesuit Missionaries, like the persecution of the Mar-Thoma Christians in India, etc. (We can count the numbers who perished in Central and South America because of disease spread by the Spanish or some of the conquest of tyrants under a false flag.)  

Let us do the math. That half million divided by twenty centuries would be twenty-five thousand per century. So during the Soviet era, the atheistic-Darwinists slaughtered in Russia - 55 million, in China - 124 million, in Cambodia - 2 million, in Germany - 8 million, this is not the complete list. This means that in the same period Christians of all stripes killed .0008% of that number, that is eight ten thousandth of ONE percent as many.  Despite these facts, our children are taught by the Darwinist ideological establishment that has taken hold of our academy that Christianity is dangerous, a killing monster, conversely that secular humanism is “humane.” When in fact history teaches something quite the opposite. 

I doubt that Father Tom would argue with anything I've stated. I even doubt that he would take exception to my criticism that his talk has been based upon the paradigm of “natural science” as a legitimate inquiry (a premise of which I totally agree) vs Orthodox Christianity. He has certainly done this. Natural science IS a legitimate inquiry, and our discussion with “Science” has to be between True Science and True Christianity. He has stated firmly that it cannot be a discussion between Science and some of the “christianities” that have turned into “ideologies.” And in my gut I know he would not disagree with the idea that it also cannot be a discussion between True Christianity and Natural Science, where Natural Science has turned into ideology. He has not focused on the bogus science, or the politicization of science, only on the bogus theologies. So at least for my own understanding, I think the inclusion of the expose' of bogus science, and the politicization of science, which has been my theme throughout is complimentary and not adversary to his overall goal in these talks.  

Take a look at what the Gay Lobby brought to Fort Bragg. Try watching this and see if Darwinism is "science" or "ideology"? 

The Atheist Darwinist is celebrated on an American Military Base, and following is a Catholic Priest being arrested at a "Catholic University" for protesting the killing of the unborn.



Darwinism is the seed of the paganism that has already cost the lives of tens of million of American Citizens. If you murder a woman's child in her womb you will be tried for murder, because under that circumstance that child is recognized as a citizen, due all civil and constitution rights, the right to life of that child in the womb is recognized. If the murderer is the mother, all is legal. Darwinism is the seed of this paganism. That child in the womb isn't a child of God with inalienable rights, it is a mass of biological matter who potential may be thwarted.  



Some young people give us old folks hope.