Chapter Eight
THE CREATOR DESTROYED
The Creator is now dead in the United States of America. All that exists now is a symbol, a concept: the fact has been destroyed. Anyone who doesn't believe that statement simply does not understand the meaning of events that have taken place in this nation in the last twenty-five years. The evidence is all around us, but nobody--myself included--wants to see the evidence or understand what it means to our present system of government.
I only saw it because I was forced to see it. Forced by the same force that keeps me pecking away at this keyboard. I cannot force you to see it; in fact nobody can force you to see it. But since this is your nation, I had to try.
For it is our nation. Like Woody Guthrie said, "This land is your land; this land is my land." The Creator is destroyed because without really thinking about it much we quit taking the Creator very seriously. All of us. If you feel yourself stiffening in righteous indignation that anyone would suggest you do not take the Creator seriously, you are precisely the person I am talking about. You, me--all of us quit taking the Creator seriously. Like Campbell said, we started treating the Creator like a myth, like a symbol we made up that exists only in our minds.
All one has to do is survey popular books written on American history, or examine the history textbooks, the sociology textbooks, the political science textbooks that have been used in public schools to teach the last two generations of United States citizens and we begin to understand how the idea of the Creator was destroyed in the public sphere of influence. Nowhere is an explanation like the one I have outlined concerning the role and the significance of the idea of the Creator in our system of government to be found. Whether the text be designed for first grade through graduate school, or designed for consumption by the general public, an investigation produces the same results: virtually no book used in public schools or available to the general public has identified the foundational nature of the idea of the Creator in this nation.
Although literally thousands of examples have been produced in the last few decades, two examples will suffice to demonstrate how the role of the Creator has been eliminated from the thought process of the citizens of the United States. World Book Encyclopedia's 1985 edition carries three full pages about the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration is presented in its entirety and under each paragraph World Book editors insert subtext that is supposed to summarize the meaning of each paragraph in the Declaration. Under the paragraph that contains the words, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness--" the editors tell us, "The signers of the Declaration believed it was obvious that 'all men' are created equal and have rights that cannot be taken away. By 'all men' they meant people of every race and both sexes. The rights to 'Life' included the right to defend oneself against physical attack and unjust government. The right to 'Liberty' included the right to criticize the government, to worship freely, and to form a government that guarantees liberty. The 'pursuit of Happiness' meant the right to own property and to have it safeguarded. It also meant the right to strive for the good of all people, not only for one's personal happiness."
Did you notice anything unexpected? Read it again. Not a word was written about the fact that all of the rights mentioned in the Declaration were available to 'all men' because they had been endowed by the Creator. This in an article that has as its ostensible purpose the explanation of the meaning of the text! To omit the idea of the Creator from the reasoning of the paragraph is to alter the meaning of the paragraph, leaving the reader utterly misinformed concerning the message the Founders of the United States of America intended to convey to posterity. Is it not exceedingly strange that the authoritative source for general information in this society, Encyclopedias, omit what is clearly the self-evident point of the Declaration of Independence? Is it not even stranger that network news has failed to find the omission newsworthy?
The second example is taken from a popular book published in 1988 entitled, Patriots: the Men who Started the American Revolution. A. J. Langguth tells us why he wrote the book, "The book would be meant for readers who knew that Washington had crossed the Delaware but didn't know why; that Benedict Arnold had betrayed his country; but didn't know how." In other words, Langguth is talking to us average Joe's and Jane's. In a book concerned with "why" and "how", we would expect to have an extensive analysis of the role the idea of the Creator had played in the thinking of the men who signed the Declaration of Independence. In the chapter entitled, Independence, 1776, even though Langguth offers much information about virtually every other idea contained in the Declaration, he says nothing--not a thing--about any role played by the idea of the Creator.
Helpful insight into why Langguth could have made such an omission is found at the end of that same chapter. Langguth tells us, "When members of the Congress came to Jefferson's stirring conclusion, (in their debate over the proposed Declaration) a majority thought it (the conclusion) should include one last appeal to the power even greater than George III. Growing up among the abuses of the official church of Virginia had bred in Jefferson a hostility to state religions, and any cant came hard to him. But some of the men in the Congress were devout, and some were politicians who knew that a document intended as propaganda would be stronger with an allusion to God, and they added one. They did not, however, meddle with Jefferson's last oath, more solemn than anything they might devise: 'And for support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor."
Two points jump out: (1) Langguth defined the Declaration as "a document intended as propaganda" (at first glance such a conclusion seems reasonable, but closer inspection reveals that Langguth is making a value judgement about the character of the men signing the Declaration: he is implying that these men were coldly calculating pragmatic politicians who invested little or no sincere conviction in the words they signed. Langguth's judgement might apply to modern politicians but to imply the Founders were men of that caliber is to presume that which few historians have implied, and no one contemporaneous with the Founders would have dared say to their face without being prepared to fight to the death); and (2) Langguth implied that at least some of the delegates at the Second Continental Congress held the idea of God to be nothing more than a propaganda technique. Voltaire once said, "History is a joke the living play on the dead." Writers like Langguth, sheltered from the actual people they write about, feel free to allow their minds to roam freely, unfettered by considerations of anything so mundane as how the people being written about would react if Langguth spoke his words to their face. Were Langguth to be transmitted through time and brought into the presence of the men who signed the Declaration, and there, to their face, given the opportunity to tell them that they intended the Declaration to be a propaganda device and that their attitude toward the idea of the Creator was not really self-evident truth, but nothing more that a propaganda technique devised by manipulative politicians, Langguth self-interest would have silenced him. He would not have opened his mouth. The men who signed their names to the Declaration of Independence were men who did not tolerate well having their honor questioned. In the off-chance that Langguth would actually have the courage to offer his analysis to the face of the Founder's, Langguth would have faced one of two consequences: if the Founders understood Langguth to be a gentleman, one of the signers would have politely asked Langguth to meet him at sunrise for some very serious business; if they did not perceive Langguth to be a gentleman, Langguth would have been caned on the spot. Duels and caning had occurred for less. To think that George Washington or Thomas Jefferson or Roger Sherman or Samuel Adams would have stood still as A. J. Langguth explained to them that they were cunning manipulators who used the idea of God as a propaganda device is to demonstrate that the writer either has no real insight into the characters of the people he writes about, or is attempting to deceive his readers about their character.
But as a contemporary writer cloistered far from any actual contact with the real, breathing people about whom he wrote, Langguth is free to denigrate the character of the Founding Fathers of the United States of America without fear that the men he wrote about would hold him accountable. And in his freedom, Langguth is able to participate in the creation of a new American myth, a myth where the Founder's were manipulative, deceitful propagandists throwing around concepts like the Creator as sops to an unlearned and easily manipulated popular hypocrites. Notice I said "we." One of the reasons you might notice an occasional note of frustration and chagrin as you read these words is because this writer understands full well that the Revolution being discussed occurred because this writer failed to fulfill his primary responsibility as a United States citizen and as a person who says he believes in the Creator. But I was not alone.
Many writers and speakers have tried to alert the public to the fact that something horribly ominous was happening in the United States of America over the last few decades since the Second World War. But attempts to hold onto the ideas upon which this nation was founded have been ineffectual, utterly impotent to halt the Revolution, and utterly incapable of leading a Reconstruction. In fact, the attempts to set the record straight about the role the idea of the Creator was designed to play in the government of the United States have proven themselves to be actually counter-productive.
While it is easy to understand how people who have rejected the reality of the Creator could have decided to ignore the fact that the authority of the United States government was erected upon an idea about the Will of the Creator, it is eerily ironic but true that the people who would be supposed to have the greatest vested interest in maintaining the idea of god in this nation--religious leaders and teachers--have done at least as much as secular teachers to eliminate the idea of the Creator from serious consideration as a necessary and foundational aspect of government thought. Not only did religious leaders and teachers, whatever their denominational affiliation, fail to accurately define the ideas which formed the consensus participated in by the Founders of the United States of America, but the explanations and attitudes they did offer resulted in a hardening of public opinion toward the influence of the idea of the Creator in government decisions.
At first glance it would appear that religious people, especially Christians, have done everything in their power to hold on to the idea of God. From pulpits and pews all across the nation countless prayers have been issued heavenward beseeching help for what is perceived to be a godless nation. All the books found in parochial or church schools that have proliferated throughout the nation in the last twenty years has tried to explain everything in the universe in terms of its relation to the idea of god. But those textbooks and the teachers who taught from them had little effect on public opinion because only a small minority of citizens was educated in those schools, and those who were educated were not taught an accurate explanation of the role the idea of the Creator was to play in this nation.
Christians have not been oblivious to what was going on. One Christian writer after another has documented the fundamental changes that have occurred in this nation since the Second World War. Before the War a firm Christian consensus ruled this nation, a consensus that had ruled with few interruptions for one hundred and fifty years. Tim LaHaye in his book, Faith of Our Founding Fathers, summarizes this consensus: "When they (political leaders) spoke of religion they meant the Christian religion. When they mentioned morality it was what we know as the Judeo-Christian moral code. When they referred to education they meant learning from a God-centered base that made ample use of the Bible. Christianity was welcome in the schools and textbooks in 1787 and for one hundred years thereafter. The Christian consensus was so strong when this nation was founded that it is no wonder that many erroneously call this 'a Christian nation.' Nowhere is that Christian consensus more prevalent than in the field of law..."
The reason Tim LaHaye wrote his book, the reason literally hundreds of Christian leaders have written books bemoaning the current political situation in the United States of America, is because every Christian in the United States of America understands clearly that the Christian consensus has collapsed. In the place of the old Christian consensus, a new consensus rules this land. While the new consensus is difficult to define, its consequences are easy to see. Public institutions are now out-of-bounds for the rituals of religion: no school prayer, no manger scenes, no proselytizing on public property. Public and private Rights are being redefined in accordance with the new consensus in ways that leave many Christians gasping for breath as if oxygen was being sucked out of the atmosphere.
Thoughtful Christians have gone through tons of ink trying to explain what went wrong. To date, none of the learned teachers has effectively brought our present context into clear focus. This is not surprising since an accurate evaluation would require the Christian leaders to face the fact that Christians themselves are primarily responsible for the destruction of the idea of the Creator that opened the door to the New American Revolution. Christian leaders who publicly communicated such an idea would not long remain Christian leaders.
The New Revolution begins to come into perspective when we realize that people who believe in the idea of the Creator have effectively removed themselves from the ability to influence those outside their sphere of influence. People who believe in the Creator for years have communicated among themselves with the rest of the world, if they listened at all, listening in sometimes amused, sometimes hostile, detachment. This inability to influence those outside their sphere of influence allowed another sphere of influence to be created in the United States of America. This sphere of influence can be defined as a "public" as opposed to a pro-Creator sphere of influence. Within the "public" sphere operate all the communication media of the governmental and "publicly" held corporations. From this "public" sphere of influence has come an analysis of reality that effectively eliminated the idea of the Creator from the "public" sphere of life in the United States of America, an analysis of reality that has its roots in the mind of Joseph Campbell.
The response of the Christian community in the United States provided the greatest impetus for the erosion of the idea of the Creator because the Christian response convinced the great majority of citizens that Christians had a hidden agenda. As religious leaders, especially Christian leaders, reacted to the redefinition of the relationship between Church and State, the general public perceived the response of the Christian community as evidence that the Church still believes it has the Right to define God, and the will of God, for the citizens of this nation. People who do not belong to a prevailing Christian consensus have always known, but few Christians in the majority have ever understood, that the Founders of this nation designed the government with the understanding in mind that some type of Christian consensus would constitute the ruling majority opinion in the United States for the foreseeable future and DESIGNED THE GOVERNMENT TO PREVENT THE CHRISTIAN CONSENSUS FROM ABROGATING THE RIGHTS OF INDIVIDUALS IN THIS NATION.
It was clear to the Founders that the new nation would be a Christian nation because the great majority of citizens were Christians. But the Founders did not trust Christians. In fact, this nation came into being at a time when virtually no one, not even Christians, trusted Christians.
Christians throughout history have tended to seize the reins of civil government in order to use the power of the sword to accomplish what the Christians in power defined as the will of God. The Founders of the United States of America lived at a time in history when centuries of horrific bloody warfare had recently concluded. In virtually all of those wars, one group of Christians used the power of the State, the power of the sword, to impose their comprehensive definition of the will of god on another group of Christians who held a different definition. The Founders of the United States of America were in agreement that they would do everything in their power to prevent a similar scenario from occurring in this nation.
For this reason they defined the plan of the Creator, which in turn defined the purpose of this government, in the broadest general terms; terms so broad that anyone who actually believed there was a Creator out-there with a will and plan of his own, and who agreed with the plan as defined by the Founders, could be a citizen in good standing in the United States of America. The idea about the Creator defined by the Founders of this nation was a concept with which Christians could agree, but the idea was so broad and the plan so vague that virtually any religious person on earth who did not support the Doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings could in good conscience support the ideas upon which this nation was built. The United States of America was a Christian nation, and a Jewish Nation, and a Deist nation, and a Muslim nation, and a nation embracing every religion on earth whose Creator agreed with the purpose of government defined in the Declaration of Independence.
The plan of the Creator defined by the Founding Fathers included limits beyond which government authority could not be allowed to go. Christians have always had a difficult time communicating to the world that they understood that concept.
The response of a huge portion of the vocal Christian community to the change in the ruling consensus in the United States since the Second World War has hardened public opinion to the idea of the Creator because the Christians have presumed that everyone in this nation is obligated to believe in the Christian definition of God. While few Christian leaders have candidly stated the issue in precisely those terms, everything from body language to inference has made it clear to the general public that Christians find tolerance intolerable.
The problem with that Christian response is it is patently false. Christians might be obligated to believe in the Christian definition of God and God's will, but United States citizens are not so obligated. According to the authority that defines Right and Wrong for the citizens of the United States of America--the Constitution founded on the Principles defined in the Declaration of Independence--a citizen of this country is obligated to believe only what those documents define about the Creator and the plan of the Creator. Anything believed beyond that is a matter of individual liberty that cannot be presumed to be an obligation of any citizen of this nation.
The First Amendment to the Constitution was designed to ensure that no single Christian Consensus could usurp the power of the State and use it to force people to agree with their definition of the plan of God. The Idea of the Creator as it was defined in the Declaration of Independence gives every citizen of this nation the Right to pursue God without restraint or punitive conditioning from any majority or individual.
Christians, instead of loyally upholding the plan of God defined by the Founders and building upon that foundation any further truths they might have to offer mankind about the plan of God, have covered the foundational idea of the Creator with layer upon layer of ideas about god that are utterly beside the point. By attempting to ram their definition of God's will down the public's throat, Christians created a backlash against the idea of the Creator, making it much easier for the idea of the Creator to be removed from the thought process of millions of people in this nation--from legal authorities, government officials, and the politicians who represent them. In so doing, Christians have defeated their own purpose of leading people to Christ. Christians have failed to grasp the fact that they cannot lead anyone to Jesus, any more readily than Muslims can lead people to Mohammed, unless people first believe there is a Creator out there with a mind and a will of his/her own.
The failure of those who believe in the Creator to accurately explain the Principles upon which this government was built meant that nobody had access to an actual understanding of the system of government intended to rule in the United States of America. Those who had consciously abandoned the idea of the Creator were given a field day to redefine reality for the American people. And they did not hesitate to take that opportunity.
Not only did the Christian community fail to accurately define the government of the United States, what they did say confused people about the plan of the Creator. The message the Christian community has sent to the world as the world moved closer to Armageddon has made the Creator appear to be unconcerned about the plight of the world. A Newsweek article of March 18, 1991 reviewed the recent spate of Christian books on Biblical prophesy written in the wake of the Gulf War. The article noted, "...evangelical Christian publishers have rushed more than a dozen prophesy volumes into print, and at least a dozen more are on the way." The caption beneath a picture of books written by Pat Robertson and John F. Walvoord read, "Gleeful Tomes: Welcoming the apocalypse".
The Newsweek article is only one example of reams of easily accessible evidence to the fact that Christians have given the public in the United States of America and other developed nations the impression that Christians are individuals who take a perverse pleasure in the disintegration of modern life. The article reports, "The self-anointed prophets are gleeful about their gloomy tidings (the coming of Armageddon). One reason is theological: their predictions rest on the belief that the Bible is literally true in what it says about the end of the world as well as about its genesis. Thus any event that seems to confirm the fundamentalists' interpretation of the last days is welcomed as proof of Biblical authority. But Christians like Walvoord and Robertson have another reason as well. The next great event on their end-timetable is 'the rapture,' in which all true believers like themselves will be instantly plucked up into heaven--leaving apostate Christians and other unbelievers to perish at the hands of an avenging Jesus. 'We will not be here for Armageddon,' boasts a confident Jerry Falwell..."
Anyone who cannot sense the negative impact on non-Christians of such an attitude being expressed by Christians is probably a follower of Falwell, Robertson, Walfoord, Graham or any of the hundreds of other Christian leaders who have been busy communicating the Christian consensus to non-Christians around the globe. The Christian doctrine of the rapture and the sense of joyful expectation the doctrine engenders in those who believe it seems to totally overlook the fact that, if the doctrine is true, those good Christians are going to be leaving behind BILLIONS of men, women and children burned to a crisp in the fires of the Tribulation.
Non-Christians naturally see the glee of Christian believers as evidence that the Christians have all along despised those who will be left behind. What else could explain Christians who exhibit smug satisfaction at the prospect of world-wide apocalypse? Christian selfishness and egocentrism? Either answer suffices to explain the public's rejection of the Christian message and the God they represent.
At the very core of the reason the idea of the Creator has been destroyed in the United States of America is the fact that Christians have convinced non-Christians that the God Christians believe in is a God who cares only about Christians. That is not the idea of the Creator defined in the Declaration of Independence. The Creator defined there endowed all men with inalienable Rights, Rights that could never be removed by any Body on earth, Rights that would never be removed even by the Creator, because the Creator had willed those Rights to be inalienable. That Creator cared about everybody; not just Christians. The message from present day Christians does not affirm that fact.
But the fatal blow to the factual validity of the idea of the Creator in the United States of America came through the Christian community's response to legalized abortion.
ROE V. WADE
Prior to 1973, government's decisions on the role of the Creator in the United States were ambiguous. But it was clear that the historic role the idea of the Creator had played in the United States government decisions was being eroded. A series of legal decisions was handed down that widened the wall between Church and State erected in the First Amendment to the Constitution. Prayer in public schools was ruled to be illegal, public display of religious symbols were constrained, public officials were inhibited free exercise of personal religious observations on public property. Nowhere though was there a decision that directly required the removal of the idea of the Creator from the thought process of American citizens.
In 1973 that changed. For the first time in the history of the United States of America, the role of the will of the Creator was omitted as a factor in the thought process leading to decisions that govern this nation. In its decision in the case called Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court of the United States of America decreed that the idea of the will of the Creator was to have no role in this nation. In a situation where the will of the Creator is most clearly seen to operate, the creation of life, the Supreme Court omitted any reference to the role of the Creator entirely and ruled that the will of the woman is to be the decisive will in any decision concerning whether the creature in the womb of the woman is to live or die.
In effect, a new definition of where rights come from was expressed by the Supreme Court. Instead of the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness being an endowment from the Creator, rights were decreed by the Supreme Court to belong to the individual because they were citizens of the United States of America. In Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court removed the structure of government in the United States from the foundation that rested on the ideas expressed in the Declaration of Independence be a legal scholar to know that legalized abortion was justified by declaring a woman had a Constitutional Right to Privacy that allowed her to be the sole Judge concerning what was to happen to the contents of her womb up until the seventh month of pregnancy.
That decision carried a logic that is clear to anyone who looks. In order for the woman's right to prevail, there could be no other Being who had a prior or superior claim to the contents of the womb.
Historically, in Western Civilization, a consensus has existed among people who held a concept of God that God was nothing if not the Creator. By that it was commonly understood to mean that God created people. Inherent in the ideas outlined in the Declaration of Independence is the notion that people have been ordained with unalienable rights because God created those people to have rights. Clearly, the explanation of reality defined in the Declaration of Independence was omitted in the reasoning process of the Judges who created legalized abortion. In Roe v. Wade the question of the role of the Creator was never raised. Had the question been raised, the question would have presupposed the possibility that such a Creator might actually be out there. The possibility of the presence of the Creator would have carried unavoidable logical consequences that would have forced the authorities to grant that if there is a Creator out there whose will creates an unborn child, there is One, other than the mother, who has a prior and superior claim to the contents of the womb. The learned Justices on the Supreme Court of the United States of America would have been forced to admit that the mother's right to privacy could hardly be judged to be superior to the Creator's right to see the creature created by the Creator born unharmed into the world.
But in the place of the logic defined in the Declaration of Independence, a New Logic was ordained by the Legal Authorities in the United States of America. No longer was the authority of government decisions to rest on their agreement with the will of the Creator. Instead, the New Revolution rested on the self-proclaimed Right of the governing authorities to endow people with Rights independent of any consideration of the role of the Creator in that process.
The argument over legalized abortion in the United States is a closed question today. Opponents and advocates of legalized abortion occupy camps containing virtually every citizen in this nation in one or the other camps. And no real communication occurs between camps.
The question of legalized abortion has become a closed issue in the United States because an underlying question has never been raised, much less understood. The question is: What is the role of the Creator in the affairs of the United States of America? The reason that the abortion issue has hardened into what appear to be irreconcilable differences is because both sides justify their positions on the basis of assumptions they hold concerning the nature and type of government that exists in the United States of America; and those assumptions have never seen the light of day, have never been exposed to the scrutiny of common sense. Without such exposure, and without the resulting scrutiny, resolution of this issue can come only under the direst circumstances.
What has abortion got to do with the will of the Creator? Why is this issue a hinge upon which the door of the thing called nation will swing, either opening onto a thriving and free New World Order, or closing, shutting mankind off from the source of life itself? Legalized abortion is a test case wherein the will of the people define what they believe to constitute the will of God. In this one issue, all the questions of life and death, right and wrong, good and evil are contained in microcosm. The answer that people give defines what they mean by the word "God".
Here's why: the Creator is, by definition, whatever it is that creates and controls life. The Creator is the Cause of life. Even in situations where an individual has dismissed every existing concept of god, when that individual tries to define reality in terms of cause and effect, that which is seen as cause is the individual's operative definition of god. No matter how hard the individual tries to escape it, the fact remains that the referent for the word "cause" and the referent for the word "god" or in all cases the same referent. The very idea of cause and effect cannot be sustained without relying on a fundamental connection between cause and a controlling god. Since reason itself relies on cause and effect as that which constitutes reason, all explanations of how things are connected, or how things should be connected, are explanations of one's understanding of god.
With Roe v. Wade, the idea of an out-there-somewhere Creator with a Will and a Plan of His own, like the one defined by the Founding Fathers of the United States, has been removed totally from the reasoning process of the Supreme Authorities in this nation, and in its place another idea of the creator was imposed, an idea that held forth the will of the legal authorities of the people as the creator of Rights and Life itself. The fact that the great majority of citizens in this nation are comfortable with that removal proves that there has been a New American Revolution. United States citizens now live in a New America peopled by New Americans where the Authorities reason from New Principles that are designed to lead to a New World Order, a New World Order that no longer contains the idea of an out-there-somewhere Creator who gave Rights to people as an inalienable gift.
Is it true that in Roe v. Wade the idea of the will of God as defined by the Founding Fathers in the Declaration of Independence was removed from the reasoning process of the authorities? One does not have to be a legal scholar to know that legalized abortion was justified by declaring a woman had a Constitutional Right to Privacy that allowed her to be the sole Judge concerning what was to happen to the contents of her womb up until the seventh month of pregnancy.
That decision carried a logic that is clear to anyone who looks. In order for the woman's right to prevail, there could be no other Being who had a prior or superior claim to the contents of the womb.
Historically, in Western Civilization, a consensus has existed among people who held a concept of God that God was nothing if not the Creator. By that it was commonly understood to mean that God created people. Inherent in the ideas outlined in the Declaration of Independence is the notion that people have been ordained with unalienable rights because God created those people to have rights. Clearly, the explanation of reality defined in the Declaration of Independence was omitted in the reasoning process of the Judges who created legalized abortion. In Roe v. Wade the question of the role of the Creator was never raised. Had the question been raised, the question would have presupposed the possibility that such a Creator might actually be out there. The possibility of the presence of the Creator would have carried unavoidable logical consequences that would have forced the authorities to grant that if there is a Creator out there whose will creates an unborn child, there is One, other than the mother, who has a prior and superior claim to the contents of the womb. The learned Justices on the Supreme Court of the United States of America would have been forced to admit that the mother's right to privacy could hardly be judged to be superior to the Creator's right to see the creature created by the Creator born unharmed into the world.
But in the place of the logic defined in the Declaration of Independence, a New Logic was ordained by the Legal Authorities in the United States of America. According to their Logic, it is no longer incumbent upon the citizens of this nation to presuppose the existence of a Creator like the One presupposed by George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Samuel Adams, Patrick Henry, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, or any other of your forefathers and mothers who actually lived their lives and defined their reasons for living in light of what they held to be self-evident truths about the Creator. According to the creators of the New Revolution, logic and reason can begin with New Self-Evident Truths; among these are that United States authorities or United States citizens no longer have to include the idea of the Will of the Creator in their explanations of reality.
How did Christians react to this most direct frontal attack ever launched on the idea of the Creator in the history of the United States of America? With the exception of a motley crew of rag-tag resisters, the huge majority of the tens of millions of Christians in the United States of America stood by and let it happen, reacting if they reacted at all, as if they had encountered just another political disagreement. Nowhere was the cry of Revolution raised. Nowhere was it trumpeted that the Master of the Universe was being attacked by the government of the United States of America, by we the people of the United States of America. Business went on as usual.
And from the response of the Christian community the world learned that, even to Christians, the Creator is just an idea, a concept that Christians believe as if it were fact. In the response to legalized abortion, Christians verified for the world Joseph Campbell's teaching about the god-games people play. Christians verified that the Creator is a concept we treat as if it were true, as if there was actually a Being out there whose Will and Plan the government of the United States of America was created to fulfill. But when the time came to demonstrate we knew for a fact the Creator was out there, Christians like everyone else in the world went about their business as usual.
There are tens of millions of Christians in the United States of America who would be utterly appalled if they read the indictment I have just leveled. Nowhere in their consciousness is there any sense of having failed to defend the Creator in the greatest and most direct assault ever launched in the course of history against the idea of the Creator.
There is a sense in which Christians are not guilty: children who have not had the opportunity to learn are not really responsible when they fail to do what an well-instructed adult would do. Christians have no consciousness of guilt because they were totally unequipped by the Founders of the United States to know how to respond to such an attack on the idea of the Creator. Two hundred years of American history have demonstrated that the Founders of the United States, while not perfect, were master builders: the fact that the government they founded has survived this long attests to that. But we could be on the verge of realizing they erred gravely. The Founders saw to it that the ideas defined in the Constitution of the United States were clearly to be understood to be Law which each citizen of the United States of America disobeys under dire penalties, but the Principles defined in the Declaration of Independence are not protected by legal restraints against offenders. The failure of the Founders to include in the Constitution a device to protect the Principles defined in the Declaration of Independence could one day be seen by historians to be the fatal error of the Founders of the government of the United States of America.
The principles upon which the foundation of the United States originally rested defined how the Creator intended for Rights to be understood by all mankind. Rights were an inalienable gift from the Creator to "all men." Because of this "all men" were created equal. Upon that foundation, and that foundation alone, the powers of the government of the United States were organized. Given the foundational nature of the idea of the Creator, how could the Founders have failed to design a mechanism to protect it?
While various historians have had conflicting views on the edifice constructed by the Founders of the government of the United States, all have agreed they were brilliant men. But brilliance has its limitations. The Founders designed the government of the United States to stand under every conceivable attack. The tripartite separation of the powers of government and the system of checks and balances built into the Constitution made it impossible for any monarch justified by the Doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings to legally gain control of the government. And the Amendment process built into the Constitution allowed changes in the Constitutional structure to be made according to law. But nowhere was there any indication that the Founders conceived of any possible threat to the Principles defined in the Declaration of Independence. To them, it was simply inconceivable that a time in history would ever arise when reasonable people would seriously question the existence of a Creator like the One defined in the Declaration of Independence, a Being upon whom all mankind were dependent for life. While the Founders were brilliant men, nothing in history could have prepared them to consider that there might actually come a time on earth when we, the people, would consent to the elimination of the idea of the Creator from our midst. That time is now.
The way Joseph Campbell and his disciples will be defeated involves people coming to understand the message in the Bible. But don't expect much help from Christians in that regard: they're the ones that gave Joseph Campbell all the evidence he amassed to prove the Bible was not literally true, thereby utterly destroying the credibility of the idea of the Creator in the minds of millions of people on this planet. Christians are the ones who wanted to kill Galileo for saying the earth revolved around the sun, and Christians are the ones who tried to convince all of us the earth and everything on it was created in six twenty-four hour periods or exactly 144 hours. Christians are the ones who tried to get us to imagine a blank planet with a dot of life on it called the garden of Eden. Christians are the ones who insisted we had to imagine a talking snake and an Adam who had no navel, since he had been created bypassing the necessity of an umbilical cord.
Christians have never been able to explain to people the difference between a pictorial view of reality in words and a factually accurate explanation of reality in words. For a couple thousand years this has created a lot of problems because the message contained in the book of Genesis was never intended to be a pictorial view of reality; it was intended to be a factually accurate view of reality.
In order for the message of Genesis to be a pictorial view of reality every word in the book could have only one corresponding referent in reality. That is what Campbell means by "literally true", and Christians have historically insisted that is exactly how we are to understand the message in the book of Genesis. Thus, when the Bible says "day", we are to understand that only one referent can be chosen for the meaning of that word, and the only "reasonable" referent is what we normally understand by the word "day": a twenty-four hour period that corresponds to the period it takes for the earth to revolve around the sun, or the sun to revolve around the earth, if you hold a pre-Galileo Biblical position.
Why am I going into this complicated discussion of word meanings? Because the question of authority is a question of words--what words we use to justify the governments that rule this planet, what words we use to define our self-image, what words we use to keep us going in those times when it feels like it's time to stop. The words we use and what we believe about those words will rule us. The quicker we get a handle on how words are used by others, the quicker we will be able to others from using words to enslave us, or destroy us.
One of the most amazing things about the traditional Christian explanation of the story in the Garden of Eden is Christians have insisted everyone believe the words to be a pictorial explanation of reality when the Bible itself tells us the words are a symbolic, but nonetheless factually accurate explanation of reality. For instance, Christian tradition would have us believe day has to refer to a twenty-four hour period, but two other places in the Bible say this: "A day with the Lord is like a thousand years, and a thousand years is like a day" (2 Peter 3:8) or "For a thousand years in your sight are like a day that has just gone by" (Psalms 90:4) When confronted with these words, one could reasonably expect even the most devout Christian to pause and reconsider the pictorial interpretation of the Book of Genesis. Obviously, there is at least the possibility that some other interpretation procedure might yield results more in keeping with the intent of the author.
When we grasp the fact that words like "day" can be understood to refer to other referents than the pictorial referent we normally ascribe to them, we begin to see that the message in the Book of Genesis might be a factually accurate explanation of reality. Instead of being required to rigidly choose only one possible referent for every word in the story we can relax and see if anything remotely resembling what we could call true might emerge.
For instance, no one denies that Homo sapiens had to start somewhere. Everyone knows that scientists have spent enormous time and effort over the last one hundred and fifty years looking for the missing link that would show us our beginning. All the story in Genesis does is tell us that there was once a creature who could do something that no other creature on the face of the earth could do: reflect an image of God. That's what the Bible says: Adam and Eve were created in the image of God. Now traditionally those words "image of God" have been interpreted to carry an enormous amount of baggage, baggage that tends to obscure one fundamental fact--a fact that Joseph Campbell himself knows to be undeniable. Of all the creatures on the earth, as far as we can tell, Homo sapiens is the only one that has ever perceived an image of God, has ever conceived an image of God, or ever expressed an image of God. And, as Joseph Campbell points out every culture on the face of the earth has always expressed an image of God. Now obviously all that had to start somewhere. The Bible tells us is that the first persons who perceived an image of God were named Adam and Eve.
Campbell makes a lot of fuss talking about how all the myths of all the cultures use the same images, the same symbols to describe what the very myths are attempting to communicate. From Campbell's point of view, this is evidence that the Bible is just another myth that has no more factual validity than even the most primitive head-hunter, man-eating tribe of primitive, pre-historic man. Somebody needs to point out that all the things Campbell calls myth could have been forced to use the same or similar symbols because they were all talking about the same thing: namely, who are we, where did we come from, what happened, how do we fix it. Since they were all talking about the same thing, it stands to reason they would use similar terms in their communication process. I mean, when you're trying to describe a giraffe you have to use words like long, and neck; otherwise nobody gets the picture. When viewed from this perspective, the question is no longer necessarily which story is absolutely pictorially precise, but which story is the factually most accurate explanation of reality.
When viewed from this perspective, we see that the story in the Book of Genesis really does directly contradict all the myths that Campbell talks about, the myths of Mother Right that sees no distinction between the Creator and the creature. Adam saw clearly that the Creator was a Being who was actually out there; Eve saw this too. To them the Creator was not an abstract concept, but a fact, a fact to whom they were totally subservient and upon whom they were totally dependent. But, the story tells us, the Creator was good to Adam and Eve; that is, until Adam and Eve decided to refuse to let the Creator be the Creator. That's when all the trouble started.
The problem with that story in the Bible about the Garden of Eden is it really does make people choose sides. It always has, and I guess it always will. Either The Creator defined by the Bible is actually out there, or Campbell is correct. Which side are you on?