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Freedom From
Political Tyranny – Economic Slavery – Police State Rule
195:8.4
It
required a great power, a mighty influence, to free the thinking
and living of the Western peoples from the withering grasp of a
totalitarian ecclesiastical domination. Secularism did break the
bonds of church control, and now in turn it threatens to establish
a new and godless type of mastery over the hearts and minds of
modern man.
The tyrannical and
dictatorial political state
is the direct offspring of
scientific materialism and philosophic secularism. Secularism no
sooner frees man from the domination of the institutionalized
church than it sells him into slavish bondage to the
totalitarian state.
Secularism frees man from ecclesiastical slavery only to betray
him into the
tyranny of political and
economic slavery.
195:8.5
Materialism denies God, secularism simply ignores him; at least
that was the earlier attitude. More recently, secularism has
assumed a more militant attitude, assuming to take the place of
the religion whose totalitarian bondage it onetime resisted.
Twentieth-century secularism tends to affirm that man does not
need God. But beware! this
godless philosophy of human society will lead only to unrest,
animosity, unhappiness, war, and world-wide disaster.
195:8.6
Secularism can never bring peace to mankind. Nothing can take the
place of God in human society. But mark you well! do not be quick
to surrender the beneficent gains of the secular revolt from
ecclesiastical totalitarianism. Western civilization today enjoys
many liberties and satisfactions as a result of the secular
revolt. The great mistake of secularism was this: In revolting
against the almost total control of life by religious authority,
and after attaining the liberation from such ecclesiastical
tyranny, the secularists went on to institute a revolt against God
himself, sometimes tacitly and sometimes openly.
195:8.7
To the
secularistic revolt you owe the amazing creativity of American
industrialism and the unprecedented material progress of Western
civilization. And because the secularistic revolt went too far and
lost sight of God and true religion, there also followed
the unlooked-for harvest of
world
wars and international unsettledness.
195:8.8
It is
not necessary to sacrifice faith in God in order to enjoy the
blessings of the modern secularistic revolt: tolerance, social
service, democratic government, and civil liberties. It was not
necessary for the secularists to antagonize true religion in order
to promote science and to advance education.
195:8.9
But secularism is not the sole parent of
all these recent gains in the enlargement of living. Behind the
gains of the twentieth century are not only science and
secularism but also the unrecognized and unacknowledged
spiritual workings of
the life and teaching of Jesus of
Nazareth.
99:3.3
The
religionist is not unsympathetic with social suffering, not
unmindful of civil injustice, not insulated from economic
thinking, neither insensible to
political tyranny. Religion influences social
reconstruction directly because it spiritualizes and idealizes the
individual citizen. Indirectly, cultural civilization is
influenced by the attitude of these individual religionists as
they become active and influential members of various social,
moral, economic, and political groups.
99:3.4
The attainment of a high cultural
civilization demands, first, the
ideal type of citizen and, then,
ideal and adequate social
mechanisms wherewith such a citizenry may control the economic and
political institutions of such an advanced human society.
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