For a substantial period of their history the ancient Greeks had no written law. All of the laws were memorized and passed down orally from generation to generation. The ancient Greeks believed that any man who required written laws was a man who lacked integrity. Other ancient civilizations conducted business without written agreement solely on the basis of verbal covenant agreement. They relied on the integrity of each individual to carry out their parts of the agreement. Business was carried out with remarkable smoothness under this system. My purpose here is not to focus on unwritten laws or unwritten business contracts but rather on the source of the integrity of the individuals.
The source of their integrity was fear of God [or gods]. The ancient pagan people intuitively knew that if they broke the law or broke a business agreement they would be held accountable by the gods or by a Karmic principle of reciprocity. This is what can be called the power of religion, even a pagan religion, to serve as a basis for a civilization. Every civilization had some form of civil religion as a basis of morals.
This is not to say that ancient pagan societies were ideal. Ancient pagans engaged in horrendous practices such as infanticide, slavery, genocide, gladiator spectacles and brutal suppression of women. Things started to change for the better as Christianity began to replace paganism as the civil religion of the West. The rise and spread of Christianity brought great moral light and reformation to ancient pagan cultures resulting in the abolishment of these brutal practices. The story of how Christianity brought changes for the better is detailed in Alvin J. Schmidt's book Under the Influence: How Christianity transformed civilization.
We are now witnessing the attempted removal of Christianity as the civil religion of western civilization. The rise of naturalistic evolution which teaches that there is no supernatural and that life came about by random collisions of atoms, has served to secularize the entire globe and to undermine the basis for civil religion and morals. Naturalistic evolution has no concept of ultimate accountability in the afterlife. It offers no moral code.
According to the Humanist Manifestos of 1933 and 1973, naturalistic evolution, which is the basis of secularism, regards human beings as mere accidents of nature who upon death lose all consciousness and awareness. Secularism has no moral imperative. There are no ten commandments in nature chiseled in stone on a mountainside somewhere. Secularism only offers a moral suggestive. No moral code is inherent in secularism though many secularists adhere to a moral code of their own choosing to give some kind of meaning to their lives. The current moral fad among secularists is a moral code called "political correctness" but this can be changed or dropped at will.
Christianity has a moral imperative. We are created in God's image and we are accountable to God and our eternal state depends on the outcome of our accountability to God. A civilization is built on a moral imperative and not on a moral suggestive. Some say that Christianity is repressive. Of course it's repressive! It represses evil and injustice.
Remember back in the early 90s when Hillary Clinton and Ira Magaziner spoke about "values education" and the need to restore values to our schools? It went nowhere because their secular mindset offered nothing that could be called values or morals.
It is very clear from even a cursory view of early American history that Christianity was regarded as the civil religion of the United States. The people willingly submitted to the unchanging laws of an unchanging God. Christianity provided the moral framework for our freedom, individual rights and gave the basis for the abolishment of slavery, dueling, polygamy and other social injustices. The Christian family culture provided stable homes and proper character formation in children.
As secular, naturalistic evolutionism has become dominant it has resulted in loose morals, a high rate of child abandonment especially by fathers and high rates of crime and corruption.
Communism fell in large part because it became obvious that it didn't work as an economic system. Millions of people were plunged into poverty or worked to death in prison camps before it dawned on people that communism doesn't work. It is becoming increasingly obvious that evolution also doesn't work. The latest scientific evidence proves that the first living cell is far too complex to have been formed by random processes alone and genetic mutations are destructive to the DNA and are no means of uphill evolutionary change. Aside from the hard science evidence, the social science evidence is piling up that shows the utter poverty of evolution based secularism as a civil religion. People are beginning to wake up to the fact that naturalistic evolution based education is destroying the shared cultural restraints that have served as the basis for western civilization. How many millions of lives must be ruined before evolution also falls of its own dead weight?
The Bible is scientifically accurate! Find the evidence at www.icr.org.
Steps to salvation:
Jesus said "Ye must be born again." (John 3:7)
- Believe that God created you and loves you and sent the Messiah (Messiah is Hebrew for Christ) to redeem you.
- Believe that Jesus the Messiah came in fulfillment of over 300 Bible prophecies to die for you to take upon Himself the penalty for your sins. (Isaiah 53:5-6, John 6:29, Romans 4:5, First Peter 3:18)
- Turn from sin and call on the name of Jesus to receive forgiveness. (Romans 10:13)
- Receive Jesus as Savior and experience the new birth. (John 1:12, Acts 2:38)
- Follow Him as Lord. (John 14:21)
"Whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved" (Romans 10:13)
To receive the salvation that Jesus purchased for us at the terrible cost of His suffering and death on our behalf I invite you to pray this simple prayer:
"Dear heavenly Father, I thank you for sending Jesus, the promised Messiah, to die for my sins. I admit that I am a sinner and I ask for your forgiveness on the basis of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. I ask you to fill me with your Holy Spirit to empower me to serve you under the Lordship of Jesus Christ, Amen."
If you prayed that prayer in the humble sincerity of your heart then you have received everlasting life, which includes power to live right in this life and entrance into heaven in the afterlife!
Bill Nugent, Overcomer Ministries of West Harrison, New York, USA
(C) 2010 William P. Nugent, permission granted to email or republish if credit given
Read Bill Nugent's award winning Christian book, Lawful or Legalistic: How New Testament Believers Must Understand Old Testament Laws. For more information and to order click here.
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DEFENDING THE FAITH
APOLOGETIC ARTICLES
Bill Nugent currently writes a series of articles called "Defending the Faith" which, as the title suggests, defend the Christian faith from the many attacks leveled against it in our postmodern world.
The articles deal with such topics as evolution, UFOs, cults, modern/postmodern philosophy, liberal theology and popular culture. At the end of each article is an invitation to receive Christ as Savior and Lord. These articles are sent out over the Internet to several opt-in email lists. People who receive these articles are encouraged to resend them to their own lists and in this way reach their own unsaved relatives and friends with the Gospel.
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