Imagine There’s No [Christian] Religion

Jeremiah said of ancient Israel: “Are they ashamed of their loathsome conduct? No, they have no shame at all; they do not even know how to blush” (Jeremiah 8:12).

Since the Sixties, pagan religion has permeated our thinking in once-Christian Western society. Those who remember the days when our moral principles were generally based on God’s commandments are shocked by the takeover of morality, exhibited even in rulings from our highest courts. Increasingly, we hear of “non-binary” actions and judgments that relativize truth and morals. There is no either/or; no external measure of right and wrong—only a blend that fits our personal choices.

The Media

In the media, “fake news” (a deliberate misrepresentation of facts to support certain political ideas) has become the norm. The crying baby on the Southern border proves the inhumanity of the US president, until….we discover that, according to its father, the baby was never separated from her mother, and, in addition, the mother had abandoned three other children in Honduras to come make money in the USA.

Academia

In academia, the open exchange of ideas in a climate of free speech, once the essence of academic life, is often deliberately suppressed in our centers of higher learning. Wake up, folks! We send our young people to these colleges and universities at enormous personal and government expense, to be educated for mature adulthood. But they enter ideological centers of cultural neo-Marxism, identity politics and uninhibited sexual license, which ridicules and suppresses any other opinions. The dormitories have become brothels, and barbaric sex orgies are normal fare for university students. The annual Sex Week at Northwestern University will feature Lady Sophia, a Chicago-based dominatrix who will teach the students bondage, discipline, and sadomasochistic practices. At the venerable Oxford University in the UK an “annual bash sees students whipping virgins, engaging drug-fueled orgies and watching live sex shows.”

On questions of free speech, even the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union), historically committed to the preservation of free speech, is beginning to capitulate to the anti-speech left, arguing that “progress toward equality” (which includes sexual excess) trumps freedom of speech.

Speech about traditional (largely Christian) sexual morals is no longer “free speech.” It is under attack. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a suggested presidential candidate, reveals how upside-down our moral judgments have become. Warren was infuriated by Rudolph Giuliani ’s remarks on porn star Stormy Daniels: “I don’t respect a porn star the way I respect a career woman, or a woman of substance, or a woman who has great respect for herself as a woman, and as a person. And isn’t going to sell her body for sexual exploitation.” Said Warren in reaction: “Insult to a porn star is an insult to every woman.” Our culture insists that Daniels is a noble “sex worker,” free, like Lady Sophia (above), to ply her trade at Oxford or any other university. All work, including prostitution, is “good” work. Morals have vanished.

Witchcraft

We have taken the Bible off its place at the family dining table, the living room and (especially) the bedroom. We’ve tossed it (Good Riddance) in the Goodwill dumpster. We are now free to search for moral authority elsewhere—say…to witchcraft, why not? David Salisbury, a self-identified witch, rises up as a defender of cultural values, blaming the NRA for recent school killings. He and seven other witches sit around a table on which a cauldron sits atop a pentacle, accompanied by “a five-dollar bill painted red—to symbolize blood—and a piece of paper with the huge block letters ‘NRA.’” These witches were engaged in the ritual of “Binding,” of casting spells as a new form of defending cultural values. Salisbury stridently hurls curses at those he characterizes as “merchants of mayhem, profiteers of pain, dealers of death,” who “fatten on the blood of innocents and feast like demons on their corpses!” He continues, “May your thoughts and prayers turn to poison in your mouths.” Witches are rising as paragons of moral virtue, though their practice of human sacrifice is ignored.

Not to be outdone, the Brotherhood of the Unnamed Path also offers a moral solution. It’s source for determining morals is a “spiritual tradition revealed to its members from the ancestors of men-who-love-men, employ age-old techniques practiced around the world that foster relationships with the divine, the ancestors, the spirits in the land and with each other.” These Brothers rise up, morally indignant, to oppose the separation of children and parents at the southern border: “We stand against these policies as dictated and enforced by the attorney general and the current administration. We condemn in the strongest terms the justification of these actions by statements of religious scripture or by indicating a need to intimidate and provoke fear.” These spiritualists, by their sexual choices, reject the very possibility of having children, yet publicly propose themselves as the moral defenders of children.

From Binary to Non-Binary

In the revamping of our culture, Christianity no longer defines morality. Indeed, the very notion of morality has shifted. A new kind of thinking is afoot, a “non-binary” approach, which eliminates clear distinctions. “Binary,” meaning “two,” emphasizes clear definitions, whereas “non-binary” considers everything to be relative. At truthXchange we use the terms “Oneism” (the merging of all distinctions) and “Twoism” (the acceptance of God’s created distinctions). In sexuality, our culture no longer sees male and female as essential; in spirituality, our culture blends God and nature into one vague spiritual whole. Such thinking is widespread and comes from the invasion of Eastern spirituality and morality. Sociologists write of The Easternization of the West, “quite unlike anything previously experienced.”[1] “As large numbers of Americans have arrived at the worldview of Hinduism,” says sociologist Phillip Goldberg, author of American Veda, the change is compared “in power to the Christian Great Awakenings of the 18th century.”[2] Goldberg says that everyone is now asked to believe in the Hindu “Advaita” way. “Advaita” in Sanskrit means “not two.” That is, nothing is “binary.” Nothing is Twoist! In this world, Christianity does not belong. It is possible to be quite specific as to how this change in thinking has occurred.

Eastern techniques of Advaita spirituality require a different way of thinking. When Westerners spend billions of dollars in the pursuit and practice of Hindu yoga and Buddhist mindfulness meditation, with the full endorsement of the popular Dalai Lama, you can be sure that the culture will be deeply changed. Mindfulness practices have skyrocketed in the West recently. Magazines feature it, celebrities swear by it, scientists study it, monks still practice it and business leaders use it for stress relief (e.g. Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Steve Jobs of Apple and Jeff Weiner, founder of LinkedIn). Apple, Google and Nike provide meditation rooms that encourage brief sessions during the workday, though a recent study shows that mindfulness is demotivating for employees, so it does not always work!

Cultural Effects

Here is proof of its effects.

Christine Chandler, an academically trained psychotherapist was a disciple of Tibetan Buddhism who practiced mindfulness meditation for hours each day for nearly thirty years. In her book Enthralled: The Guru Cult of Tibetan Buddhism, she provides an indisputable, objective witness to the effects of such practice on the mind.

Simple mindfulness meditation for the Western beginner asks you to stop thinking, stop analyzing right and wrong, and to live in the moment to relieve stress. However, the deeper you get in mindfulness, under the instruction of lamas (holy men), you learn that the real intention of mindfulness is to show, as Buddhism has always believed, that the world is “just an illusion” (100). Eventually, the self and the other must be destroyed (36) via the “esoteric logic of non-duality” (37). “Non-duality” is another way of referring to the “non-binary” mentioned above. In this logic, “facts do not exist” (14), “lying is allowed” (8), and “history is not real” (9). Christine Chandler finally realized that “the lamas can do whatever they want, because they [are] already dwelling in a state of nonduality” (xxii). They taught that the use of reason is the “obstacle to compassion and enlightenment” (17), that “moral judgments about right and wrong…[are] the enemy,” and that “basic goodness…[is] beyond any judgment of good and bad” (xxi). She saw this as a manipulation of language in the service of spiritual power. Also, the ultimate goal of mindfulness, which Chandler, as a non-Christian does not see, is the classic Buddhist goal of denying the objectivity of created reality and its role of witnessing to God, the Creator of reality.

Chandler does realize, however, that this way of thinking and spiritual practice becomes a form of brainwashing, which is how she finally experienced it. She left the group after almost thirty years, having understood that “your reasoning mind, objectivity, and ability to judge, starts to slowly turn off” (102). “Part of my mind had definitely fallen asleep for nearly thirty years,” she says (104). Her conclusion is that mindfulness meditation is “mind-control,” and that “…if you can diminish the ability to reason and think objectively…you can eventually weaken the foundation of Western civilization…” (preface). This, she believes, is the intention of Eastern Buddhism.

How is the project working?

Three Canadian Events

I was in Ontario, Canada, recently. If Canada is an example of what will happen everywhere in the West, Christians will soon be shut out of any significant cultural roles. Clearly something has happened to Western civilization that makes Christianity a dangerous threat, which must be criminalized and eliminated. Mindfulness is everywhere in Canadian culture and receives the favor of the courts.

Three events stood out:

1. The Huffington Post shows pictures of twenty policemen in dress uniform, sitting on prayer stools, deep in meditation in a Buddhist temple. These officers, from Ontario’s Peel Regional Police Force, were in the temple for a lecture on mindfulness meditation and Buddhist philosophy. The deputy abbot, Bhante Saranapala, observed with satisfaction: “They were very nice and they liked it and they think it should be part of their daily practice.” But how will law-enforcement professionals, trained in “binary” right/wrong Western laws, do police work using the “non-binary” principles of Buddhist spirituality? Can they issue a “fake” parking ticket marked “guilty and not really guilty” in order to avoid stress?

2. Canadian Bill Whatcott, long-time anti-abortion and pro-family activist, was informed in mid-June, 2018 that a national criminal arrest warrant has been issued for him. He is wanted for a “hate speech” crime that took place two years ago in Toronto! His “hate speech” crime was distributing leaflets that present the Gospel and the biblical truth about homosexuality to Toronto’s homosexual pride parade in 2016. The authorities had to think a long time before inventing this crime, for which he faces a minimum of two years in jail.

3. Also in June, 2018 a ruling came down from the Supreme Court of Canada, concerning a case against a Christian college, Trinity Western University in Langley, British Columbia. In 2012, Trinity Western announced its plan to open a law school. The Law Societies of British Columbia, Ontario and Nova Scotia, objected because the school would require students to sign a covenant restricting sexual relations to those between a man and woman within a lawful marriage. TWU’s mandatory covenant demands classically-defined holy Christian living “characterized by humility, self-sacrifice, mercy and justice, and mutual submission for the good of others.” It requires members to abstain from using vulgar language, lying or cheating, stealing, using degrading materials such as pornography, and “sexual intimacy that violates the sacredness of marriage between a man and a woman.”

The Court stated that law graduates from Trinity who model their lives this way would not be recognized as valid lawyers. Trinity appealed for reasons of religious discrimination. Last week, while I was there, the Supreme Court of Canada concluded in a 7–2 decision that tolerance of LGBTQ was required of TWU, but the LGBTQ community did not have to tolerate Christians’ constitutional rights, which could be overridden. The court determined that LGBTQ’s rights and non-binary Oneist sexual thinking were paramount to the “public interest” and required the infringement of religious rights and the living out of biblical moral principles, thus the denial of Christians to freely practice law according to biblical binary or Twoist principles. In the words of Michael Brown, “the court ruled that Christianity and higher education are incompatible” and that any Christian living this way in Canada is a threat to the culture. “The majority judgment said the covenant would deter LGBT students from attending the proposed law school, and those who did attend would be at risk of significant harm.” The significant harm would be exposure to Christian truth about sexuality which may not be allowed to flourish in modern cultures that claim to be civilized. Canadian Christians have concluded: “…there is little space left in our political culture for religious institutions to fully and equally participate in the public square since their beliefs and moral values whether at work, in education or in politics are now subject to determinations by administrative bodies.” Needless to say, this decision also denies the very basis of modern society, namely pluralism and diversity, what we call free speech. The Supreme Court of Canada, like the ACLU, has become an embarrassment to its own values—if one were still to think in binary terms!

One of the judges defended his judgment against Christian norms as being “what’s best for Canadian society.” He never said how he knows what is best, and there is no discussion, because his judgment is a classic example of religiously-inspired, pagan, non-binary, power-driven, social engineering. The deep soul of the West, so long under the binary either/or influence of the Bible, has been utterly transformed in the minds of its leading jurists, who have come to believe that diversity means “all views are welcome other than biblical Christian views.” For this judge, biblical views, including those of the Queen (who is still Queen in Canada), are not what is best for Canadian society.

Christians in the West must be sobered by Canada’s suffering but must not remain silent. All nations need to understand that the Bible alone contains what is best, both for a blessed life in this world and a blessed life in the next, based on the promise of Scripture: “Abraham shall surely become a great and mighty nation, and all the nations of the earth shall be blessed in him” (Gen 18:18). One day this blessing will come when Jesus will reign unopposed over his creation and at the name of Jesus every knee will bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father (Phil 2:10–11).

 

[1]  Colin Campbell, The Easternization of the West: A Thematic Account of Cultural Change in the Modern Era (Boulder London: Paradigm Publishers, 2007), 39–41.
[2] Philip Goldberg, American Veda: How Indian Spirituality Changed the West (New York: Harmony Books, 2010), 5.