Paul's Passing Thoughts

The following is in response to the Ben Shapiro/John MacArthur interview video that TANC Ministries reviewed on December 16, 2018

There is so much in this interview that requires an in-depth treatment.  I’ve had a half dozen articles dancing around my head over the last few weeks, each of them threatening to eat a hole in my brain, so finally I decided to start writing them in no particular order. This isn’t the first part, but it is a part of my ongoing criticism of Ben Shapiro’s interview with John Macarthur December 2nd, 2018.

At around the 9 minute 30 second mark is the following exchange.

Ben’s questions: (summarized) Has it been a mistake to see the president as a moral figure whose job it is to build/uphold societal moral fabric? Are you saying that it is our job in communities to build the social fabric and let the president shape policy?

Johnny Mac: “Yeah, and look, you can’t blame him for the complete destruction of the family. He had nothing to do with that. That’s why the fabric’s coming apart.”

It would have been vogue and cowardly to lump the whole of America’s moral failings on Donald Trump. Indeed Judeo/Christian twitchyness over sexual practice makes him an easy whipping boy. But of the few good things John MacArthur said in this interview, the refusal to dump western culture’s moral decline on President Trump is correct.

Of course Ben Shapiro is morally twitchy as revealed by his litmus test of sexual propriety–e.g. don’t have sex with porn stars.

Whatever one thinks of having sex with porn stars, and marrying more than one wife, and locker room talk on an Access Hollywood video, the root of Ben’s moral superiority is as nonsensical as saying Jews can’t be podcasters in the 21st century because the Pythagoreans in the 7th century BC forbade people to eat beans. It is nonsensical precisely because the question of WHOSE moral standard men are obligated to follow is imbedded in the whims of the gods.

Barack Obama didn’t screw around with porn stars, had only one wife, and there are no Access Hollywood videos with him saying how he would like to grab a woman between the legs. Does that make him a paragon of virtue and “qualified” to stem American moral decline?  Or the better question, does President Obama’s obvious muslim leanings mean that advancing Islamic morality was EXACTLY what he was supposed to do? I mean, if the President’s job is to build/uphold social fabric then the mystical source of that social fabric is irrelevant right?

Yeah huh?  How does that Islamic “moral” expectation work out for an Orthodox Jew?

Ben, maybe you should go ask Linda Sarsour what she thinks of that moral standard or . . . just study some history. Even a casual review of European history details what happens to Jews under that mystical moral framework.

And speaking of history and mystical moral frameworks, Johnny Mac trots down the path in an effort prove his thesis on the causes of America’s moral decline.

Johnny Mac:

You know when you think about how God looks at this or any Society, the default position of humanity is brutally corrupt.

I mean, you read The Bloodlands, so between Soviet Russia and Germany between the late 1930s and 45 and 13 million people are killed, none in a military uniform, none in a war.  13 million people were massacred by Russians and Germans in those brief years. That is a testimony to what will happen to people when evil is not restrained.

I assume the book that Johnny Mac mentions is The Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin written by Timothy Snyder, detailing the slaughter in Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Russia and the Baltic states.

The real number of people killed during those years is probably lost because after WWII the “winners” of the war delivered 2/3rds of the world’s population to a brutally corrupt socialist dictatorship. The Soviet Union rewrote history and therefore the death count with impunity. But 13 million is sufficiently large for us to know that what happened there was really, really, bad. However, I want you to understand the actual number (13 Million +/-) is not specifically important. In this instance Johnny Mac is using lots and lots of murder as the proof of human “brutal corruption.” But Johnny Mac gives the exact same judgment as the explanation for one guy in a car driving through a protest in Charlottesville NC, August 20, 2017.  And the number there was well below 13 million.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gm3U39lnPO0

See, 13 million and a half dozen are on the same moral par because John Macarthur is trying to use an object lesson to validate his foundational metaphysical assumption: Man is brutally corrupt. Or as he said in the video above. . .

“The human heart is desperately wicked,” he began. “And the human heart is hostile, towards God and self-centered, and proud, and selfish and angry. What Charlottesville simply demonstrates is that fallen humanity is corrupt. All I see in that is the justification of anger.”

Johnny Mac’s overt logic = This (specific) bad thing happened because Man (generally) is morally depraved: selfish, self-seeking, and doesn’t like God very much.

The problem is that his “proof” of human depravity is a narrow generalization that begs the premise: Lots of murder = brutal corruption = human depravity = lots of murder = brutal corruption. Or said another way: his explanation is nonsensical, and it is time for someone to call BS.

I understand why people struggle to challenge the presumption.  In western culture the doctrine of Pervasive Depravity has been burned into our minds as a metaphysical given. So most people are quick to scrub through their soul looking for “moral failing” and then extrapolate that internal “evil” as proof of Johnny Mac’s doctrine.  It is as if our individual stray moral infractions mean we are a hair’s breadth away from slaughtering the population of Rhode Island.

Beyond the fact that thinking about stealing a pack of gum is at no point the slippery slope to genocide, anyone exercising an ounce of independent thinking would rightly ask: “If human depravity (generally) is the cause of mass slaughter, then how come mass slaughter isn’t the norm in western culture?”

If Johnny Mac is right then Charlottesville should have looked like Death Race 2000. For that matter, every city, every burg, every village, where two human beings reside should be a cauldron of violence.  And The Bloodlands would be everywhere, all the time, with (God’s appointed) dictators stacking up the bodies like cordwood.

Right?

But let’s dig deeper into our own psychies to test the pervasive depravity metaphysic.

Do you recoil at the thought of mass destruction?

Yes?

Riddle me this: How come?

If you are pervasively depraved, in accord with the historic doctrine, to which many of you still  claim “spiritual” solidarity, how then are you opposed to someone running people over with a car?

By definition you should (at best) be morally . . . blank . . . and (worst??) morally affirming, asking how you can help exterminate  . . . whomever.

If depravity is the causality of man’s “brutal corruption” why does mass slaughter like The Bloodlands affect you?

I know, genocide is horrific to think about, but it is a very very big abstraction that most people have no ability to gasp, so let’s bring this closer to home.

Why is Ben morally indignant about Donald Trump’s sex life?  Again, if we are morally depraved (assuming sex is morally corrupt and sex with porn stars an even greater aberration on the corruption) shouldn’t we all be having sex with porn stars?

If you are not, then why do you have a moral reaction to someone else acting in accord with their existence?

And this is the point: How can you, dear reader, as a depraved soul, render any moral reaction?

If you are depraved, why would you want to render any moral evaluation?

The correct, logically consistent answer is: you wouldn’t because you couldn’t.

You wouldn’t know how to aspire to be moral any more than a fish knows how to aspire to be dry.

And don’t buy into Johnny Mac’s absurd answer for moral virtue: e.g. because you have a belief system based on authority your conscience is restraining (your) evil.

Here is a summary of Johnny Mac’s logic. God has designed evil to be restrained in three ways: Conscience, Family, and Government. You can hear his full rambling explanation near the 10:20 mark but his loose logic says that:

1. Everyone has a conscience, a “skylight” that condemns them for doing bad things . . . sort of. (You can do bad things to the conscience and end up flying planes into the world trade center).
2. Families and more precisely fathers us their  “authority” to restrain bad action.
3. God uses government to keep humanity from doing bad things.

And herein is the glaring flaw throughout the “conscience as restrainer of evil”  explanation. If Man’s metaphysical reality is: “brutal corruption” and ” . . .the human heart is hostile, towards God and self-centered, and proud, and selfish and angry,”  Man can’t also have a good part that keeps him from evil because he doesn’t know anything else. Man cannot originate, follow, or otherwise identify GOOD because he can never know GOOD.  This means that man can’t retroactively “corrupt a good conscience” by rejecting to the “correct” moral framework. Man never knew the correct moral framework.

So the premise collapses on its own vacancy and it doesn’t matter what fathers or governments do. Neither of them can restrain what they are existentially inclined to emulate.  Johnny Mac’s point 2 and 3 are little more than chaff floating over the root error.

Notice that the title “father” does not magically consecrate morality to a moral reprobate. The most compelling object lesson here is that the Catholic church calls their priests father and they can’t seem to stop molesting alter boys.

And as for the restraining power of government  . . . Oh dear God. Government isn’t the restrainer of evil, it is the undisputed, pound-for-pound, super heavyweight, world champion perpetrator of evil. If there is any historical lesson, it is that Government must be restrained at all cost.

A history lesson should not be necessary, but if Ben Shapiro’s sharp mind can be dazzled into rational mush by Johnny Mac’s Bloodlands explanation, it must be needed.

National Socialist Germany’s theological hero was Martin Luther, so to say the prevailing denomination was Lutheran is a study in the obvious. But for those readers who resist connecting the dots, that means the prevailing doctrine was Reformed Theology. That  means Germany was in solidarity with the Westminster Confession. That means Orthodox Christianity dominated the public square. That means if there was ever a nation whose individual and collective conscience should have had an iron clad “skylight” it was Germany during the 1930’s and 40’s. I dealt with the theological and social forces of National Socialist Germany in my 2016 TANC lectures so I won’t detail them here, but the inescapable, irrefutable reality was the people killing “none in a military uniform none in a war” were the rank and file, good evangelical Christians doing exactly what they thought God wanted them to do.

“But John, the Soviet Union was an atheistic state. Doesn’t that validate the premise?”

Not even close. Marx might have called religion the opiate of the masses in protest to mindless obedience to an all knowing god, but his solution was to flip religious devotion to mindless obedience to an all knowing State. At the root, Christianity and Marxism hold the same fundamental presumption: men are cogs in collectivist wheel to be told what to do, and when to do it from an all powerful external force.  Reason must not apply.

Furthermore, for all of the government enforced atheism in the Soviet Socialists Republic, never forget that the Bolshevik revolution was against Czarist Russia which was a centuries long Christian theocracy: a government consecrated by the Eastern Orthodox Church. The catalyst for the “atheistic” revolution was Czarist theocratic tyranny that had perpetrated generations of atrocity as good Christian rulers.

The reality available to anyone with a critical thinking bone in their body is that The Bloodlands slaughter took place dead square in the middle of peoples steeped in generations of “Judeo/Christian” values. They were the recipients of the “revelation” sent to establish God’s ordained government to “restrain” evil, yet they were the greatest perpetrators of evil.

Johnny Mac’s metaphysical and historical synthesis is total BS and indicative of a profound intellectual bankruptcy  . . . which is the real root of American moral decay.

Johnny Mac and Ben Shapiro are correct that western culture hangs in the balance, but the causality of its decline is NOT because America has abandon Judeo/Christian values.

Morality does not, cannot, come from mysticism, and our salvation from savagery does not, cannot, come from faith. The real causality of America’s moral decline is because its “intellectual leaders” are leading the charge away from what set it apart: Reason.

~ John