Chapter H1
Lucifer's Rebellion
The War on the Word
––– Chapter 6 –––
How the End of Feudalism
Helped Enslave Society
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Topics covered: ►The communal family living in Charlemagne's feudalism. ►Children were taught character at home, schooling was only for adults. ►Submitting to the Bible is the goal & the test of our Pilgrim's Progress journey. ►College teachers had to be professing Christians, so they came to be called "professors." ►But because international commerce introduced Greek philosophy, college professors fell in love with Reason, which is the enemy of faith, and education became a major source of leaven and unbelief. ►The Crusades spread philosophy and materialism. Materialism made bartering no longer practical, and money became necessary. Reason then convinced parents to stop properly rearing their kids, & send them to school instead so they could get money-paying jobs. ►Money replaced barter, enabled international commerce, & encouraged inventions & "progress" in order to maximize profits...& the transition from idyllic feudalism to the frenetic-pace of modern society began. ►The printing press quickly spread knowledge...& the Industrial Revolution made the love of money & materialism "important," "good," & "necessary." ►By 1800 the harm "progress" was doing to Christianity, to personal character, & how it was terminating the freedom of feudalistic life & causing people to be enslaved by technology gave rise to groups & individuals who tried to warn everybody about why technology was irresistibly harmful. ►Looking at these end times through a glass, darkly.
Chapter 6 (13 pages)
HOW THE END OF FEUDALISM
HELPED ENSLAVE SOCIETY
CHARLEMAGNE, FEUDALISM, AND EDUCATION
The collapse of the Western Roman Empire in 476 AD allowed the peoples of Britain, Scandinavia, Germany, and France – including Celts, Anglo-Saxons, Lombards, Gauls, Franks, and Alemanni – to spread out and settle in areas of Europe they’d previously avoided. These mass-scale migrations by peoples with different cultures, combined with the absence of law enforcement, resulted in large waves of crime. But as the decades rolled by, a surprising trend was noticed: When these “barbarians” encountered Christians across Europe, they seemed to gravitate – to be drawn – to Christianity. (This widespread, peaceful, astonishingly-rapid mass conversion to Christianity by barbarian hoards is almost completely ignored by historians. Is that because these groups of barbarians were offspring of the “Lost Ten-Tribe” migration into Europe?) These various barbarian tribes so quickly became Christians, abandoned their previous religions, and adopted the Latin language throughout Europe that they lost all traces of their former cultures in less than three centuries – in about 750 AD their descendants were indistinguishable from the rest of Europeans.
One of these early notable European barbarians was Clovis (466-511 AD). He was an important king who united the Frankish tribes in the French region, married a Christian woman, and converted to her western Christianity – which helped make Europe’s Christianity western rather than Arian or eastern. Interesting note about how much scholars don’t know: Even though Clovis was a big and important ruler in European history, we still don’t really know what his name was. There are lots of theories about what his name might have been – but nobody knows for sure. All we know is as a young (unidentified) man, he distinguished himself in battle, which caused people to combine two words in their language that had to do with battle and bravery into a nickname, Clovis – which he was called for the rest of his life. The point: Bible scholars and theologians are fond of saying various names of important figures and rulers in the Old Testament (hundreds of years before Christ) are erroneous…when they don’t even know – and wouldn’t recognize – Clovis’ real name if they tripped over it…and Clovis lived hundreds of years after Christ.
Clovis was so important to French history that Paris was later made France’s capital merely because he lived there and is buried there. (Note: Historians usually call early European Christians like Jerome and Clovis “Roman Catholics” because the church in Rome was the most influential congregation of that era. But historians don’t know or care about doctrine, and the doctrines and practices that distinguish Roman Catholicism didn’t begin to exist until centuries after Christians like Jerome and Clovis died.)
Charlemagne (742-814) was descended from two Latin-Vulgate-using Frankish kings who saved Europe from becoming Muslim. His grandfather was Charles Martel (688-741), who stopped invading Muslims – after they’d conquered all of Spain – from getting any further than halfway through France; and then Charlemagne’s father, Pepin the Short (714-768), about 35 years later drove the Muslims completely out of France back into Spain.
Charlemagne is called “the father of modern Europe” because he did much to unify and educate the peoples of Europe, and because he was crowned by Pope Leo III in the year 800 – which showed the Roman church was well on its way to establishing a denominational identity because it had begun to accumulate enough political power to enforce its doctrinal stances. Because he was crowned by the Roman church, Charlemagne is often called a forerunner of the Holy Roman Empire (that would last for about 1,000 years). He is also credited with helping develop the informal societal framework called feudalism that existed throughout Europe from about 800-1453 AD.
Feudalism (800-1450)
European kings, like Charlemagne, needed to control vast territories. Therefore, they divided their kingdoms into large sections of land, called manors or fiefs, that were ruled by lairds – also called lords. These lords were wealthy and powerful, and they owed allegiance to the king…they owed a feud to the king, which is the origin of the word fee (which was the origin of the modern property tax). Everybody who lived on a manor owed allegiance and a feud (usually services and/or barter) to their lord. This vertical-hierarchy system of king, lords, clergy, knights, and several ranks of serfs came to be called feudalism.
The lord of the manor/fief was the boss, and his job was to make sure everyone on his manor contributed to the welfare of the whole manor. Most people by 800 AD were Christians, and each manor had a building – formal or not – that served as a worship center presided over by one or more preachers. With no law enforcement, each manor had to protect itself. Therefore, soldiers, called knights, lived on manors in return for their protective services. At the bottom of the social structure were serfs, also called peasants.
Serfs were taken care of from birth to burial; they were provided with homes, food, and protection, and in return they did all the manual labor on these vast tracts of land. Manors could not survive without serfs, and everybody up the social hierarchy understood that fact and appreciated their service. Serfs planted, tended, and harvested crops; cared for livestock, managed forests, roads and trails, and provided food, firewood, and labor for the entire manor.
Feudal communities were communal; all people unselfishly did their respective jobs, spent their whole lives together, and had the kind of tightknit, fulfilling lives that come from a combination of an authoritative social hierarchy, an emphasis on religion, and the kind of work ethic that breeds respect, humility, and confidence across all levels of society. Feudalism was a blend of the mostly-agrarian way life had always been…with the newly-added fear of the unknown caused by the disappearance of the authority, societal order, and enforcement of the powerful Roman Empire. (Feudalism had long existed in many cultures around the world besides Europe and the Roman Empire, including China, Japan, India, and Russia. In fact, Moses was a type of king who ruled over the “lords” of the twelve tribes.
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Threats faced by European feudal communities ranged from small roving bands of “robbin’ hoods,” to invading groups such as Vikings who raped, murdered, kidnapped, burned, and plundered.
Modern historians, because feudalistic societies were not “free,” tend to portray feudal life in mostly negative ways. But, again, feudal life was very similar to the way life had always been – mostly agrarian lifestyles in which people lived hand-to-mouth. Life back then had the advantage of necessity; in order to survive, people had to work (Gen 3:17-19,23). God has decreed that we must work to eat, therefore working (physical labor) is a good thing.
Because the anti-Bible values of the pagan Greek-philosophy-based Enlightenment (such as equality) were spread throughout Western society by Catholicism and Protestantism, it was necessary for modernists to begin badmouthing feudalism. The very idea that people in positions of authority could be respectfully referred to as “lord,” and “sir” like they are in the Bible was abhorrent to the Greek-philosophy-based idea that “all men are created equal” adopted by Western societies and religions. This ancient social rank-based obligation to be respectfully faithful to all authorities was a duty called “fealty,” but anti-authority equality-based events such as the Enlightenment, the American Revolution, and democratic governments subverted vertical, fealty-based societies…as did the rise of money-based societies, “progress,” and the Industrial Revolutions. Let’s look at ancient life to see how it compares with modern life.
Family life: Rural families tended to be large because children are supposed to be servants (Gal 4:1), and there was a lot of work that needed to be done. Younger children did easier chores like collecting eggs, older children helped with plowing, planting, harvesting, cutting firewood…everything. If chores weren’t done, or weren’t done properly, it negatively affected the entire family. Therefore, being punished was an important part of growing up (Heb 5:8). Growing up back then – because of life’s necessities – required obedience…and obedience, in turn, resulted in the formation of many traits of good character, including respect for and submission to authority, self-control, humility, charity (defined as outward-directed works, as in doing things for others rather than for Self), dependability, responsibility, patience, and endurance. When a child did his chores responsibly, he wasn’t doing anything above-and-beyond his duty; he was just doing his job (Lk 17:7-10). But when a child didn’t do his job, or did it sloppily, he was being an unnecessary burden to everybody else, and everybody recognized that not properly doing your job was wrong in principle, burdensome, and possibly harmful to the family – and therefore deserving of corrective punishment for the good of the child, the family, and society. In families and communities in which children were properly trained up, therefore, peer pressure became a good force that frowned on dereliction of duty, and that appreciated the value of jobs well done.
Life in feudal communities, therefore, was good: Everybody had duties and responsibilities that benefitted the whole community, and everybody understood that. Lords who were good managers were respected by serfs, and dependable serfs were respected by nobles. In other words, in communities in which everybody was good at his job, lords, clergy, knights, and serfs all respected each other and got along well (1 Cor 12:14-26). When a serf was walking home after a hard day’s work, and he passed a small group of knights on patrol (who had fought off a marauding band of hoods the week before), they waved and chit-chatted with each other. And when the serf rounded the bend in the chilly, quiet twilight air and saw his daughter locking the chickens into the coop for the night, and saw smoke rising from his cabin’s chimney, he knew his wife had supper going, and he experienced one of those quiet, joyful feelings that enrichen life…so he stopped, bowed his head, and thanked God for His blessings, for his family, for his community, and for the good people in it. That’s why the feudal period is called the age of chivalry, when society was known for generosity, fidelity, and courtesy – which is all based on an outward-directed (charitable) respect for others. The foundation of this chivalrous respect was the feudal family-like community in which necessity forced people to pull together in their daily lives, and this kind of lifestyle fostered the development of social relationships that, because they were built on authority, were respectful, cordial, and symbiotic. But in later centuries when agrarian lifestyles became more and more untenable, the effects “modernity” had on the bonds of family and community began to turn the authority-based outward-directed sense of belonging that was part of working together, into a more inward-directed sense of independence and selfishness that subverted authority. The importance of doing your job for the welfare of the whole family and community that contributed to good character and good relationships began to fade from social culture as outward-directed charity (which is the bond of perfectness – Col 3:14) was replaced by selfishness.
Summary of why life was good in humble, agrarian lifestyles: Those lifestyles were filled with round-peg submissions to authority…and the issue is authority. Our authoritative God told us to work to eat/grow, therefore when people submitted to various authorities in life they grew in character. Working/submitting to authorities is doing your duty…it’s being a servant – which is our God-given purpose in life. Servants serve others; their work is unselfish, it is outward-directed, it is charity, which is the bond of perfectness. All of that goes into why there is no nobler deed than the performance of duty. The opposite of unselfish charity is selfishness/covetousness…which means Self is your god, which is why covetousness is idolatry (Col 3:5). In hard-working communities of good character children are taught to be obedient servants by spanking. Children then apply that learned characteristic as they mature into functioning parts of their communities; every time they obey the sign that says KEEP OFF THE GRASS, every time they help somebody with his workload, every time they resist the temptation to lie they are submitting to some form of authority – they are conforming to God’s way. When “progress” makes life easier we work less and develop less character…because servants need to work/submit to things like laws, rules, and people that are outside of self. That takes Romans 7 character, and that is the Pilgrim’s Progress journey God built into life. We are here to demonstrate that we are servants…and everything in our modern lives is trying to prevent that by making us selfish, self-centered, pride-filled, uncharitable, and carnal.
When a Christian has an authority over him he doesn’t like, or when he has a duty he doesn’t like, or any similar situations, he is always required to wholeheartedly do his duty because of his selfless, submissive, outward-directed love for the Lord – and that is how we train our carnal selves into becoming servants fit for God’s kingdom:
Eph 6:5,6 Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto Christ; Not with eyeservice, as menpleasers; but as the servants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart;
Some examples of Christians who were the kind of Scriptural servants who demonstrated their love for God by fully pleasing their earthly authorities include Abraham’s wife Sarah, who selflessly obeyed his awful orders; and Joseph and Daniel, who greatly pleased their pagan masters in Egypt and Babylon.
However, if we do not monitor ourselves from our inner sanctums in order to exercise self-discipline, we run the risk of idolatry. For example, if a man’s boss wants him to do a certain task, but the man takes quality-reducing shortcuts because he would rather go watch TV and he thinks his boss won’t notice the reduction in quality – he is committing the sin of idolatry. How? By letting his covetousness, his wants, lusts, and preferences make him think his only concern is his earthly boss…when in reality he is supposed to be demonstrating via his singleness of heart that he is serving Christ. I say again, we shouldn’t obey worldly laws and authorities because we like them and/or think they are good; we should obey them because our inner-sanctum love for Christ, enforced by our self-discipline, forces the things we covet, want, and prefer into second place…rather than letting our Natural carnality make us idolize Self by putting Christ into second place behind the things we want.
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The rise of education
In the old days, children were educated by both the family and the community. Older siblings and kids, parents, and relatives and neighbors all contributed to the education of children…because they were true communities. Children learned how to be respectful, how to endure punishment, how to handle an axe, how to milk a goat, how to butcher a pig, how to knit clothing, how to hunt animals, how to help each other…in short, how to contribute to life and survival. They were proud of their strength and abilities when they were young, and they were generous with their wisdom when they were old. They were families and communities and they knew how they fit in, and they were happy to contribute.
Several factors caused Charlemagne, beginning in 787 AD, to stress education among his lords, especially reading and writing. First, he discovered that many clergy members couldn’t read their Latin Vulgate Bibles to their congregations. The original purpose of education, therefore, was Bible instruction. Second, for everyone in his empire to have the confidence-inspiring universal sameness that is the result of order and unity, he wanted written copies of his wishes, rules, and orders to be available at each of his feudal manors, and he wanted his lords to be able to read them so he could hold them accountable. He had schools, book-copying centers, and even lending libraries established throughout his realm. Subjects that were taught included reading, writing, religion, grammar, music, history, poetry, literature, law, art, architecture, and cultural practices from other regions such as Spain, England, and Italy. These educational programs were only for adults, not children. Children were taught informally every day by the adults with whom they interacted in the community…and therefore character was typically a byproduct of children’s growing up process, and education was only intended for adults who were already supposed to have developed the character and values needed to properly evaluate what they were being taught.
Life on feudal estates was serene, predictable, inwardly rewarding, and good. But over the centuries as society became more and more educated, education – which tended in a few good men to become an added responsibility (Lk 12:48) that made men more charitable, reflective, and humble – became for most men a shallow badge of prestige, which caused their charitable sense of responsibility to rot and became the kind of selfish pride and greed that too often are characteristics of modern society. Yes, education can be a good tool that helps society…but if society isn’t careful, knowledge can blind the majority into thinking progress, because it reduces work/makes life easier, is good (such as the Industrial Revolution) – but it isn’t, as we shall see. The Pilgrims’ Progress school of work, hard knocks, and the narrow way that is full of stumblingstones and rocks of offense is good for us. But making that journey through life easier by turning it into a smoothly-paved road tends to blind us to the goodness and benefits of the “old-fashioned hard lives” our ancestors lived.
A Heartfelt Reminder
Perhaps, because in the narrower context of the subject we’re getting into in this chapter, as well as the broader context of the overall war on the word, and because it’s on my heart, this is a good time for a reminder that our Christian walk must be not just cerebral, but circumspectly cerebral. Our modern, Enlightened society brainwashed us into thinking right and wrong is the issue – not authority. That seems easy enough to abide by, but the complexities of life, customs, and laws of society, combined with our natural carnal minds and our wants, likes, preferences, and opinions tend to get us sidetracked. It is important that we submit to the earthly authorities over us whether they are right or wrong. We are not to follow the local laws because we like and agree with them; we are to obey them because we are disciplined soldiers of the Lord Jesus Christ…and we are going to always glorify Him by submitting to His Headship. No matter what we like or want or are afraid of, the only thing in our lives that is of the utmost importance is our humble, disciplined service to our Lord. He deliberately put us on Earth under rulers whose laws we will sometimes find objectionable. That is the test of our Pilgrim’s-Progress journey! We must always keep the Lord in mind, and obey and glorify Him by dying to the lusts of our flesh. I say again: Our walk on Earth is designed to teach us how to be servants…and we are serving Christ when we submit to the imperfect human authorities over us. If we do that, Christ will show His approval of us by saying, “Well done, thou good and faithful servant.”
I hope, as you read this WOW, that it reinforces the necessity that having cautiously-suspicious, narrow-minded, literal-reading-of-the-Bible-based discernment is a necessity as we go through life because our Natural carnality, combined with the fact that the Devil is way ahead of us, means we are casualties of war waiting to happen. The Bible and the facts of history don’t make human beings look very good. It doesn’t matter if we look at God’s people in the OT, or at modern Christianity, or at modern unsaved society – from a Biblical perspective and a personal perspective it is horrifying because the battlefield all around us is piled high with casualties living and dead…and none of them (like Matt Seven) had any idea they had been leavened along the way. Our only salvation is in the person of the Lord Jesus Christ, but only if we develop a proper-and-real Christ-honoring relationship by walking with Him with self-examining humility and self-controlling discipline in strict accordance with His written word. The Devil’s goal in this spiritual war is to separate us from the Word by making the word have none effect. Our lives are individual tests to see if our society, our family, friends, and all of the distractions and enticements of modern life are going to make us casualties…or if we will remain focused on the Lord and the authority of His word.
With that mini sermon/reminder out of the way, I’m ready to jump back into the flow of history.
In Charlemagne’s western Europe, the Latin Vulgate (in handwritten manuscripts) was pretty much the only reading material because the Latin-speaking churches weren’t interested in the writings of Greek philosophers. But over in the Byzantine Empire (Eastern Roman Empire), because the Greek language was used by the Eastern Catholic Church to unify its members – just as Latin was used by the Western Catholic Church to unify its members – the writings/leaven of the Greek philosophers were more readily available. For that reason, some believe the Christianity in the Byzantine Empire was affected by the Reason of the Greek philosophers earlier than the Christianity in the Latin-speaking West. They also think the abundance of poor Greek translations of both the Hebrew Old Testament and the Greek New Testament (the Alexandrian manuscripts so detested by Origen and Jerome) may have affected doctrine in the eastern regions. They also think interactions with Christ-rejecting, NT-rejecting Masoretes and Muslims who were all over North Africa, Babylon, the Holy Land, Antioch, Syria…and eventually all the way to the doorstep of Constantinople itself, may have influenced (in minor ways) some doctrines of the Eastern Church and caused Arianism to be popular in the eastern regions. (Arianism denied the Trinity and said Christ was neither one with – nor equal to – the Father.)
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As travel and trade slowly began to increase in the century before the Crusades, scholars in western Europe began to learn more about the Reason of the Greek philosophers. Although Reason is contrary to what the Bible says – and therefore contrary to many things in Christian societal culture – “education” was increasingly taken over by the “self-evidence” of Reason. And it didn’t take long for “uneducated,” hard-working, Christians with good character in local communities to find out about this new kind of “education” being taught in their homes, churches, and one-room schoolhouses – and they were upset. When teachers were confronted about their Scripture-eroding teachings, they tried unsuccessfully to defend themselves by explaining that Reason was good because it was exposing Bible-based faith as old-fashioned superstition.
At first, when Charlemagne started requiring education across his realm, teachers had been humble Christians who merely used homes, churches, and one-room schoolhouses in the community to teach their adult students to read – by using the Latin Vulgate Bible. But when heated Reason-vs.-faith debates caused Bible believers to expel Reason-believing educators from the local homes and churches traditionally used as informal classrooms, these unpopular educators, to isolate and protect themselves, gradually decided to rent (and later construct) “formal” schools, colleges, and universities as independent strongholds over which local communities had no control.
Oxford University was founded in 1100, and because its teachers were required to be “professing Christians,” it became customary to call these teachers “professors.” The classrooms and lecture halls were unheated and drafty, so teachers and their adult students wore black gowns over their clothes for warmth…and these gowns quickly came to symbolize academics, which became a source of pride among the educated. But the townspeople who lived near Oxford, when they learned about the “rational, independent,” anti-Bible teachings, came to despise the black gowns…and a cultural division developed that came to be known as “town vs. gown.” Over time, “educated” people began espousing a “Christianity” based on manmade morality and Reason, and those who continued to believe in Thus saith the Lord were despised as “uneducated” and “superstitious.” Colleges and universities were largely responsible for spreading the insidious subtlety of Reason…and this “legitimizing” of Self unleashed the deceptive power of carnality that would produce science, political science, and all sorts of “knowledge”-based “progress” that would radically change society and make people completely dependent upon the world system for survival (Job 2:4). Notables from Oxford University include Roger Bacon, William of Ockham, and John Wycliffe.
University of Paris was founded in 1200. Notables include Peter Abelard (yes, even though he died over 50 years before the U of Paris officially came into being), Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, and Erasmus. The U of Paris became so influential, it overshadowed Athens, Alexandria, and Rome – which made Paris a favorite destination for liberals, and is one of the reasons I call the University of Paris the Temple of Reason. Abelard (AOR p.H7-3) is a prime example of what education often does to men, perhaps especially those who are exceptionally bright…and those others who are intellectually less than average; they become insufferable, argumentative assholes of low character who constantly rebel against authority.
Cambridge University was founded in 1209. Notables include Francis Bacon, Sir Edward Coke, Isaac Newton, and Charles Darwin.
An interesting historical statistic is the fact that even though education was for adults, by the year 1338, almost half of what we think of as “school-age” children were attending schools along with adults – especially in many Italian city-states including Florence, Genoa, Venice, and Milan. What, then, had happened to the “town vs. gown” / faith vs. Reason controversy that made schools unpopular and controversial? And what made many parents “reevaluate” their age-old parenting methods and the pros and cons of schools…and decide to stop “homeschooling” their kids in the necessary fundamentals of life and character, and to begin sending their young children to schools with teachings they knew to be subversive to Biblical faith? Why had making children “literate” become so important to parents that they decided Thus saith the Lord was unnecessarily strict? And why were cities in Italy so popular? It was because of “progress” …as we shall see shortly.
The men from the universities of Paris, Cambridge, and Oxford taught and influenced many, many other men, who all contributed to the dawn of the Age of Reason. For example, one of the many factors that led to the demise of the feudalistic lifestyle was the Magna Carta of 1215, which attempted to take away some of the King’s prerogatives and give them to his lairds/barons. The Magna Carta was drawn up by a controversial, Enlightened, rebellious archbishop, Stephen Langton, who studied at the Temple of Reason…and his Magna Carta started the centuries-long process of taking authority away from kings and other governmental authorities…by giving it to “laws” written and approved by “the people.”
THE CRUSADES HASTEN THE RISE OF TRADE, MONEY-BASED SOCIETY, AND THE END OF FEUDALISM
Charlemagne began educating adults in about 800 AD. European scholars began using Reason to “improve” education in about 1000 AD. The main Crusades were fought between about 1100 and 1300 AD. Parents began sending their young children to schools in about 1200. Let’s look at what happened.
In 1095 the fortress city of Constantinople was in imminent danger of falling to the Muslims, who had ruled – for three hundred years – Spain, north Africa, Arabia, the Middle East as far as India, and the entire Holy Land right up to Constantinople. The Eastern Orthodox Catholic emperor of Byzantine asked the Roman pope to save Constantinople. The pope called on the European “faithful” to serve God and receive spiritual rewards by going to Constantinople to defeat the Muslim army.
The first crusade, called the People’s Crusade, which was also the largest crusade at 100,000 men, women, and children, was a haphazard collection of mostly poor people from Germany, France, and Italy who had no idea what warfare involved. As this huge undisciplined army walked through Europe, it massacred Jewish communities (“they crucified our Saviour!”), and looted and burned a number of other communities that had goods the crusaders wanted, leaving a trail of death, destruction, and ill will. When this huge “army” of amateurs got to Constantinople it quickly attacked the Muslim army…and was annihilated, exterminated, wiped out…gone.
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After the disaster of that first crusade, the following crusades were better planned, better led, better financed, and manned by more knights and nobles. And instead of walking the whole way, they began sailing on ships from Italian ports to and from the Holy Land.
The crusader armies were financed in part by manor lords who mortgaged their vast estates. The armies were manned by manor lords, knights, and serfs…which left the manors in the care of a fraction of the number of people needed. Millions of crusaders were killed in the Holy Land. Diseases killed many of those who stayed behind on the manors. Feudal life, which had always been hard, became a real struggle.
The biggest beneficiaries of the Crusades were the Roman Catholic Church and the Italian ports of commerce.
The Catholic Church, because of the Europe-wide enthusiastic response to its call for crusades, became generally accepted as the supreme authority. It also became the wealthiest and largest landowner in history – in large part because of the Crusades. When kings and lords needed money to finance their crusades (weapons, food, transportation), they often made deals with the extremely-wealthy Vatican. If they died during the crusades, or safely returned but couldn’t pay their debt, the Church got their land. The Church ended up with more land, power, influence, and money than it knew what to do with.
During the eventful centuries of the Crusades there was a constant stream of men and supplies going back and forth between Europe and the Holy Land. The port cities in northern Italy, such as Venice, Genoa, and Pisa, were convenient because they had easy overland access to and from all of Europe, and they became thriving commercial hubs for the carts and wagons serving Europe, and for the merchant ships serving northern Africa, Arabia, the Holy Land, and the Orient. When European crusaders, who often came from rude living conditions on feudal manors, arrived in the Middle East they were amazed at the dazzling variety of goods for sale in markets and bazaars – such as spices, silks, ivory, dates, tapestries, precious stones, pearls, and perfumes. When these goods were shipped to Europe they took with them plague-infested fleas.
The number of available ships couldn’t keep up with the growing demand for goods and troop transport, so ports like Venice quickly started ship-building businesses. These wealthy Italian cities were teeming with merchant seamen, investors, shipyard workers, prostitutes, and vendors of all kinds. Merchants and investors, wanting to profit from the flourishing commerce, poured money into these cities, which quickly gave rise to the new, flourishing banking industry. More ships were built, more goods were shipped, more money was made. Wealthy, powerful Catholic bishops and cardinals formed political and business alliances with wealthy, powerful merchants, bankers, and government officials. Corruption was rampant and unchecked. Businesses such as shipbuilders, hotels, bars, banks, markets, tailors, etc., all needed employees – often employees who were literate – and business owners, who couldn’t find enough workers, began paying high wages to attract applicants.
People in Europe quickly found out that long-distance trade (as opposed to local trade) required money (as opposed to barter) to buy merchandise. And people on feudal manors usually had little or no money – and that was becoming a problem because it was hindering their lust for material things.
Word spread across Europe’s struggling undermanned feudal manors that good-paying jobs were available for illiterate workers in Italy, and better-paying jobs were available for literate workers. Many illiterates quickly left their manors and went to Italy. Many other illiterate young adults began attending schools, learned to read and write, and then went to Italy. Many parents, who, because of the “town vs. gown,” Reason vs. Bible controversy, had been dead-set against sending their young children to schools, decided with their carnal minds it was financially worth it for them to ignore their consciences and send their children to school…so they could get jobs that paid wages – money! That money would make life easier and would allow more and more people to buy the eye-candy merchandise from the Middle East. This created even more demand for merchandise, and the Italian city-states happily tried to expand their businesses to meet the demand. They became so wealthy, and they needed so many workers that people on feudal manors flocked to these urban money-making centers…and that marked the beginning of a huge and historically-important (in a bad way) societal transition from an agrarian-based economy in which people were largely self-sufficient – to a money-based one in which people who had no money would die. History, because it only views life through today’s lenses, labels people on feudal manors as “poverty stricken” because they had little or no money…which completely ignores the fact that they led charmingly-serene lives of contentment in the slow lane, had good character, and were successfully self-sufficient – until money and “progress” shattered their idyllic pastoral existence.
The Crusades killed so many lords that the people trying to survive on manors found themselves increasingly dependent upon their kings, with whom they’d previously had little contact. As a result, common people became more important to kings, and kings became more important to commoners. The few remaining nobles (knights and lords) found themselves increasingly marginalized by a changing societal structure.
When youngsters who’d left the manors to work in Italy sent money back home to their parents, those parents became consumers, and consumers attracted investors, and investors financed the establishment of businesses, and businesses attracted employees…and little communities became towns, and towns became cities throughout Europe. When merchandise from the Orient made its way west to a ship at a port in the Holy Land, then transferred in Venice to an animal-drawn wagon for the road trip to a town in France, and then to the shelves in a store, the owner of the store could no longer accept bartering from his local customers because none of the businessmen involved in transporting the merchandise from the Orient to France had any use for a couple of pigs and two sacks of fresh peaches; they wanted money because it was easy to carry, didn’t need to be fed, and wouldn’t spoil and go rotten. Yes, bartering with pigs and peaches in a small community was useful and practical, but as trade, commerce, and various modes of transportation became international and involved more and more people, only money was useful and practical. The Crusades increased travel, transportation, and trade…and thereby hastened the demise of bartering and the rise of money. I say again: feudalism, bartering, labor-based self-sufficiency, a true communal symbiotic bond among people, and, to a lesser degree, widespread good character, are dependent upon limited travel. (If today’s frenetic travel via trains, planes, ships, and cars were to be significantly restricted, it would cripple the flow of material goods, put many people out of work, and topple today’s commerce-dependent financial system.) The Crusades greatly changed the world largely because they kick-started mass long-distance travel. The Crusades enticed people into leaving the slow-lane quiet of their “Inner Sanctums” in which they communed with God all day, into spending much valuable time focusing on money, material goods, science falsely so called, sports, movies, fashion, technology, smart phones, etc.
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Because of the increased variety of material goods from faraway places for sale in local stores, lords who survived the crusades and retained possession of their manors, increasingly found they, too, had less use for bartering. In the past, their serfs paid their feuds/fees to their lords with labor and barter (sheep, milk, eggs). But now, lords began wanting money from their serfs (as rent/property taxes replaced the feud)…and society in general began the erratic and often tumultuous transition from the age-old, familiar, predictable, consistent agrarian society in which physical labor, bartering, family, community, and church members ensured survival and formed the basis for communal bonds among people – to a money-based society that was new, unfamiliar, unpredictable, increasingly urban, and ever-changing based on the latest technological inventions and improvements…and the new money-based society began weakening communal bonds and making neighbors strangers.
All of the good that was part of feudal life would, when Reason and equality were made part of Western civilization, be called “evil,” “authoritarian,” “oppressive,” “demeaning,” and “antiquated” by clueless people like scholars, theologians, and Karl Marx (even though God ordered them not to think that way in 1 Cor 12:14-26). Western leaders had clueless, unscriptural outlooks and wanted to make sure none of the above words in quotation marks would apply to the new civilizations created by their American and French Revolutions. Indeed, during the French Revolution, the French specifically outlawed any kind of feudalism (admittedly, a lot of that had to do with trying to curb the corruption and power of the Catholic Church), and Western democratic capitalists began to teach that any form of socialism/communism (in which dictatorial authorities control everything and outlaw private property ownership) is anti-Christian. But the Bible makes it clear that those ways are not anti-Christian. In fact, God Himself killed Christians who failed to wholeheartedly get with the socialistic/communistic program (Ac 2:44,45; 4:32-5:11; Mt 20:1-16).
While the Crusades were going on, the “Christianity-professing” professors in universities were continuing to use Reason to turn people away from the Bible and to end feudalism. Indeed, it was professors at the Temple of Reason itself in Paris that taught a young man from England, Stephen Langton (1150-1228) to apply Reason to everything. Langton became a Catholic priest and worked his way up to England’s Archbishop of Canterbury. He then used his influence among manor lords to undermine the authority of the king of England (a king who was, even though it’s irrelevant, a real jerk). The Enlightened Langton authored the Magna Carta in 1215 that restricted the authority of the king. Following Langton’s lead, the lords signed it. The Magna Carta itself went nowhere, but the Reasonable self-evidence of anti-authority equality continued to spread until it brought feudalism to an end and chopped off the head of Britain’s king in 1649.
After the Crusades killed a mere three million Europeans, the Black Death of 1346-1353 killed fifty million more Europeans (almost two out of every three people, or about 65% of all Europeans), which left many manors no longer able to properly function. The resulting shortage of labor made merchants and employers – who were desperate for workers – pay highly-attractive wages, which caused more serfs to leave their manors to get jobs…which made those serfs money-dependent for survival.
The spread of Reason also caused scholars to start using “senseless deaths” from plagues and accidents to deny the existence of God and become “humanists” because “no God would be that cruel.” Then, the Hundred Years War in Europe killed three million more people and brought even more changes to European society.
The Hundred Years’ War (1337-1453). In 1066 William the Conqueror from France conquered and ruled England and began making French the language of England. Over the next several centuries a dispute arose between England and France over whether English kings (who were descended/related to William the Conqueror) in London had dominion over both England and France like William did. This led to a series of bloody wars that historians lump together and call the Hundred Years’ War. Some of the results of the war: 1) England and France became independent, semi-permanent rivals. 2) Large professional standing armies in which serfs were foot soldiers who, armed with newly-invented cannons and armor-piercing longbows, were militarily more effective than noble-led armies of mounted armor-wearing knights. Armor-wearing knights on horses used to be semi-impervious to crossbow-using archers because of the slower speed and shorter range of crossbow arrows. But longbow arrows went much faster, farther, and put an end to the era of armor-wearing knights. That caused knights to vanish and nobles (lords) to become relatively powerless aristocrats who adopted “coats of arms” as symbols of their faded glory days. 3) The feudal system died, and the nobles’ old chivalry was replaced by a shallow, pretentious image of what a “gentleman” was. For example, instead of raising armies of mounted knights for serious life-saving, manor-protecting reasons, aristocrats invited other aristocrats to participate in fox hunts…and fox hunts replaced battles, and fox hunters replaced warriors. 4) Charlemagne and the Holy Roman Empire had tried to unify Europe and bring it under the rule of a single authority, thus threatening to undo the Lord’s good work in Gen 10:32-11:9. The Hundred Years’ War, however, ended that harmful-to-Christianity striving for international unity by promoting national sovereignty and giving countries strong national identities. It would be 500 years before other attempts to conquer and unify Europe were made by Napoleon and Hitler. 5) The Hundred Years’ War prevented French from becoming the language of Britain, the United States, Canada, New Zealand, Australia…and therefore the universal language of the world. 6) The Hundred Years’ War helped Britain escape the clutches of the Vatican, become Protestant, and ensure that the KJV rather than the corrupt Catholic Douay-Rheims Bible version would become the Authorized Bible and the God-given inerrant “crutch” that would preserve faith in God’s word for centuries. 7) The Hundred Years’ War made Britons painfully aware they were a vulnerable island nation apart from continental Europe, so they built themselves into a maritime power, which helped them discover, explore, and conquer vast areas around the world that became the Protestant, KJV-using British Empire…and, alas, the foundation of Enlightened Western civilization. Yes, even as the KJV spread Christianity around the world, the seeds of Christianity’s downfall – Greek Reason – were also spread.
THE PRINTING PRESS: THE MOST INFLUENTIAL INVENTION IN HISTORY
In 1450 a German printer, Johannes Gutenberg (1400-1468), produced a revolutionary, versatile printing press that had movable type. The first book he printed was the Latin Vulgate Bible Version. Almost overnight the price of books began to drop, and everybody wanted a printed Bible. Massive handwritten Bible manuscripts were suddenly old fashioned. And what better place to have a printing business back then than in the northern Italian cities that collectively were the commercial hub of the Western world.
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Most printers decided to establish their businesses in Venice, and by the late 1400s it had dozens of printing businesses equipped with the newest printing presses. Two good examples are Aldus Manutius and Daniel Bomberg.
Aldus Manutius (1449-1515) was born in Rome. In 1494 he moved to Venice and started his own printing business, the Aldine Press. There were so many competing printers in Venice it was difficult to get established. Manutius decided not to try to compete in the crowded full-sized Bible market, but would instead publish the Greek and Latin classics in smaller, cheaper “pocket sized” books to supply the growing interest among scholars in pagan philosophical works. But because scholars wanted to read the classics in the “original languages” (a harbinger of a coming destructive trend among Bible scholars and theologians), Manutius also published Greek and Latin grammar books as quick-reference “cheat sheets” for all of these pseudo scholars in “the languages.” In 1495 he published the first printed volume of Aristotle’s works, which was very popular. (If you need to refresh your memory about how popular the pagan classics were over the next 300 years, read the bottom paragraph on AOR p.H11-3.) Note: Many of today’s evangelical Christians have become so convinced that pagan philosophy’s Reason is so critically-important to understanding Christianity and government, they are offering courses that exalt the pagan philosophers (!), Enlightened equality-based government, and deeply-involved political activism…in order to defend “American political ideals.”
Daniel Bomberg (1483-1549) also moved to Venice to start a printing business. Lots of people were already supplying the always-popular Bible, and Manutius had already found a profitable niche for himself printing the classics on pagan philosophy and his Hebrew-and-Greek-dictionary forerunners of modern layman’s aids. Bomberg found that nobody in Venice was printing Hebrew-language religious books, so he became the first by hiring a Hebrew scholar, Jacob ben Chayyim (1470-1538), to produce in four volumes in 1525 The Standard Printed Edition of the Masoretic Text. It was a layman’s aid that included the Masoretic text with the Masoretic markings for vowels, pronunciation, and punctuation; Masoretic notes on the text; and extensive commentaries by Hebrew scholars. Bomberg, knowing many Jews liked the convenient way the Latin Vulgate Old Testament had been divided into numbered chapters two centuries previously, had the same thing done with his publication of the Masoretic Old Testament. It was a runaway bestseller, had multiple printings over the centuries, became the standard Rabbinical Bible, the standard Masoretic Hebrew OT text, and it was used, unchallenged, by everybody everywhere for over 500 years.
The effects of the printing press on society and history were massive. Printed books sped up history by causing rapid, unprecedented changes. Literacy became widespread, even among the lower classes. Only 32 years after the printing press appeared, there were over 100 printing businesses in western Europe. Only 50 years after the printing press came out, there were almost 20 million copies of 35,000 different book titles printed. Most people learned – to some degree – about Greek theories about how beneficial Reason and equality are.
Human knowledge spread like wildfire beyond the printed word: during the Renaissance color painted pictures (art) captured the imaginations of everybody (illocutionary effect) by effectively conveying messages and emotions by bypassing words. (In a universe created by God’s words, we do not want to get away from our dependency on words.)
Before the printing press, people had to believe their preachers, but when they were able to read the Bible, they found that Church teachings were often different from Thus saith the Lord. Catholics, both priests and laymen, began to ask questions, and the Vatican reacted by trying to silence them. Martin Luther was a master at using printed pamphlets, and the Protestant Reformation would not have happened without the printing press.
Previously, school educational curriculums had been leavened in general ways by Reason. But the religious wars between Catholics and Protestants began to influence school curriculums in specific ways. This caused four “religious denominations” to form: 1) those who went by the Catholic Church; 2) those who went by their Protestant church – or their newly founded cult starting in the 1800s; 3) those who became humanists and turned to science for answers; 4) and those who stuck with Thus saith the Lord.
Books were so effective at teaching – even on their own – that all previous methods of educating people became obsolete; everything now revolved around books. Information in books – and pamphlets, such as Thomas Paine’s Common Sense (AOR p.H13-3,4) – sparked the Protestant Reformation, the English Civil War, the American and French Revolutions, and the American Civil War. Scientific discoveries, along with scientific and unscientific theories caused society (including Christians) to become more and more secular.
The printing press changed the world, and it did so with astonishing rapidity. Without the printing press the Industrial Revolution and all the “progress” it triggered probably wouldn’t have happened…and we’d still be living in a pre-industrial slow-lane society with a vertical hierarchy.
THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION AND THE RISE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION
Western civilization is built on three pillars, Alexander the Great (325 BC), Augustine (400 AD), and Thomas Aquinas (1300 AD). Those three men were hugely responsible for the spread of the Greek philosophers’ ideology that said it is OK for mankind to depend on and be guided by his self-based Reason. Ideologies are the engines that determine the course of human history. The Greek ideology that said it was OK for a man to proceed independently without consulting the gods – as long as what he did was right and good in his own eyes – was a hugely radical deviation at a fundamental level from the way life had always been since God created angels and men. It was a fundamental square peg that corrupts God’s round-peg creation because it theorized that it is good for man to eat the forbidden fruit, to rely on his own knowledge of good and evil, and to presume that man’s inventions are good for him and for society – in spite of what the Bible teaches us about inventions in Ps 99:8; 106:29,39; Ecc 7:29; Pvb 8:12. To see the consistency of Pvb 8:12, pay attention to the pattern (good things are followed by bad things) in Pvb 8:7,8,10,11,12,13. The work of the Three Pillars of Western civilization spread the carnality of square-peg Reason to God’s people. At that point the curve of the graph of human “progress” began going up like a rocket, feudalism ended, and society rapidly became urban (Isa 5:8).
The Three Pillars spread their philosophical evil ideology, and most of mankind swallowed it hook, line, and sinker. Let’s now watch society change as mankind uses his Reason to come up with many witty inventions that Enlightened history has lauded as helping mankind raise his standard of living by escaping poverty (having little or no money, for which there was almost no need) and tyranny (living contentedly in a mutually-beneficial community with a benevolent vertical hierarchy) and by using technology to make life on a superficial level seem better, more productive, and more efficient.
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Britain’s Industrial Revolution began with the 1765 invention of the “spinning jenny,” which mechanized the making of thread and yarn so it could be used to weave huge sheets of fabric. (The results of the Industrial Revolution in the United States were, for our purposes here, very similar to those in Great Britain.) At first the spinning jenny did the work of 8 people in textile factories, but with improvements it soon replaced 120 people. The new machinery eliminated the need for skilled spinners and weavers, and unskilled workers were hired instead. The following figures will give you an idea of why the Industrial Revolution truly was a revolution: Before the spinning jenny, Britain needed to import 2.5 million pounds of raw cotton each year to be spun manually. By 1787, only twenty-two years after the jenny was invented, Britain needed to import 22 million pounds a year, then 58 million pounds in 1800, and 588 million pounds in 1850.
In 1781, improvements in the design and efficiency of steam engines made them suitable for use inside factories – not just for ships and locomotives. Innovations in mass production, factory assembly lines, steel making, advanced machine tool production, and widespread distribution of electrical power for factories caused unimaginable increases in production. Newly efficient locomotives, large steamships, and small steamboats all but eliminated the need for people to continue distributing merchandise by leading trains of heavily-laden pack horses along winding bridle paths.
When farm machinery was invented, one or two horses pulling a harvester made it no longer necessary for farmers to find and hire seasonal workers for the crops. Crop prices dropped, and small farmers found themselves unable to make enough money to keep farming, they simply couldn’t compete against farm machinery on larger-acreage farms. Unsavory decisions had to be made, so the farmer, his wife and two children sold their little farm, packed their bags, and moved to the city to get jobs to earn enough money to survive. In the city they rented a squalid tenement they could afford, and got in job lines with hundreds of other displaced Britons. Their 10-year-old son was hired to work at low wages in a factory, nobody else in the family was hired, and they continued waiting for a job opening. Their savings were used up. They got hungry…and frightened. Unsavory decisions had to be made again. The wife and the 14-year-old daughter became prostitutes. Eventually, all of them were able to get factory jobs, but there were no celebrations; they were deflated and discouraged. Yes, in terms of labor it was easier working long hours in the factory than it often had been on the farm, but factory work was repetitive, boring, and tedious. The long hours of manual labor back on their small farm was often hard, but they were all pulling together, appreciated each other, felt a sense of accomplishment, satisfaction, contentment, and pride…and they all missed the clean, fresh air, rural countryside…and their good lifestyles. In the city, the boy’s character development, without the constant oversight and direction of his parents, suffered. Six years later he got involved with other ne’er-do-wells, did some horrible things he shouldn’t have, was properly hanged…and dumped into a pauper’s grave.
Before the Industrial Revolution, people helped their churches and neighbors by supplying them with material goods, crops, livestock, and labor. When society became money-based, however, and when farmers could not compete with the new farm machinery, donations of all kinds to churches were greatly reduced, and churches no longer had the means to support congregants. I say again: In the old days when the harvest was larger than you needed, when the livestock multiplied more rapidly than needed, people often donated food, animals, and labor to their churches for struggling church members. But as society became “more advanced and modern,” and success was measured by monetary profits that weren’t really needed, that extra money quickly went into the purchase of unnecessary luxury items…and therefore there was nothing left over to donate to the church for the poor. Indeed, rural churches often found themselves struggling to stay afloat. Lacking understanding of the larger forces affecting society (progress and greed), people in financial straits began to wrongly blame and despise their churches and stopped attending. Neighbors could no longer afford charitable contributions to each other, and the increasingly old-fashioned sense of community began to vanish.
The Irish potato famine
In the 1840s, international trade introduced a potato blight (a crop disease) to Europe. Most farms were only slightly affected because they had a diversity of crops and livestock. But in Ireland many farmers grew potatoes almost exclusively.
Most people in Britain ate cereal grains, so most larger farms – including those in Ireland – grew grains. A high percentage of farms in Ireland were too small to grow enough grain to get their large families (which kept getting bigger) through the winter. Therefore, many small farms grew potatoes because they were cheap (and worth very little in the marketplace), easy to grow, and could adequately feed the families and their pigs. When the potato blight hit, tens of thousands of farm families in Ireland were starving; but because grain prices were now very high in other countries, Ireland’s large farms decided to make more money shipping their grain overseas instead of feeding their own starving neighbors. During the potato famine a million Irish died, and a million more moved to other countries hoping to get jobs.
The fact that Ireland and England decided to ignore their starving masses by making more money shipping foods overseas has made some people claim that the love of money should be blamed – not technology. It’s a fair point, but the fact is, if it weren’t for modern technology (rapid locomotives and oceangoing steamships), many perishable foods would not have been able to survive the journeys to foreign markets…and would have stayed in Britain and fed the poor. Also, it is the love of money that encourages more technological inventions that make it easier to make more money. That means, people being what we are, you cannot eliminate our love of money…but we can get rid of technology and live without it like most people throughout human history did.
Technology goes international
It was Britain’s large-acre farms in the late 1700s and early 1800s that put small-farm families out of business and forced them to make unsavory decisions about how they could survive. But after the 1860s Civil War in America the vast mid-western prairies in America became mega grain farms with modern farm machinery that produced unprecedented quantities of grain. Russia was also producing lots of grain – not with technology, but with lots of very cheap labor. The cheap grain from America and Russia flooded British markets and drove Britain’s fat-cat large-acreage farmers (who had destroyed small-farm families) into bankruptcy. Technology had made the world small, and businesses suddenly found themselves forced by economics into competing with market forces on the other side of the globe. In order to compete, businesses realized they either needed improved technology or cheaper labor…or both.
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The 6-inch ruler/graph that illustrates the rise of technological progress
Take a horizontal 6-inch ruler and let each inch represent 1,000 years of mankind’s history (a day is as a thousand years) from Adam to today. The last inch (representing the Biblical 6th day of history that goes from the end of the 5th inch to the end of the ruler at the 6-inch mark) represents the period from 1000 AD to 2000 AD (today). The end of the ruler represents the beginning of the Tribulation. Everything we’ve talked about in this chapter, beginning with the demise of feudalism, has taken place in our last-inch modern era. If you were to draw a graph that represents both 1) agrarian life in the slow lane, and 2) the rise of Western civilization’s “progress,” the first 5 inches of the graph would be a flat horizontal line down along the ruler representing feudalism. And then, shortly after the end of the 5-inch mark, right at the beginning of the 6th day, the line would start going uphill faster and faster to represent how astonishingly far away we’ve gotten from the study to be quiet (1 The 4:11) lifestyles that began way back with Adam. Progress is not a good thing, and the point where the graph begins to rapidly curve uphill may represent when, on the last day before the Tribulation, “He Who letteth” began to be taken out of the way (2 The 2:7).
In trying to take a bird’s-eye Biblical view of history that (perhaps) runs the risk of oversimplifying things, I’ll say this: I think God, knowing we’d get farther away from the good old days when He communicated with us orally, planned ahead by giving us the phonetic alphabet and His written word. Then, later, He used the manuscript mess as a stumblingstone that those with little faith could use as an excuse to incorrectly think His inerrant word no longer exists on Earth, and therefore to say, “He has His inerrant word with Him up in heaven” (where it doesn’t do us any good). During this same time His faithful followers trusted that His word did actually exist, even if hidden parable-like in plain sight among the various manuscripts. When education, knowledge, and “progress” began blinding more and more of His church as the above curve on our “ruler/graph” rose more and more steeply, God used the King James Bible translators to – unbeknownst to them – solve the manuscript mess “parable” by producing something Christians had never needed before: a hard copy, historically-unique Bible that was irrefutably inerrant…and the only Book with His name and rank on it. And He used the printing press, the British Empire, and the universal language of English to aid in the Great-Commission all-around-the-world publishing of His Book (Mk 13:10) in preparation for the dark last days (v.4). We live in a treacherous era in which we are perched at the top of the graph’s “progress curve.” All of the Devil’s clever influences have successfully convinced most people there is no God, and caused many Christians to believe less and less of God’s word. And there, but for the grace of God and His Bible, go we.
ATTEMPTS TO CURB THE HARMFUL EFFECTS OF TECHNOLOGY
Britain obtained dominion over many colonies and became a wealthy world power because of technological progress. But because the Devil now has dominion over the world, wealth and worldly power are detrimental to spiritual and personal character and wellbeing. The harmful effects “progress” was having on both society and Christian charity and fellowship was noticed by many people, so, let’s look at some of the men who protested the technological revolution. The first group to notice the harmfulness of technological progress was the Luddites.
The Luddites' anti-progress views
During the late 1700s in Britain a group of textile workers and weavers, for a variety of reasons, were unhappy with what progress was doing to society. This group came to be called “Luddites,” and the first thing that got their attention was good family members having their lives disrupted to such an extent that they saw no viable alternatives but to became whores and criminals because the old-fashioned community- and church-based welfare system had broken down. Luddites realized the dwindling influence and prestige of churches in the community was very harmful for society. (History would later show that government-run anonymous welfare undermines character and leads to widespread welfare abuse and increases in crime.) Luddites were also afraid (correctly) progress was going to make them lose their jobs to unskilled workers (and robots and AI computers). Therefore, from 1811 to 1816 they protested by rioting, disrupting factory work, and vandalizing machinery. They believed the astonishing growth of profits had made the love of money more important than Christian brotherly love. Even though the Luddite fears were correct, they were wrong to riot. Governmental authorities correctly executed some Luddites and imprisoned others…and the rioting came to an abrupt halt. When a government enforces its laws and will, that is true and effective rule – even if it is froward. The head must rule, and the members must obey. All societies need authority-plus-enforcement if they are to survive. Authority without enforcement is no authority. When a froward ruler punishes a disobedient member, the member must always be blamed – because the issue is authority, not right and wrong.
Over the years, more and more examples of harmful effects of progress all over Western civilization have broadened the term “Luddite” and now these modern anti-progress groups are often called “neo-Luddites” who believe a goal of governments and societies should be a return to simple, close-to-the-land lifestyles (similar to the way a number of modern groups live such as the Amish) that fosters a sense of community…rather than the greedy pursuit of unrestrained profit-driven progress. Neo-Luddites oppose industrialization, automation, computerization, and all new technologies in general that encourage consumerism to increase profits. Also, because it causes people to lose existing jobs, neo-Luddites oppose the modern corporate practice of sending domestic jobs overseas to countries with lower wages simply because it will increase profits – saying it, too, subordinates brotherly love to the love of money.
As technology began spreading and entrenching itself in society, it gradually began to occur to business leaders that technology was revealing humans to be inefficient, unreliable, selfish complainers…and wouldn’t it be nice if technology could someday make humans unnecessary!
In general, the unthinking masses who favor progress, predictably respond to the arguments of neo-Luddites by sneering that “they’re just technophobes and conspiracy theorists who are afraid of the mythical one-world utopian globalist movement.” Let’s examine some of these modern-day “technophobes” – whose writings often catch naysayers by surprise.
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Jacques Ellul's anti-progress views
Jacques Ellul (1912-1994) was a French philosopher, theologian, and professor. Some of Karl Marx’s writings got him thinking about how Western civilization has gone wrong, and he ultimately decided technology is a big cause of that.
Intelligent enough to discount Marx’s anti-Christianity stance, Ellul realized that the effect Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution had on unthinking society, together with unthinking society’s growing acceptance of all things having to do with science, together with the harmful effects that the Reason of the Enlightenment had on both theologians and on their “higher textual criticism” of the Bible, all combined to seriously undermine Western civilization’s belief in the sacredness of the Bible. Once the Bible was no longer perceived as God’s word, all economic theories – capitalism, communism, and socialism – began to increasingly bow to the god of profit by emphasizing the necessity and importance of efficient economic production to such a great extent that financial profit has itself become an unquestioned sacred belief and objective. (Notice that, unlike capitalism, communism, and socialism, monarchy is never associated with any specific type of monetary or governmental policy…because monetary policies are always up to the monarch, he is not bound by any system or rules – because the head is always in complete command.)
Ellul believed the secularizing influence of evolution, science, and theology, together with the waning influence of the Bible, rendered mankind unable to recognize how much of a threat technology is to society. Once technology demonstrated that efficiency produces profit, and once we quit being properly influenced by the Bible and its emphasis on brotherly love and the two greatest commandments, we became – collectively – a lower form of life. For example, without the guidance and instruction of the Bible (and books from bygone days that emphasized, described, and demonstrated the importance and necessity of character), people become shallow creatures who live their lives in the pursuit of entertainment, self-gratification, and the advancement of their materialistic and financial state. Indeed, modern education has decreased its emphasis on reading, writing, and arithmetic; on character development; and on learning how to absorb information in such a way that fosters evaluating the truth, relevance, and value of information – and instead teaches students to have baseless high opinions of themselves. Ellul also believed this secularized form of human cannot resist pursuing knowledge for its own sake (such as enthusiastically seeing if animal diseases can be genetically modified to infect humans, and seeing if we can grow genetically-modified embryos that are part-human-part-animal in human wombs…and in computer-nourished “robot wombs”), and pursuing continual increases in technologies of all kinds imaginable. In other words, he thought human beings, without the insights of the Bible, and without the limitations imposed by the Bible, are unable to resist the siren song of knowledge and technology for its own sake. He believed all religions that are not based solely on the Bible will all find ways to rationalize all forms of technology because efficiency is always “better” …and therefore always “good” to the non-discerning carnal mind. He was afraid mankind would become a slave to technology for the simple reason that technology is “progress.”
Ellul was reluctant to uncompromisingly condemn technology, modernity, and progress because neither he nor anybody else knows how to undo history and take a largely-ignorant, selfish society back to Amish-like living – and therefore his wimpy “solution” was people should “understand that technology is just a tool mankind should use for good; it is not our master that should always be accepted and submitted to.”
The Unabomber's anti-progress views
Dr. Ted Kaczynski (1942-2023) was an American math-genius professor with a high IQ and a PhD from MIT who, losing a painful battle with rectal cancer, hanged himself in prison close to his 82nd birthday. During the 1960s he became increasingly concerned about the future of humanity because of the harmful effects of technology. He read and agreed with some of Jacques Ellul’s works, but he was correctly convinced Ellul’s quiet plea for people to pay attention to what technology has been and is doing to the planet and its people was going to reach very few people. Believing that the situation is too dire for halfway measures, Kaczynski began blowing stuff up to get his message into the public eye in a big way, eventually unintentionally killing three people. It took the FBI decades to finally catch him in 1996, and it was the FBI that nicknamed him “the Unabomber.” For that reason, Kaczynski, before he was captured, wrote a thesis about technology entitled, The Unabomber Manifesto: Industrial Society and Its Future. The opening sentence of his manifesto proclaims, “The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.” All hands agree his manifesto was impressively written…and most readers are shocked by how right he was about so many things.
Kaczynski believed technological “progress” is anything but progress. In fact, he believed “civilization” is a near-incurable disease because [ignoring the inexorable role carnality plays in the downfall of societies] it was technology that transformed normal, traditional, feudal “society” into what we call “civilization” – which is a blinded state of enslavement. Blinded because one of the effects of technology (especially in this digital age) is its ability to convince people that technology-based civilization is somehow some kind of good-deal blessing – in spite of the obvious historical and everyday evidence to the contrary. Kaczynski also said technology cannot exist and do its job unless man creates vast “systems” that support and allow technology to properly function. For example, cars are worthless without extensive networks that provide fuel, gas stations, fuel-delivery ships, pipelines, trains, and trucks, roads, maintenance, trained drivers, rules of the road, etc. Indeed, wars have been fought over petroleum resources. Also, when technology is first invented and offered to the public as “completely optional,” it often later forces people to use it! For example, a man who uses a horse to get around and therefore shuns cars, later finds that roads and highways are everywhere and “progress” has made horses unusable as routine modes of transportation. Another example: When the Internet was invented, only a very few people used it. Today it has so wormed its way into daily life and become such a “necessity” that people now say, “Internet access is a human right.” Another example: Banks and insurance companies are trying to get their customers to voluntarily install their “convenient apps” on smart phones so customers can quickly and easily do routine transactions. Those apps utilize incredibly-precise GPS-aided monitoring technology (that federal law requires manufacturers to build into all smart and dumb phones) to monitor where you go; how fast you drive; how quickly you accelerate, brake, and corner; what spot you park in; whether you are the driver or a passenger; and if you text, talk, or check emails while driving. The apps are voluntary now, but soon the coming “corporatopian technocracy” will require everybody to have all kinds of apps.
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Technology, said Kaczynski, does not and cannot regulate and modify itself in order to satisfy what people want; people are the ones who must modify their behavior in order to submit to the needs of technology – e.g., if you’re driving a car and you’re late, you are still required to comply with the speed limit, stop at the red light, etc. Also, because of all the pro and con rhetoric about capitalism, socialism, and communism, Kaczynski stressed the fact that it’s not capitalism, socialism, and communism that are making you buy cars, get insurance, download tracking apps, and stop at red lights – because those monetary and governmental systems are increasingly-archaic – it’s technology that is making us voluntarily or involuntarily conform to its dictates. Technology continually and inexorably gains more and more control over every aspect of our lives. Kaczynski was especially troubled at what society will be like once quantum computers with artificial intelligence using 5G technology become involved, and when genetic manipulation of humans (and many other “transhuman” technologies that already exist today) begin to go mainstream.
Kaczynski said technology destabilizes society and makes life so unfulfilling that people spend their lives pursuing the lusts of the flesh and of the mind (Eph 2:3 on steroids) – all of which are unnecessary, trivial, and ultimately unfulfilling wastes of time. We engage in so many of these trivial activities because technology has made it so we don’t have to really work toward meaningful goals; we get whatever we want with little effort, and therefore quickly turn to other diversions. He said liberal “leftists” are some of the best examples of the harmful effects technology has on people because of the nutty stuff they try to make big deals of, such as obsolete socialism, political correctness, feminism, homosexuals, animal rights, and other anti-common-sense causes that reveal leftists to be riddled with “feelings of insecurity” that are rapidly spreading to many other people because of today’s unsatisfying society. He didn’t spare conservatives: they reveal themselves to be doltish fools because, even though they whine incessantly about the decay of traditional moral values, they enthusiastically embrace technology without evaluating what’s going on in current events, such as: “Hmm, I wonder if the rapid changes to society [Kaczynski was mostly referring to the Nietzschean “God is dead” movement that made the cover of Time Magazine in 1966, and to the social and moral upheaval of the drug-addled, sex-crazed 1960s] caused by technology [cars, interstate highways, TVs, transistor radios, men on the moon] have had anything to do with the rapid breakdown of society’s traditional values.” (Perhaps one of the most undeniable proofs that society is full of lowlifes who lack character and self-discipline is the fact that American citizens cannot stay away from illegal booze and drugs. For example, during Prohibition in the 1920s in the city of Chicago alone, gangsters were fighting with each other for control of the illegal liquor trade because Americans in Chicago alone were spending a billion dollars a year for booze. And today Americans are spending over a trillion dollars a year for illegal, life-threatening drugs. Even the U.S. government forms secret partnerships with drug cartels to sell drugs to lowlife Americans so it can have billions of untraceable dollars to fund illegal activities at home and abroad.) Technology has and is harming society psychologically, it is destroying the environment, and it is using up Earth’s resources. (Unbelievable amounts of mining needs to be done just to produce one average-sized lithium car battery.) Kaczynski believed the disease of technology is so powerfully contagious that halfway measures to “control” it cannot work; like a cancer it will always continue to spread – unless it is completely eliminated and then banned from society.
One of his ideas is thought-provoking to Christians. He evaluated the history of technology and concluded technology is a menacing, evil presence that is more akin to an organism than to mere hardware. To wit: 1) It has had rapid, universal, and unprecedented acceptance by humans. 2) As the Luddites first observed two centuries ago, technological inventions have been detrimental to society and to Christianity. 3) The good that technology has done (efficient, consistent production and higher profits) is neither significant enough nor “good” enough to justify or excuse its harmful effects to society and Christianity. 4) Many people have, based on research, been convinced that technology is harmful, addictive, and so dominating that it forces us to alter our lives and routines to accommodate its needs and incorporate it into our lives. 5) Once people acknowledge the truth of points 1 through 4, they make zero lifestyle changes – as if either points 1 through 4 do not exist…or they are powerless to stop being swept along.
Now that we’ve looked at the Unabomber, let’s see if we can apply all of this to Satan’s attempt to take over the church: Technological inventions didn’t show up until the beginning of Day 6 of Biblical history (keeping in mind that the Bible has nothing good to say about inventions). Once technological inventions arrived, the 5-day-long flat curve of progress abruptly and dramatically began rising because the Lord began giving the Devil freer reign, and then shall the Wicked be revealed (when it is his time). Could the huge “advances” in “civilization” – as depicted by the dramatically-rising “progress curve” – be causing loss of faith, woe, and societal chaos because they are inspired by the Devil who knows he hath but a short time? If that is not correct, could it be that our modern-day woe-causing inventions are because we, like our OT carnal-mind-using brethren, are hoist on our own petard because we have lost, and continue to lose, more and more of the savor of our salt? No matter if one or both points are correct, we should be protecting ourselves by coming out from among them, by living quiet lives in the slow lane, and by obediently immersing ourselves in Thus saith the Lord so that we might better hear the Lord’s still small voice.
Chellis Glendinning's anti-progress views
Chellis Glendinning (1947- ) is a psychologist and environmental activist who published Notes Towards a Neo-Luddite Manifesto in 1990. She grew up in a wealthy, respected family in Cleveland, Ohio, was jailed for her illegal political activism during the 1960s while a student at UCal, Berkley, and now lives in South America in a small city in Bolivia. Her father was reputed to be a good doctor, but he sexually abused his daughter to such an extent that she never married and is still trying to recover emotionally. In trying to understand what her father’s problem was, she concluded he was just another abused victim of evil Western civilization – a civilization that began when Caucasians from Europe began invading the Native Americans’ continent. She also decided it was Christian doctrinal insanity that had been causing wars and persecutions in Europe for 300 years. She compared the rates of mental illness, emotional problems, and depression among people in the technologically-frenzied pace of life in Western civilization with those in societies that live life in the slow lane closer to nature such as Amish, Eskimos, and Native Americans…and found that the higher up you are on the curve of the technological-progress graph the more problems you have. She recognized that most of our modern social and personal problems began about a thousand years ago when “progress” began to “civilize” Western societies. But she also decided mankind’s problems go back over 10,000 years to when hunter-gatherer primitive man built the first fence to cruelly domesticate animals so we could force them to carry burdens and plow fields back in the beginning of the age of agriculture. Today, mankind is using technology to bulldoze nature and replace it with endless shopping enterprises; clear-cuts; rioting, crime-ridden, graffiti-filled cities; crumbling pavement; drug-addicts who shit on sidewalks and in grocery store aisles; non-addicts who can’t get through a day without antidepressant drugs; eroded farms that raise crops with chemicals; toxic wastelands; pollution everywhere; and endless flocks of heads-bowed zombies entranced by glowing cellphone screens who have dead eyes and slack jaws and actually think our awful square-peg modern society is “normal.”
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She has concluded that technology deserves most of the blame because it has put mankind out of sync with nature. Mankind evolved from an inhuman mucky primordial soup, and unless we get back to those evolutionary roots we are doomed to shallows and to miseries – because when we abuse Mother nature, she punishes us. Therefore, we must holistically restore our health by ending pollution, animal extinctions, the squandering of Earth’s resources, and we must restore our evolutionary connection with the seas and the stars. If we can reconnect with whatever we haven’t yet destroyed of our evolutionary heritage from Mother Earth, we can re-tap into the intelligent presence of the Earth’s lifeforce matrix and find our individual true selves.
Her rabid feminism contributed to her theory that the Judeo-Christian blind acceptance of the Bible’s arrogant stupidity when it tells us we are superior to Mother Earth, and are therefore supposed to exercise “stewardship” over her by subduing and having dominion over her, is a major reason society has gotten so far off track. She is an example of how nutty and rabidly radical well-intentioned Godless liberals can be – even if they get some things right.
What these neo-Luddites propose mankind should do
Since technological progress has made society full of people who are unhappy, unfulfilled, insecure, restless, and even suicidal, neo-Luddites want to eliminate all technology. If we compromise by keeping some technology, it will inevitably lead to more compromises in the future. Some of the things on the following list are there because modern Luddites believe the Earth’s resources that are needed to support a technology-enabled world population would eventually run out. Some of the steps that need to be taken include:
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Eliminate all electromagnetic technologies such as cellphones, computers, TVs.
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Eliminate electricity and everything that cannot function without it.
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Eliminate chemical technologies such as all non-natural medicines, all synthetic fabrics and materials, and chemical pesticides and fertilizers.
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Eliminate nuclear technologies such as weapons, electrical power generation, cancer treatments, smoke detectors.
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Eliminate genetic engineering such as farm crops, diabetic insulin, transhuman robotic body parts and implants.
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Eliminate technology-producing occupations such as scientists, engineers, and profit-driven businesses.
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Eliminate mechanically-driven power tools, but keep simple hand-powered tools.
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Eliminate politicians who believe “bigger-is-better,” and who think governments should have the high-tech ability to monitor and control all people with biological engineering, pharmacological and psychological control measures, electronic surveillance and location tracking, and economic-reward “inducements.”
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Practice moderation in all things, eradicate materialism and private property, and emphasize community-based self-sufficiency because it requires people’s cooperation to survive, which enhances satisfaction and contentment.
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Orient our lives around ideology, values, modesty, and reality – not technology, possessions, status, and appearance.
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Some of the technological inventions they would eliminate that would certainly have the biggest negative impact on modern society – including mass human die-offs – if they were to suddenly (rather than gradually) disappear include electricity, fossil fuel, diesel engines, and hydraulics.
Even if modern technological advances do not result in mass loss of jobs on scales equal to or greater than they were back in the Luddites’ era, modern neo-Luddites believe technology will inexorably, gradually bring about societal collapse of a kind that will not gently return mankind to Amish-like quiet lifestyles in the slow lane, but will instead either quickly destroy mankind with a nuclear holocaust, or gradually render Earth environmentally incapable of sustaining human populations larger than small groups living in isolated pockets. They believe people in modern civilization can be successfully coerced into a gradual (but grudging) transition that will enable them to live like modern groups such as the Amish.
Putting the above historical events into Biblical perspective, it becomes obvious that walking away from the self-sufficient agrarian lifestyles of feudalism was a huge mistake; it put society at the mercy of money because society began to need money to survive. This chapter has looked at several things related to “progress” that have been detrimental to both society and Christianity, but leaving feudalism in order to work for money can be seen as the point in history when Christians’ bondage and actual enslavement to the Devil’s world accelerated.
And Satan answered the LORD, and said, Skin for skin, yea, all that a man hath will he give for his life. But put forth thine hand now, and touch his bone and his flesh, and he will curse thee to thy face. And the LORD said unto Satan, Behold, he is in thine hand… (Job 2:4-6). We don’t know what kind of pressures we may face. But our love-based relationship with the Lord must cause us to jealously adhere to Thus saith the Lord no matter what happens…even if our dying breath is not my will, but thine, be done (Lk 22:42).
The purpose of this chapter is not to convince you to become a neo-Luddite and shun everything associated with progress. It is to make you aware that, because of our carnal tendency to be selfish, materialistic, and to “know” right and wrong, we are all “Eves” who are way out of our depth trying to discourse with the Devil. I’ve been advised, for example, to read a bunch of books by “Christian” authors and write detailed critiques of them in order to help Christians know how and why so much of modern “Christianity” is unscriptural. But the Lord has told me to come out from among them – not to read their bullshit and discourse in detail with them: But avoid foolish questions, and genealogies, and contentions, and strivings about the law; for they are unprofitable and vain. A man that is an heretick after the first and second admonition reject; Knowing that he that is such is subverted, and sinneth, being condemned of himself (Titus 3:9-11). Our duty isn’t to answer their foolish questions, to endlessly wrangle about doctrine, and to research everything outside of our slow-lane lives hoping we’re smart enough to figure everything out and avoid the things that are evil and subversive; our duty is to stick with the Lord by walking circumspectly with Him via His literal word. Our duty isn’t to read other books – it’s to stick with the Bible.
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Looking at progress through a glass, darkly
If the latest findings about the universe are correct, and a bunch of inert, lifeless atoms are not the fundamental building blocks of the universe as previously believed (which was reviewed on chapter 1 page 4 under The universal wave-force and intelligent energy of the living word of God), and if the latest evidence that suggests all atoms everywhere throughout the universe consist of, or are controlled by, a force of living intelligence that is instantaneously aware of everything that happens all over the universe, then it might be profitable for us Bible believers to think about what may be going on during these dark last days we find ourselves in…and we’ll do so by looking at similarities that may be types or evidence of what’s going on:
God is almighty, all-knowing, and ever-present. When something happens anywhere in or outside of this universe, He instantaneously knows about it – because everything, living or inert, consists of Him. He can heal us or make us sick. He knows our thoughts, words, and every move we make. Take a minute to think about the fact that by him all things consist.
The Devil wants to exalt himself above the Most High…but he’s not all-knowing. However, he is the prince of the power of the air, and his “cross” is an electricity-carrying power pole. Transmitted communications, Internet info, and all other forms of electricity-powered transmissions are limited to the speed of light. The world of the dark last days is different from the world of all previous ages; our modern-progress-driven world is a world illuminated by electric light. But 24-hour illumination is by no means the biggest change brought about by electricity. The biggest and most far-reaching change is the Digital Age.
God is the alpha and the omega. Digital things are governed by ones and zeroes, and our lives are being increasingly monitored and governed by digital devices. Anything you can imagine can be programmed – created, if you will – by arranging ones and zeroes. Indeed, many people are now losing their jobs to things run by ones and zeroes. Everything in “modern” life is being taken over and controlled by ones and zeroes: digital money, pocket phones that can do pretty much anything, automobiles that drive themselves and monitor everywhere you go and everything you say and do, TVs and computers that are collecting so much information about you that AI programs know more about you and how to manipulate you than you know about yourself. If electricity suddenly quit existing, the world would have a mass die off. But a long-term worldwide power failure probably isn’t going to happen because the prince of the power of the air – without electricity – loses a large segment of his ability to monitor and control as a false alpha and omega. Ones and zeroes allow him to use modern means of digital identification to control every aspect of our lives. He won’t know that information instantaneously, but he can know it at the speed of light. All of the world’s currencies are being converted to digital currency. How did we become powerless to resist being part of the modern digital society? It became inevitable when we inherited carnality by being lured away from a strict belief in Thus saith the Lord. As a result, we live in a world obsessed with, driven, and guided by the love of money.
The Digital Age of electricity-powered ones and zeroes becoming ubiquitous all over the world is one of the Devil’s ways of trying to imitate God’s all-knowing, ever-present power. It will have much to do with bringing the Antichrist to power, and the image of the Beast may be transmitted to hand-held, glowing screens by ones and zeroes.
Our lives will not be “ours” anymore. But remember, it’s OK for Bible believers to have digital IDs, phones that track everything we do, and to no longer be allowed to clamour against whatever the government says – even if the government is wrong and froward. It’s OK for Bible believers to be surrounded by a modern form of “Christianity” we know is horrifyingly unscriptural and blatantly anti-Christ. But if we find ourselves asked, pressured, or coerced into doing something that requires us to turn our backs on Christ, we must realize and accept the fact that the time has come for us to glorify our Saviour by walking together with Him as a lamb to the slaughter.
The Devil’s control over the world is growing every day at a frightening pace…and there is nothing we can do about that. Our job is to believe the Bible by being doers of what it says. In that way we preserve our individual salt, which contributes to the welfare of the church, and helps our Lord win the War – over our dead bodies if necessary. But remember, if we find ourselves terrified, all alone with no surviving Christian fellowship, and seemingly without God (Deut 8:2; 2 Chron 32:31), we must draw upon our love for Him that has, over time and experiences, proven to be more meaningful, more rewarding, and more wonderful than the awful glimpses of ourselves (as in Lk 22:61,62) we’ve had along our Pilgrim’s progress journeys that have made verses like 2 Chron 4:16 – 5:4 take on a real and deeply-personal meaning.
In short, my brothers and sisters, the key to Christ, the key to life, is His word. And no matter what people say about “love,” “Christianity,” “tolerance,” and “getting along,” our relationship with Christ has become our lives, it has become who we are as we’ve fed on His miraculously-inerrant word. And we won’t have it any other way.
…in nothing I shall be ashamed, but that with all boldness, as always, so now also Christ shall be magnified in my body, whether it be by life, or by death. For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain. (Phil 1:20,21)
Have ears that hear...
and endure to the end, comrades!