Christians were outraged, and the politicians inside the secular Garden of Evil realized they had to appease these voters by tossing them a bone in the form of a face-saving “victory”: In 1864 Congress authorized that IN GOD WE TRUST be put on the two-cent coin! Nothing legally binding, nothing anywhere that would officially define who this “God” was, no Jesus Christ, and no Bible – just another nebulous Enlightened term on a two-cent coin that would make Thomas Jefferson laugh at the gullible stupidity of enthusiastic Christians who rejoiced and thanked God for “giving them the victory.”

Over the years Congress felt it necessary to toss out more bones: It later put IN GOD WE TRUST on all the money! (That was a major boost for the Protestant work ethic!) Congress stopped mail delivery on Sunday because some Christians thought the first day of the week was supposed to be a day of rest, chaplains were allowed in the District of Carnality, churches that voluntarily submitted themselves to the incorporation laws of the U.S. were rewarded with tax-exemption, and President Reagan became the darling of Christians by declaring a temporary “national Bible week.” In 1954 when Moslems, Hare Krishnas, and Christians complained about the 1942 officially-adopted secular version of the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag, Congress, at the urging of President Eisenhower, added the generic “under God” to the Pledge. The Pledge instantly became a hit in Christian schools and churches, Masonic temples, American Buddhist meetings, etc.

During the buildup to the Civil War people were killing each other over the issue of abolition, but nobody wanted to secede from the union over it – just like nobody wants to secede from the union today over the issue of abortion. The fact is slavery was quickly being made obsolete by economics; it was simply too expensive to have slaves, and the institution was already being phased out – even in the South. Eli Whitney’s cotton gin did slightly prolong the economic feasibility of slaves because it processed cotton faster than the existing work force could pick it. But that ended when machinery was developed that harvested cotton. By the time the Southern Confederacy drew up its Constitution, it included a timetable for the abolition of slavery. That, however, did not keep the North from trying to use the issue of slavery to claim the moral high ground. President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation (which assumed powers the Constitution did not give him) freed only the slaves in the states the North had not yet conquered; Lincoln preserved slavery in the northern states that still practiced it and in the Confederate states occupied by the North.

Because the right of a sovereign state to secede from anything with which it might be confederated was not seriously questioned, the initial sentiment in the North when the South threatened to secede was “good riddance.” But then economics intervened. The most important harbor in the U.S. was New York. Charleston, because of its eastern seaboard location and its extensive railroad system linking it with the east, was second. New Orleans was third because the Mississippi, Missouri, and Ohio rivers gave it natural highways reaching far into the continent west of the Appalachian Mountains. The North charged a 25% import tariff. The South set its rate at 10%. If you were shipping steel from France to the U.S., a 15% profit margin would certainly cause you to unload in Charleston or New Orleans. Because of its more sophisticated economy the North had higher overhead costs and could not compete with a 10% tariff. Newspaper editorials appeared in the North saying if the South seceded there would be grass growing in the deserted streets of New York in ten years. That’s why Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor was so important to the North, and is why the military action of the Civil War began there.

To southerners, President Lincoln was like King George III: he was taxing them, denying their “right” to self-determination, and he was responding with military might to their declaration of independence. From a Biblical perspective the North was right (unless the southern nations were in fact sovereign) because rebellion against evil and oppressive authority is never right. From the standpoint of the principles of the Declaration of Independence, however, the southern states were right (whether they were sovereign or not). But it is difficult or impossible to defend one side or the other because democracy is rife with contradictions whether viewed through Scripture or secular logic – contradictions that are compounded by years of “legal precedent.” As soon as the U.S. came into existence it began changing as it reacted to inconsistencies and problems, and in so doing it created new problems and inconsistencies. Because the states were sovereign nations people used to say, “I’m proud to be a citizen of these United States.” Until the Fourteenth Amendment there was no such thing as an “American citizen” because you were not a citizen of the United States, you were a citizen of (for example) New Jersey, which was confederated with the other states by its participation in the federal government in the District of Columbia. But when immigrants were processed in New Jersey and then went inland to find a home, were they to be treated by Virginians as foreign citizens of New Jersey, or were they to be treated as all colonists had been before the American Revolution when all colonists were citizens of Great Britain/citizens of the United States? Slowly the ideological lines were drawn: Those who valued the principles of the Declaration of Independence favored states’ rights; those who valued a practical compromise favored a stronger central government. (As Bible believers you and I favor anything that gives authority to the single head.)

Another problem with democracy for Christians concerns government officials. Should we pray for them and refrain from speaking ill of them because they have the rule over us, or should we view them as our public servants? We can only ignore such contradictory nonsense if we ignore the importance of authority. And for Christians to ignore authority is a critical mistake with huge and far-reaching ramifications and consequences.

When Article Thirteen prohibited slavery in violation of Article One, this contradiction was made possible by the increasing importance of the Declaration of Independence as an authoritative bible for society. When Natural Law was exposed as nothing but Greek mythology, some other mystical authority had to be found to rule society. And since the National Reform Association’s lost cause showed everyone the Constitution could not be based upon Christianity or the Bible, all Enlightened eyes turned to the Declaration of Independence. It had it all: It combined a generic “God” and democracy and patriotism and the principles of the Age of Reason in one foundational document that could be an ideological substitute for the Bible. Proponents of treating the Declaration of Independence as a “higher authority” include President Lincoln, who appealed to the principles of the Declaration to make slavery evil; William Seward, a senator from New York and Lincoln’s Secretary of State who purchased Alaska; and modern-day Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who wants to restore Natural Law as “human nature” and “reason” rather than as the old discredited God-implanted moral code. Vestiges of “godly” Natural Law still existed in Lincoln’s day, so it was easy to claim an ideological supremacy for the Declaration of Independence because no patriotism- and democracy-worshipping Christian would argue with it. Therefore, the Declaration ceased being merely a joint announcement by thirteen rebellious colonies and became – without legislation of any kind – a document superior to the Constitution. The southern states had already accepted the authority of the federal government over the states when they applauded the Missouri Compromise, and now they found that the very Constitution that restricted the powers of the federal government (by limiting it to specific tasks beneficial to the states) had become itself subject to the principles of Greek mythology behind the Declaration of Independence! It was perfect…because Americans may scoff at Natural Law, but they’d never deny their belief in the “sacred” principles behind the Declaration of Independence. From a Christian perspective, therefore, “Seward’s folly” wasn’t Alaska; it was making the Declaration a clever substitute for discredited Natural Law. And that is how the federal government justified the creation of laws that told the states what they could and couldn’t do: The Thirteenth Amendment wasn’t violating either Article One or the Bible, because anything that contradicted the principles of the Declaration of Independence was now unconstitutional and unchristian. The government was merely submitting to the same “higher authority” that all Freedom worshippers bowed to.

For the same reasons, the legal system was (supposedly) no longer based on Natural Law/Common Law – it was based on “Equity” (or “Conscience” as it used to be called), which is now known as “equity jurisprudence.” In this way the legal system became based on the same principles as the Declaration of Independence. The brilliance of this is in the fact that the Declaration of Independence can never be changed. We can vote to change the Constitution, and revision committees can change the words in the Bible, but not one jot or tittle of the Declaration of Independence can ever be changed because it is a historical document. Today no church doctrine or governmental law will be tolerated if it violates the underlying ideology of the Declaration of Independence. Satan has done well: All Christians now worship the “original Greek”, whether it be the ERROR manuscripts or the Greek philosophy underlying the Declaration of Independence and the Age of Reason.

I’ll use this Civil War era quote to show that Reason had become so unquestionably authoritative that self-evidence was its own proof: “Slavery is contrary to the principles of Natural Right and to the great law of Love. It is founded on injustice and fraud, and can be supported only by the existing laws and customs which have been established by men acting against the Laws of Nature. This point is not necessary to prove, indeed, a discussion of these principles has become unnecessary in consequence of the revelations of the Enlightenment concerning Reason and Common Sense.”

And now look at this 21st century Hollywood movie quote. This speech was made by the star of the movie to a congressional committee, and it was the patriotic, dramatic, and ideologically-inspiring turning point of the show that made you want to jump up and recite the Pledge of Allegiance: “Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen of the committee…I stand for a woman’s right to choose. I stand for the elimination of the death penalty. I stand for a strong and growing armed forces because we must stomp out genocide on this planet – and I believe that is worth dying for! I stand for seeing every gun taken out of every home – period. I stand for making the selling of cigarettes to our youth a federal offense. I stand for term limits and campaign reform. Mr. Chairman, I stand for the separation of church and state. The reason that I stand for that is the same reason that I believe our forefathers did: It is not there to protect religion from the grasp of government, but to protect our government from the grasp of religious fanaticism. I may be an atheist, but that does not mean I do not go to church; I do go to church: The ‘church’ I go to is the one that emancipated the slaves, that gave women the right to vote, that governs every freedom that we hold dear. My ‘church’ is this very chapel of democracy that we sit in together, and I do not need God to tell me what are my moral absolutes; I need my heart and my brain and this ‘church’.”

The Civil War was the first and only time the United States declared war on a democracy. In many ways the Civil War was necessary in order to resolve some of the questions and problems that were not anticipated when the Constitution was written. The Civil War also served as a distraction from the issue of upon what – now that Natural Law was discredited – is the government of the U.S. – including the now-sacred Declaration of Independence – based? With the practical problems faced by the nation during the buildup to war, during the fighting, and during Reconstruction, people were not able to remain focused on the principles and concepts of the Bible. And by the time the dust of Reconstruction settled, states’ rights and the sovereignty of the states were dead issues, and “these United States” passed into history and became “the United States.” A union of confederated sovereign nations became one nation under a strong central government. The original meaning of sovereign state in practice became county, and therefore the original meaning of federal government became that of central government. And the District of Columbia lost its reason for being, which has resulted in people today wanting it to be represented in Congress just like a state.

As the government in the District of Columbia gained the ascendancy and the states lost their sovereignty, the central government gradually forced the states to adopt secular governments. The early state constitutions that in some way recognized the Christian religion were declared to be contrary to the Enlightenment doctrines embraced by the central government and the f-ing fathers, so they were all rewritten and made secular. Constitutions can be changed because as official laws they are under the control of the people. The Declaration of Independence, however, cannot be changed because as a “sacred” historical document it is under the control of no one on earth. Today in the United States the philosophic doctrines embodied in the Declaration of Independence are, in practice, the final authority in church and state.

MODERN HISTORY

By the late 1800s everybody knew Natural Law was a myth, and Western civilization found itself in turmoil. Some people wanted to press on with “progress” as if the faulty origin of the Age of Reason didn’t matter, and some people wanted to return to the old ways in an effort to restore order, discipline, and predictability to society. As a result, Western civilization found itself full of well-intentioned social activists who variously preferred monarchy, democracy, capitalism, socialism, communism, anarchy, women’s rights, etc. Even the working class rose up and formed labor parties to fight the “evil” of corporate monarchs. (This social turmoil would eventually boil over into two world wars that would ensure the triumph of the principles of Natural Law.) In an effort to understand the social issues, a number of European philosophers went all the way back to the Greeks and analyzed the history of philosophy – similar to what Thomas Jefferson had done before he died. They, too, found themselves unimpressed with the arguments used to establish democratic government, and they were disgusted with the decadent fruits of democratic society. Two of these men were Germans: Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) was the first in a series of German philosophers who rejected the liberal principles of the Enlightenment, and who was dismissively contemptuous of democracy. Nietzsche also attacked the contradictory value system of Enlightened Christianity (he was an atheist), and was highly critical of the theory of self-evidence popularized by René Descartes.

Oswald Spengler (1880-1936) opposed the validity of the mental processes used to justify the Enlightenment. He was the Einstein of philosophy because his philosophical relativism said any human system of thinking, or any method of formulating values that utilizes Self or human culture or experience, is invalid because of its limited perspective. (The mature Christian would word that differently: Any system of thought or values that utilizes the carnal mind is invalid, because only God has the big picture, the perspective, and the authority to think and decide.)

In France Charles Maurras (1868-1952) rejected the democracy in which he lived because he believed its philosophical foundation was wrong. A large anti-democracy movement started that, like many rebellious groups, contained unsavory elements who, in this case, were Roman Catholics who blamed the evil Enlightenment on Protestantism, Judaism, and Freemasonry. Maurras was editor of a royalist, anti-democratic newspaper who collaborated with the Germans in World War II, and he was sentenced to life in prison at the Nuremberg trials.

Because of these men many Germans rejected not only the principles of the Enlightenment, but also believed Western civilization had been wrong to abandon the paternalistic monarchical social structure used by God’s people during the previous six thousand years of human history. The old social order and the new were ideologically at enmity with each other; war clouds were brewing between democratic nations and nations wanting to remain autocratic. The issue is authority.

Frederick the Great, the King of Prussia from 1740-1786, was a brilliant military campaigner who made Prussia the greatest military power in Europe. He was an Enlightened absolute monarch who liberalized much of society and started Germany on the road to modern Enlightenment.

One hundred years later Kaiser Wilhelm I was King of Prussia and emperor of Germany from 1861-1888. He was influenced by his wife who was Enlightened and who encouraged him to be open towards British political theory (democracy). Wilhelm I proclaimed a “New Era” of liberalism, but appointed a conservative, Otto von Bismarck, as his “iron chancellor.” Bismarck subdued proponents of Enlightenment and espoused the old paths. Bismarck also fought against the political meddling of the Roman Catholic Church, which he distrusted. After Wilhelm’s death his son, Frederick, ruled for a short time (1888). He was the first Prussian prince to attend a university. His Enlightened education, together with the fact that he married the eldest daughter of Britain’s Queen Victoria, caused him to be very liberal. But this liberal man died only three months after coming to power. His son, Wilhelm II, who was the grandson of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, ruled from 1888-1918. His Enlightened mother – Queen Victoria’s daughter – tried to make Wilhelm II a liberal, as did his Calvinist tutor who tried to instill in him the Protestant love of Reason. Wilhelm surprised everyone, however, by seriously studying the Bible and noting the glaring discrepancies between it and the democratic Enlightenment. His trips to England to visit his grandparents became less frequent as he matured and became increasingly disgusted with England’s moral laxity, comparative lack of social order, and its open, vulgar love of money. He sided with the conservative elements in Germany who thought they needed to be guardians of virtues increasingly abandoned in Western nations.

When Queen Victoria died in 1901 relations between the two countries deteriorated. Later when Enlightened Serbian nationalists, motivated by the same “Freedom-fighting” ideals as Barabbas and the U.S. f-ing fathers, tried to start a revolution and liberate the Slavs from Austria-Hungary by assassinating the Austrian crown prince and his wife, the different ideologies in the West resulted in rapid polarization and war. Prussia (Germany) backed Austria-Hungary’s attempt to stop the revolt. Democratic England, France, and the U.S., who were all philosophically opposed to autocracy, quickly declared war on the German Empire in President Woodrow Wilson’s “war for democracy.” Thus, World War I was the first war in history (as opposed to revolutions) fought because of Enlightenment principles.

Germany was defeated, Kaiser Wilhelm II went into exile in Holland, democracy was forcibly installed in Germany, and the allies literally divided Germany into East Germany and West Germany by giving a middle portion of Germany to Poland so it could have a seaport.

Events happened rapidly again. In France in 1922 Catholic royalists formed a large anti-democratic movement. In Italy, Germany, and Spain a surge of anti-democratic and anti-communist sentiments sparked popular uprisings. For reasons that go back to the division of Catholicism into Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodox Catholicism, the Vatican brought Mussolini, Hitler, and Franco to power – just as it later brought Poland’s Lech Walesa to power in a more successful campaign against Russian communism. Mussolini is the one who coined the term “fascism” for this growing ideology. These fascist revolutionary leaders, like the American revolutionary leaders, were not men of high character with idealistic motives. So why did honor-oriented Japan join them?

Back in 1854 the United States in an attempt to bolster its economy by expanding its trading empire, sailed a fleet of modern warships to medieval, isolationist Japan, and at gunpoint forced it to end its policy of self-sufficiency and isolationism by signing a trade agreement against its will. Japan rapidly became a modern industrial and military giant. It also became increasingly disgusted with America’s moral laxity, comparative lack of social order, and its open, vulgar love of money. Adopting the methods used by the U.S. in 1854, Japan began using military aggression to protect its economic interests. In response to that aggression, President Franklin Roosevelt put an economic squeeze on Japan’s monarchy, which countered by signing a treaty with its ideological allies, Italy and Germany, in 1940 in an attempt to create a stabilizing balance of power against U.S. economic and ideological imperialism. Other nations had valid reasons to fear American ideological aggression because the U.S. now believed it had to force other nations to be “good” by making them embrace both democracy and capitalism. In other words, the U.S. thought itself justified in violating the sovereignty of other nations because it now believed the issue to be right and wrong – not authority.

The democratic countries defeated the authoritarian countries in the world’s second war for democracy. (Back in the WWII era there were still only about twenty democratic countries among hundreds of monarchies.) The victors forcibly established democratic governments in Italy, Germany, and Japan, and then held the infamous war crimes trials at Nuremberg, Germany. During the trials the Nazi officers claimed to be innocent of any crimes because in their ideology and in their country orders were to be obeyed without question, just as they had been for six thousand years of history. The democracies, utilizing Hugo Grotius’ theory that Natural Law applies to all men of all nations and religions, told these officers they should have used René Descartes’ self-evident Reason and John Locke’s democratic principles to overthrow the evil authorities over them instead of wickedly employing the age-old authoritarian belief – resurrected by Nietzsche – that rebellion was wrong and obedience was right. And, in a move that still shocks legal minds, the Enlightenment theories of the democratic countries were retroactively applied to these Germans who, it was agreed, should have “known” through “self-evidence” that the newly emerging theory of “human rights” superseded duty and obedience. (Yes, I’ve simplified things in order to make historical and ideological points.) The German officers were declared guilty and were executed.

In only three wars, the American Revolution, World War I, and World War II, the United States made it clear to the rest of the world that any laws, customs, or religious practices that violate the doctrines of the Age of Reason/Declaration of Independence will not be tolerated. The military efforts of Alexander the Great to Hellenize the world are now being completed by the United States. Today most nations are democratic.

Oliver Cromwell and the U.S. f-ing fathers militarily forced their Enlightened beliefs upon the authorities over them, which established precedents for rebellion against superiors. The allies at Nuremberg had a different problem; they wanted to militarily impose their Enlightened beliefs upon other sovereign states and the people who lived in them – just as the District of Columbia had used its Enlightened beliefs to fight the Civil War and force the states to rewrite their constitutions. The victors at Nuremberg had four problems. First, because of national sovereignty, they had no authority over other nations. Second, they had no precedent upon which to base and legitimize the trial. Third, they wanted to take the astonishing step of holding the defendants accountable ex post facto for violating Enlightenment principles that were not part of their culture. Fourth, they wanted to make the predetermined outcome of their Cromwellian monkey trial appeal to the masses so Nuremberg could later be used as a legal precedent when necessary. The allies’ ideological position in the trial and the precedent they wanted to set was, “You should not have obeyed the orders, rules, or laws of the authorities over you if those laws or authorities are deemed to be immoral or wrong by a majority of Enlightened and Reasonable people.” The position of the defendants was, “Our responsibility as subordinates is to obey the will, orders, rules, and laws of our authorities, who alone have the prerogative to determine whether those orders are good or not.”

Just as Martin Luther, Cromwell, and Thomas Paine had, the allies knew emotionalism would sway the grazing masses – not detailed Bible discussions and philosophic and legal arguments. So they used over two hundred court sessions to graphically illustrate and describe how hideous the actions of the defendants were and how nice the victims were – neither of which was the purpose of the trial. The issue was should they have obeyed orders or disobeyed orders. The allies also purposely left a German representation of the Ten Commandments hanging in the courtroom in order to convey the Aquinas doctrine that anything offensive to human Reason is also self-evidently contrary to the laws of God.

Nuremberg did establish the desired “legal precedent.” But it established another curious precedent in courtrooms: When a man is on trial for murder the issue in the trial is whether he did it or not. In spite of that, prosecutors spend much time trying to sway the “grazing jurors” with irrelevant emotionalism. Much time is spent in court with graphic illustrations and descriptions of how hideous the crime was and how nice the victim was, neither of which does anything to establish guilt and is a complete waste of time.

Nuremberg was the most significant event in world history since the American f-ing fathers established a secular democracy. Biblically speaking, Nuremberg signified the official imposition of the Age of Reason upon the rest of the world. Yes, autocratic forms of government still existed in abundance in 1945, but they were now officially and openly considered to be evil by Enlightened Christian nations. And the handful of Enlightened Christian nations that won WWII launched the largest and most widespread evangelistic crusade in history: The objective was not to spread the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the objective was to spread the Doctrines of the Age of Reason. The United States alone spends billions of dollars a year to preach and enforce democracy around the world.

Martin Luther was tried and convicted in 1521 at Worms, Germany, by Christian advocates of obedience for the crime of resisting the authority of his superiors. Only 115 miles from Worms and 424 years later, Luther’s descendants were tried and convicted in 1945 at the Nuremberg trials by Christian advocates of independence and rebellion for the crime of not resisting the authority of their superiors. What had been good was now evil, and what had been evil was now good. The world was now upside down; the Age of Reason was firmly and “officially” established as right and good (Is 5:20,21).

SATAN’S GREAT SEAL

If I were to design a Great Seal to symbolize Satan’s subtle efforts to prevail over Christianity, it would be modeled on the Great Secular Seal of the United States and would be a pyramid with six layers depicting the historical steps leading to damnation for Christians:

● Equality is the bottom or foundation of the pyramid. This is the poison of the forbidden fruit that caused Adam to rise up to a position of equality with God so that he usurped God’s prerogative of being the Authority who decided right and wrong. Equality is the opposite of authority. It is enmity against God. It makes us carnal and it starts a war in our members as our old man and new man struggle for supremacy.

● Philosophy is the second layer. Once a Christian begins thinking on his own without the Bible he is philosophizing, he is being carnal. The Greek prophets of philosophy used impressive achievements in math and science to “legitimize” their written instructions on how to utilize Reason. Greek philosophy is not just pagan, it is the Gospel of Satan. Philosophy taught naïve, unsuspecting Christians how to ascend to a position of equality with God from the standpoint of authority.

● Laws of Nature are the third layer of the pyramid and were an important and necessary interim step. The “Laws of Nature” took the “pagan” out of philosophy and made it palatable to Christians, who used the fact that God created nature to convince themselves that He really does want us to use Reason. The Laws of Nature became the justification for all the developments of Western civilization from Aquinas until the era of Andrew Jackson, when it was discredited. The Laws of Nature gave Christians Reason to believe it was not only acceptable to be carnal by ignoring the Bible when determining right and wrong, but that it might even be better for the development of Christianity and society to do so.

● Laws of Man are built upon the Laws of Nature and become the new foundation of democratic society when the Laws of Nature crumble and fall away. Upon what then do the Laws of Man rest? Faith. Faith in self, in self-evidence, in good intentions, and in “equity.” Faith in the doctrine that God will be pleased with us as long as we think what we do is both right and good. The Laws of Man truly make man the foundation and measure of all things. The Laws of Man (also called the Rule of Law) make society of the people, by the people, and for the people, which is idolatry and blasphemy.

● Rights are derived from philosophy and legitimized by the Laws of Man. Rights are “inalienable”, which produces covetousness – a desire to possess, to own, and to keep that to which you have a “right”, including things like life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. In short, “rights” make us covet Self, and coveting anything is idolatry. It was covetousness that made Christians decide not to repudiate the democratic Reason they had inherited from the f-ing fathers and go back to the old paths when the “Laws of Nature” were exposed as a pagan hoax and Trojan horse.

● Freedom is the top cornerstone of the pyramid and is represented by the Enlightened eye. Personal freedom – being liberated from a dependence on the Bible and from the ideological enslavement of the Bible – is Satan’s objective. Having incorporated the lower levels of the pyramid and having personalized them by making them part of who you are, how you think, and how you look at things, means you have achieved the freedom and independence of being your own authority. You are on your own. You are damned.