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Aug 26, 2008 - 8:24:51 PM |
I
delivered a speech on many of Maine's college campuses in 2005. At
every location the room was full to overflowing. The speech was first
delivered at Bowdoin College on September 19th. It was titled in honor
of a hero of mine from Maine's past, Joshua Chamberlain. In addition
to serving with distinction in the Civil War, he was Governor of Maine
and President of Bowdoin.
A man named Franciso described the speech as "truly inspirational." He posted it to an academic website. You can read it here.
He observed in his website posting, "An ISI Campus Representative from Bowdoin College passed this on to me
and reported that hundreds of gay rights activists turned out to scorn
Mr. Heath, and cry out against his 'bigoted' views. In the end, he
captivated those who truly listened." Here's the speech:
It is a pleasure and an honor for me to be here tonight. Bowdoin is a
truly great institution. A past president of Bowdoin, William DeWitt
Hyde, was the speaker at the first convention of the Christian Civic
League of Maine. A portrait of a man I admire greatly, a former Bowdoin
professor hangs on the wall opposite my desk, and that is the Civil War
hero, Joshua Chamberlain. I will have more to say about Chamberlain
later.
I was once a young person in search of
truth. That is why I studied theology and philosophy. There are many
advantages to having college students as an audience. You are
open-minded, idealistic, and seeking answers to life's hard questions.
You are also used to sitting through long lectures which are sometimes
not the most interesting. I promise you what I have to say tonight will
be anything but boring.
Tonight you will
hear ideas you haven't heard before; and it is unlikely that you would
hear them at any other college campus. But the essence of a liberal
arts education is openness to new ideas. All I ask is that you listen
to what I have to say with an open mind. Ernest Hemingway said that he
knew when a phrase was right and true, because it had a certain ring to
it. So I would ask you to listen with your hearts and minds, and to
listen for that certain ring of truth, without any preconceived notions
you may have about Mike Heath or what I stand for. Many of you may
indeed have such preconceived notions. You may have heard Mike Heath
described as hate-filled… vitriolic… a Bible-thumper… a Holy Roller… to
sum it all up, an ogre. Well, here I am, you be the judge.
The
topic of my speech tonight is the upcoming vote on the gay rights
law…is it a just law, a moral law, one that will conduce to the good of
society? In pondering how best to present my reasons why the recently
enacted law is unjust, I realized that we cannot understand the law
outside its proper context. Therefore I arrived at the somewhat
strange-sounding title "The Vision Place of Souls – Why there are so
many Bush-bashers, Dream- Catchers and Soul-snatchers."
First,
let me share with you a dream that someone told me about recently. The
dream was of a magnificently-constructed modern edifice of brick,
glass, and steel, so tall that it seemed to reach up to the sky. It was
a splendid building, the best of its kind. Yet the building was leaning
perceptibly to one side. Those who dwelt in the upper stories were
warned to get out; but instead of leaving, they laughed, saying that it
was the sturdiest and most magnificent building in the world. There
were only a handful that had the foresight to heed the warning and
leave; and then the building teetered and collapsed. But here is the
most meaningful part of the dream: one of those who fled the collapsing
building ran into a neighboring building, and there he saw the most
beautiful young woman seated, staring blankly into a row of television
screens. He cried out to the woman, "Don't you realize what is
happening around you? Instead of looking at all these television
screens, why don't you look into your soul to see what is going on?" To
which the beautiful woman replied: "There is nothing in my soul."
This
dream sums up the predicament of modern man. He doesn't see the world
with the eyes of his own soul. He is looking at the world through the
eyes of others. As a result, he is oblivious to the dangers around him.
Worse than the barrenness and sterility that inhabits the souls of many
in the modern world, is the belief that the soul simply does not exist.
There is little representation in dreams that can be
called abstract, in the sense of abstract art. Dreams are in most cases
quite realistic, even in the case of nightmares. Visions, even if they
are extraordinary or horrifying, are usually concrete and specific. We
marvel at the power of the mind to portray reality in such accurate
detail, so that when dreaming about a crowd, we can see each individual
face as if that person were standing before us. Yet our perception of
the world while awake is a product of that same power of the mind which
creates the dream. Our perception of the world is very much a product
of the soul. The soul of man expresses itself in art and in all
products of the human imagination. Each thing a man produces, for good
or evil, is an outward expression of his soul, just as the world and
everything in it, is a product of God's soul.
The art
of an earlier age strove to attain an ideal, or a perfection of form.
There was a striving for beauty, and an awareness that beauty in a work
of art resulted from a near approach to the ideals of order, wholeness,
and harmony. Not only in art, but in all aspects of life, ideals were
used as goals and standards; and this is what distinguishes Western
civilization from all other civilizations, the invention of the concept
of the ideal, along with the concept of the individual soul. These
ideas predate Christianity, as does the idea that there is one God who
dwells in the heavens, who is the father of mankind, and who can be
known through reason. Together, these concepts about God and the
individual soul are the essence of Western civilization.
If
you go to the Walker Art Building on campus and view the rotunda you
will see a mural which shows Rome and the different elements which make
up art: Wisdom, Knowledge, Soul, Life, Harmony, Love, Color and Form.
But it is also wisdom, knowledge, harmony, and form, and above all the
soul, which make up Rome. The mural is part of the Walker Art Building
because America, until recently, was regarded as the child of
Greco-Roman civilization; as was the entire Western world, which
eventually came to be known as the Free World. Before that it was
called Christendom – but that is another story.
I
bring all this up because the contrast between the modern age and the
ages which preceded it is best seen through art, which as we said
before, is an outward expression of man's soul. For anyone who wants to
understand the modern world, the very best question he can set before
himself is "Why is modern art considered good?" No other question leads
more quickly to an explanation of the modern age. Let me give you an
example. One performance artist went on stage and performed a piece of
art which consisted of sawing a violin in half. Another artist -- a
quite famous one at that -- nailed a row of toilet seats to a board and
called it art. This same artist had already become wealthy and famous
for splashing squiggles of paint on a canvas, and now his art is
developing along new lines. There is another artist, one not so famous
perhaps, but one who earned himself a fine reputation among the art
critics of his day. This artist worked for peanuts, as he quickly
smeared gobs of paint onto a canvas. When his work was taken to an art
dealer, he was hailed as an unknown genius, and the art dealer offered
him $20,000 for one of his paintings. But the artist never collected
the money; for this unknown genius was an elephant at a London zoo who
worked with a paintbrush attached to his trunk.
I
am sorry to be so iconoclastic. I am sure some of your art professors
wouldn't appreciate this story. My story of the elephant belongs to the
class of information that we are not really encouraged to think about.
The scandal of modern art gets much worse. Some of you may have heard
of the horrific displays at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York,
which were exhibited under the name of "Sensations." Although it was
praised highly in the mass media, this alleged art was so horrifying
that I cannot in good conscience describe it here. There are some
aspects of our culture I am forced to remain silent about for the sake
of decency. You might want to reflect for a moment why such art is put
on a par with the masterpieces of the past. Another question to ponder
is why the image of man has been removed from modern art. As I said
before, such questions are the most useful and enlightening we can ask
because they lead us to the heart of the matter. How did disharmony and
disorder -- or on occasion sheer malevolence and hatred of humanity --
come to be regarded as valid and worthy expressions of the human soul?
If
we look into the origins of modern art, we will encounter such terms as
"the destruction of external reality." The first group of expressionist
poems was called "The Twilight of Mankind."1 These new forms of art,
characterized by despair and irrationality, were taken up by the
revolutionary forces in Europe who wanted to overthrow the existing
order. And that is part of the puzzle. Modern art from the beginning
has been championed by left leaning political forces, the goal being to
alienate the masses from the existing social order, and to demoralize
the opposition.
The disorder in art is part of a wider
revolutionary disturbance in society which can be traced back to the
Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Anyone who wishes to
understand our current political system must make a close study of the
French Revolution. Many of the political terms we use today originated
in this period, including the word "radical," the terms "left-wing and
right-wing" the words "communism and commune," and the use of the color
red to symbolize revolution – all these things had their origin during
this period – as did the call for atheism in politics. The call to
remove God from public life is not a new idea, nor is the ideology
known as liberalism a new idea. Both these ideas are already centuries
old. I will remark in passing that the French Revolution was
essentially anti-religious in nature, and this effort to separate
religion from the state was devastating. It is a pattern which was
repeated with even greater intensity in our own century. If you ever
hear someone tell you that we must eliminate religion from public life
in the name of liberty and fairness, please be mindful of what has
happened under every government that sought to make an exile out of
God. The death toll in the twentieth century has been in the tens of
millions. All this was the result of making man sovereign, and not God.
This is a cardinal tenet of liberalism.
Bertrand
Russell, who was an agnostic, said that there are three main pillars of
Western civilization, and those are technology and mastery of the
machine; our Greco-Roman heritage; and the Bible. Please remember that
these are Bertrand Russell's words, not my own. When I said earlier
that our society is no longer part of Western Civilization, I meant
that two pillars of this civilization have been removed by liberalism,
namely our Greco-Roman heritage, and our belief in the Bible. Instead
of these two pillars, we now have three main currents of belief
propagated by three men who have been elevated to the status of
cultural icons; these are Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and Charles Darwin.
You would do well to refrain from challenging the ideas of these three
gentlemen on campus, because Freud, Marx, and Darwin are quite
literally the gods of the modern age. Anyone who challenges their ideas
is quickly branded as a heretic. People will often ask in a
half-mocking tone of voice "Is nothing sacred anymore?" Well, yes,
there is still something sacred in America - the ideas of these three
men. I may incur the anger of the reigning orthodoxy - which is
liberalism - by attacking the ideas of these three men. Liberalism is
very much orthodoxy and a dogma, and in spite of its claim of being
progressive and a challenge to the existing order – I am here to tell
you that it is the existing order. Its ideas hold sway over every
member of the media and every corporate board in America. Those who
dissent are quickly ostracized from the halls of power.
It
would be impossible to discuss fully the ideas of these three men here
tonight. But the ideas of critical thinking and deconstructionism are
so prevalent on college campuses these days, I thought today as a
Christian, and in the interest of fairness, I would take a stab at
deconstructing and deflating the false gods of the left -- especially
because the tribute these false gods have exacted from our society is
the life of the society itself.
First, Karl Marx. Let
me ask you, what ideas have caused more misery to mankind? Wherever the
ideas of Karl Marx have become the official ideology of the state, man
has become a miserable and wretched creature, no more than a slave. In
Marxism we have the doctrine of the soullessness of man in its purest
form – dialectical materialism – an account of the origin and evolution
of the universe which leaves God out entirely. History is guided by –
of all things – economic forces. There is only one idea which is more
deceptive and absurd than Marxism, and we will come to that in a
moment. Yet much of what is taught on college campuses today is a form
of Marxism – 'Marxism-lite' if you will - the view that religion is
evil, that Western civilization, alone among the civilizations of the
world, is oppressive and rapacious.; that all of America's problems can
be laid at the foot of George Bush and his wealthy supporters. We do
not have time to go into this in any detail, except to briefly say that
the words "freedom" "democracy" "republic" and "parliament" are all
Western inventions. Every nation on earth has adopted Western forms of
government, precisely because organizing society along these lines is
liberating, and not enslaving. And I cannot resist telling you that the
first nation to outlaw slavery on earth was a Christian nation, and the
man responsible for it was a born-again Christian, William Wilberforce.
Slavery still exists today. If any of you are curious, I can produce a
map of the world which shows the nations where slavery still exists,
and none of these countries is a Western nation. But enough about Karl
Marx. There is no need to look into the matter further.
Let
us briefly examine another cultural icon who holds sway over society,
and that is Charles Darwin. You are used to thinking about Darwin in
terms of a scientific theory, but if you take away anything from this
speech tonight, I hope it is the realization that Darwinism is much,
much more than a scientific theory. It is above all a political
ideology which lends justification to the society in which we live. We
were all taught in the public school system to believe in Darwinism,
the way earlier generations of students were taught the catechism of
the Christian faith. Darwinism is a quasi-religious worldview which
offers an explanation of man's origins and a view of his destiny. It
provides the moral justification for why a larger and more powerful
state can gobble up a smaller or weaker state, or why a large
corporation can put small business owners out of business in the name
of efficiency and an economy of scale. If you listen carefully, you
will hear that terms from Darwinism are used more often to describe
events outside of science than to describe events within science. Time
and Newsweek love to talk about the evolution of the automobile, the
evolution of pop culture, or the evolution of the hemline. When you
hear the term "evolution" outside the field of science I hope you will
realize that its use is absolutely bogus, and betrays a very shallow
way of thinking. One State Representative in Augusta lectured the
Christian Civic League on the "evolution of marriage."
You
can incur great wrath by challenging this particular cultural icon.
When Christians recently brought a court challenge to introduce the
concept of Intelligent Design in the public schools, every main stream
magazine in America took us to task. It was another attempt at
enforcing orthodoxy, and keeping everyone in line. A challenge to
Darwinism is a challenge to the status quo.
Now
we come to the last of the cultural icons, Sigmund Freud. In weighing
which of these three cultural icons has caused more harm to our
society, I could do no better than to assign equal blame to each; but
were it not for the ideas of Freud, we might have seen our way out of
the problems caused by the other two.
I said earlier
that there was only one idea more absurd than the idea that economic
forces determine the course of history, and that is Freud's idea that
the sex instinct is the force behind all human culture. According to
Freud, all products of the human mind, all art, all invention, and all
philosophy are a product of a sublimated sex instinct. Like Darwin's
ideas this idea reduces man to the level of an animal. It was a very
powerful idea for those skilled enough to make use of it. A body
politic preoccupied with sex, is much more tractable and compliant than
an alert and informed public.
Sex pervades every
aspect of our society. Modern advertising is Freudian. The human sexual
instinct is used to market products. If you want to know who reduced
woman to a sex object, devoid of a soul, look into the writings of
Sigmund Freud. Thanks to Freud, our society has developed an enormously
dirty mind, thinking that everything we see has a hidden sexual
meaning. An equally damaging idea of Freud was that all the ills of
society can be laid at the doorstep of the repressive father as he
competes with his male children for the attention of the mother… on a
psychological level, of course. As a result, generations of Freud's
disciples undermined the authority of the father in the home, and
discipline within the society at large. Even though Freud has been
exposed as a charlatan…it has been revealed that he simply made up many
of his clinical interviews with his patients, his ideas are still
regarded as sacrosanct. But since every great figure of the West is
exposed to criticism in our colleges – George Washington, Thomas
Jefferson, Jesus Christ himself - let me do the same for Sigmund Freud
- the world's greatest authority on sex - by telling you that Freud got
his sister-in-law pregnant, and so his wife wouldn't find out, he
procured an abortion for her.
Freud told us that all
would be well in society, if only we were free of our sexual
repression. So society came to experience a "sexual liberation" in the
sixties, an odd blend of Marxism and Freudianism. What we were not told
however, is that "sexual liberation" and the call for "free love" were
always pushed by left leaning political forces, from the time of the
French Revolution. For example, the first advocate for abortion in the
U.S. was an anarchist. Revolutionaries have always known that the
fastest way to make a political leftist is to deprive someone of their
sexual morality; and for many, free love was the real attraction of the
left-wing movement. Such ideas are aimed at undermining society; and
the family has been the prime target from the beginning.
The
progress towards sexual anarchy was very slow, and proceeded in stages,
as America moved from a prudish Victorian culture to the culture in
which we live today, in which anything goes. Even those of you who are
opposed to my position on the gay rights law must agree that there has
been a gradual progression towards "loose sexual morals."
Again,
I am hampered by an inability to discuss indecent material. The latest
trends among some liberal thinkers are for a form of sexual liberation
which is absolutely bizarre and unmentionable. They go far beyond a
mere acceptance of homosexuality. Others in the gay rights movement,
encouraged by the success of gay marriage, are now advocating that the
traditional concept of marriage be abolished, to be replaced by legal
unions between three or more people, in arrangements called by the
newly-coined words "polyamory"" or "polyfidelity." Where will it all
end? Logically it ends with the death of the institution of the family.
There are many in the gay rights movement who are calling for just
this, the abolition of the family.
All this has been a
somewhat round-about approach to our question of the gay rights law.
"Gay rights" and same-sex marriage can be considered properly only in
the context of an ever-worsening climate of sexual permissiveness. In
turn, the worsening climate of sexual permissiveness must be considered
in the context of a society which chooses disorder over order, in art,
in music, in philosophy, and in all other aspects of life, including
sexual relations.
What occurs beyond this point is not
pleasant to contemplate. But we can make a guess based on the current
state of our culture. If we have a popular culture which favors
disorder over order, which exalts the emotions of lust, anger, and
greed over the virtues of charity, temperance, and self control; if the
animal nature of man is exalted over his spiritual side, what do you
think the result will be if society breaks down?
I
wanted this talk tonight to be about gaining a vision of where we are
as a society, so we could then proceed to a discussion of the specifics
of the gay rights law. Without the proper context, the law cannot be
understood properly. I would like to close with a quotation by Joshua
Chamberlain, and then take your questions about the specifics of the
law.
Chamberlain is credited with gaining the victory
at Little Round Top, the battle which changed the course of the civil
war. He was of course a skillful general, but what made him great was
that he was a man of deep spiritual insight, a man of vision who
believed in the soul. I would like to read a quote of his which is
inscribed on a plaque beneath his statue that overlooks the Joshua
Chamberlain Bridge in Brewer.
"In great deeds, something
abides. On great fields, something stays. Forms change and pass; bodies
disappear, but spirits linger to consecrate ground for the vision-place
of souls. And reverent men and women from afar, and generations that
know not us and we know not of, heart-drawn to see where and by whom
great things were suffered and done for them, shall come to this field
to ponder and dream; and the shadow of a mighty presence shall wrap
them in its bosom and the power of the vision shall pass into their
souls." That is my prayer for you tonight. Even though it is no longer
proper today to speak of God and the soul on college campuses, I wanted
to remind you that this is your heritage, and I fervently pray that you
will never allow anyone to deprive you of it.
Now I will be happy to take questions on the gay rights law.
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