 All right, and the title of our series, Theology of Public Life, we've started the main outline of that series. We're gonna take several weeks to work through this. We've started the main outline with the first of the subjects that we've outlined there, the rise of the new religion, the rise of the new religion. And what I wanna do this morning, if you'll entertain me for one more Sunday on this subject, is I wanna wrap this up, put a bow on it, make it clear, hopefully, and draw a connection between what we've been talking about with respect to the new religion, how that came about, and then connect that to what has become, in our day, its authoritative arm, which is the government, and the court system in particular. It's like the magisterium of the new religion is what we're thinking of it as. And I wanna make that connection for us this morning. And so, if you've got an outline there, we've got outlines floating around. Please avail yourself of one of those. It'll help you follow along. And I wanna begin, maybe with a bit of an illustration to help us understand this. And I wanna be able to have it clear in our minds what it is that we're looking at today, how we interpret it rightly from the Bible, so that we know better how to address it. And we're gonna get to the point of addressing it. Right now we've been covering some background information. We've been looking at sort of diagnosing, if you will, or interpreting our current circumstances. But we're gonna get to the point where we apply the Bible to that, apply our understanding to that, and make some decisions with respect to how we address that. But we gotta understand it, I think, in some cases first, so that it's not a mystery to us what's happening, okay? And so I begin with the rise of the new religion. I think a good way, maybe, to summarize this for us is that we have this person. Okay, I'll be very careful to try to, so that's clear, clearly a person. We're gonna call this person, we're gonna give him a name. We're gonna call him, this is his name, Roman I. Roman I is his name. This man is feudal in his thoughts. His foolish heart has been darkened. He's darkened in his understanding. He's exchanged the truth of God for a lie. He's worshiped and served the creature rather than creator, who's blessed forever, amen. He, Roman I, is given over to idolatry, right? So this is Roman I. Roman I is what we've been describing as a psychologized man. A psychologized man. Roman I is no longer economic man who would find his meaning or significance in providing for his family, looking outside of himself to earn a living, as it were, finding meaning or significance in work. He's no longer political man, finding his meaning or finding his identity in those things which he is associated with. Sometimes the military or sometimes civic organizations or politics or our legal system, whatever you may find meaning in. And he's no longer religious man that came out of the medieval period where the center and focus of his life is everything, God or the church. He's no longer any of those. Roman I is now devolved into psychological man. And Roman I creates meaning for himself. He thinks about those things that are most important to him, how he feels is most important. He's turned himself inward on himself. And Roman I's main priority in life is to be free, is to pursue freedom. Freedom for who he is, freedom from any external impositions on himself, those repressive codes that he grew up with or those repressive systems that seek to hold him down. Roman I wants to free himself from all of those things and be his authentic self. And being free and in pursuing authentic self, what Roman has to do is to cast off all of those external impositions. He has to free himself from them. So he labors to cast off oppression. And one of the most significant expressions of oppression are what he would consider to be the arbitrary sexual moral codes of religion, in particular Christianity. The enemy of Roman I really is Christianity, right? And that's where we get down to it. The enemy of Roman I is God. He doesn't want to have anything to do with him. He is laboring to cast off God. And one of the reasons that Roman has done this is because his worldview has changed. He's no longer thinking of his worldview in terms of mimesis, which is imitating or mimicking God as his creator. The one whose image he bears, now he's thinking poetically or poiesis. He's creating meaning for himself and he's turned himself inward on himself. And as part of psychologized man's, Roman's sense of morality, he placates his guilty conscience, his accusing conscience by doing moral things. And those moral things are freeing others from oppression too. And so where he might have once in times past found morality or moralism in obeying a Christian ethics or a Christian moral code. Now Roman finds his, placates his guilty conscience or attempts righteousness as it were by his own moral code, which is freeing others from oppression. We'll talk about that in a minute. Well, Roman here, Roman first, psychologized man, meets secular humanism. All right? I'm gonna call that, we'll use the abbreviation here because you can't read by writing anyway. Secular humanism, all right? And secular humanism is basically the foundation of the new religion, okay? The new religion is basically a trumped up, fulfilled or blossomed, if you will, form of secular humanism. And Roman has once nothing to do with God. And in fact, man is the center of the universe. Man is the center of existence and not just any man but Roman himself is the center of his own existence. Secular humanism has religious doctrines associated with it. It's a faith system. Secular humanism is a faith system. They would say that there is no God and that's a faith statement. That's a theological statement. And Roman has replaced God or replaced traditional Christian doctrines with doctrines of his own making, which include evolutionary theory. That's a doctrinal statement. That religion comes with doctrinal texts that most secular humanists have not read such as the origin of species and others. They are evolutionists, atheists, agnostics. And there's a faith associated with it. There's exclusivity to this religion. If you don't adhere to this particular religion and you can be fired from your job, you can be blackballed, there are already people. There have been people in this church already who have been fired from their job on these types of grounds. So this is not something that's just a hypothetical future thing. This is a current now thing that's going on. You can be blackballed, they're very exclusive. They bear no rivals. Secular humanism is an exclusivist religion. This secular humanism, the problem with humanism, or the objection traditionally to humanism, is it has no objective or basic morality associated with it. And that there are philosophers, sociologists who believe that apart from an objective morality, society can't survive. That things crumble in on themselves. Everybody does what is right in their own eyes. It's the mantra of Israel in the land under the judges. There is no king in Israel and everybody does what is right in their own eyes. And that's sort of the idea behind failure of secular humanism to last is because there is no morality, objective or transcendent morality on which they can base any kind of a moral code. Well, that is a thing of the past because secular humanism has now met Marxist philosophy. And I'm gonna try to write, you're really gonna have trouble with that. Farther I go, the worse it gets. Secular humanism has now been joined together with Marxist morality. Marxism puts everything in a category essentially, not to oversimplify it, but puts everything in a category of oppressed and oppressors, of the powerful and the weak. And it is the morality of Marxist, the morality of Marxism to free the oppressed from those oppressors or to free the weak from those who exert power or influence over them. So Marxist categories have become the morality of the new religion, secular humanism. And that's what Roman first is adhering to. And so in order to be more, this is characteristic of all false religions. All false religions are works righteousness, right? So we know Christianity, the only true religion is a religion of his righteousness, right? A foreign righteousness and alien righteousness, that is not our own, that is given to us as a gift from God that we might be reconciled to him. All false religions are religions of works righteousness and secular humanism or the new religion, this blending of the psychologized man with secular humanism and Marxist theology, if you will, Marxist morality, that blending has formed a new religion and the morality of that new religion are these Marxist categories of the oppressed and the oppressor, the weak and the strong, the powerful and the social justice then of freeing the oppressed from their oppressors or freeing the weak from those who exert power over them. And that's become the morality and they pursue that morality with a religious zeal. And you see that in our country today. It's all over the place. They pursue it with a religious zeal. This is a faith system. That's why we're calling it the new religion. I think this is a good characterization of how this has formed. All right, so what I wanna do if you look at your outline is I wanna then walk through each of those points quickly and show you the progression. How do we get to where we are today and how does this connect with now what has become the authoritative arm or the magisterium of the new religion which is the government and in particular the court system. Where this authority, the authority of the new religion is being exerted is not behind the walls of some new secular humanistic cathedral. It's being exerted on the marble floors of our Capitol building and in our Supreme Court building. And it's going to be exerted in the courts. So I wanna make that connection for you. This agenda, the agenda of the new religion is going to be pressed forward. Frankly, we're already seeing it accomplished in our court system and this is something we have to prepare for. It's not something that may possibly come. It's already here, it's already happening and it's going to continue and going to continue to get worse. So we as Christians need to be able to engage in our culture under that new reality and we need to be able to prepare ourselves for what's coming. And I think the more that we understand the circumstances that we're in, the more that we see clearly, I'm not a prophet, you're not a prophet, but the more that we understand, the more that we see clearly what is actually coming, how that's going to take shape, how it's going to look and then what we have to do to prepare ourselves in response, okay? And we wanna be faithful to the Lord with the gospel. Our responsibility in this generation, as it is in any generation, is to preach the gospel to lost people. This world is not gonna be transformed by reasoning against secular humanism. This culture, anything to do with transformation in this world is going to be affected by the preaching of the gospel, God giving sinners a new heart, regenerating them by his spirit and bringing them into the new kingdom. You know, conveying them out of the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of the son of his love. It's the only way that change is going to be effective and that's why the church can't be wrapped up in social justice initiatives, can't be wrapped up in only or merely these social justice type concerns. Our concern is, as it always has been and should be, to preach the gospel, okay? So the rise of the new religion. We've identified the new religion. The new religion is psychologized man. We're calling him Roman first. Psychologized man meets secular humanism, meets Marxist morality, okay? So that's the new religion. Psychologized man meets secular humanism blended with Marxist morality. We're gonna see that more clearly as we sort of walk through all this, right? And that's what's going on today. That's what we see today. All right, first. First, this progression, and I wanted to do this by way of summary from some of this we covered last week. This progression involves a shift in worldview from the mimetic to the poetic. We talked about those terms from mimesis or where we get our word mimicking from. From mimesis, the Greek word meaning to imitate, right? It means to imitate. Following what others have determined. Our greatest imitation is of the one who created us. We are to imitate or bear the image of God who created us. So if you have a mimetic worldview, we are to find meaning in imitating our creator and bearing his image, following what he has determined for us. That shift from the medic to the poetic or poiesis from the Greek word poign, meaning to make. We create or make our own reality, a creative process by which the individual in the cocoon of life blossoms into a butterfly. All right, that's the sort of the idea behind poiesis or a poetic worldview. From mimetic to poiesis or poetic, from the world having a given or established meaning, a given purpose, a given morality, a given authority outside of man that man must discover for himself, that man must conform himself to through imitation, making man focused outside of himself, even directing his attention to God who created him. From that mimetic worldview to poiesis or the poetic worldview, the world essentially having no given or established meaning, no given or established purpose, no given or established morality, no authority, no authority outside of man that he must conform to, but rather human beings create meaning and purpose for themselves. They have increasing control through technology over the circumstances or that natural authority that is brought to bear on them, and part of the development of technology is to overcome that authority, that natural authority, so to speak. They create their own meaning. They create their own purpose in part by rejecting any morality or any authority outside of themselves or external to themselves, putting off oppression that exists outside of themselves. There is little for the poetic man, there is little to which he must conform, but rather they pursue the conformity of all that which is external to them, to their own identity, their own thoughts, what they believe to be legitimate. This is the shift in worldview that produces humanism. It's a shift that produces a very man-centered, worldly philosophy. It's the shift that is very natural, if you will, quote unquote natural to fallen man who pursues the course of this world is sinful lusts the world of flesh and the devil, right? Second, first involves a shift in worldview from a medic to poetic. Second, this shift in worldview provides fertile soil for secular humanism. It's under this poetic worldview that secular humanism develops. It dethrones God. There is no transcendent order. There is no transcendent law. There is no transcendent law. For a caregiver, there is no transcendent judge. It's why most humanists are either agnostic or atheistic or none, N-O-N-E, right? It dethrones God. Secondly, it deifies man. Humanity becomes the supreme authority. A man is ultimately autonomous. That is the mantra of secular humanism. Man is autonomous. Man is his own God. I am the captain of my fate, right? I am the master. I am the captain of my soul. I'm the master of my fate. One of that Invictus poem, scathingly or just brazenly anti-God. Man is ultimately autonomous. Humanism seeks some fictional utopia of true human freedom. And what true human freedom means to the humanist is freedom from any external impositions. Any moral codes imposed on him from the outside. Any authorities that are imposed upon him from the outside. Man, Roman I, wants to be free. He wants to be free from anyone else's impression or anyone else's idea of who or what Roman I can or should be, right? That's freedom to Roman I. Leading to less and less, this freedom in pursuit of equality in their utopian idea of freedom. It leads to less and less inequality. And so less and less human conflict. The idea is that the freer and freer we become and the more that we affirm and appreciate everyone's individual freedom, the less and less human conflict comes about, the more and more we appreciate one another, the less in conflict we are. And pretty soon we reach this glorious utopia where there is no war anymore and we all live together in love like the John Lennon song, right? World lives at peace together. What we're seeing, the more that secular humanism spreads is exactly the opposite, right? The more conflict, the more strife, the more contention, the more anger, the more wars, the more riots, right? That's where secular humanism is getting us. Just this week from Doug Wilson, when man aspires to become deity, the nature of his folly is such that he does not start to close in on his goal. Man wants to become deity, he doesn't even begin to close in on his goal. The demented vision is such that when what starts happening is divergence, not convergence. Now there was, he doesn't close in on his goal, he gets farther and farther away from it. He does not become ever more godlike and sublime. The floors are not the polished marble of Valhalla, but rather more like the concrete floor of the monkey house at the Cincinnati Zoo, right? Now that's true, the Cincinnati Zoo. That the more we see secular humanism spreading, this mindset spreading, the more that we see chaos and anarchy. And some, we're created to be like God. We are created to bear his image. We are to be like Jesus Christ. We have been Christians predestined to be conformed to his image. Why? Because he is good and righteous altogether, true. And we are to conform to him, but we are not doing that. And we see that exemplified in our society and just a head long rush away from God. Third, third, secular humanism takes root in the social imaginary of the 18th century enlightenment. We define that social imaginary as the way society tends to think in group or think in mass as influenced by often what are elitist thinkers who perpetuate or propagate their thoughts, their philosophies, their worldly philosophy, their ideas on the culture, on society. And this all really began in earnest in the enlightenment, during the enlightenment period. It's interesting to me that man defines the age in which he is awakened to the light of his own reason as enlightenment when that same progression or regression is described by God as man becoming futile in his thoughts and his foolish heart is darkened. Man calls it enlightenment, God, Romans one calls it a darkening, calls it futility and we see it to be true. Many have never read the first word of Immanuel Kant or Jean-Jacques Rousseau, but what trickles down into the thinking of that period and those that follow it, including, and we're gonna find this out next week, including the thinking of our own founding fathers, those who formed our constitution, our Declaration of Independence, this humanist thinking trickled down into their understanding, through what's called the social imaginary, it became a part of the social imaginary. This kind of thinking trickles into our own heads such that each of us, the way that that thinking goes is that each of us should have our own way of realizing our own humanity, the freedom. Some might say we've been given the inalienable right to pursue our own understanding of our own humanity, our authentic selves that we should find and live out and own humanity without surrendering to or conforming to some external imposition. What does that sound like? Sounds like mimesis, right, versus poiesis. Sounds like poiesis. It's the birth of liberalism. Birth of liberalism took place during the Enlightenment period and now it's predominantly the way that people think. It is bled into, leached into the social imaginary and it's all around us even if we're not careful in our own thinking. Part of that thinking also is that we should reject those impositions. Whatever those external impositions are, we should reject those impositions whether they come from a society or whether they come from a previous generation. It's why you see this sort of cultural or societal forgetting that's going on right now, destroying oppressive or repressive institutions of the past, doing away with all those things. That oppression should be cast off whether it comes from society, whether it comes from a previous generation, from government or from, especially from religion and in particular Christianity. It's interesting how in all of this that the number one arch enemy of the secular humanist of Roman first, his arch enemy, arch enemy of psychologized man is Christianity. That's because Christianity is true religion and they're putting off God. Man knows who God is. God has shown it to them. He has manifest himself in them. Romans chapter one, they're putting this off. Okay, in other words, to use Rousseau's assertion from the Enlightenment, people, the people are sovereign. God isn't sovereign over government. People are sovereign and any government of the people finds its right to exist and govern only by the consent of the people. Now that has significant bearing on the formation of our own government. We're gonna see this next week. Sounds good. Sounds good on the surface. But what happens when that government which governs by the consent of the people governs by consent of a people who are morally degraded? What happens when the people no longer have any objective morality and they're not the consent of the people is not some transcendent or objective morality but is now, they're calling good evil and evil good. It's now some objective immorality. What happens when the government begins to govern by the consent of that people? We're gonna see that. Fourth, secular humanism meets therapeutic or psychologized man. This is, this old religion now being combined with or meshing with a shift that has taken place in man himself from the memetic to the poetic and secular humanism now mixed with or blended with psychologized man who's turned everything in on himself and sees everything in psychological categories. Oppression no longer means physical or economic. Oppression is on the level of thoughts and ideas. No longer people are sovereign. The people are sovereign as it was in Rousseau's day but today under this new psychologized man this new reality, the inner psychological life of the person of the individual is sovereign. This is the logical conclusion or the eventuality of secular humanism. This is where it gets you. We have arrived at it. It's been developed now. It's a baby in its infancy but this monster is growing and it's going to continue to grow. It's going to continue getting bigger and bigger. If humanism deifies man and man is to put off external conformity, the masis for the individual pursuit of his own meaning in life, poiesis then my purpose in life as a psychologized man is to be authentic, to pursue my freedom, to pursue a life lived without external constraints, a life that is made after my own image, a life that is my doing, right? I am the master of my fate, the captain of my soul. Fifth, fifth, that happens within the perceived boundaries of a humanistic morality at first, a humanistic morality. Humanistic morality says essentially do no harm, right? Do no harm. That's the mantra of humanistic morality, the primary moral mantra of the secular humanist. Religious sexual morality in particular is seen to be arbitrary. Anything external, anything outside of himself is considered to be arbitrary. Who decides and who are you to decide and who are you to tell me, in other words, right? So anything external to himself is considered to be an arbitrary morality. Therefore, the 60s sexual revolution, for example, the Stonewall Riots, the feminism, the homosexual revolution, all of that is an expression of the moral freedom, if you will, of psychologized man. He makes up his own morality and he's casting off any external impositions. A product of that, those in particular, sexual moral codes are the product of an oppressive religious system. They are the product of an oppressive, male-dominated hierarchy, or they are the product of an oppressive, family-centric patriarchy. And chief among the fruits of those oppressive systems, you think about those, those are systems, right, that impose a morality from the outside. And so Roman I, the psychologized man, wants absolutely nothing to do with any of them because they're imposing some arbitrary moral code on him that they have no right, no warrant to impose. And so Roman I wants to do away with all of them. And chief among the fruits of those oppressive systems are the institution of marriage, which we've seen come unraveled in our country altogether. The institution of the family, which is also being completely unraveled, the sex outside of marriage, no fault divorce, fatherlessness in our country is an unbelievable, rampant pandemic, if you wanna define what an actual pandemic is, it is horrific fatherlessness in our country. Gender roles, gender roles are arbitrary, imposed constructs, and therefore gender identity, sexual ethics, the definition of what it means to be a person. A person is his authentic self, that little blob of tissue in your uterus is not a person. We have no problem killing him. The person is the one who's having that thing imposed upon their freedom, right? The person is the one imposed upon, the one who has the right to kill the baby, right? All this we see as developments or the natural sort of logical eventualities of Roman I, the psychologized man meeting secular humanist morality, meeting Marxist categories, right? If you wanna think about this, a good way to look at this is to go to the BLM site. Black Lives Matter, you go to the BLM site and you might think initially that BLM would be about black lives. And the oppression, they perceive that black people have endured at the hands of white people in our country. But that's not what you find at the BLM site. What you find at the BLM site is this exact program or agenda, casting off anything to do with the institution of marriage, the undermining, the destroying, the doing away with the institution of the family, breaking down gender roles, therefore gender identity. What does any of this have to do with BLM, right? But that's what you find in the about us part of the Black Lives Matter site. This is what they're after. They're after a secular humanist, new religion, mix of atheism, agnosticism, right? A psychologized man pursuing Marxist morality. That's what they're about. What we're seeing today from these groups and others like them is a backlash now against what they see to be oppressive in arbitrary constructs. The pendulum has swung all the way out to the other side. And just like we've seen in other situations, right? We've heard the term backlash before. Knee jerk reactions are a backlash. What we're seeing is a backlash against what they view to be oppressive, which in particular is God and Christianity, right? In particular is Christianity. This is a backlash against all of what they see to be oppressive moral codes. Harm then, the way they would define harm, harm is defined as anything that stands in the way of a person living his authentic life in rejection of those arbitrary oppressive institutions. And that was sort of first exemplified or communicated by the slogan, if it feels good, do it, right? If it feels good, do it. We're entitled to live our own authentic or real life. We're entitled to our own understanding of morality. No one should impose that upon ourselves. And any institution that presumes to do that should be done away with, and we should do that with great zeal and with anger. We should destroy that thing as a repressive, oppressive institution, something that stifles the true expression of our own personal selves. It needs to be done away with. And in particular, Christianity is the figurehead, if you will, of all that that stands for, right? Sixth, this new religion, Roman first, meets secular humanism blended with Marxist morality. This new religion bears no rivals. Not only is the new religion mutually exclusive with religious claims to objective morality, oppressive institutions must be torn down as harmful to the common good. In other words, to the secular humanist religion does harm, family centric patriarchy does harm, traditional or conservative perspectives do harm, therefore conservative or traditional or Christian thought is harmful. Traditional, conservative, Christian words are harmful. And why do you see now, today, the silencing or the stifling of free speech on college campuses? And one of the reasons you see that is because college campuses are one of the few places where that can be effectively done, right? You don't get to stifle or you can't right now anyway. Right now, we're sort of unable to muzzle the guy on the street corner preaching the gospel. You're sort of unable to muzzle corner, Baptist church members out en masse at Lake Yola or at Cranes Roost preaching the gospel or at the abortion mill preaching the gospel because there are laws that currently exist on the books that to some degree protect our right to do that. That's the public square, so to speak, but where that can be particularly challenged and undermined is on college campuses. And what you see happening on college campuses now will overflow its bounds into the public square in short order. It's already happening. We're already seeing it in other countries, in particular just this last week in Canada when the government is now putting fences around the church where James Coates is a pastor. We're already seeing it outside the college campus in the public square. That's going to happen more and more and more. It's not gonna stop on college campuses and pretty soon in the public square in the same way that you see conservative in broad terms, but Christian in particular terms, more that you see Christian words, Christian thought, Christian ideas, stifled, silenced, shamed, hurled out on the college campuses. You're gonna see that in the public square very soon. And the way that's gonna be done is one, it's gonna take place through public institutions like college campuses. College campuses aren't the only public institutions. Amazon is a public institution. Facebook is a public institution. Twitter is a public, right? We're talking about, and when I say public institution, I mean in the public square, maybe private companies, but they're not government companies, right? They have the quote unquote right to do those things. We're gonna see it start happening that way, and then it'll begin to be legislated in the courts. And we'll talk about that next week more. This new religion bears no rivals. Tolerance is not an option. It is the moral imperative of the new religion to destroy them. Put off the oppressor, to pull down the powerful in favor of the weak, Marxist morality, and they pursue that morality with a works righteousness religious zeal, right? And that's what's going on today. It's a moral imperative to destroy them. This includes destroying any memory or any record of them. And that's what we're talking about when we speak of that cultural forgetfulness. Forgetfulness of the sins of our past, so to speak. And it's not just a forgetfulness. It's a repudiation of all that, right? So it's not just enough to destroy them in the present. We must destroy any memory of them in the past. It's a repudiation of all that they stand for, and essentially sort of the idea behind that is it puts the person on level ground, so to speak, where they can start from scratch, thinking the right things. And what is thinking the right things? Thinking how they want you to think, right? It's very totalitarian, what we're talking about. Seventh, seventh, this produces a religious zeal at the heart or thought or identity level of an individual. At the heart or the thought or the identity level of the individual, this produces a religious zeal. That's why you can have like pictures floating around the internet of young women, young men on college campuses, looking like they have absolutely lost their minds in yelling down someone who is expressing an opposing viewpoint, right? It produces within them a religious zeal. If you don't accept the transgender person for who he or she is by using their decided personal pronouns, then you are a bigot and you deserve to be shouted down because your thoughts and ideas and bigotry are harmful to that person. And so they pursue their Marxist morality with a religious fervor that would match any crusading Muslim, right? And the object is to destroy God, dethrone God, destroy Christianity. And all this is happening under the watch of a feckless, cowardly, despicably in error, counterfeit, professing Christian church, right? Let me give you some religious markers. If that last point, seven, this produces a religious zeal at the heart or thought or identity level of an individual, then the religious markers of that new religion are this. Religions are centered on identifiable doctrines and this new religion has identifiable doctrines. There is no God, no transcendent order, no transcendent lawgiver, no transcendent judge. Man is God. The psychological inner life of the individual is sovereign. He makes his own meaning, poiesis. The purpose of his life is to be authentic, to pursue truth, which is what he makes it to be, to pursue the true you in happiness, right? Identifiable doctrines. Religions are centered on identifiable values. Well, the values of this new religion include, for example, evolution, in answer to no God, right? There is no God, so their doctrine becomes evolutionary theory. And abortion, for example, in answer to the sovereignty of the individual, the individual is so sovereign, in fact, they can murder the child that has born, was conceived in them. So these are the values, if you will, of the new religion, things like evolution, things like abortion, homosexual marriage, they define what marriage is. No one else is capable of defining marriage. They define what marriage is. Religions are centered on faith. All of this is a faith proposition on the part of the secular humanists. The commitment of its adherents to exclusive ethical values and ideals, these ethical values and ideals becoming moral imperatives. Religions are centered on faith. This is no question about it. This is a faith pursuit on the part of these people. Religions are centered on morality. While as we've stated, the morality of this new religion is Marxist. Marxist oppressor repressed categories are applied to social, psychological factors. Used to be under Karl Marx, that oppressors were those who would exert physical power over you, take your property, take your possessions, harm your person. Now all of those Marxist categories are applied to social or psychological concerns like the thought life of the person who he or she thinks that they are what makes them happy how they define their authentic selves, their own identity. So this morality applied to psychology. Social, it's applied socially in terms of social justice, intersectionality, race, privileged versus oppressed classes in those categories, power, et cetera. And we'll talk about that when we get to the social justice section. And that Marxist morality is applied psychologically. We see that in triggers, right? I've been triggered safe spaces, the right to be affirmed, the dignity of the individual. If you do anything to violate their own inherent dignity as an autonomous human being, you should be hung on the gallows. In other words, oppression becomes social or psychological. That means that words and ideas become the most powerful weapons. This will be a war, if you will, that's waged with words and ideas rather than at the point of a spear, point of a sword. The morality of the new religion is to be against oppression. The morality of the new religion is to be against repression, which is social justice. It's necessary to promote good words, good ideas, even enforce them, right? So why would bad, quote unquote, bad words or bad ideas be allowed? False religions are all a form of works righteousness, and this new religion is legalistic about it. That's where we see virtue signaling. Virtue signaling is Roman first employing his morality, pursuing his morality with zeal, right? Virtue signaling, cancel culture. Cancel culture is Roman first employing Marxist morality with religious zeal. Boycott decisions, we've been seeing that unfold this week in Atlanta, right? Just the absurdity of it all. Adherents fight less and less in terms of class warfare, and more and more in terms of warfare against psychological oppression or repression, more and more against those in terms of words and ideas. Therefore, expressed in a religion of hate speech, for example, or it's expressed in a rejection of microaggressions, is another example of that, right? Microaggressions, where psychological categories give shape to what is understood to be oppression. What are offends their dignity, whatever causes psychological harm is therefore considered to be oppressive. Not just oppressive, but politically oppressive, right? It has to take place in public because the legitimacy of it, the legitimacy of it is found in the public acceptance of it, right? In other words, for my thoughts, my ideas to be legitimized, they have to be accepted in the public sphere. So it's not just private, it's political, right? These things are all dragged into the public sphere in terms of our politics. To merely tolerate new ideas or different ideas is a form of oppression. We can't merely tolerate them. Toleration is something that people in power do with people they don't agree with or want in their circle, right? Toleration is something oppressors do with the oppressed, they tolerate them. So it can't be a matter of toleration, it's gotta be wiped off the face of the map, right? Therefore the new religion requires the destruction of mutually exclusive ideologies, in particular Christianity. Finally, right? Seventh bears no rivals. Finally, politics then, politics is the means by which the necessary legitimacy is legislated. Politics is going to be the means through which they believe they're gonna win the war, okay? False religions often perpetuate their false ideals through force or compulsion. We've seen that in our history, right? Roman Catholicism and their crusades or Islam at the point of the sword. Adnausium, there are examples of that, right? Mormons going across the northern part of the United States killing people in their way to convert others to Mormonism. We see this in religious history that false religion often perpetuate their false ideals, their false values through force or compulsion. And that's going to happen now through words and ideas and through the government as their sword, right? The court system politics. Truman said this, the book I recommended to you last week, listen to this, to follow Rousseau, which is an Enlightenment secular humanist or an Enlightenment humanist, Enlightenment humanist. To follow Rousseau is to make identity psychological, who we are, what we are, to make it psychological. To follow Freud, which is what our culture is doing through the social imaginary, Freud has leached into the social imaginary of our country. To follow Freud is to make psychology and thus identity sexual. To mesh this combination with Marx is to make identity and therefore sex political and the politics that is produced thereby has a distinctive character precisely because the reality that it thinks it is addressing is at base a psychological one, right? This has become a battle, if you will, of psychology, a battle of thoughts and ideas. To transform society then is to do so politically. To transform, in other words, not to do that through tanks and airplanes, it's to do that politically. To transform society politically is to do so sexually and psychologically. That's why you see over the past since really the sexual revolution of the 60s until now this hyper sexualization of everything, including the identity of the individual, right? To transform society is to do so politically. To transform society politically is to do so sexually and psychologically. Therefore, psychological categories are at the heart of revolutionary political discourse. Where once oppression was seen in terms of economic realities like poverty or legal categories like freedoms and rights, now oppression relates to the psychology and self-consciousness of the individual. Hatred, bigotry, identity. It's one of the reasons that racism and hatred and bigotry are thrown out today. You could consider those bullets, if you will, from the enemy, spears, if you will, from the enemy. Instead of using bullets and spears, missiles, they use those words, hatred, bigotry, racism, identity, the political sphere is internalized and subjectivized. Everything to do with an objective morality has been thrown out the window. They're then weapons associated with the new religion's war, with their battle. One of those weapons, for example, is media, right? And I don't think this is a mystery to most of us. Yes, I'll go ahead, brother, question. Yeah, I've been rambling for a while, sorry. Now go ahead and ask a question because I'm getting on to a new subject here. To check. Okay. No, I was asking if you could maybe listen in terms of counseling some of our Christians here who work in the workplace, and we see a lot of this idea is seeping through our employers in the workplace, where, for example, I work in a school district that recently adopted LGBTQT week. And so, and I think I was talking to another brother here where it's sort of being pushed on the employees to accept certain things. And so from a Christian worldview as a believer, being in the workplace we're supposed to provide and care for our families, how do we wrestle through those things? Yeah, amen, very good question, brother. And we're actually, we're gonna get to that good bit as we get to sort of wrapping up these things. We're gonna talk about that extensively, but to give you a preview, I read a book a while back. It's been a couple of years ago. It's called The Gulag Archipelago by Alexander Solzhenitschen. And it's a book where he recounts his experience at the rise of communism in Soviet Union and his life. He was arrested, sent to Gulag, later released and because of his writing exiled. And then here recently, most recently, there's a book by Rod Dreher, he's a professing Christian. He wrote a book entitled Live Not By Lies. And the statement, one of the statements that Alexander Solzhenitschen would cling to in his exile or in the Gulag was Live Not By Lies. Or when living under what is an increasingly totalitarian government or an increasingly hostile circumstances that the thing that Christians must cling to in Alexander Solzhenitschen as a professing Christian is to live not by lies. There are ways in which or freedom in circumstances to determine what that looks like, but we as Christians at its base level cannot go along with a lie. And that has far reaching implications on the job, doesn't it? Because already in our church, there are people who have been asked by their employers to use personal pronouns for the person who's claiming to be transgender or they're asked to sign documents in support of what is this inclusivity of the homosexual agenda or all those kinds of things. And I think what Christians need to do to make short answer now of that question with longer answer coming, more detailed answer coming is to live not by lies. We can't give into the lie of that. I don't have to, every time I see a transgender person who has asked me to use she when I know that it is a he, I don't have to use it or he whenever I see them. I can avoid the pronouns altogether. There's all kinds of ways in which I can live in the truth. But what I'm not to do is to succumb to the lie. When you succumb to the lie, you're succumbing to the plot of the devil, right? This is a scheme of the devil. We're not to be ignorant of his schemes. We have to stand for the truth. And standing for the truth, even in the face of that kind of onslaught is what I think Christians have to do. We're gonna discuss that more fully here coming soon. One more question then I'm gonna finish up. Sean. Some of the terms that you gave her can be loaded terms like the term racism. Yeah. Being an African American, but going all the way to like my grandmother being born in the early 1900s, I've heard a lot of talk of racism in my life and experienced different things. So, but then there's a false understanding of it too. Yeah. So, to me, how do you navigate defining that and understanding the false from what has happened in history to help people understand how to deal with topics like that? Yeah, extremely good question, brother. And we're actually gonna talk about that when we get to social justice. But yeah, there is a, well, let me say this, maybe at the outset. Racism is not a biblically defined term or a biblically defined sin. There is one race and that is the human race, right? So the Bible doesn't even acknowledge racism that same kind of a construct. But what we understand as racism today is ethnic vain glory, right? So the Jews were guilty of ethnic pride or ethnic vain glory in demeaning others, right? And we see that in the Bible in various ways played out. And so even in our day, defining that, I think is really, really important. But then too, that term racism, although it may have, there may be elements of that that we would consider to be a good that we can talk about has been weaponized and used employed in pragmatic or expedient ways that have nothing to do with ethnic vain glory. And that's what we need to distinguish between, right? What is ethnic or vain glory? What is pride and what is actual, what we would call racism and what isn't. So we'll get there, brother. That's a really good question and that's important for us to be thinking about. Okay, let's wrap this up because we gotta get to service here soon. Media is an arm of this new religion and employs what sociologists have called death works. Death works, death works are works of art that produced by the media that seeks to delegitimize or undermine the value and the esteem of, for example, Christianity. And you'll see that in the works of art that Truman brings out in his book, The Rise and Trime for the Modern Self. One, for example, is I'm not even gonna give you the title of it because I don't even wanna say it, is a crucifix, it's considered to be a work of art but it's a crucifix submersed in urine. And it's called, anything from that to songs. Like I remember it just being appalled at this Pop-Tart, Ariana Grande, come in with a song called God is a Woman, right? God is a Woman. I just looked at the lyrics briefly because it's a pretty disgusting thought. So all, and that has little to do with gender and very much to do with sexuality. Things like that, those are called death works. Seeking to the repletive use of explicatives, in particular, one word in particular, just constantly, just all over the place. You can't get away from it. That is the media arm of the new religion exerting its power, as it were, to undermine those oppressive, repressive, societal or religious moral codes in order to do away with anything that is not freeing to the individual, right? So death works, the media through death works. Education becomes a way to indoctrinate adherence to the new religion. Government becomes the way to legislate the new religion. Listen to this from Marxist, and then we'll wrap up with this, we'll finish next week. Marxist sociologist Herbert Marcus, 1966. These are words that have leaked into the social imaginary. Listen to what he says. Now this is the way that elitists today are thinking. Surely no government can be expected to foster its own subversion, but in a democracy, such a right is vested in the people, in the majority of the people. In other words, a government can't set up rules that's gonna lead to its own undermining, right? But that right is invested in the people. The people can overthrow the government if they want to, right? A majority of the people can. This means that the ways should not be blocked on which a subversive majority could develop. In other words, Marcus is pushing for removing any blockages, blocks to a majority subverting current norms or current traditions, conservative as he would put it, a conservative government. Want to take away all those things that block a majority from overthrowing that government. If they are blocked or by organized repression and organized indoctrination, in other words, religion, for example, Christianity in particular, they're reopening, removing the blocks, may require apparently undemocratic means. Now listen to what this person is saying. He's an American citizen. They would include the withdrawal of toleration of speech and assembly from groups and movements which promote aggressive policies, armament, chauvinism, discrimination on the grounds of race and religion, or which oppose the extension of public services, abortion, social security, medical care, et cetera. He supports withdrawing toleration from those groups. Moreover, the restoration of freedom of thought may necessitate new and rigid restrictions on teaching and practices in the educational institutions, which by their very methods and concepts, serve to enclose the mind within the established universe of discourse and behavior, thereby precluding a prior rational evaluation of the alternatives. In other words, we're going to legislate the restriction of these thoughts and ideas. We're going to legislate what is allowed to be taught in the schools in order to, these things enclose the mind and we've got to give people freedom of thought. So all those bad ideas, bad words, bad thoughts, bad concepts, namely Christianity and thoughts about God, all that has to be pushed out of the way so that we can get back to a blank slate as it were and people can be free to think as we do, in other words. Good words and ideas are promoted. Bad words and ideas are withdrawn from toleration or restricted, all to ensure a prior rational evaluation of all the alternatives as long as you come to the one alternative that they think you should come to. And who knows the truth, right? How can this be legislated? Who knows the truth? Well, presumably Herbert Marcus and other liberal elites like him. If you have ever read him, but these ideas are part of the social imaginary as seen on college campuses today. Teaching anything but what is leftist or Marxist and you are fired, all of this is going to require coercion by government force through the courts and it is already happening. Listen to this from Truman. Traditionalists only maintain their beliefs about sex and sexual immoralities on the grounds of irrational bigotry. In short, they are either stupid or immoral or both. In such a world, the idea that religious freedom is a social good is not simply increasingly implausible. It is also increasingly distasteful, disturbing and undesirable. To put it differently, the social imaginary of the West is no longer that of the American founders for whom religious freedom was regarded as a good that actually helped social cohesion. It is now regarded as something that poses a potentially lethal threat to that cohesion. In that context, what happens to religious freedoms when rights are in conflict? The religious freedoms are the ones that are done away with because they're seen as bad or repressive or present. These issues are gonna be decided in the courts where Christianity in the courts increasingly seen as immoral, where Christianity is seen as detrimental to civic or political stability. And besides all of that, Christianity is a choice. We have the choice to adhere to it or not to adhere to it. And for the common good, we can choose not to. And that's the way that things are gonna be decided in the courts. All right, don't forget your amendment voting slip. I wanna invite you back to evening service too. We're gonna back to our essentials studies tonight and let's go to the Lord in prayer and then to worship. Father in heaven, thank you for our time together. Lord, please be with us as we seek now to worship you. And we thank you Lord for a day set aside like this to do just that. We love you in Jesus' name, amen.