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The Summit Lecture Series: Making Sense of Your World with John Stonestreet, Part 18

The Summit Lecture Series: Making Sense of Your World with John Stonestreet, Part 18

Last updated on: October 25, 2016 at 3:31 pm by Christian Podcast Central

The Summit Lecture Series: Making Sense of Your World with John Stonestreet, Part 18 2016-10-25T15:31:22-08:00 Christian Podcast Central

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“As humanists we urge today, as in the past, that humans not look beyond themselves for salvation. We alone are responsible for our own destiny, and the best we can do is muster our intelligence, courage, and compassion to realize our highest aspirations.”
– Paul Kurtz, “The Humanist Manifesto, 2000”

The problem at the core of this statement is the matter of whose aspiration we ought to aim for. Throughout the past 100 years, we witnessed competing aspirations that tried in vain to fix our world and bring about utopia.

The hard truth is that none of these efforts to create utopia made our world any better. In fact, they made our world worse.

In fact, the Secularist legacy is “Utopian dreams built on Darwinian assumptions”. In other words, the idea that we can actually control our evolution and move the human race forward (Darwinian assumptions) was supposed to bring about a perfect world. One of the things they promised was eugenics, or the ability to genetically produce a better human being. They thought that since experts had been able to create better animals through selective breeding and genetic alteration, then the same could be done to humans.

When we think of eugenics, the group that most often comes to mind are the Nazis, who envisioned a “perfect” Aryan race. But, you won’t believe where the Nazis got their ideas: from American intellectuals.

U.S. eugenics poster advocating for the removal of genetic "defectives" such as the insane, "feeble-minded" and criminals, and supporting the selective breeding of "high-grade" individuals, c. 1926

U.S. eugenics poster advocating for the removal of genetic “defectives” such as the insane, “feeble-minded” and criminals, and supporting the selective breeding of “high-grade” individuals, c. 1926

In fact, Henry Ford and John D. Rockefeller actually financed projects dealing with eugenics. All across America at County Fairs, there were “Fit Family Contests”. If contestants could prove from their family history that they had no “imbecility” or people with low IQ’s, no mixed races in their familial line, and had a pure genetic strain of blond hair, blue eye “perfection”, then they could win a prize for being the “Fittest Family” in the county.

In that same era, there was an abundance of cases of sweet, innocent African American children in south Alabama who were promised candy and a party and instead were drugged and when they woke up, they had been brutally sterilized.

There was Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who presided over a case in Virginia proposing the legality of forcefully sterilizing an African American girl because of her low IQ. The arguments for it were: She has a low IQ; her mother has a low IQ; her grandmother has a low IQ; so, the world would be a better place if their family line were put to an end. And Oliver Wendell Holmes granted the mandatory sterilization of this woman, against her will because, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

Forget Germany. This was all happening in America in the 20th century.

One of the key voices in all this was Margaret Sanger, an American birth control activist, sex educator, writer, and the founder of Planned Parenthood. She ran a magazine called The Birth Control Review. She was also part of the second utopian project, which was a set of ideas commonly known as “Sexual Freedom”. She basically taught that we could reach Utopia if we had birth control.

Firstly, birth control would allow women to have orgasms without any sort of responsibility. And secondly, we could control the “lesser population” or “unfit” from having babies. According to Sanger, the “unfit” consisted of African Americans and the poor. She actually believed that poverty had a genetic element to it.

These are not information tidbits that Planned Parenthood displays on their website. You’ll need to dig a little to uncover these truths.

When she gave up editorial control of The Birth Control Review, her chosen successor almost immediately ran a feature headline article on eugenics, written by the Third Reich’s top genetic scientist. Across the nation, American scientists were put off because the Germans were using their ideas and actually putting them to work.

The mayor of Chicago actually penned and publically published a congratulatory letter to Adolf Hitler. He not only condoned Hitler’s tactics, but believed that the Nazi’s work would make the world a better place.

That’s insane.

Margaret Sanger, herself, started a program called “The Negro Project”. Their goal was to eliminate or curb America’s black population. She paid African American pastors $100 to preach sermons that encouraged their congregants to go get sterilized or at least get on birth control. Since then, it’s undeniable that Planned Parenthood targets minority neighborhoods. 80% of Planned Parenthood’s abortion clinics are situated in minority neighborhoods. African Americans make up 11% of the nation’s overall population, but they have 40% of the country’s abortions. 60% of the African American babies in New York City are aborted each year.

The Negro Project has been quite successful.

In his book The War Against the Weak, Edwin Black, a Jewish Secularist Liberal set out to demonstrate the Church’s co-option by the Nazi party. But, while Black set out on his project, he discovered one correspondence after another between the Nazi scientists and American intellectuals… and as a Jew, it ticked him off! A shorter book with a similar message is Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism.

The irony is that their goal was sexual freedom – to take sexuality out of the family and separate it from marriage and childbirth. Yet, while today’s college students are more sexually active then ever, they are overall riddled with oppressive shame, guilt, and other consequences instead of the excitement and freedom that is assumed. Instead of being sexually free, they have become sexual slaves.

The truth is that our world cannot be simply fixed.

It must be redeemed.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Summit Lecture Series

the Negro Project

Utopia

Worldview

“The Humanist Manifesto”

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