BELIEVING THE UNBELIEVABLE
By
Samuel L. Blumenfeld
January
30, 2002
NewsWithViews.com
It is easier to believe a credible lie than an incredible truth.
And that explains why Americans were so psychologically unprepared
for the horrors of September 11th.
They simply could not
conceive of normal human beings carrying out a plan of such diabolical
destruction in this day and age of liberal enlightenment.
We’ve been led by progressive education, humanist theology, and
our left-leaning media to believe that human beings are basically good and
that when they do terrible things like hijacking planes, they are simply
responding justifiably to American or Israeli aggression.
Ordinary
Americans could not understand that there were human beings who would live
among us, enjoy the hospitality of our free society, and yet painstakingly
plan to murder thousands of innocent people in the name of religion.
A good many Americans are indifferent to religion.
They enjoy Christmas and Easter, but mainly as cultural events of
the yearly calendar, extravagantly promoted for commercial gain.
Religious fanaticism is something they cannot even begin to deal
with.
Nor
could Americans understand how anyone, particularly those who profess to
believe in God, could be driven by such consummate hatred that they would
gladly inflict on fellow human beings such extreme pain and cruelty.
Nothing in our American idea of religion, toleration, sense of
decency and love for one’s neighbor prepared us for this kind of
suicidal insanity. All of the
preaching in the liberal churches, all of the humanism and
multiculturalism in the public schools have left us psychologically
unprepared for a real encounter with evil.
And
we are now being told that it could have been worse, and that these
Islamic fanatics are planning bigger and better attacks against us.
How does one understand such evil?
Back in the days after World War II, our family in New York made
contact with the family’s sole survivor of the holocaust in Europe.
My parents’ extended families, living in Poland, had all been
killed. That sole survivor,
my parents’ niece, had migrated to Canada with her husband whom she had
met in a displaced persons camp in Germany.
My mother and I took the train to Montreal where we had a very
emotional meeting with my cousin. In
the course of our conversations during our stay, I asked my cousin what
went through their minds when the Germans invaded Poland.
She said they all knew that things would be bad, “but we didn’t
know it would be that bad.”
They
had assumed that the Germans, a civilized and highly cultivated people,
were simply incapable of doing what they eventually did. In fact, the Germans had been very friendly to the Jews of
Poland in World War I. What
that, in time, taught me is that the most civilized people in the world
were capable of the worst barbarism if the circumstances made it possible.
The pagan Hitlerian regime with its demented racism is what made it
all possible.
Of
course, even if my relatives had known it would be that bad, what could
they have done to save themselves? It
wasn’t until most of the Jews of Warsaw had been taken to the death
camps that the remaining remnant decided to stage an uprising. Even though they had few weapons, they felt it was better to
die by fighting a last-ditch battle and taking some of the enemy with
them, than merely dying as victims. In
that regard I thought of those passengers in the hijacked plane over
Pennsylvania who courageously decided it was better dying preventing the
hijackers from killing more Americans than dying as passive victims
smashing into the Capitol or White House.
It
wasn’t until I became a Calvinist that I began to understand how the
Germans could do what they did. John
Calvin had no illusions about human nature, and he found more than enough
in the Bible to characterize man as “innately depraved.”
And it is this innate depravity that is the cause of evil in man.
The only way that innate depravity can be controlled is by belief
in the God of the Bible and his laws that tell us how to live.
Since America was founded mainly by Calvinists who believed in
man’s innate depravity, they conceived of a form of government that
would prevent any one man from gaining so much power as to become a
dictator. They believed that
it wasn’t power that corrupts man, but man who corrupts power.
That
Calvinist distrust of man is at the basis of our Constitutional system.
But it is the liberals who have tried to convince us otherwise.
“Trust us,” they keep saying.
“Give us your guns. Give
us your children to educate. Give
us your earnings. Trust
us.” But, thank God, there
is enough of a residual distrust of government among Americans that makes
them resist the liberal siren song of surrender.
And so, all it takes to understand what happened on September 11th
is to understand human depravity in all of its horrendous capabilities.
Back
in colonial days, children were taught to read with the New England
Primer. Each letter of the
alphabet was taught in reference to a lesson from the Bible. In teaching the letter A, the lesson was: “In Adam’s
fall, we sinned all.” Powerful
stuff for the children of early America.
Today they are taught, “See Spot run,” or its Mickey Mouse
equivalent. We must do better
than that if we are to survive as the nation our Founding Fathers gave us.
Incidentally,
as our nation was in prayer in remembrance of those 7000 people who
perished on September 11th, the only place in America where you
couldn’t pray was in the public school.
© Samuel
L. Blumenfeld - All Rights Reserved
Samuel
L. Blumenfeld is the author of eight books on education, many of which are
available through Amazon.com.
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