State Of Mankind - How Much Do You Know?
Excerpts from "How the Specter of Communism Is Ruling Our World"
(38) Play the role of God…
For thousands of years, the main institution of political power was monarchy, which received its authority from God. Heaven endowed the ruler with the divine right of kings. Emperors and kings performed a sacred role as intermediaries between man and God.
Today, many nations are run by democracies. In practice, democracy isn’t the rule of the people, but rather the rule of the representative chosen by the people. The election of a president is a democratic procedure. Once in office, the president has broad powers over politics, economics, the military, foreign relations, and so on.
Democracy cannot guarantee that good people will be elected. As the overall moral standard of society sinks, the winning candidates may well be those who specialize in empty or inflammatory rhetoric or are prone to cronyism. The damage to society is huge when a democracy does not take provisions to maintain the moral standards set by gods. The advantages of electoral representation disappear and are subsumed into mob politics that throw society into chaos and fragmentation.
The point is not to debate the respective merits of a particular political system. We are simply stating that moral values are the cornerstone of social stability and harmony. Democracy and the rule of law are merely the format by which society operates.
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Liberalism and progressivism have now become the standard of “political correctness” in the West. In fact, they have been pushed to the point of becoming a secular religion.
Western leftists have used different labels throughout history, sometimes calling themselves liberal and sometimes calling themselves progressive. The two concepts do not differ significantly.
The ultimate concept of liberalism and progressivism is similar to that of communist ideology. Proponents advocate “freedom” and “progress” as absolute moral good and attack any dissenting opinion as heresy.
Similar to communism, atheism, evolution, and scientism, liberalism and progressivism replace the belief in God with humanist reason, effectively taking man himself to be a god.
They share the same enemies as the communists and blame social problems on perceived injustices or defects in the capitalist system, which they intend to subvert or overthrow.
Their methods are similar to those of communists. They think their cause so important that no means is off-limits to them. They can use violence or deception as called for in different situations.
The quasi-religious characteristics of liberalism and progressivism are inseparable from the historical background of their origin.
Rapid scientific progress since the eighteenth century greatly strengthened humankind’s confidence in its own ability and fuelled the progressive intellectual trend. French philosopher Marquis de Condorcet, a pioneer of progressive thinking, stated in his work Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind that reason leads people to the path of happiness and morality or goodness. Following this, progressivism became more aggressive and began pushing reason onto the altar of worship.
Progressive thinking allows one to view reason, conscience, and the Creator as separate, fostering the idea that man does not need the Creator’s salvation: He can use his own rationality and conscience to sweep away the evils of greed, fear, jealousy, and the like; man can establish paradise on earth and do away with the divine.
The arrogance of progressivism is exhibited in a statement by 19th-century French politician and art critic Jules Castagnary: “Beside the divine garden from which I have been expelled, I will erect a new Eden. … At its entrance, I will set up Progress … and I will give a flaming sword into his hand and he will say to God, ‘Thou Shalt not enter here.’” [9]
Filled with this kind of thought, people entertain an illusion of controlling humanity’s destiny and manipulating its future—that is, mankind wants to play the role of God—to create a utopia without God, a “paradise on earth,” which is the essential idea of communism. The struggle to achieve this paradise has caused a deluge of blood and misery.