Secular Totalitarianism
In the Words of Albert Einstein
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In doing some research the other day I came upon the following passage written in the private journals of Albert Einstein sometime in the mid 1930's. From what I've read this was written shortly before many like him left Europe before the onset of the war. This emigration was known as the "brain drain." He knew about the impending danger in Germany. Take a listen to what he had to say back then. I think you'll find it very informative especially in lieu of where we find ourselves now since he penned these words. I emphasized a few comments that jumped out to me as I re-wrote his words.
"But even after mateiralism and mechanism have been more or less vanquished, the devastating influence of the twentieth-century secularism will still blight the spiritual experience of milions of unsuspecting souls.
"Modern secularism has been fostered by two world-wide influences. The Father of secularism was the narrow minded and godless attitude of nineteenth and twentieth-century so called science-atheistic science. The mother of modern secularism was the totalitarian medieval Christian church. Secularism had its inception as a rising protest against the almost complete domination of Western civilization by the institutionalized Christian church.
"In this present day (1930s), the prevailing intellectual and philosophical climate of both European and American life is decidedly secular-humanistic. For three hundred years Western thinking has been progressively secularized. Religion has become more and more a nominal influence, largely a ritualistic exercise. The majority of professed Christians of Western civilization are unwittingly actual secularists.
"It required a great power, a mighty influence, to free the thinking and living of the Western peoples from the withering grasp of a totalitarian ecclessiastical domination. Secularism did break the bonds of church control, and now in turn it threatens to establish a new and godless type of mastery over the hearts and minds of modern man. The tryrannical and dictatorial political state is the direct offspring of scientific materialism and philosophic secularism. Secularism no sooner frees mankind from the domination of the institutionalized church than it sells us into slavish bondage to the totalitarian state. Secularism frees mankind from ecclesiastical slavery only to betrray us into the tyranny of political and economic slavery.
"Materialism denies God, secularism simply ignores him; at least that was the earlier attitude. More recently, secularism has assumed a more militant attitude, assuming to take the place of the religion whose totalitarian bondage it onetime resisted. Twentieth-century secularism tends to affirm that mankind does not need God. But beware! This godless philosophy of human society will lead only to unrest, animosity, unhappiness, war, and worldwide diseaster.
"Secularism can never bring peace to mankind. Nothing can take the place of God in human society. Nonetheless, we should not be quick to surrender the beneficient gains of the secular revolt from ecclesiastical totalitarianism. Western civilization today enjoys many liberties and satisfactions as a result of the secular revolt. The great mistake of secularism was this: In revolting against the almost total control of life by religious authority and after attaining the liberation from such ecclesiastical tyranny, the secularists went on to institute a revolt against God himself, sometimes tacitly and sometimes openly.
"To the secularistic revolt we owe the amazing creativity of American industrialism and the unprecedented material progress of Western civilization. And because the secularistic revolt went too far and lost sight of God and true religion, there also followed the unlooked-for harvest of world wars and international unsettledness.
"It is not necessary to sacrifice faith in God in order to enjoy the blessings of the modern secularistic revolt: tolerance, social service, democratic government, and civil liberties. It was not necessary for the secularists to antagonize true religion in order to promote science and advance education.
Without God, without religion, scientific secularism can never co-ordinate its forces, harmonize its divergent and rivalrous interests, races, and nationalisms. This secularistic human society, notwithstanding its unparalleled materialistic achievement, is slowly disintegrating. The chief cohesive force resisting this disintegration of antagonism is nationalism. And nationalism is the chief barrier to world peace.
"The inherent weakness of secularism is that it discards ethics and religion for politics and power. You simply cannot establish the brotherhood of mankind while ignoring or denying the fatherhood of God.
"Secular social and political optimism is an illusion. Without God, neither freedom and liberty, nor property and wealth will lead to peace.
"The complete secularization of science, education, industry, and society can lead only to disaster. During the first third of the twentieth century we have killed more human beings than were killed during the whole of the Christian era. And this is only the beginning of the dire harvest of materialism and secularism; still more terrible destruction is yet to come."
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