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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
25 of 32 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Secular Radicals and Their Agenda,
This review is from: Grave Influence: 21 Radicals and Their Worldviews That Rule America From the Grave (Hardcover)
In 2004, Las Vegas County Commissioners and members of the community gathered to debate laws that would restrict "erotic dancers." They decided to proscribe moderate rules for "lap dancing." Most of the citizens and the commissioners did not sight any moral law that would prohibit such behavior. Instead, one after another sighted pragmatic reasons to support their arguments such as: Scientific research indicates sensual touching promotes good health for the human heart. One lady who spoke was an ex-stripper, and she recounted how stripping ruined her life (research has also indicated that many serial rapists and sex offenders visit strip clubs and this eventually leads them to commit heinous sexual crimes against others).Endorsement of pragmatism raises the question: By what standard does society use to discern what works best? Through lap dancing, many men will have healthier hearts; yet, many others will be injured as an indirect or direct result of this perversion. This is just one small example of the lack of moral stndards applied in the civil and cultural realms within the USA. Herein Brannon Howse declares that Christians have "lost the culture war." In "Grave Infulence: 21 Radicals and Their Worldviews that Rule American from the Grave," Howse demostrates how socialism, communism, atheism and occultism have successfully attacked the Christian character of America. This page-turner is large (368 pages), yet the style makes it accessible to young people and non-scholars. The auhor calls believers to stand for truth and contend for Christian convictions to protect your freedom, family, and church. Howse also notes the importance of education to promote one's worldview as the secularists have effectively accomplished. He opines: "Education is the most powerful ally of Humanism and every American public school is a school of Humanism." This volume addresses the worldviews promoted by: - Kierkegaard - Nietzsche - James - Dewey - Darwin - Skinner - Marx - Freud and many others. Many secularists attempt to hide the atheistic ground for their ethical views by calling it Pragmatism. Yet laws cannot be completely based on the principle of what "works best." Pragmatism is an abstract notion and falls under its own weight. It tumbles inasmuch as the principle itself cannot be tested, studied, and found to work best. Furthermore, an absolute fixed ethical system cannot be based on what maximizes utility. The utilitarian precepts can be "Play-Doe" in the hands of righteous men or wicked men. Wicked people can decide that all manner of evil has more utility, and then pass laws based on that evil. Nazism wooed the German people in great numbers through the utilitarian application of Hitler's ideas. The majority of the German people believed that Nazism brought happiness and great industry to their country in the late 1930's and early 1940's. Yet Nazism was evil. The records of the Nuremberg Trials on Nazi war crimes states: "About a million and a half people were exterminated in Madnek... over 133,000 persons were tortured and shot... Germans... exhumed and burned corpses, and crushed their bones with machines and used them for fertilizer... Nazi conspirators mercilessly destroyed even children. They killed them with their parents, in groups, and alone... they buried the living in graves, throwing them into flames... conducting experiments on them." Without God, nothing can supply the paradigm for universal moral absolutes. Society needs an absolute universal moral law to evaluate what is best and what is good, or it will fall into barbarism. Without God, moral choices are unclear and unintelligible. God is the only precondition for moral absolutes. The true God is inescapable. Men may try to escape His moral decrees, but without them, life can only lead to despair and pain. Supreme Court justice Stephen Bryer revealed his ultimate measure for deciding law. On November 10, 2005 on CSPAN he conceded that he knew his ruling was right by how he "feels" in his heart. The brilliant atheist Bertrand Russell admitted that he based his ethics on how he "feels." Pol Pot felt he needed to mass-murder one million of his citizens in the killing fields; Hitler felt like murdering over 10,000 people a day and to use the skin of those murdered to make lamp shades and use their hair to make sacks. Only a moral system grounded on peremptory rational commitments to God can pronounce that mass murder is always wrong. If men are wicked with religion, what would they be without it? (Benjamin Franklin). An Associated Press article, of March 6, 2003, reported an opinion poll of the people of Russia. The poll found that 53 percent of the respondents viewed Stalin's role (he murdered some 20 to 35 million people) in Russian history as "absolutely positive" or "more positive than negative." Yet, only 33 percent said his role was "absolutely negative" or "more negative than positive." And in America, the Columbine High School murderers justified their crimes using Darwinism and wearing natural selection shirts. I would personally add: What if the majority of a nation voted that killing people with big noses or large feet made them most happy? What if 51 percent voted to kill the other 49 percent who had bigger noses or larger feet? Is it wrong? By the utilitarian benchmark it is lawful and good inasmuch as it benefits the most human beings. By what standard does society measure happiness and pain? If most people are not happy and feel pain because they cannot afford steak seven days a week, does society have the moral obligation to take the people out to Sizzler every night? What if the majority of people can't afford to buy the super size meal deal at Taco Bell? Do we owe the people a big Chulupa combo with an extra-large Pepsi because this will make the most people happy? One needs an absolute moral yardstick to make law. Pragmatism and utilitarianism cannot supply this absolute standard. Philosophers fell short when they attempted to devise a obligatory criterion. The best they could come up with was the "pleasure calculus." The laborious chart did not work because it was arbitrary and could not deliver a universal and fixed moral touchstone. God has given mankind the blessing of an absolute moral law that binds all men at all times. This gift is His commandments. The absolute moral law which all censure, prohibition, civil restraint, individual rights, approbation, and righteous jurisprudence are derived. We are to reject all moral and ethical systems that are not derived from the principles of God's law. There must be an unchanging standard of absolute moral laws. Personal preference ethics cannot rightly condemn Nazism, slavery, abuse, environmental destruction, murder, and rape. That view is false and contravenes God's word. There are moral absolutes and God has revealed them in the Bible. Furthermore I would note: Our epistemological means of discerning what is good and right is found in the Bible. That is our authority and our guide. Man is not the standard. Science is not the standard. Why? Because only the Bible can provide a standard based on an all-knowing and unchanging being, God. The standard must be based on an unchanging source, or ethics could change. If moral standards were mutable this would mean: lying and murder on one day are bad. The next day they might be good. This is impossible and collapses the floor it stands on. If lying could be good, there can be no truth, which is a truth claim. This is self-confounding. Honesty is not just the best policy, it must be practiced in order to communicate and live with others. William Bennett reminds us: "Society cannot exist or function properly when people aren't honest." He then reminds us that "Our forefathers understood that honesty is essential to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and are impossible without the honesty of our country's citizens... Honesty... involves consistency between our thoughts and our actions." But what survival value would honesty be for natural selection to infuse this into our genes? One must presuppose honesty to account for communication, but evolutionary advantage would be with those who lie for personal gain and survival. Deception and dishonesty would better insure the multiplication of more of their genes. We are superintended by the hand of a sovereign God who gives us laws and principals that do not change because He is immutable. There is no place for full and free personal autonomy apart from God. Nietzschian philosophy, communism, and Nazism proclaim an ethic based on autonomy and survival of the fittest. Their foundational values led to the murder of tens of millions. If a man attempts to dismiss God from ethics, they end up with concentration camps and genocide. Without Biblical restrictions from an unchanging God, wickedness would flourish. To have a righteous nation, it must have a moral code from an unchanging and inerrant God. Only He could provide a fixed standard of good. Jeremiah 50:35-38 (ESV): 35 "A sword against the Chaldeans, declares the Lord, and against the inhabitants of Babylon, and against her officials and her wise men! 36 A sword against the diviners, that they may become fools! A sword against her warriors, that they may be destroyed! 37 A sword against her horses and against her chariots, and against all the foreign troops in her midst, that they may become women! A sword against all her treasures, that they may be plundered! 38 A drought against her waters, that they may be dried up! For it is a land of images, and they are mad over idols." There Are Moral Absolutes: How to Be Absolutely Sure That Christianity Alone Supplies
18 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
"The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind Continues",
This review is from: Grave Influence: 21 Radicals and Their Worldviews That Rule America From the Grave (Hardcover)
I recently picked up a new book by evangelical leader Brannon Howse. I say he is a leader because of his radio talk show, his eight widely-sold books, his appearances on such programs as the O'Reilly Factor, and his position as president and founder of Worldview Weekend, which trains over 50,000 men and women every year. Upon first seeing his new book, Grave Influence, I was enthusiastic. The thesis of the book as I understood it was to list the intellectual inheritance of 21 thinkers and how their ideas still affect our culture today. Upon closer inspection I was gravely disappointed. An entire catalogue of every error within the book is beyond the scope of this post. What follows is a list of only a few.Among the first problem I notice is on the back cover itself where Howse writes, "Through this book, you'll see that 21 enemies of the Biblical worldview-and our constitutional republic-along with their followers don't want their agenda unveiled for the American people." I don't even want to go into his assumption that the entire left wing/non-Christian agenda is some sort of conspiracy that is secretly plotting how to destroy Christianity. One of the intellectual problems among evangelicals today is our tendency to label enemies by we they want to see them and not seriously consider their arguments. This is regrettably a recurring theme of Howse's work. As he did with the democratic party, with one fell swoop he lays waste to all of environmentalism by saying on page 31, "As I document in this book, many of today's educators, government bureaucrats, and corporate leaders are committed to a radical environmentalism stemming from their mysticism and pantheistic pagan spirituality that requires a worship of nature." Rather than consider the legitimate points made by environmental thinkers, even Christian environmentalists, it really is so much easier to label all such thinkers as mystic pantheistic pagans and thereby condemn anything they might do or say. Although he lists 21 enemies of the Christian worldview, I will only go into two of his choices. The first of these men is Soren Kierkegaard. Howse writes, "In the mid-1800s Kierkegaard, who 'claimed' to be a Christian[emphasis mine], denied any consistent morality. Known as existentialism, his ideas suddenly gained steam in America a hundred years later. The central tenet of existentialism is that there is no absolute truth." In these three sentences Howse evidences a lack of understanding of both Kierkegaard and existentialism. Howse's first problem is his belief that existentialism is the same as moral relativism. Howse states quite simply that "the central tenet of existentialism is that there is no absolute truth." Such a definition is patently false. Walter Kaufmann in his book Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre gives a summary of existentialism: "The refusal to belong to any school of thought, the repudiation of the adequacy of any body of beliefs whatever, and especially of systems, and a marked dissatisfaction with traditional philosophy as superficial, academic, and remote from life--that is the heart of existentialism." Howse undoubtedly had access to this definition as he quoted from this same book two pages later. How he still managed to give a patently false and simplistic definition of existentialism in his own book, one can only wonder. Second, Kierkegaard would adamantly reject any insinuation that he was an advocate of moral relativity. Only if one were to grossly misread Kierkegaard could you come away with such a conception. Rather than take time to understand the complexities of Kierkegaard's thought, Howse presents what is known as the straw man. Thus, in his discussion of Kierkegaard and existentialism, Howse apparently has a correct understanding of neither. Also disappointing is Howse's treatment of John Maynard Keynes. While I theoretically agree that Keynes's economic theories are destructive, I do not agree this ought to be included in a book concerning thinkers who are attempting to destroy the Christian worldview. Included in this chapter is sincere praise for Andrew Jackson for destroying the Bank of the United States. Howse is in favor of this destruction because the only proper currency is one backed by gold and silver; again, this is apparently the only Christian theory of currency. Howse neglects to mention that the only national stable currency at the time was from the Bank of the United States. After the bank was abolished the country entered into the panic of 1837 precisely because no state bank offered a reliable alternative. However, if one starts by arguing that the Bank of the United States is unchristian, one need not concern oneself over such details as truth. I myself am both a devout Christian and a professor of philosophy. I found it almost physically painful at the many errors and logical fallacies strewn throughout this work which had showed so much promise from the cover. More painful then mere errors of thought, which I can correct when I read my own students' papers, was the knowledge that this work is being consumed, and this seems to be true from other reviews, by earnest followers of Christ. Such readers are not being trained to become effective ambassadors for the Kingdom; they are only setting themselves up to be dismissed and ridiculed by any serious thinker. As Nietzsche himself commented (look, we can use unchristian thinkers to make solid points!) the easiest way to defeat any argument is to make bad arguments in its defense. If this book is any indication, evangelical Christianity is in serious trouble. I can only hope and pray that this book and his other works do not fail to delude an entire generation of readers. There are better books out there. Go pick up C.S. Lewis or Chesterton. Go pick up a book by William Lane Craig. Pick up something worthy of respect.
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Eye Opening and Challenging,
By
This review is from: Grave Influence: 21 Radicals and Their Worldviews That Rule America From the Grave (Hardcover)
I'm a homeschooled student in my last year of high school. My Dad assigned Grave Influence as part of a world view course I am taking. Even though I have only read the first six or so chapters (I am currently reading about Friedrich Nietzsche), I harbor a great respect for the book and highly recommend it to anyone and everyone. Brannon Howse begins the book by stating that Christians have lost the culture war. It sounds like a gloomy start, but as a teenager continually being bombarded with American culture, I couldn't agree more. The messages coming from the radicals illuminated in this book are echoed all over the face of America in Movies, TV, politicians, the neighbor next door, and even in the Sunday school classroom. The culture war is lost, but the spiritual battle continues and is fiercer than ever. Grave Influence brings the scattered and murky beliefs permeating America to your face and allows you to really understand where it came from, and where it could lead."Every Christian must prepare and understand the nature of this spiritual battle because it is coming with an intensity none of us ever imagined - right here, right under the dimming light of our U.S. Constitution. Second Timothy 3:1 tells us that in the last days perilous times will come, and, my friend, they are here... My purpose in writing this book is to help you see the world and all the events taking place as a big picture, not just bits and pieces. I want to inspire, train, and raise up godly leaders of all ages to lead the Church during this hour..." Grave Influence (Brannon Howse, page 9-10)
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