Commentary: Mightier Than The Sword (Part Eighteen)
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John W. Ritenbaugh (1932-2023)
Given 10-Oct-15; 10 minutes
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transcript:
This commentary features probably the best known philosopher/scientist to all of you listening to this: Charles Darwin. He was British, and like the last three or four philosophers I reported on, he was born in the early 1800s—in fact in 1809.
Satan was very busy at this time period in western world history, raising up Ralph Waldo Emerson, Karl Marx, and Charles Darwin in the same brief time period. They were born, I believe, in about a 4-year span.
Karl Marx and Charles Darwin metaphorically turned the world upside down. Emerson impacted American religion greatly by encouraging the membership to be self-governing in a pagan way. Marx made his impact in the realm of politics, economics, and way of life. Darwin [made his impact] in the world of biology and religion.
In a major way, Marx’s family life was pretty much normal for a young German, but he made a severe religious change as a young man. Interestingly, Marx and Darwin had somewhat similar paths regarding their beliefs about God and religion.
Darwin was the fourth generation of a family of male leaders who hid their atheism from the public behind a façade of publicly-appearing conformity to the Christian faith. They did “all the right things,” but as time moved on and public acceptance of atheism became more acceptable, especially in Charles Darwin’s young adult life, these men dropped their hypocrisy and became much more openly anti-God.
Young Charles didn’t quite fit the mold of the family’s three male leaders who preceded him. It wasn’t until attending Cambridge University while preparing for the ministry that a rather abrupt change took place in his religious stance. Excerpts mined from papers written during his early university years reveal statements from biographers that, “he [Darwin] did not then [his early years at Cambridge] in the least doubt the strict and literal truth of every word of the Bible.”
Apparently, the turning point took place in 1828 when he was 19 years old. As with Marx, nobody knows what precipitated the radical change in his thinking, but from that point on he made a determined effort to eliminate every vestige of the Christian faith from his thinking.
He was not a continually angry man like Marx, but he was quietly, intensely anti-God in his writings, while at the same referring to a Creator—the hypocrisy in the family is beginning to come out here—in those same writings. When asked why he referred to a Creator in the very papers in which he expounded on his anti-God evolutionary theories, he quietly told the questioner it was a marketing ploy intended to curry public favor. He was ever the hypocrite like his male ancestors.
November 24, 1859, may be the most important date regarding religion in modern history. That was the date his book titled, The Origin of the Species, was published. It took him 28 years to write it. The world hasn’t been the same since.
The first edition sold out in one day—this is 1859—and that indicates there was a ready audience to accept his massive errors. It must have been advertised as they were going along. So there was a ready audience out there to buy the book. It is evidence that apostasy was the zeitgeist of the times. Many, many people were looking for a reason to escape from God and this was their way. The Origin of the Species provided them with their justification.
Darwin was a sick man who would probably be described today as “twisted.” By his own admission, he was a sadist who “loved” to kill animals. He took enjoyment in torturing animals. He killed birds by smashing their heads with a hammer. At the time he was 17, he wrote he spent summers killing larger animals, not for their meat but simply for the pleasure he derived from killing them. It is interesting that Proverbs 12:10 says, “The righteous man regards the life of his beast, but the tender mercies of the wicked are cruel.”
His autobiography also records he took guns on his research ship, the Beagle, in hopes he might kill some cannibals. Entire books are devoted to his mental problems. He suffered from depression, agoraphobia, insomnia, vision alterations, hallucinations, malaise, vertigo, fainting, spasms, tremors, cramps, colic, nausea, headaches, nervous exhaustion, dyspepsia, and fear of impending death. That is only a partial listing. According to Darwin’s own testimony, his health problems began at age 16, and by the time he was 28 he was virtually incapacitated by his mental illnesses.
What was the cause of all of this? According to a Dr. Jerry Bergman, author of The Dark Side of Charles Darwin, it was Darwin’s fear that he had murdered God—that he had devoted his life to a fantasy, an illusion, and a dangerous one at that.
What possible influence could this agnostic, racist, mentally-ill sadist have had on any person of intellectual or moral stature? Well, the public didn’t know all these things. They were buying the book simply because it was something they wanted to read and it was popular. But even had they known, it would have made no difference simply because of the spirit of the times. The world and its spirit was moving toward what we are involved in our lives today. It would have made no difference because what we are looking at is the tremendous grip human nature, under the control of Satan, has on human life.
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