Believing the Unbelievable

by Samuel L. Blumenfeld

from the _Chalcedon Report_, Sept. 25, 2001

Emphasis Key: _italics_
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The reason why Americans were so psychologically
unprepared for the horrors of September 11th is because
they simply could not conceive of normal human beings
carrying out a plan of such diabolical destruction.
We've been led by progressive education, Unitarian and
liberal 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. And even after the events of September
11th, there are American students and peaceniks who
have learned nothing from the experience.

Ordinary Americans could not understand that there were
human beings who would live among us, enjoy the
hospitality and pleasures 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 boosted 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 liberal churches, all of the humanism 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 were a civilized,
Christian people, from a highly cultivated society, and
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 is what made it all possible.

Of course, even if my relatives had known it would be
that bad, what could they have done? 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. 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 decided it was better dying preventing
the hijackers from killing more Americans than to die
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 for the most part 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 there is enough of a residual distrust of
government among Americans that make them resist the
liberal siren song of seduction. 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.
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Samuel L. Blumenfeld wrote the lead article for
_WorldNetDaily's_ October _Whistle Blower_, a powerful
indictment of America's government education system. He
is the author of eight books on education, most of
which are available on Amazon.com.
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? 2001, Chalcedon Inc., PO Box 158, Vallecito, CA,
95251.  To view the online version of this article go
to:
http://chalcedon.edu/articles/blumenfeld010925.html
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