The End of Reason

Life Without The King…

Following is a recorded conversation between serial killer Ted Bundy and one of his victims:

Laura: Where have you taken me, Ted?

Bundy: To a place where no one can follow us—or find you—at least not until long after I have disappeared—and you are dead.

Laura: What do you mean?

Bundy: What I mean is that I intend to rape and murder you.

Laura: Oh, my God, my God, why?

Bundy: Because, my dear, it will give me the greatest possible pleasure to do so.

Laura: Please, please, spare me. Send for ransom, ask anything. I know my parents and their families and friends will do anything to save my life.

Bundy: But you fail to understand me. I don’t want anything from anyone else. It is raping and murdering you that I want, and nothing can substitute for it. By the way, unless I have lost count, you will be the 89th young woman—person I should say—who has been good enough to gratify me in this way. Believe it or not, I am very grateful to my victims—although I do not think of them as victims, but rather as those making the sacrifices necessary for my freedom—the freedom to live my life the way I choose to live it. Nations praise those who sacrifice their lives for the freedom of others, as you will shortly be doing. I would be glad to erect a monument to your memory—and to that of all the others, past and future, who have made and will make the same sacrifice—although I do not think it is practicable for me to try to do so.

Laura: But Ted, how can you possibly call raping and murdering your “freedom”? What about my life and freedom?

Bundy: I recognize that your life and your freedom are very valuable to you, but you must recognize that they are not so valuable to me. And if I must sacrifice your life and freedom to mine, why should I not do so? The unexamined life was not worth living to Socrates. And a life without raping and murdering is not worth living to me. What right do you—or does anyone—have, to deny this to me?

Laura: But rape and murder are wrong. The Bible says they are wrong, and the law says they are wrong.

Bundy: What do you mean by wrong? What you call wrong, I call attempts to limit my freedom. The Bible punished both sodomy and murder with death. Sodomy is no longer regarded as a crime, or even as immoral. Why then should murder—or rape? But, you say, rape and murder are against the law, and if the law catches me, it will punish me. Very well, and if it does not catch me, what then? After so many highly successful and immensely gratifying rapes and murders, I do not think the law has much to say to me. In any case, it can hardly punish me any more for what I am about to do, than for what I have already done. So I see little benefit for you in this argument.

Laura: But surely, surely, Ted, you must see that killing an innocent human being is wrong. Did you, or do you not have a mother and a father, or a sister or a brother, or friends, in whom you recognize a life like your own, that should be as precious to you as your own life? Is there not something within you—a conscience—that tells you that to be a human being is to recognize that everything is not permitted? And that your own happiness—indeed your own freedom—depends upon living within the bounds prescribed either by God or the moral law?

Bundy: Well, Laura, I am glad we are having this talk. None of my other victims ever asked me to justify myself as you are doing. And so I must tell you—and hope it will afford you some satisfaction—that you are if possible increasing the pleasure I am having from our acquaintance, short as it must be.

I want you to know then that once upon a time I too believed that God and the moral law prescribed boundaries within which my life had to be lived. That was before I took my first college courses in philosophy. Then it was that I discovered how unsophisticated—nay, primitive—my earlier beliefs had been. Then I learned that all moral judgments are “value judgments,” that all value judgments are subjective, and that none can be proved to be either “right” or “wrong.” I even read somewhere that the Chief Justice of the United States had written that the American Constitution expressed nothing more than collective value judgments. Believe it or not, I figured out for myself—what apparently the Chief Justice couldn’t figure out for himself—that if the rationality of one value judgment was zero, multiplying it by millions would not make it one whit more rational. Nor is there any “reason” to obey the law for anyone, like myself, who has the boldness and daring—the strength of character—to throw off its shackles. And I was assured, by what I regarded as the highest possible authority—a Harvard-trained philosophy professor—that, the root notion of [true] freedom is . . . the spontaneous, uninhibited expression of the integrated self . . . [and that] the absence of freedom means . . . the presence of blocks or limitations that prevent unfettered expressions of the self.

I discovered that to become truly free, truly unfettered, I had to become truly uninhibited. And I quickly discovered that the greatest obstacle to my freedom, the greatest block and limitation to it, consisted in the insupportable “value judgment” that I was bound to respect the rights of others. I asked myself, who were these “others”? Other human beings, with human rights? Why is it more wrong to kill a human animal than any other animal, a pig or a sheep or a steer? Is our life more to you than a hog’s life to a hog? Why should I be willing to sacrifice my pleasures more for the one than for the other? Surely, you would not, in this age of scientific enlightenment, declare that God or nature has marked some pleasures as “moral” or “good” and others as “immoral” or “bad? In any case, let me assure you, my dear young lady, that there is absolutely no comparison between the pleasure I might take in eating ham, and the pleasure I anticipate in raping and murdering you. That is the honest conclusion to which my education has led me—after the most conscientious examination of my spontaneous and uninhibited self.

At this point in the tape there was a sharp scream, followed by a click, indicating that the tape recorder had been turned off.

Chilling, isn’t it?

This fictitious conversation is a product of the mind of Harry Jaffa of the Claremont Institute. Though I am not a fan of Mr. Jaffa nor of his Institute there is a profound message in this theoretical conversation.

It reflects the culmination of nihilistic humanism; it is the finale to the path our nation is currently following; it is tyranny and death; it is the blossom that comes forth from the mindless killing of war, the callus manipulation of citizens in foreign nations, and the immoral pursuit of power; it is the last chapter of every nation that chooses to forsake the moral standards of a Righteous God and follow the dictates of their own evil hearts.

Well meaning Christians across our nation are busy working to defeat President Barak Obama in the coming election.  They sincerely believe the black cloud of despotism can be parted by electing a righteous president.  Human solutions to national problems have been the rule in the United States of America.  We have proudly proclaimed religious freedom and elected a government that is full of pride and free from Christianity. Nations that do not heed an overarching legal standard are humanistic nations.  In those nations aggressive foreign wars and idolatrous patriotism are common.   This futile quest for a political solution has been going on for generations; it has resulted in a consistent decline in moral standards and an increase in disobedience to our founding document.

Hundreds of thousands of Christians have rallied around the Tea Parties.  But an all too common double betrayal dashed some of their hopes, 44 of 52 members of the House Tea Party Caucus in violation of their Oath and the trust of their supporters voted to extend the un-Constitutional Patriot Act.  Tea Party favorites Michelle Bachman of Minnesota and the frighteningly precise Alan West of Florida were among the offenders.

The God of the Bible, His Laws or His ways have never been seriously considered by the government of the United States of America.  The Constitution creates a secular government by putting all religions on a level footing and forbidding a religious oath.  In spite of the fact that righteousness is forbidden by our Constitution (A nation that legalizes disobedience to God’s Law cannot be a righteous nation!) American Christians and their leaders are busily engaged in an impossible task of attempting to create it through political power.

I received some bizarre criticism from my “Satanic Solutions” essay.  One critic wrote “Our Forefathers had no king but Jesus and fought a fearful revolution to prove it.  They did not set men up in kingship over the Christ.  Our People were and are already under Covenant with the Almighty by way of inheritance and bequeathal as the Covenant People of Scripture.”  Christians are the New Israel but to assume a Covenant to obey God’s Law without assent is an intellectual leap that would humble a jack rabbit.

After pointing out that the state constitutions provided for government by Godly men, another critic writes, “Consequently, these States did not see a reason to duplicate their own commentary, but rather to enter  into a “Contract” amongst themselves — they held to an agreement that was contractual in nature and not designed, as some of its critics seem to demand, as a religious document, which, if contested in the future, could only be resolved if all were of the same faith, a sticking point that could hinder resolution of potential issues.”  This man seems to believe that the Christian clauses in some of the state constitutions would override the secular nature of the national document. The Constitution created the Federal Government and provided it with the potential tyrannical power to tax, to command armies, and even take control of state militias.  When the states ratified the Constitution of the United States of America they created a powerful new entity that they were enjoined to obey.  When it denied the Christian doctrine of exclusivity by encoding religious freedom and denied a Christian oath it opened the door for atheists, agnostics, and legislators of foreign religions to write and encode laws that require citizens to disobey the Law of our Creator.

Insanity is characterized by repeating the same unsuccessful behavior over and over again.  When will Christians begin to understand that humanism (depending on the intellectual abilities of men) has become an evil idol that prevents our nation from enjoying the blessing of the One True God?  When will we begin to realize that when a political candidate claims to be a Christian his definition of Christianity may not include God’s righteousness?  Will Christians vote for Ron Paul (I have supported him in the past) who claims to be Christian but voted for open sodomy in the armed forces?  Will we support the Republican Party when John Boehner, Speaker of the House, claims President Obama was born in Hawaii and is a Christian?  What should Christians do when mendacity has been pervasive for so long it is now accepted as normal?

Man was not created to govern himself.  When we ignore King Jesus and His overarching standards we begin the journey to the logic of Ted Bundy.  Can anyone see the similarity between the collateral damage of our bombs and Ted Bundy’s murders?

“If, as Scripture makes clear, we are to live by what at most can be called 613 laws, then we cannot have a power-state nor a power-church, because their sphere of relevance is limited to a very few of those 613 laws.”