Malcolm Muggeridge (1903-1990) was a British journalist and one-time editor of "Punch Magazine," published in England, a weekly magazine of humor and satire established in 1841. He was a utopian socialist until he saw the horrors of Stalin. He was renowned for his rapier wit, the power of his language and pen. He wrote: "The depravity of man is at once the most empirically verifiable reality but at the same time the most intellectually resisted fact."
One article he wrote at least 30 years ago is scary for its prophetical insight on our Christian heritage of Western Civilization:
"So the final conclusion would surely be that whereas other civilizations have been brought down by attacks of barbarians from without, ours had the unique distinction of training its own destroyers at its own educational institutions, and then providing them with facilities for propagating their destructive ideology far and wide, all at the public expense.
"Thus did Western Man decide to abolish himself, creating his own boredom out of his own affluence, his own vulnerability out of his own strength, his own impotence out of his own erotomania, himself blowing the trumpet that brought the walls of his own city tumbling down, and having convinced himself that he was too numerous, labored with pill, scalpel, and syringe to make himself fewer. Until at last, having educated himself into imbecility, and polluted and drugged himself into stupefaction, he keeled over–a weary, battered old brontosaurus–and became extinct.”
George Will echoed the same sentiment when he wrote, "There is nothing so vulgar left in our experience for which we cannot transport some professor from somewhere to justify it."
The phrase, "having educated himself into imbecility" is striking for many reasons, one of which is that Paul said the same thing, "Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools." (Romans 1:22) To profess oneself to be wise is "speaking with an air of certainty, stating something with a high degree of confidence, even forcefully or aggressively, asserting his or her view without need for proof or regard for evidence." (Stephen C. Weber)
Examples of being educated into imbecility abound as we see in the following statements. "Gender is fluid." A recent news report of a school shooting in Colorado reports that "the perpetrators are an 18-year-old male student and a female student who is transitioning to a male." A person on CNN argues, "When a woman is expecting, that is not a human being inside of her.”
An example of professing oneself to be wise and spoking with that air of certainty and with a high degree of confidence, forcefully and aggressively is furnished by Rabbi Barry Block, writing for Jews on the historicity of the Exodus:
"We invite disaster when we insist that the Bible be treated as a history book. If we require that a good Jew believe that all the stories in the Torah actually happened, we are likely to turn away a good number of our most faithful people.
"Teenagers, in particular, are often skeptical of the accuracy of Bible stories. They are quick to conclude that Judaism is bogus since its central stories do not hold up under the lens of historical scrutiny. May we be blessed with the courage of Rabbi Wolpe, who stood before his congregation and affirmed his faith in the truth of Torah, even as he questioned the historicity of its most important narrative.
"Just like Rabbi Wolpe [head of the largest Jewish congregation in America], we are able to say to our young people: The Torah is not a history book or a science text, but so much more. The Bible communicates the most important lessons known to humanity. May we ever derive meaning from the Exodus, whether it happened or not. May we find revelation in every word of the Torah."
Two Jewish authors, responding to the imbecility of the above wrote: "So the message is: The Bible is not a reliable guide to Jewish history. But because some smart-alecky ancient ancestors fabricated a mythic exodus from Egypt, modern Jews should disrupt their lives cleaning and scrubbing, changing their diets and their dishes, taking time off of work and performing meaningless rituals."
Their point is, "Where did the Passover come from if there was no historical Exodus?" That's a good and unanswerable question. If the Exodus is a myth, so is the Passover. If the Passover is a fable, what's the point? Why invent it?
"The Associates for Biblical Research" stated the issue well:
"The Bible has been under attack in the western world for over 200 years but never more intensely than today. These attacks have taken different forms and have come from many different corners of the academic world, from philosophers to scientists, to textual critics. In the specialized world of archaeology, the attacks have increased dramatically in the past 50 years.
"Once a specialization filled with Bible-believing individuals, the field of archaeology is now overrun with atheists and skeptics, agnostics and those committed to the destruction of the Bible as a source of true historical information.
"These attacks on the Bible are a part of a sweeping movement in western culture. Spearheaded by academic elitists in the university and the public educational system, the news and popular media, and the entertainment industry, these revisionists cloak themselves with supposed objectivity, purity of motives, and the superiority of science over the "uninformed," "unscientific," religious community.
"They regularly mock those who question their world-view and their conclusions by name-calling and the worst forms of anti-Bible and anti-Christian propaganda. They have powerfully infected the church by turning Bible-believing Christians against the very Scripture which is the foundation of truth and life in this world. Instead of contending for the Bible, Christian academics, pastors, and lay-persons are making egregious accommodations to these destroyers of faith and truth."
William F. Buckley sums it up: “The academic community has in it the biggest concentration of alarmists, cranks, and extremists this side of the giggle house.” And " “I would sooner be governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than by the two thousand members of the faculty of Harvard.”
Historian Arnold Toynbee wrote: “An autopsy of history
would show that all great nations commit suicide.”
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