A Return to Pagan Antiquity

by Dr. Maria Pia Perez
Lynn, Mass.
Candidate for Mass. GOP State Committee

We are living in a time that’s ushering in a Dark Age. When the restraining influence of Christianity is removed from a country or culture, unmitigated disaster will naturally follow. This has been a repeated pattern of the last century.

In this century, many Christians seem clueless about God’s first command, the cultural mandate. We are to take all the potentialities of this world, all of its spheres and institutions, and bring them all to the glory of God. We are to use this world to the glory of God. In every aspect of the world, we are to bring glory to God, which means in all the world’s institutions.

Unfortunately, in the last 75 to 100 years, the church has often ignored the cultural mandate, and we wonder why we have so little impact on the world. The recent COVID-19 closing of the churches demonstrates that the church is irrelevant to modern society. The culture even deemed it non-essential. We have allowed ourselves to be irrelevant, and we’re reaping the consequences. We have been in retreat and have yet to seek to fulfill the cultural mandate.

In the physical realm, there is the second Law of Thermodynamics. This law says everything is running down, running out, and going from order to chaos. In the spiritual realm, there is also that tendency downward, away from God, in response to the work of Satan, who is continually trying to pull us down and is fighting against us.

We are seeing in our society a return to Pagan antiquity. Nietzsche said that history is the battle between Rome (the pagans) and Israel (the Jews and the Christians). Many of the ideas of Nietzsche were put into practice by his philosophy disciple, Hitler, and about 16 million died as a result.

The Christian Church seems to be in retreat. But we can be rest assured that truth and history are on our side. Let’s examine the positive contributions that Christianity has made through the centuries. These include hospitals, which essentially began during the Middle Ages, and universities, which also began during the Middle Ages. In addition, most of the world’s most outstanding universities were started by Christians for Christian purposes. Further examples include, literacy and education for the masses, capitalism and free enterprise, representative government, mainly as it has been seen in the American experiment, the separation of political powers, civil liberties, and the abolition of slavery, both in antiquity and in more modern times, modern science, the discovery of the new world by Columbus, the elevation of women, benevolence, and charity; the Good Samaritan ethic, higher standards of justice, the elevation of the common man, the condemnation of sexual perversions, high regard for human life, the civilizing of many barbarian and primitive cultures, the codifying and the setting of the writing of many of the world’s languages, greater development of art and music, the countless change lives transformed from liabilities into assets to society, and the eternal salvation of innumerable souls.

The Value of Human Life.

In Pagan antiquity, the pagans attributed little value to human life. Now in the post-Christian West, we have abandoned our Judeo-Christian heritage, and life is becoming cheap once again.

According to the centuries-old tradition of paterfamilias, the birth of a Roman was not a biological fact. Infants were received into the world only as the family willed. A Roman did not have a child; he took a child. Immediately after birth, if the family decided not to raise the child literally, lifting him above the earth, he was simply abandoned. There were special high places or walls where the newborn was taken and exposed to die. Before the explosive and penetrating growth of medieval Christian influence, the premortal evils of abortion, infanticide, abandonment, and exposure were a normal part of everyday life in Europe; afterward, they were regarded as the grotesque perversions that they are. Abortion disappeared in the early church. Infanticide and abandonment disappeared. The Justinian Code was explicit in declaring infanticide and abortion illegal.

The Value of Women

Before Christian influence, a woman’s life was also very cheap. In ancient cultures, the wife was the property of her husband. In Pagans and Christians, Robin Lane Fox points out that the killing of infant girls was so widespread it affected marriage customs. Adult girls were in shorter supply due to the habitual exposure of baby girls, which was a further break in the size of the family and the balance of the sexes.

In China, infanticide of little girls was a common practice. If a couple had more than one or two girls, they would be disposed of immediately. It was done in different ways. She could be put out as food for the wild dogs and wolves. The father would sometimes take her to a baby tower where she would die of exposure and starvation and be discovered by birds of prey. Others again would bury the little ones under the dirt floor in the room where they were born. If there is a river flowing by, the children would drown or be thrown in it. Adam Smith, writing in 1776, confirms this in his book The Wealth of Nations. He states, “In all great towns of China, several babies are every night exposed in the street, or drowned like puppies in the water. ”

In India, prior to Christian influences, widows were voluntarily or involuntarily burned on their husband’s funeral. Pyrus, a grizzly practice known as settee, Charles Spurgeon, told of a Hindu woman who said to a missionary, “Surely your Bible was written by a woman.” “Why” he asked, “because it says so many kind things for women.”

Polygamy has disappeared in numerous places around the world because of the impact of Christianity. This is significant because polygamy is inherently unfair to women.

The Elderly

Throughout history, many tribes and peoples killed off their elderly, much as they killed off their unwanted babies. The Eskimos used to kill their elderly by setting them adrift in ice floes, floating out to the sea.

As we move away from God and his principles in this country, we are reverting to a more Pagan view of life. We see the move afoot to kill off the elderly, whether it’s called mercy killing or euthanasia. Some today are advocating that those elderly persons who lack a certain quality of life should die and get out of the way for the younger population  Today, there is a hideous way of abandoning the elderly that is common enough to warrant a name: “Granny dumping.” This refers to bringing an older adult to a hospital, racetrack, or someplace crowded with people and abandoning them there.

The Beauty of Sexuality

In the historical novel The Last Days of Pompeii, One character says of another, “Ione has but one vice, she is chased.” From a Christian perspective, sex is holy in the context of marriage. Any deviation from that is wrong. Christianity has helped to preserve the family as a basic unit of society. It has prevented millions of people from getting sexually transmitted diseases. It has prevented much unhappiness on the part of those who obey the biblical teaching.

One author, at the time of the collapse of the Old Kingdom of Egypt 4500 years ago, wrote that “sexual anarchy assumed extreme forms and spread through a large part of the population  Side by side with an increase of sexual perversions, a shameless sexual promiscuity also greatly increased  They seduce members of the same family, relations between father and daughter, son and mother, remained not unknown.” The authors especially stressed the cases “where a man lived sexually with two sisters, or with a mother and her daughter  Adultery, rape, and prostitution greatly increased  Homosexual love entered the mores of the population.”

The ancient pre-Christian world was rife with sexual immorality and perversion. A large picture book entitled Eros and Antiquity includes pictures of ancient paintings, marble, statuary of every kind, and vases adorned with ancient pictures. They are pretty obscene, and the male sexual organ is a constant theme. It was expected to find a phallic symbol adorning the outside of houses in the remains of Pompeii.

In AD 125, The Christian Aristides, an Athenian Philosopher, wrote a defense of the Christian faith to Emperor Hadrian. Here is what he said related to sexual matters: “They do not commit adultery or immorality. Their wives, Oh king, are as pure as virgins, and their daughters are modest. Their men abstain from all unlawful sexual contact and impurity in the hopes of recompense that is to come in another world.”

In general, Christianity continued and exaggerated the moral sternness of the Jews. Celibacy and virginity were recommended as ideal.

The Civilizing of the Uncivilized

Nothing in the annuals of history compares to what Christianity has done and can still do to civilize barbaric people. Much of the civilized attitudes we have in society ultimately come from our Judeo-Christian heritage. The moral code of Christianity is based on Judaism and the 10 Commandments, which have given us the standard of right and wrong for centuries. As Abraham Lincoln once said, “The Bible is the greatest gift God gave to man. Apart from it, we would not know right from wrong.”

Judaism gave the world a much higher view of morality than it had known before  Jesus Christ took the Jewish base, expanded it, and sent it out into the whole world. Throughout history, many barbaric and cruel tribes and cultures have been civilized by the positive influence of Jesus Christ. Had Christ never come, we might well be drinking out of human skulls, as many of our ancestors did.

Anath, one of the goddesses of the Canaanites, was described “as the patron of war, in  pursuing bloody orgies of destruction. She fiendishly butchers mankind young and old, in a most horrible and wholesale fashion, wading  delightedly in human gore up to her knees, yes, up to her throat, all the while exalting sadistically.”

What happens when Christian restraints are removed?

Today, as the Christian influence, particularly in the West, is pushed back, we see more and more of what it was like before Christ. “Ours is a cut-flower civilization, said Dr. Elton Trueblood many years ago. A cut-flower civilization may, for the moment, have some beauty. Its technological advances are stirring, but it has been cut off from the source of its life and is inevitably decaying. Already we see the welting petals  And the drooping of the leaves. Our nation is already in a state of advanced degeneration.”

General Weigand said, “When the Battle of France is over, I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization.” The great statesman recognized the link between Christianity and civility, contrasting with neo-paganism and tyranny.

For the most part, the atrocities of the 20th century happened because modern man rejected God, as one wag put it:

• In the 18th century, the Bible was killed.
• In the 19th century, God was killed.
• In the 20th century, man was killed.

The humanist state inevitably leads to tyranny and despotism. As  Dostoevsky said, “If God is dead, then all things are permissible.”

William Lynn, the first US House chaplain, stated on May 1st, 1789, “Let my neighbor persuade himself that there is no God and he will pick my pocket and break not only my leg but my neck. If there be no God, there is no future account.”

In 1799, Alexander Hamilton condemned the French Revolution’s attack on Christianity as “depriving mankind of its best consolations and most animating hopes, and to make a gloomy desert of the universe. He went on to affirm a civilized world is justly due to Christianity. He posited that the French, in renouncing Christianity, relapsed into barbarism. War resumes the same hideous, savage form which it wore in the ages of Gothic and Roman violence.”

Conclusion

Only the God of the Bible states that all men and women are equal, made in the image of the Creator, and to do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Christianity has reference to the principles of right and wrong. It is the foundation of those morals and manners upon which our society is formed. Remove this, and they will fall.

Let me end with the words of Dwight Eisenhower, who addressed the American Legion Back-to-God program on February 20th, 1955, in which he said, “Without God, there could be no American form of government, nor an American way of life. Recognition of the Supreme Being is the first, the most basic expression of Americanism. Thus, the Founding Fathers saw it. And thus, with God’s help, it will continue to be.”

America’s founders planted the seed in soil rich in Judeo-Christian beliefs, and the harvest was the most accessible, prosperous nation with more individual liberty than any nation the world had seen (Federer, 2017).

Works Cited

Federer, W. J. (2017). Who Is The King in America? And who are the counselors to the king  Fort Myers: Amerisearch Inc.

Kennedy, D. J. & Newcombe, Jerry. (1994)  What if Jesus Had Never Been Born? Nashville: Thomas Nelson Inc..