"Julie J." writes:
Hey, Ed.
Did you catch DJ Kennedy's sermon this a.m.? He used the Julian Huxley quote again. 'Said he heard it with his own ears. Sheesh!Julie
To: "Julie J."
Subject: Re: Kennedy said it again!
Date: Mon, 30 Aug 2004 16:29:48 -0400
Sure it wasn't pre-recorded?
"Julie J." writes:
Ed,
I called Coral Ridge Ministries (1-800-988-7884) and asked if last Sunday was the first time the sermon "More Evidence for God" was preached. They told me it actually aired for the first time on April 11, 1999.
The sermon was particularly atheist-bashing, even by Kennedy's standards. The version on their website is considerably abridged. In the television version, he slams both Huxley and Bertrand Russell, another one of his favorite atheist poster boys for depravity. He tells (again) the story of how degenerate Russell was, and of course, it was due to his atheism.
In case you haven't heard it, the story is that BR liked to cheat on his wives and seduce his friends' wives and daughters. Kennedy's usually kind of vague about the particulars, but in this sermon, he adds some details about how BR's dear friend (no name) once invited him to his mansion, and he ended up seducing his 16-year-old daughter.
Kennedy probably surmised this information from a book called "Intellectuals" by Paul Johnson (Harper & Row, 1988). He's touted it in several of his sermons. Naturally, I got a copy of the book a few years ago when I first heard these accusations against BR. It's a pot pourri of chapters, each one dedicated to the evils of a secular intellectual (deist, sceptic, or atheist) who "felt himself bound by no corpus of revealed religion." Yet these "mentors" were "just as ready as any pontiff or presbyter to tell mankind how to conduct its affairs."
Johnson slams Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Percy Shelley, Karl Marx, Leo Tolstoy, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ernest Hemingway, Jean-Paul Sartre, Edmund Wilson, Victor Gollancz, Bertolt Brecht, Noam Chompsky, and even manages to toss in a woman, Lilian Hellman. Typical chapter titles include:
"Lies, Damned Lies, and Lillian Hellman," "Bertolt Brecht: Heart of Ice," and "Tolstoy: God's Elder Brother." BR's chapter is entitled "Bertrand Russell: a Case of Logical Fiddlesticks."
In the chapter on BR, it discusses his political views, philosophy, and his interest in women. He liked sex, and openly committed adultry. But his wives knew it, and he didn't try to hide it from them. He was an "open-marriage" kind of guy, and allowed one of his wives to have affairs, too (the others didn't try). This alleged "16-year-old" daughter of a friend is probably Helen Dudley. Here's the excerpt about her:
"Then in 1914 followed a discreditable episode with a young girl in Chicago. Helen Dudley was one of four sisters, the daughters of a leading gynaecologist, with whom Russell stayed while lecturing. According to Russell's account, 'I spent two nights under her parents' roof, and the second I spent with her. Her three sisters mounted guard to give warnings if either of the parents approached.' Russell arranged that she should come to England that summer and live with him openly, pending a divorce. He wrote to Lady Ottoline [his then-mistress] telling her what had occurred."
I don't know how D. James Kennedy figured out she's 16 years old from this. I'm sure if she had been, Johnson would have mentioned it. Probably just another one of his "lies, damn lies."
One thing I noticed about this past Sunday sermon, though, was at the end of it, when he devotes about 10 minutes to a year-in-review of the ACLU's activities. Erwin Lutzer is a featured speaker. Lutzer is the other author who mentions the Huxley quote in his book "Exploding the Myths that Could Destroy America." He's the one Kennedy legitimately cited in one of his books, although Lutzer didn't provide any citation. So, the two must know each other. You can take a look at it from here.
Just click on "ACLU Update." Be prepared to gag at the whole thing. Lutzer's main concern is not letting gay people adopt babies.
Julie
From: Ed Babinski
To: "Julie J."
Sent: Wednesday, September 01, 2004 7:11 PM
Subject: Here's my latest sermon... you can compare it to Kennedy's.
Here's my latest sermon... you can compare it to Kennedy's. *smile* I am afraid I'm turning into quite a ranter with age.
Yes, I agree with the Rev. D. James Kennedy at least in the factual sense that the agnostic philosopher Bertrand Russell, committed adultery, so did the evolutionist, Julian Huxley, and Julian's wife too I think, just google up the newly published letters of "Mary Sarton" for more info. However, Julian and Julliette Huxley also lived to celebrate their golden wedding anniversary, which Kennedy no doubt forgot to mention. Neither did he mention the famous people in the Bible, nor famous modern day ministers who also committed "adultery," nor the famous men in the Bible with multiple wives and concubinage partners. Here's two verses for
Kennedy, "judge not," and, "first remove the beam from your own eye."
Of course elevating "sexual escapades" to the worst of sins overlooks that Christians persecuted fellow Christian "heretics," Jews, Muslims, witches, executed adulterers, kept women subservient, and disciplined children with the rod. Christian men like Luther and Calvin helped incite people to do such things. And right after the births of Lutherism and Calvinism there came perhaps the greatest war Europe has ever known (based on the percentage dead, its duration and the destruction it left behind, and no telling how much worse it would have been if both sides had modern weaponry like those used in the World Wars), I am speaking of the "Thirty Years War."
Today's secular wars were indeed horrendous, especially due to the world's increased population (since the late 1800s when vaccines and plumbing came into widespread use and reduced childhood illnesses) when cities were larger and hence more people existed who COULD be killed, and when more weapons existed to kill them quicker, easier, faster, and at longer ranges, more bullets, more artillery, more bombs, more gas, more tanks, etc. Dictators like Hitler, Mussolini basked in the "awe of rulers" that the churches had been busy INSTALLING IN PEOPLE'S MINDS FOR CENTURIES, along with centuries of anti-Semitic bigotry. Even communism had to pose as a "new religion," promising "paradise," a "worker's paradise," indoctrinating youth, doing everything religions do, and that includes the way Mao's little red book has raised high and waved about like a Bible by his followers, and memorized by them as well, verse by verse. And of course Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and other communists also persecuted "heretics." The testimonies of American intellectuals who at first imagined that violent communistic revolution was the answer to the world's problems, then who repudiated communistic propaganda, is captured in a book appropriately titled, "The God That Failed." Yes, "the God."
Also, Kennedy mistakes all of America's blessings as being due to its "Christian heritage," but he neglects to mention America's Deistic heritage and classical heritage, equally strong influences, even moreso at her founding. "God" yes, but not of a particular religion, and not one who would be offended by "freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of the press," nor even by a deliberate neglect of the mention of the word "God" in our Constitution. Unlike both a theocracy or communism, one has to let the people read and believe what they will. However that also opens up the possibility of one religion gaining enough converts to be able to exert considerable sectarian force on such a government, as seems to be happening today. Though in the end, pollution, population, and greed may be the forces that bury every nation, regardless of its founding principles or religious majority. Not a cheery thought.
But of course conservative Christians are comforted even by that thought, putting a rosy hue even on the "end of the world." Their God will never fail them, not even as mankind sees its own extinction approaching on the horizon, because they can always convince themselves "it's part of God's plan." What if it's not part of God's plan, but of our own ignorance? What if we might be able to do something about things NOW if we protested the use of trillions of dollars each year by all the nations on earth to build things that simply go boom? If we used the money to develop alternative energy and recycling technologies (and to build technology to protect us from incoming asteroids)? If we used the money to pay people to get vasectomies in the most overcrowded regions on earth? If mankind woke up to its situation, living on a tiny lifeboat hanging in space, instead of damning each other to hells both in this life and in the next, and arguing over jots and tittles in holy books, or greedily devouring huge coporate bonuses and consuming junk food and junk entertainment and junk, period. Ah, but isn't that the primate way? Amusing ourselves to death I'd say, with religious entertainments being a primary form of such amusements that will continue to grow as the death of our species nears.
Kuwait's recent elections went to the fundamentalist Muslim party, and Islamic fundamentalism is growing in the highly westernized nation of Turkey. The southern hemisphere of earth is also growing in fundamentalistic religious believers, even in communist China. I also heard that people in China are having increasing psychological problems, not enough psychiatrists. Increasing pollution also. And water shortages in the bigger cities where more and more people from China's countryside are moving. And there pollution in the holy land of the Near East, and water shortages there as well, and in India and Pakistan. Most of the rivers in America are polluted, many lakes deemed unsafe to eat fish caught in them. And big ocean fish vanishing, fished out of the seas. Dead zones in the oceans. Ground water pollution levels rising. Superfund toxic pollutant dumpsites, leaking, requiring a trillion dollars to clean up. Relatively few people are reading, or listening, compared to the increasing billions reading their Bibles and Korans. "Oh save us!" We cry, and God will laugh and say, "Hey, I gave you the technology, the earth's wealth, and you used it for junk, from junk food to coporate junkets, from internet porn to sectarian religious preachers selling tickets to heaven and damning the rest to hell. Hope you had fun! Times up, let's see what brewing on the next solar system over yonder."
I also need to add some mention in such a sermon that Christianity, like Islam, is one of the most perfect indoctrination/control systems that has yet evolved on earth. Once you convince people that you have the truth that their eternal souls depend on believing, and dangle both an eternal carrot and an eternal stick in front of them, you don't NEED to brandish the earthly carrots and earthly sticks as much as, say, an atheist dictator would have to in order to maintain his desired strict control, because the basic "controlling" elements are already cemented in place internally. Though such internal religious control elements do tend to heighten fear and increase competition among alternative religious belief systems, such as rival Christian theologies and rival religions. So everything is never completely well in a religious country, or in countries that boarder each other and favor rival religions. (An atheistic country without a dictator, however, seems quite well off, and can have a low crime rate, like Czhechoslovakia today. )
And one must also admit that fear of big earthly sticks does seem to have worked effectively for communist China, since her crime rate continues to be the lowest on earth per capita, though that didn't hold true of communist Russia, but then, the Russians do tend to like their vodka, and the Chinese were a more sober and Confucian-like people to begin with. The American justice system, one must add, weilds it's earthly stick on its own people with less force than China does on her own people, since America prefers to simply lock people up, and presently has more of its population incarcerated than any other nation on earth, where it also tries to convert them. However, America's prisons contine to remain the fullest on earth, regardless of attempts to impose religion on repeat violators. Yes, America, with churches everywhere and preaching in our prisons, and one of the highest rates of belief in "God" in the world barring Ireland and Iran, continues to have one of the world's highest crime and incarceration rates.
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