I’ve had a thought about Christianity in my head since driving down to Abingdon Friday afternoon. I was imagining having a conversation with Stephanie about why I’m not a Christian, wondering what she would say to this and that, and yet another contradiction in basic Christian doctrine.

It all came about from thinking about a book of Maw-Maw’s I skimmed when I first got here. I was sitting by the television and I noticed “Satan” in the title, and obviously became intrigued. I picked it up and saw the wonderful title: Satan Is Alive and Well on Planet Earth. It’s by Hal Lindsey, whom I researched just a little on the internet, but nothing significant. The surprising thing is it’s published (in 1972) by Zondervan Press in Grand Rapids. Who made the decision to publish such idiocy? At any rate, during his silliness, he writes the following:

When man fell into Satan’s hands, God immediately launched His plan to redeem man from this helpless situation. What Satan didn’t count on was that God would be so just that He wouldn’t forgive man unless divine justice was satisfied. And something much more incredible — that God would be so loving that He would be willing to step down from heaven and temporarily lay aside all of His divine rights and become a man. Satan didn’t anticipate that God, as a man, would later to a cross and bear His own righteous judgment against the sin of the whole universe.

Satan Is Alive and Well on Planet Earth (63)

This requires one slight altercation in the Christian definition of God: either he can’t be omniscient or he can’t be completely benevolent. “When man fell into Satan’s hands, God immediately launched His plan . . .” This means that God was waiting for the Fall — he new it was coming, and had planned for it. This makes one wonder how loving God is to create a being knowing that he was creating this being to be damned because of his own nature. It also implies that God didn’t know beforehand — though this implication is admittedly weak.

The whole thing points out the danger in saying God had a plan. When was this plan hatched? Before creation? If so, then he created humans to be damned — at least those who don’t “accept Christ” and all that nonsense. After creation? If so, then he didn’t anticipate the Fall — and he is not omniscient. Of course I’m just butting my head against a cliché wall, for in the end it’s all “a matter of faith” and I realize that such thinking does nothing for anyone but me. It only reinforces what I already believe, just as this Satan Is Alive and Well nonsense probably only reinforced what Maw-Maw believed. (There’s a lot about how Christ came down and suffered for our sakes — this is nothing new. Yet it’s as if he’s explaining it to people for the first time. I suppose the equivalent would be Dr. Clayton reading only intro to philosophy books — it’s filled with stuff he already knows.

Speaking of philosophy, a chapter entitled “Thought Bombs” deserves a few words. He writes that

a few eighteenth-century men . . . dreamed up ideas which have sent shock waves to rock our thinking today.

The contamination of these explosive ideas has been so devastating that it has completely permeated twentieth century thinking. . . . Satan took their concepts and wired the underlying frame of reference for our present historical, educational, philosophical, sociological, psychological, religious, economic, and political outlook. You and I and our children have been ingeniously conditioned to think in terms that are contrary to biblical principles and truths in all these areas — without our even realizing it. . . .

I realize it is a serious charge to imply that these brilliant men, who in many ways made significant contributions to our world, were instruments of Satan to lead men’s thinking away from eternal truths, but as the case against them unfolds I believe the conclusions will be justified.

Satan Is Alive and Well on Planet Earth (84, 85)

That’s a fairly significant claim to make. “He’s basically going to try to show how some philosophers are Satanic,” I thought. “I wonder in how much detail he will deal with these thinkers?” I thought. Of course, I knew it was for the general readership — not for anyone with any background in philosophy whatsoever.

Before launching into these “thought bombers,” he warns, “You may find some of this pretty heavy reading . . .” A nice pat on the back — what I’ve written is so difficult for some to understand, but “it is absolutely essential that we understand how we have come to this present hostility toward God’s viewpoint of life.” He’s setting his readers up for some “heavy” philosophical musings, that’s for sure. With that, he launches his section about the first thought bomber: Kant. I think I’ll put the entire section in:

Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher. He never traveled more than sixty-nine miles from his home in Prussia, where he lived from 1724 to 1804, and yet his original thinking formulated principles which still sway the civilized world.

Until Kantian philosophy began to influence the intellectuals of the age, classical philosophy as based upon the process of antithesis, which means that man thought in terms of cause and effect. This means if A is true then non-A cannot also be true. According to classical philosophy, values were absolute.

The world at large accepted these possibilities of absolutes in both knowledge and morals. Before Kant you could reason with a person on the basis of cause and effect. However, this one man and his critiques began to question whether people could actually accept things which were beyond their five senses.

A modern French philosopher described the Kantian thinking this way: “Kant was able to go definitively beyond skepticism and realism by recognizing the descriptive and irreducible characteristics of external and internal experience as the sufficient foundation of the world.”’

In Kant’s analysis of the process of thought he proposed that no one can know anything except by experience. He believed that individual freedom lies in obedience to the “moral law that speaks within us.”

Kant, therefore, finding no personal basis for accepting absolutes, triggered the ideas which would result in the philosophy introduced by another German[, Hegel.]

Satan Is Alive and Well on Planet Earth (85, 86)

There it is, ladies and gentlemen — in just 237 words he “demolishes” one of the most important philosophers of the eighteenth and nineteenth century. One of the most important in the history of philosophy. And he did it all without having a single primary source. (At least he doesn’t include any of Kant’s books in his “bibliography.”)