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In Reply to: Another Theory About Utopian--Hippy--Free Spirits--Nature posted by locke on December 05, 2005 at 21:50:24:
"Locke":
Sorry--your "nose" has deceived you about John Locke.
This is the Gen eXers Board; I know.
Historical honesty is something I would like to comment on, here; admittedly as a Christian, but primarily as someone who attempts and intends to pursue honesty with his intellect, as I assume you believe that John Locke would, in your place.
I get that, when you got out of TF, you wanted to pattern yourself after John Locke; am I right?
He wanted to oppose authoritarianism, as I can safely assume the both of us do as well, post-cult. Correct?
He believed that it was possible to use reason to try to grasp the truth, and he believed in using such reasoning to determine what were the “legitimate functions of institutions”.
His scholarship and politics in England, France and Holland were quite interesting, by his writings.
Were you aware that he was not anti-theist, but believed not only in “Natural Law”, as well as Natural Law's Creator, the theistic Christian God, but that he approached belief in God much as did Renee Descartes: a thoroughgoing Christian theist?
Descartes tried to give a philosophical proof of the inescapability of the innate existence of God in his Discourses, which were a bid to become a professor at the Catholic French Sorbonne, a completely Catholic institution. Locke did not believe in that specific kind of “innateness” Descartes wrote about.
However, a another Brit, whom Locke sounds a lot like, was David Hume—if you want to read a brilliant and logically inescapable rebuttal of Hume, read CS Lewis’ “Miracles”, which points out that Hume merely argues in a circle, and does not prove his main hypothesis, which claimed to be able to exclude the validity of the possibility of any kind of belief in God as philosophically viable.
I’ve been reading philosophy and history for over 31 years, now, as a result of the intellectual hunger I experienced after leaving TF Independence Day, 1974. Among other sources I’d be glad to point you to would be the following book review, as well as the more laborious but definitely worthwhile read, IMHO, of the book itself.
One of the best brief writings on John Locke can be found at the URL
http://www.creationism.org/csshs/v14n1p07.htm, as well as in a book by a guy named Gary T. Amos (see reference below*).
The URL gives a scholarly review of Amos’ well-researched and irrefutable book (as to provable historical accuracy about what Locke actually believed and wrote).
Be forewarned: It’s not PC and/or atheistic in its Point of View.
The reviewer is Ellen Myers. She points out some of the following things:
-There exists in most American learning institutions today a prejudice which produces “profound misperceptions of historical persons and events”, and that the author, Amos, learned & proved “that many ideas he now knew as Christian were falsely ascribed by most historians to non-Christian sources”, “that Locke was in fact a Bible-believing Christian”, and that Amos said he “felt tricked or robbed...[that he] “…had been lied to…”, [and that]… Locke had been lied about”.
Further, Amos showed that “…after three years of intensive study of the original writings of the American founding fathers and of the impact of Christianity on the growth and development of European law and liberty, [he] found that every key term in the Declaration of Independence had its roots in the Bible, Christian theology, the Western Christian intellectual tradition, medieval Christianity, Christian political theory, and the Christian influence on the six-hundred-year development of the English common law”; furthermore” that many ideas he now knew as Christian were falsely ascribed by most historians to non-Christian sources”.
She notes that Amos went on to show that a series of false premises existed, and have been falsely taught in US schools and universities, so that a “typical uninstructed person's view [demonstrably based on a false premise] of Christianity and the American Revolution goes something like this” (i.e.untruths):
(1) True Christianity was always a "faith" not requiring the use of reason. Reason was important to the Greeks and Stoics. To give reason a role in Christianity is to mix Christianity with paganism.
(2) In the 1200s Thomas Aquinas introduced rationalism into Christianity by merging Aristotle's thought with the Bible, a perversion of the faith.
(3) Rationalism set the stage for faith to be rejected completely if science ever made faith unnecessary,
(4) John Calvin in the 1500s tried to restore Christianity to "pure faith." He made God totally inscrutable and His will unknowable. (I differ here—I am not a Calvinist!)
(5) Puritans in the 1600s did not stay true to pure Calvinism but introduced rationalistic links between cosmology, a natural rights theory of government, and faith.
(6) Full-fledged rationalism entered with Isaac Newton and his mechanistic model of the universe.
(7) John Locke placed reason above the Bible. At the turn of the eighteenth century, Newton's science and Locke's extreme rationalism led directly to the Enlightenment, which replaced God with reason.
(8) This development led to Enlightenment thought in America as well so that by the time of the Declaration of Independence the colonies were submerged by rationalism and deism
She states that Amos’ rebuttal is basically as follows:
(1) In The New International Commentary on the New Testament. John Murray shows how "the law of nature" is a Christian concept based on the teachings of the Apostle Paul.
(2) The longer phrase "law of nature or God" was used already in the very early 1300s in a debate between rival Catholic monastic orders (Dominicans and Franciscans).
(3) The simple phrase "law of nature" was already part of Catholic theology and canon law at least as early as the eleventh century.
(4) Thomas Aquinas used this phrase repeatedly in his Summa Theologica in the thirteenth century, and he did not make it independent from the control of Scripture.
(5) The term entered the common law of England already at the time of Bracton (d. 1268). The term meant the eternal moral law God the Creator established over His created universe. It was a technical term for "creation law"--the original scheme of things purposed or willed by the Almighty.
(6) Sir William Blackstone, the great jurist who gave us the Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765), was widely read in the colonies and required reading at almost all colonial universities. Amos quotes Blackstone at length to show that for him the "law of nature" was Christian, not deistic and indeed meant the same as "the will of God."
(7) In Romans 1 and 2 St. Paul pointed to God the Creator's general revelation in nature and in men's hearts, to restrict His law to the Mosaic law is to repudiate the law of God; and St. Paul did not take his ideas in Romans 1 and 2 from the Greeks and Stoics of his time but rather from the Old Testament, written centuries earlier.
(8) Amos's extensive excerpts from John Locke's own writings show conclusively that Locke was not a deist but a Bible-believing Christian.
(9) John Calvin (Institutes), the Westminster Confession, Samuel Rutherford (Lex Rex), and supposedly deistic Matthew Tindal (Christianity as Old as the Creation) are quoted to show that the Declaration in no way opposed Calvinism or Puritanism.
(10) The Declaration of Independence cannot be traced to Greek or Stoic philosophy because the Greeks and Stoics thought law and nature opposed each other, had no concept of Biblical creation ex nihilo, and believed that nature and God were the same. Even when the phrase "law of nature" was used, it did not mean the same as in Biblical creation-based Judaism and Christianity.
I would highly recommend this review, and the book itself.
See:
*Gary T. Amos, Defending the Declaration (Brentwood, TN 37027; Wolgemuth & Hyatt, 1749 Mallory Lane, Suite 110; Hardcover, 235 pp. incl. 2 Appendices, End Notes and Bibliography). $14.99 single copy ppd. Quantity prices available from Word, Inc., 1-800-299-9673,
I am not political. However, I am a stickler for not re-writing history, as Berg did. Locke was, demonstrably, not the person you’ve been taught he was, but was a Bible-believing Christian.
It does take a little more work to search it out than just taking a professor’s word for it—they are not always such astute scholars, themselves, or even honest—some of them have as much of an agenda of their own as Berg did, in “reframing history” to his own ends, and “deceiving the minds of the simple” (me, at one time in my life).
Sincerely,
OT2 (OldtimerToo)
