Has Christianity Failed?

by Eric D. Butler

C H Douglas Warns - An Anti Christian Offensive - Christ's Revelation - A Developing Christian Civilisation
Faith and Works - Trinitarian Constitutionalism - Reformation Extremes - The Promise of the British Empire
Christ the Judean - Of More Than Academic Interest - A New Religion - Regeneration

The following are the notes of an address given to the Melbourne Conservative Speakers' Club
on Monday, December 7,1992. In one sense it is a foolish question to ask if Christianity has failed, which is akin to asking if the electric power system has failed because the lights are not shining, without first ascertaining if the light switches have been turned on. The lights will come on when a human effort is made to use the switch that permits the electric current to flow to the electric light globe.
While there is a Christian philosophy, Christianity is not primarily a philosophy, nor is it merely an ethical system; it claims to be a revelation of Truth. C.H. Douglas has said that Christianity is either of the warp and woof of the universe, or is merely another set of interesting opinions. Douglas also made the comment that Christianity provided a glimpse of reality which, as yet, was only dimly understood. This is certainly true when we come to consider the question of genuine freedom, which Christ, the founder of Christianity, promised was available through that Truth which He represented.The promise was that "Perfect freedom" could be obtained through service to God, and was available to all. Every civilisation throughout history has been the reflection of an undergirding religious or value system governing all of man's activities. Once the belief in and practise of that system is undermined, civilisation dies and eventually collapses. One of the features of a dying civilisation is that the majority of people are unaware of the death process. Only a relatively few, those who might correctly be described as prophets, have sought to warn their fellows of impending disaster unless there was a change of direction.
The great Roman, Cicero, tried in vain to warn that the Roman Civilisation was ultimately doomed unless there were basic changes. C.H. DOUGLAS WARNS Shortly after the first major tragedy of this violent and destructive century, the author of Social Credit, C.H. Douglas, warned that unless there were major alterations to a financial system being used to misdirect the economic system from its true purpose of serving the individual consumer, Western Civilisation was going to disintegrate into a new Dark Age.
Douglas stressed that the financial policies being pursued with growing convulsions and social disintegration inevitable, were fundamentally anti-Christian, in that they sought to make the individual subservient to systems.
"The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath",
was one of Christ's statements which enraged his bitter enemies, the Pharisees.
The Pharisees were the dominant religious and political party in the small Roman Province of Judea when Christ conducted a three-year ministry which changed the course of history. Christ's universal message for Mankind was violently opposed by the Pharisees, who taught that they alone had been chosen by God to regulate the lives of their fellows.
Christ presented a vivid word picture of the Pharisees, charging that they were hypocrites who had shut up the kingdom of heaven against man, neither going in themselves nor permitting others to go in.
Christ taught the explosive truth that the Kingdom of God was not external, but was within each individual, who could find it by searching. The Kingdom was available to all, not just a few, the "Chosen".
Christ further denounced the Pharisees by saying,
"Ye make clean the outside of the cup and of the platter, but within are full of extortions and excess. …Ye are like unto whited sepulchres, who indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones, and of all uncleanness",
concluding by calling the Pharisees "serpents" and a "generation of vipers".
Now many might say that what Christ said about the Pharisees two thousand years ago is only of academic interest today.
But when Rabbi Finkelstein of the prestigious Jewish Theological Seminar of the United States points out that the religion today known as Judaism is an extension of Pharisaism, while there is a widespread view among professing Christians that Christianity and Judaism spring from the same spiritual roots, the matter is of the greatest importance, if the true Christian Faith is to be defended.
Douglas said many years ago that Christianity had become a form of liberal Judaism.
The situation has deteriorated since Douglas made this observation, the result of a persistent campaign by the supporters of Judaism in its various forms to, subvert the true character of Christianity.
The position is more serious than most Christians realise. AN ANTI-CHRISTION OFFENSIVE In his scholarly and carefully documented work, Judaism and the Vatican, the well-known French writer, Viscomte Leon de Poncins, deals with the audacious attempt by representatives of Judaism at the time of Vatican Council to have the Roman Catholic Communion declare itself against the Gospel account of Christ's conflict with the Pharisees, conflict ending with Christ's crucifixion.
The Gospel of St. John was strongly criticised, but the Gospel of St Matthew, was labelled as being blatantly "anti-semitic".
The general charge was that Christianity is primarily responsible for what is termed "anti-semitism", now and over the past centuries. Rather than face the truth that traditional Christianity is completely incompatible with the philosophies of the spiritual descendants of Pharisaism, Christian tolerance, together with lack of understanding of Christian history, have been subtly exploited, with Christians generally continuing to retreat in face of Jewish pressure, most of this being applied by aggressive Political Zionism.
A classic example of this aggression was the threatening attitude employed by Mr. Mark Leibler, President of the Zionist Federation of Australia towards the Headmaster of the Brighton (Melbourne) Church of England Grammar School, because he had seen - while visiting the school - references to the murder of St. Stephen the first Christian martyr, written on the blackboard by the school's chaplain during a religious class.
Mark Leibler not only complained to the Brighton Grammar School headmaster, stating that the description of how - following Stephen's clash with the Jewish Sanhedrin - he had been killed by mob violence, was "shocking" and likely to lead to "anti-semitisim but he also wrote to Melbourne Archbishop Raynor.
The most striking feature of Mark Leibler's correspondence concerning the matter was its violent, intemperate and intolerant tone. Even the Uniting Church, which officially has adopted a similar attitude to the Zionists on a number of public issues, has felt the "anti-semitic" lash because it issued a report claiming that the State of Israel was violating the rights of Palestinian people.
Zionist pressure resulted in the president the Uniting Church, Rev. Darcy Wood, apologising for the booklet, but not its basic intent, and after meeting with Zionists spokesmen, agreed that there were some errors in the book and that he would issue a "clarification".
Zionist spokesmen claim that the second document was worse than the first!
Jewish philosophy has been aptly described as that of the one-way street.
The retreat by the Roman Catholic Communion has been highlighted by a report in the Melbourne Age of November 3, that the Roman Catholic Church will now recognise Judaism as its "older brother", under a new set of guidelines seeking to improve relations between Christianity and Judaism.
The President of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, Mr. Leslie Caplan, describes the launching of the guidelines in Sydney as a landmark in interreligious history, The Age report stating that there is to be a re-writing of some school texts. It appears to be only a matter of time before the story of Christ and His teachings, as recorded in the four Gospels, will also be re-written in an attempt not to appear to be giving offence to Judaism, or any other religion.
Leslie Caplan makes the significant comment that the guidelines
"are prompted by the ever-increasing multicultural and multi-faith nature of our society, the advent of Neo-Nazi and other anti-semitic denials of the fact of the Nazi Holocaust and the relativising of the event, as well as the recognition of the Jewish roots of Christianity."
Christians are being asked to accept that Christianity is a junior brother of Judaism, the implication being that they worship the same God.
This is a direct challenge to both history and Christian tradition, and turns both upside down.
As we have seen, the spiritual roots of Judaism are in Pharisaism, which completely rejected Christ, who claimed that His loving Father was a very different God to that being worshipped by the Pharisees. CHRIST'S REVELATION The essence of Christ's revelation was that Man is born in the image of God, that every individual is a unique being, that everyone counts.
Christ said that He had come that Man might enjoy the life more abundant.
Christ's followers were taught to pray that their loving Father's "will" be done on earth, as it was in Heaven.
The Lords prayer is the answer to those who claim that Christianity is "too otherworldly".
There are no recorded references of a call for sacrifices. "My yoke is easy, my burden is light", said Christ.
Freedom was essential for the individual to seek to know God, and to love Him.
"The Truth shall make you free", said Christ, stating that he was the Truth.
"Follow me," he said.
The Truth was not an end in itself, but a means to an end. Freedom, freedom for all.
Christ's teachings and, of course, His works, came as a bombshell in a society groaning under the rigid imposition of Pharisaical regulations which sought to govern every aspect of human behaviour, with the priests full of the spirit of selfrighteousness.
People could not be trusted with Freedom.
But how, in the absence of a maze of regulations and freedom were individual relations to be governed?
Christ gave that amazingly simple answer: individuals should love God and one another.
Commenting on the law of Love, Douglas said that so far from being a mere piece of sloppy sentimentalism, it was a brilliant exposition of a vital political principle.
In practise it transforms societies.
If every individual seeks to love God the Father, striving to discover and apply His laws in every sphere of human living, and also loves his neighbour as a fellow child of the same Father, he does not need man-made regulations to ensure that he respects the rights and freedoms of his fellows.
There was a time when the Christian law of love governed societies much more than it does today.
Houses could be left unlocked because private property rights were respected.
Women could walk the streets in safety at all times.
The abduction and sexual abuse of children was unknown.
Business could be conducted with little stress on written agreements.
A man's word was "his bond".
The great Australian tradition of mateship was a reflection of the spirit of the Law of Love.
Greater love had no man, than a willingness to lay down his own life for a friend. A DEVELOPING CHRISTIAN CIVILISATION Western civilisation has been correctly described as a Christian civilisation. It was, of course, never a completely Christian civilisation. But over two thousand years it was becoming increasingly Christian.
While the Greek and Roman civilisations prepared the way for the advent of Christianity, Christian civilisation was completely different from all past civilisations. It was the Christian teaching that man was a special creature made in Gods image, with a supernatural destiny, which gave the human person a significance previously unknown anywhere.
It freed the individual from the domination of the group.
Man now saw himself as part of a type of cosmic spiritual drama, and felt that he had the capacity to shape history.
Christianity was a religion of hope, and encouraged the development of man's most divine attribute, individual creativeness.
God's goodness and love, His immediate and all pervading presence could be directly perceived in each person's life.
Christ offered a completely new way of life, one which not only transformed individuals and their relations one with the other, but also their relationship to institutions, including government.
The question of government, which is basically one concerning power, has been central to the human drama from the beginning of time.
The Greek and the Roman philosophers grappled with the problem of how to protect the individual from the natural tendency of all governments to increase their own power, and the corrupting influence of all power, particularly centralised power, but with little success. Christ well understood the temptations of power, as witnessed by his rejection of the offer of World dominion in the wilderness while, in one statement, answering a trick question by the Pharisees, He resolved the problem concerning government.
Christ said that while the individual must render unto Caesar - the government - that which legitimately belonged to government, the individual must also render unto God that which belongs to God.
This required that the power was not excessive, but was limited to the true purposes of government.
Christ's statement gave government a legitimacy and authority it has not previously enjoyed, now being elevated to special role in the divine order. But that role had to be limited, with government accepting the higher authority of God.
The Romans did not persecute the early Christians, primarily because they were a new religious movement. The Romans generally were tolerant about new religions, of which there were a number.
What concerned them were the unique features of the Christian claim that the individual's first loyalty was to God, not the StateFAITH AND WORKS Faith without works is dead, wrote St. James.
Western Christendom was not developed merely by Christians saying they believed in the Christian revelation.
The law of thermodynamics does not of itself move anything because engineers say they have faith in the truth of the law. That truth must be incarnated through heat engines and appropriate mechanisms so that it can, for example, move ships across the ocean.
Truth can only move mountains when bulldozers and other earthmoving equipment are devised and used by Man.
A Christian civilisation evolved over two thousand years because enough Christians strove to make all Man's activities reflect the Christian concept of reality and its value system.
The development of a Christian orientated system of constitutionalism and government reached its highest point in England, along with the system of Common Law, a system of law which grew out of the climate created by the Christian Church.
Stress was placed on the value of every individual, who must always be assumed to be innocent until proved guilty by a jury of his peers. Compassion and mercy were Christian virtues along with good manners and chivalry, particularly towards women.
A Christian civilisation was Christ-centred, not based upon the deification of Man.
Art, literature and music were all mirrors of the Christian ideal.
Work for work's sake was unknown; there was a direct relationship between production and consumption.
It was between the medieval period of the 12th and 15th centuries that the glorification of God in the flowering of craftsmanship reached its highest level, as witnessed by the building of the great cathedrals.
The craftsman who loved his work has today been replaced by the process worker, an impersonal cog in a vast production system, controlled by a debt financial system and increasingly designed to "capture" foreign markets.
The debt system as practised today was unknown.
Christ's warning that Man could not worship both God and Mammon was taken seriously.
Usury was regarded as a moral question and prohibited.
The wrong use of money was condemned as a source of corruption.
Attempts were made to ensure that instead of price being governed by what an individual might obtain, as in an Oriental bazaar, there should be a "just" price.
A statute of Edward II, under whose reign important constitutional developments took place in England, attempted to relate price to genuine costs.
Money was decentralised and issued locally by Royal and Church mints.
English land was used to feed English people, whose economy enabled them to sustain a Church every four square miles. TRINITARIAN CONSTITUTIONALISM For hundreds of years constitutional development in England grew out of the Christian concept of God.
Generally overlooked today is that this concept stressed the trinitarian nature of God - Father, Son and Holy Ghost.
It was at the famous Council of Nicea in A.D. 325, called by Emperor Constantine following his conversion to Christianity, that the brilliant young Bishop Athanasius argued that the nature of reality was trinitarian, that true unity was the product of diversity.
The development of what came to be known as the Athanasian Creed was one of the most distinctive landmarks in the development of Christian constitutional government, with power divided between the House of Commons, the House of Lords, - originally both lords temporal and spiritual - and the Crown.
Constantine's conversion and a cessation of the persecution of the Christians permitted the Authority of the Christian leaders to emerge, with the Council of Nicea called to discuss the relationship between Church and State.
It was a major landmark in the long history of the development of a Christian society, badly shattered by the Reformation, with Henry VIII in England executing his famous Chancellor, Sir Thomas More, for resisting his absolutist demands.
Moore was the very incarnation of the English Common Law, which he believed Caesar - in the form of Henry - must also accept.
Henry's violation of the historic growth of Christian constitutionalism, resulted in the inevitable corruption of power when removed from the restraining influence of Authority.
By 1571 it was not considered usury if interest did not exceed 10 percent.
The next century saw Cromwell bringing the Jewish moneylenders back into England.
By 1664 the Bank of England had been established, and for the first time England had a national debt.
The spirit of Pharisaism was in the ascendancy.
The Gospels inform us that the early Pharisees were "great lovers of money".
Some Church leaders protested against the establishment of the Bank of England, but to no avail.
What is generally described, as the Reformation was inevitable, considering the corrupt state of a Church exercising both Power and Authority.
The debauchery of some of the pre-Reformation Popes was a dark stain on the history of Christendom, although the post-Reformation period saw the emergence of a number of Popes whose lives were models of piety, with Pope Leo XIII, and Pope Pius XI producing Papal Encyclicals which are worthy of study by all Christians.
In Rerum Novarum Pope Leo denounced the "rapacious usury . . ... still practised by covetous and grasping men."
Forty years later in Quadragesimo Anni, Pope Pius XI was more specific with his reference to the
"domination . . . most powerfully exercised by those who, because they hold and control money, also govern credit and determine its allotment, for that reason supplying, so to speak, the lifeblood to the entire economic body, and grasping in their hands, as it were, the very soul of production, so that no one can breathe against their will."
Pope Pius's Encyclical appeared during the Great Depression years when, to their credit, a few Christian leaders denounced the inhumanity of a financial policy, which sacrificed human beings to the god of financial orthodoxy.
The last major effort by a Christian church to denounce the debt system was the 1962 report of the Christian Doctrine of Wealth Committee of the Congregational Union of Scotland.
But while initially raising the hope that Christian leaders were about to start denouncing the power of Mammon, the Congregational Union Report was put to rest with the silent treatment, and leaving the power of mammon to continue unchallenged until the present day.
Such has been the legacy of the fragmenting of Christianity over 500 years ago. REFORMATION EXTREMES The tragedy of the Reformation period was that the understandable zeal for cleansing resulted in extremes that tended to throw the baby out with the bath water. Not only was the unity and Authority of the Church fragmented, but literalism started to replace tradition concerning the Bible, with dozens of new sects emerging to provide their own allegedly inspired interpretations.
This opened the way for a flood of criticisms by the so-called Higher Critics, who seized upon any discrepancies, particularly in The New Testament to seek to undermine the traditional Christian Faith.
Extreme manifestations of Puritanism, similar to that of the Pharisees, were encouraged by the doctrine of pre-destination, leading to a self-righteous attitude towards the less fortunate by those who had been materially successful.
The doctrine of Faith without Works, which St. James described as the "faith of devils", had far-reaching social effects, reversing the traditional Christian teaching which had regarded avarice as far worse than improvidence or idleness, and made charity a prime Christian duty.
Work for work's sake became a type of new religion.
Leisure of any kind was regarded now as some type of sin. As pointed out by Professor Tawney in his work, Religion and The Rise of Capitalism (1926), the Puritans accepted
"the necessity of . . . large-scale commerce and financing and the other practical facts of business life."
The emergence of the Industrial Revolution found the Christian Church incapable of providing any constructive lead concerning what was a development of the greatest significance. The best that some Christian leaders and spokesmen could offer were protestations against some of the worst features of the revolution, such as child slavery.
The Industrial Revolution had made God's abundance available on a scale previously never contemplated.
Not only was it possible to ensure that everyone in an industrialised country had adequate material security, but that growing leisure time was possible, with every individual able to follow more enthusiastically Christ's injunction
to seek the Kingdom of God within.
It was becoming possible to more readily accept Christ's teaching that no one need to take thought for the morrow.
God's gifts to man were beckoning him forward to a new Golden Age.
But with few exceptions, Christian leaders appeared to be afraid to accept the gifts. Blinded by the Black Magic of financial orthodoxy, they were incapable of rejecting the Pharisaical teaching that something for nothing was immoral, and of giving a practical meaning to the Doctrine of unearned grace. THE PROMISE OF THE BRITISH EMPIREIt is true that some of the benefits of the new Industrial civilisation were starting to reach a section of the peoples of Western civilisation. The decentralised British Empire, with an association of self-governing sovereign nations whose constitutional structures were an extension of those of the United Kingdom, was holding out the promise of a far more harmonious world.
But the enormous potential for a new growth of Christian civilisation was shattered by the first of the numerous disastrous events that have marked the most violent and destructive century in recorded history.
The very discoveries that provided the key to a new civilisation made it possible to destroy on an unprecedented scale.
The First World War marked the beginning of a growing retreat by Christendom. Symbolic of the nature of the retreat was the historic decision of 1917, by the British House of Lords, that Christianity was no longer part of the law of England.
Up until that time, all British Lord Chancellors had expressly stated that Christianity was a major feature of the English constitution.
Sir William Holdsworthy, Professor of Law at the University of Oxford, said at the time of the House of Lords decision, that
"It is not unlikely that Caesar, now that he has abandoned the task of serving for God the things that are God's, will find considerably greater difficulty in securing for himself the things that are Caesar's".
Subsequent events have grimly confirmed Professor Holdsworthy's warning. The challenge to authority in all its forms has opened the floodgate to a new barbarism.
Christianity is relegated to the role of junior brother to the modem Pharisees.
C.H. Douglas described modem Christianity as little more than liberal Judaism.
But what is left of Christianity has been almost completely Judaised as witnessed by the constant reference to Judaeo-Christianity and the statement that Christ was a Jew, the inference being that Christ belonged to a racial group which practised what today is called Judaism. CHRIST THE JUDEANThe historical truth is that Christ was a Judean, a description of the Roman Province where He was born and lived.
The term "Judaism" was completely unknown at the time of Christ. It was first coined by the Jewish historian, Flavius Josephus, to describe the faith of the adherents of Pharisaism.
The term "Jew" was also unknown at the time of Christ, and did not make its appearance in the English language until it was first used in 1775 by the English writer Sheridan, this being derived from the term "Iewe", itself being a corrupted and contracted English word for the "Iudaeus" as found in the 4th century St.Jerome translation of The New Testament from the original into Latin.
The modem use of the term "Jew" no longer even remotely refers to the primary meaning of the original Latin.
No one in the English-speaking world today believes that a "Jew" is a "Judean".
The general belief is that a Jew is a certain type of religious person, a member of a certain race, or both.
In an examination of this subject, the well known American businessman, Benjamin H. Freedman, a convert to Christianity from Judaism, charges that "When the word 'Jew' was first introduced into the English language in the 18th century, its one and only implication, inference and innuendo was 'Judea'.
However, during the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, a well-organised and well-financed "pressure group" created a "secondary" meaning for the word "Jew" among the English-speaking peoples of the world.
Every student of the history of languages knows that there are innumerable examples of the "secondary meaning" of words, these being completely different from the original.
Pontius Pilate's inscription on the cross was, quite naturally, in Latin, and read "lesus Nazarenus Rex Iudeaortum".
The English translation of the Latin is Jesus the Nazarene Ruler of the Judeans".
In the original Greek manuscript of the Gospel of St. John, reference is made to the demands by the Pharisees that Pilate alter the reference to Christ as "Ruler of the Judeans", protesting that Christ only had said that He was ruler of the Judeans.
Pilate impatiently replied, "What I have written, I have written." OF MORE THAN ACADEMIC INTEREST This question is of far more than mere academic interest, and unless Christians have a clear understanding of the truth, they will be for ever retreating in the face of pressure from the modem Pharisees, who have demonstrated that they are past masters at distorting history to suit their own anti-Christian programme.
Even more misleading than the misuse of the term "Jew", has been the skilful promotion of the God-given right of the Zionists to drive out the indigenous people of Palestine, many of them Christians, from the home they had occupied for over a thousand years.
Large numbers of Western Christians condoned what was done, claiming the Zionist Jews were fulfilling biblical prophecy, that the semitic Jewish people were merely returning to their own original promised land.
The truth is that at least 90 percent of those people calling themselves Jews have no historical racial link with Palestine.
Known as the Ashkenazim Jews, their origins were in the Khazar Empire of Central Asia, which adopted Judaism as the State religion in the 7th century.
The conquest of these non-semitic Asiatic people by the Pharisees produced a formidable force with far reaching consequences for Mankind. The eventual destruction of the Khazar Empire resulted in its people migrating into Russia and Eastern Europe.
There they maintained their Pharisaical religion in all its purity, and eventually became the driving force behind both Communism and Zionism.
Originally opposed to Zionism, the Westernised Sephardic Jews, of genuine semitic background, were eventually driven into accepting the aggressive Zionist programme.
Although known to some students of history, the story of the Khazars was relatively unpublicised until the astounding publication in 1976 of The Thirteenth Tribe, by the famous Hungarian Jewish writer Arthur Koestler, who carefully documented the story in considerable detail. The book caused a major, if only temporary, international sensation.
Koestler wrote that the story of the Khazar Empire as it emerges from the past "begins to look like the most cruel hoax which history has ever perpetrated". The main victims of this hoax have been the Christians.
The truth, of course, makes nonsense of the widespread use of the swear term "anti-semitic" against anyone criticising Zionist power.
After some initial publicity, The Thirteenth Tribe was consigned to George Orwell's "memory hole" and became difficult to obtain. At the time of Koestler's death the Zionist press of the world was full of eulogies of Koestler's writings, but there was not one reference to The Thirteenth Tribe. A NEW RELIGIONThe elevation of the alleged Jewish holocaust, always spelt with a capital "H" in the Zionist press, into what in fact is a new religion, demanding mere faith from its devotees, has served a number of Zionist purposes, including of course the defence of Zionist Israel. But generally overlooked is the type of psychological warfare waged against Christianity, the central theme being that what happened to the Jewish people during the Second World War was the end result of the "antisemitism" fostered by traditional Christianity.
The well known Zionist propagandist, Elie Wiesel, one of the numerous Jews who, by some undisclosed miracle, survived Auschwitz, has said that all Christians must bear a collective guilt for what allegedly took place at Auschwitz, which has been elevated into a type of shrine representing the greatest suffering ever experienced by Man.
All other examples of human suffering pale into insignificance compared with Auschwitz.
Christians are relentlessly encouraged to develop a deep guilt complex about the matter.
Even the slightest inference that the much-publicised Jewish holocaust may have been exaggerated, is liable to bring the charge that this is a manifestation of "anti-semitism" and, even worse, is blasphemous.
But criticism of Christianity, even with revolting comments about Christ, is regarded as legitimate.
The Truth shall make you free, said Christ. But what about the Truth concerning the alleged Jewish holocaust, with claim that millions of unfortunate Jews were gassed, most of them at Auschwitz in Poland?
No Christian can dispute that, along with other people, including the Poles, Jews suffered badly at the hands of Nazi Germany.
There were acts of bestial brutality But the claim that six million Jews were systematically gassed as part of an official policy, denies commonsense.
The claim has been progressively reduced, leaving only Auschwitz as the main centre of alleged mass gassings.
But the Auschwitz myth remains in spite of a progressive demolition of the original claims.
The personal testimonies of those who worked at Auschwitz, a major German industrial complex, that no gassings took place; the scientific examination by America investigator Fred Leuchter; proving that the alleged gas chambers could not have been used for gassing; the official death figure of 75,000 as now revealed by the Russian archives, these deaths mostly from disease, are all dismissed by those maintaining the myth, which will probably even survive for a time the recent admission, in a video-taped interview, by Dr. Franciszek Piper, senior curator and director of archives at the Auschwitz State Museum, that the alleged gas chambers through which thousands of visitors have been shown over the years, had been "reconstructed", on the basis of "eyewitness" recollections.
This gigantic hoax over three decades took place with the, support of the Polish communist government. REGENERATIONThe regeneration of a Christian civilisation which is near death, requires first an honest assessment of its critical plight.
The dominant philosophy of today is collectivist, with worship of bigness, which is allegedly more efficient. Nations are urge to become part of Common Markets which later can be merged into some type of New World Order.
As the power of the state and its instrumentalities increase, so is the power of the individual further weakened.
What is taking place is a retreat from the degree of practical Christianity that once existed.
The individual feels increasingly helpless in the face of centralised power, or resorts to violence in a blind reaction to what is happening. The Church has been reduced to the role of being little more than a social welfare agency, and when any economic policies are advocated, they take the form of a request to the State that it takes from some to give to others.
The spirit of collectivism is all pervasive.
The seriousness of our plight is masked by the fact that many of the outward material forms of our Christian civilisation still exist.
But the spirit, which produced them, has been progressively killed.
We do not make the mistake of believing that because we can still admire the ruins of Greek art on the Acropolis at Athens, or read the works of the great Greek philosophers, that the Greek civilisation is still alive.
It died over 2000 years ago, when its spirit died.
Western Europe is still dotted with the famous cathedrals and other expressions of the Christian faith, but today they are little more than museums relying upon paying tourists for their upkeep.
What we are left with is but the shell of a Christian civilisation that, with all its imperfections, promised so much hope for the future of Mankind.
Today it lies broken and bleeding.
But we must not despair, always being sustained by that paradoxical truth that
"the present plight of the world is the only hope for the world."
The plight of the world is the result of violating the truths of that Absolute Reality we call God.
That reality remains. Just as the man who jumps over the cliff not only violates that absolute known as the Law of Gravity, but demonstrates the truth of the law, so does today's world demonstrate that there is an answer.
That answer was revealed two thousand years ago and over the centuries.
The Eternal Kingdom of God still remains within each one of us, waiting to be found and developed.
Those who have some understanding of the nature of the crisis, through which we are passing, have a special responsibility to provide that type of Christian leadership that will challenge the forces threatening a new Dark Age.
By deepening their faith in and understanding of reality, they are like the sailor on a dark and stormy night who is confident that he will make port because he knows that the compass by which he is guided is a constant reflection of an unchanging reality.
The truth is that so far from Christianity failing, only Man has failed to remain faithful to those Truths which Christianity revealed.
But God in his great wisdom has provided Man with free will by which he can repent for past mistakes and make a fresh start.
That is what is urgently required today, a fresh start.
For the true Christian, this is a most challenging and exciting prospect.

First published in THE NEW TIMES, DECEMBER 1992 - VOL. 56, No. 12.
Electronic text by Noddy: ©MooCow Publications, Numurkah, Victoria. 26 November 2000