Culture Is An Expression Of Values

George Grant

Quoting George Grant:

Inevitably, cultures are an expression of the values of a people. The values are drawn out of traditions and habits and language of a people. A culture is a legacy of faith. You can’t get around that at all. Cultures that attempt to get around that are just cultures in transition from one faith to another. Culture is a manifestation of faith. G.K. Chesterton said, “A culture is the accumulation of ritual, traditions symbols and habits. Those things which grow out of a people’s perception of what matters most. In other words, a culture is a legacy of faith.”

Because culture is drawn out of the word cult, as T.S. Eliot says, the manifestations that we have in society, the way we relate to each other, the way we do business, the way we transact our regular rituals in community, are necessarily drawn from cult or from faith.

Religion is an inescapable concept. Everyone worships someone or something. When people start talking about some humanistic values, or putting man at the center of all things, they have turned the worship of God into a worship of self. As a result, they have propounded this notion that we are all gods and sovereign over our sphere of influence. History demonstrates that when man thinks he is in control, those are the times when society is the most out of control. Today, we have more consistently applied the religion of humanism than in any time in history and look at what it has wrought! What a societal mess it has made! Humanism is an utter and complete failure, precisely because man’s actions are so arbitrary and ultimately so cruel. Humanism is a failure because we have made a god out of a creature rather than the Creator.

Guilt

“Let us go forth therefore unto Him without the camp, bearing His reproach.”  (Hebrews 13:13)

“Unto Him that loved us, and washed us from our sins in His own blood.”  (Revelation 1:5b)

There is a fountain filled with blood

Drawn from Immanuel’s veins,

And sinners plunged beneath that flood

Lose all their guilty stains.

(William Cowper, 1731-1800, English poet and hymn writer)

Your Tax Dollars At Work

Washington’s auto intervention has proven

The Eco-Friendly Pelosi-Mobile

predictably disastrous. It seems Beltway-bailed-out GM and Chrysler are not experiencing a bounce after all, with now-bankrupt Chrysler falling to eighth place in U.S. car sales and both GM and Chrysler losing significant market shares to Ford, which, incidentally, once again ranks second in domestic car sales — sans government help.

Welcome To Sharia In America

Solzhenitsyn

Alexander Solzhenitsyn was born in 1918 at the beginning of the October Revolution that brought Communism to Russia, establishing the Soviet Union. His father died in a hunting accident six months before he was born and his mother worked as a typist.

Aleksandr Solzenitsyn

He was a gifted student, especially in mathematics but his first love was writing. He was an avowed Communist and readily enlisted in the Russian army after Hitler invaded his country in June, 1940. Solzhenitsyn became a tank commander and was on the front lines in February, 1945 as the Soviet Army bore down on Hitler’s Berlin. However Solzhenitsyn was arrested at that time and put in a series of gulags. What was his crime? He had been writing secretly to a few friends, denouncing the policies of Josef Stalin. The writings were confiscated and Solzhenitsyn was sentenced to eight years in prison, eventually ending up in a gulag in Siberia. He was suffering from cancer while there and a Jewish physician named Boris Kornfeld, who had recently become a follower of Jesus, was witnessing to Solzhenitsyn one night, telling him that neither Communism nor any other ideology made sense, that Jesus had changed his life.

The next morning Solzhenitsyn heard that someone during the night had crushed Kornfeld’s skull with a mallet. Later Solzhenitsyn too became a follower of Jesus. He was released from prison in 1953 and became a mathematics teacher in a high school, but he continued to write secretly. Eventually he published A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Remarkably Nikita Kruschev allowed the publication of this book, buying Solzhenitsyn’s claim that it was anti-Stalin, not anti-Communism. Eventually Solzhenitsyn was able to publish his greatest work The Gulag Archipelago that won him a Nobel Prize in 1970. He was deported from the Soviet Union in 1976, taking up residence in Vermont to finish his monumental writing projects. He was allowed back into the new Russia in 1994 and died just a few years ago. His 1978 commencement speech at Harvard University rocked the western world where he claimed that the west had lost her soul, that her departure from the Christian faith and embrace of materialism had weakened her beyond repair. . . .

Solzhenitsyn came to understand that creatio ex nihilo, not naturalism, explains the origin of all things. Bad ideas, like naturalism, kill. He came to see that Communism was built upon atheism which could not be substantiated by the evidence of creation. And he came to see that western materialism was also built on the notion that man is supreme over God. Because he gained a Christian view of creation and God’s dealings in the world, he was able to gain perspective on his suffering. He came to say, later in life, that his eight years in the gulag made him who he was, that he would not exchange those years for anything.