Yes, Lieutenant, let me feel. Please, Lieutenant, let me feel. Yes, Lieutenant, let me feel. See you. See you. See you. It's about 135 miles north-northwest of Las Vegas. To get there, take Highway 93 north out of Las Vegas. That's Highway 93 north out of Las Vegas. And not too long after you leave the city of north Las Vegas, watch for a sign. You're going to have to get off the main freeway and make a left under the freeway and then stay on Highway 93. All the way up until you get to Highway 375. And it will go west. Take Highway 375 west. It may or may not be labeled as the extraterrestrial highway. It has been so officially named. However, I don't know if they've put up signs or whatever. Last time I saw it, it was just plain old Highway 375. You want to take it west. And you're going to go up over Hancock Summit, down into and across the Tickaboo Valley, over another little summit called Coyote Summit. And when you come down the other side, you will see the little town of Rachel, Nevada, on the left of the highway. And the last time I was there, the last building on the left was the Little Alien, and that's where you're going. The first lecture will begin at 1 p.m. on the 4th of July. 1 p.m. on the 4th of July, the first lecture series will begin. The first meal will be served that night, supper on the 4th of July. There will be breakfast and supper on the 5th, breakfast and supper on the 6th. The last meal will be breakfast on the 7th, at which time everybody should be heading out to go back home, wherever it is that home is. If you're flying into Las Vegas, you'll need to rent a car. And I would advise that you rent a four-wheel drive vehicle if you can afford it. If not, just rent a good car and stay on the highways. If you rent a four-wheel drive, then you'll be able to go to some interesting places off the highway, which Nevada is full of. So, that's it. 93 North, out of Las Vegas. Watch for the sign that tells you 93 North is going to split from the main highway. Get on 93, stay on it, all the way to Highway 375. Take Highway 375 west over Hancock Summit across the Tickaboo Valley on the other side. Up another little summit called Coyote Summit. And down the other side on the left, you will see the little town of Rachel, Nevada. The last time I was there, the last building on the left was the little alien. So, I hope to see you all there on the 4th. And you've got plenty of time to get there. If you're a little bit late, that's okay. Don't worry about it. Tonight, we're going to hear a speech by Leonard Peikoff. It doesn't matter where he did this speech or when he did it. What matters, ladies and gentlemen, is what he says. Please pay very close attention and remember that while the subject matter of this speech is the religious right tonight, he is neither for the right conservative or for the left liberal. He's not for either one of them. And I hope you get that message tonight. So, listen very carefully and enjoy this broadcast. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Smith. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. As specter of launching America, the specter of religion, this, for Owen Karl Marx's literary start, is my theme tonight. Where do I see religion? The outstanding political fact of the 1980s, in my judgment, is the rise of the new right and its penetration of the Republican Party under President Reagan. The bulk of the new right, as you know, consists of Protestant fundamentalists, typified by the moral majority. These men are frequently allied on basic issues with other religiously-oriented groups, including conservative Catholic of the Wing of F. Buckley Hill and neoconservative Jewish intellectuals of the commentary magazine variety. All these groups observed the behavior of the new left the while last and concluded, understandably enough, that the country was terrible. They saw the liberal idealization of drug hippies and nihilistic hippies. They saw the proliferation of pornography, of sexual perversion, of noisy lips and power groups running to the Democrats to demand ever more outrageous handouts in Florida. They heard the routine leftist deprecation of the United States and the routine counsel to appease Soviet Russia. And they concluded, with good reason, that what the country was perishing from was a lack of value, of ethical absolutes, of morality. Values the left recorded are subjective. No lifestyle and no country is better or worse than any other. There is no absolute right or wrong anymore, they said, unless the liberal added, you believe in some outmoded ideology like religion is. Precisely, the new right of street life. That is our whole point. There are absolute truths and absolute values, they say, which are the key to the salvation of our great country. But there is only one source of such value. Not man or the earth or the human brain, but the deity as revealed in Scripture. The choice we think they conclude is the skepticism, deprecation, statism of the Democrats, or morality, absolutes, Americanism, and their only possible faith, religion. Old-time Dale Princeton religion. Here's Mr. Reagan in 1980, quote, Here's Jack Campbell, quote, Or as Education Secretary Bennett sums up, this viewpoint, quote, Our values of the free people and the central values of the general Christian tradition are flesh of the flesh and blood of the blood. Now, politicians in America have characteristically given lip service to the platitudes of priority. But the new right is different. These men tend to mean their religion, and they are dedicated to implementing their religious creeds politically. They seek to make these creeds a governance factor in the realm of our personal relations, our art and literature, our critics and hospitals, and the education of our youth. Whatever else to say about him, Mr. Reagan has delivered handsomely on one of his campaign promises. He has given the adherence of religion a prominence in setting the national agenda that they have not had in this country for generations. This we find our subject for tonight. It is the new Republican inspiration and the deeper questions it raises. Is the new right the answer to the new left? What is the relation between the Judeo-Christian tradition and the principles of Americanism? Are Ronald Reagan and Jack Kent, as their admirers declare, leading us to a new era of freedom and capitalism, or to something else? In discussing these issues, I am not going to talk much about the new right as such. But its specific beliefs are widely known. Instead, I want to examine the movement within a broader philosophical context. I want to ask, what is religion? And then, how does it function in the life of a nation? Any nation, past or present. To be sure, these are very abstract questions. But they are in a stable. Only when we have considered them can we go on to judge the relations between it, a particular religion, such as Christianity, and a particular nation, such as America. Let us begin then with a definition. Let us ask, what is religion as such? What is the essence common to all its variety, Western and Oriental, which distinguishes the phenomenon from other cultural manifestations? In a general way, we may answer, religion involves a certain kind of outlook on the world and a consequent way of life. In other words, religion is a type of philosophy. And as such, a religion must include a view of knowledge, which is the subject matter of the branch of philosophy called epistemology, and must include a view of reality, which is covered by metaphors. And then on this foundation, a religion builds a view of values, and that is its ethics, or morality. So the question becomes, what kind of philosophy constitutes a religion? The Oxford English Dictionary defines religion as a particular system of faith and worship, and goes on in part, and quotes in part, recognition on the part of man as some higher unseen power, as having control of his destiny, and as being entitled to obedience, reverence, and worship. Unquote. The fundamental concept here is faith. Faith in this concept means belief in the absence of evidence. This is the essential that distinguishes religion from science. A scientist may believe that any of these which he cannot observe, such as atoms or electrons, but he can do so only if he proves their existence logically by inference from the things he doesn't observe. A religious man, however, believes in some higher unseen power, which he cannot observe and cannot logically prove. As the whole history of philosophy demonstrates, no study of the natural universe can warrant jumping outside it to a supernatural end. The five arguments for God offered by the greatest of all religious thinkers, Thomas Aquinas, are widely recognized by philosophers to be largely disaffected. They have each been refuted many times, and they are the best arguments that have ever been offered on this subject. Many philosophers, indeed, now go further. They point out that God not only is an artist of faith, but that this is essential to religion. A God susceptible of proof, they argue, that would actually rest religion. A God opens a few enlarged to scientific studies, to rational understanding, they note, but that God would have to be definable, delimitive, finite, amenable to human concepts, obedient to scientific law, and thus incapable of miracles. Such a thing would be merely one object, among others, within the natural world. It would be merely another kingdom for the sciences, like some new kind of galaxy or cosmic ray, not the transcendent power running a universe of humanity, manly worship. What religion rests on, they conclude, is a true God, i.e., a God not of reason, but of faith. If you want to concretize the idea of faith, I suggest that you visit, of all places, the campuses of the Ivy League, where, according to the New York Times, a religious revival will now occur. When you find students visibly discussing proof or struggling to reinterpret the ancient myths of the Bible into some kind of consistency with the teachings of science, on the contrary, the students, like their parents, are insisting that the Bible be accepted as literal truth, whether it makes logical sense or not. I quote from one campus religious officials, quoting the Times, quote, Students today are more reconciled to authority. They're in less need for students to sit on their own mountain top, unquote. In other words, to exercise their own independent minds and judgment. Why not? They are content, complete, to believe. At Columbia, for instance, a new student group gathers regularly on campus, not to analyze, but, quote, to sing, worship, and speak in tongues, unquote. Here is a chapel at Columbia, quote, People are coming back to religion in a way that some of us once went to the counterculture, unquote. Absolutely true. And note what they are coming back to, not reasons for logic, but faith. Faith means the method of religion, the essence of it at its most. And, as the Oxford English dictionary states, to believe in some higher unseen power is the basic content of religion. It's distinctive to a reality, its method. This higher power is not always conceived as a personal God. Some religions construe it as an impersonal dimension of some kind. The common denominator is the belief in the supernatural, in some entity, attribute, or force, transcending and controlling this world in which we live. According to religion, this supernatural power is the essence of the universe and the source of all values. It is the realm of true reality and of absolute perfection. by contrast, the world around us is viewed as only standing real and as inherently imperfect, even corrupt, in any event metaphysically unimportant. According to most religions, this life is a mere episode in the soul's journey to its alternatical building, which involves leaving behind earthly things in order to unite with view. as a pamphlet issued by a tabloid information group expresses this point, man, quote, cannot achieve perfection or true happiness in his life here on earth. He can only achieve this in eternity of the next life after death. Therefore, what a person has or lacks in terms of worldly possessions, privileges, or advantages is not important, unquote. in New Delhi a few months ago, expressing the viewpoint, Pope John Paul II urged on the Indians a right of asceticism and renunciation. Unquote. In Quebec, sometime early on, he described, quote, the fascination the modern world feels for productivity, profit, efficiency, speed, and records of physical things, unquote. Human humanity explained in Luxembourg, quote, consciously organized their way of life merely on the basis of the realities of this world and now it is for God and his wits, unquote. Which brings us to religious ethics. The ethics of which also involves faith, faith in God's commandments. Virtue in this view is obedience. It is not a matter of achieving your desires, whatever they may be, but of seeking to carry out God's. It is not the pursuit of egoistic goals, whether rational or not, but the willingness to renounce your own goals in the service of the Lord. In other words, what religion counsels is the ethics of self-transcendence, self-admigation, self-sacrifice. what single attitude most stands in the way of his ethics, according to religious writings? As signify, wise side of sin, because man is a metaphysically defective preacher. His intellect is helpless in the crucial questions of life. His will has no real power over his existence, which is ultimately controlled by God. His body loves with all the sensations of the flesh. In short, man is weak, ugly, and low, a typical product of the low, unreal world in which he lives. Your proper attitude toward yourself, therefore, as to this world, should be a negative one. For preachers that is you and I, honor means humility, self-abstigation, even self-disgust. So we can sum up so far, religion in essence means orienting one's existence around faith, God, and a life of service, and correspondingly of downgrading or openly condemning four key elements, reason, nature, the self, and man. You see, the religion can have the equation with morality or values or even philosophy as such. It represents a specific kind of philosophy with its own specific code of morality. Now our question is, what effects does this kind of philosophy have on human life? we don't have to answer by theoretical deduction because Western history has been a succession of religious and unreligious periods. And the modern world, including America, is a product of two of these periods, of Greek or Roman civilization and of medieval Christianity. So to enable us to understand America, let us first look at the historical evidence of these two periods. Let us look at their views on religion and at the practical consequences of these views. Then we will have no trouble grasping the faith and essence of the United States. Ancient Greece was not a religious civilization, not on any of the counts we mentioned. The gods of Mount of Wisdom were like a race of elder brothers to men. Mipson's brothers were rather limited powers. They were closer to E.T. than the world, and do anything we would call God. They did not create the universe, or shape its law, or leave any message of revelations, or demand a life of faculties. Nor, in fact, would be taken very seriously by the leading voices of the culture, such as Plato and Aristotle. From start to finish, the Greek thinkers recognized no sacred text, no installable priesthood, no intellectual authority beyond the human mind. In other words, they allowed no room for faith. Systemologically, most were staunch individuals, who expected each man to grasp the truth by his own power of observation and logical thought. For details, I refer you to Aristotle, the preeminent representative of the Greek spirit. Metaphysically, as a result, Greece was a secular culture. Men generally dismissed or downplayed the supernatural. Their energies were devoted to the joys and challenges of life. There was a shadow, we believed, in immortality, but the dominant attitude to it was summed up by Homer, who had the killings to declare that he would rather be a slave on earth than quote, bear sway among all the dead that these are. Unquote. As to three ethics, it follows on his face. All of the three things agree that virtue is egoism. The purpose of morality in their view is to enable a man to achieve his own fulfillment, his own happiness, by means of the proper development of his natural faculty, above all, his cognitive faculty, his intellect. And as to the Greek estimate of man, look at the statues of the Greek gods, made in image of human strength, human grace, human beauty. And read Aristotle's account of the virtue, yes, the virtue of public. I love to add here that in many ways, Plato was an exception to the general peer religion of the Greeks, but he was not dominant until much later. When his spirit did take over, the Greek approach by that fact had already died out. What replaced the cleansing era of Christianity. In the ways of this electively speaking, where it's exact opposite of Greece. The leading philosophic function of the time, Augustine, stated that faith was the basis of man's entire mental life. You know his famous avarism, one must first believe, in order that one may then know. Now the word reason is nothing but a handmaiden of theology. It is the mere adjunct of faith, which cast is to clarify as far as possible the dogmas of religion. What if a dogma cannot? Terrified? So much to better answer the earlier church father, Tertullian. A truly religious man, he said, delighted in thwarting his reasons, because that shows his commitment to faith. Now Tertullian's famous answer when asked about the dogma of God's self-sacrifice on the cross, credo quia absurdum. I believe it because it is absurd. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Isn't it unfair to ask man to throw away his whole enjoyment of life? The medieval answer is, what else befits creatures be followed by original sins? Creatures who are, in Augustine's words, close, sordid, crooked, ulcerous, and be spotted. Now what were the practical results in the ancient world than in the medieval of these two opposite approaches to life? Greece created philosophy, logic, science, mathematics, and a magnificent man glorifying art. It gave us the base of modern civilization in every field. It taught the West how to think. In addition to its admirers in ancient Rome, which built on the Greek intellectual thing, Greece indirectly gave us the spectacle of the rule of law and the first idea of man's right. This idea was originated by the pagan historians. Politically, the ancients never conceived a society of full-fled individual liberty. No nation achieved that before the United States. But the ancient Hitlerian searched the theoretical basis for the concept of liberty and in practice, both in some of the Greek city-states and in Republican Rome, large numbers of men at various times were comparatively free. They were incomparably more free than their counterparts ever had been in the religious culture of Egypt and its abilities. Now, what were the practical results of the medieval approach? The dark ages were dark on principle. Augustine fought against secular philosophy, science, art. He regarded all of it as an abomination of deceptive science. He cursed science in particular as the lust of the eyes. In other words, unlike many Americans today, who drive to church into the Cadillac, or take their favorite reverend on the DCR to not interrupt their attendance practice, the medieval took religion seriously. They proceeded to create a society that was anti-materialistic and anti-intellectualist. I do not, I assume, have to remind you of the lives of the saints, who were the heroes of the superior, including the men who raised only sheep, gall, and ashes, who quenched their thirst with laundry water, and slept with a rock for their pillow. These were men resolently denied, defiant, nature, the body, sex, pleasure, all the snares of this life, and they were canonized for it, as by the essence of religion, they should have been. The economic and social results of this code of values were inevitable. Mass stagnation and abject poverty, ignorance and mass deliteracy, ways of insanity that swept whole towns, a white expectancy in the teens. woe on the ye who laugh now, says the sermon on the mountain. Well, they were pretty safe on this challenge. They had precious little to laugh about. What about freedom in this era? Study the existence of the funeral servant, tied for life to his slaughtered ground, his noble overlord, and the all-encomplicate decrees of the church. For someone, an example floated a home, jumped several centuries forward to the American church, who were met evil, rendered, transplanted, converted, and conscious, and who proceeded to establish a thorough, groan, theocratic dictatorship in colonial Massachusetts. Why is it they? It was necessitated, they said, by the very nature of their religion. If you are owned by God, they explained to any potential dissenture. Therefore, you are a servant who must act with your creator through his spokesman decrees. Besides, they said, you are innately betrayed, so a dictatorship of the elect is necessary to ride herd on your head, to be supervised, like all else, by the elect. And if all this makes you unhappy, they ended up, so what? You're not supposed to pursue happiness in this life anyway. In short, there can be no philosophic reach between thoughts and actions. The consequence of the epistemology of religion is the politics of purity. If you cannot reach the truth by your own mental powers, but must be obedient to a cognitive authority, then you are not your own master, and you cannot guide your behavior by your own judgment either, but must be submissive to his actions as well. This is the reason why historically, as I'm Rand often pointed out, faith and force are all the correlators. Each requires the others. Now, I want to acknowledge you that the early Christians did contribute some good ideas to the world, ideas that proved important to the cause of future freedom. They must go to speak if the angels there do. In particular, the idea that man has value as an individual, that the individual soul is precious, is essentially a Christian legacy to the West. Its first appearance was as a form of the idea that every man, despite original sin, has made the image of God. As again, it's a pre-Christian notion that a certain group or nation has a monopoly on human value, while the rest of mankind are properly slaves or mere barbarians. But notice one thing here. This Christian idea by itself was historically impotent. It did nothing do on shackle the serfs, or stay the inquisition, or turn the purest elders into Thomas Jefferson. only when the religious approach lost its power, only when the idea of individual value was able to break free from its initial Christian context and become integrated into a rational, secular philosophy, only then is this kind of idea fair practical proof, as we are now going to see. Now let us ask what, or more exactly, who ended the Middle East? My answer is Thomas Aquinas, who introduced Aristotle, and thereby reason, into medieval culture. In the 13th century, Aquinas, the first time in the millennium, reasserted in the West, the basic pagan approach. Reason, he said, in deliberate opposition to August, reason does not rest on faith. It is a self-contained natural faculty which works on sex experience. An essential task is not to clarify revelation, but rather, as Aristotle had said, to gain knowledge of this world. Man, as finest declared forthrightness, must use and obey reason. Whatever one can prove by reason and logic, he said, is true. Now, Aquinas, his self-thought, that he could prove the existence of God. And he also thought that faith is often valuable as a supplement to reason. But this is not all for the nature of his revolution. His was the charter of liberty, the moral and philosophical sanction which the West had desperately needed. His message to mankind, as the long ordeal of faith was in effect, it's all right, you don't have to cycle your mind and more you can't think. The result in historical short order was the revolt against the authority of the Church, the feudal break-up, the Renaissance. Renaissance means rebirth, and rebirth of reason and of man's concern with this world. Once again, as in the pagan era, we see the rise of secular philosophy, natural science, man-glorifying art and the pursuit of earthly happiness. It was a gradual, tortuous change, each century becoming a little more worldly than the preceding, from Aquinas to the Renaissance, the age of reason, to the climax and end of this development. The 18th century, the age of enlightenment, this was the age in which American founding fathers were educated, and in which they created the United States. The enlightenment represented the triumph, or a short while anyway, of the pain in grief, and specifically of the Arab's genuine experience. Its basic principle, accordingly, was respect for man's intellect, and correspondingly the wholesale snippet of faith through revelation. Reason the only oracle of man, said Ethan Allen of Vermont, who spoke for his age, and demanded unfettered free thought, and in ridiculing the primitive contradictions of the Bible. There is a brief quote from him, written in 1784, quote, while we are under the tyranny of priests, it will ever be their interest to invalidate the law of nature and reason in order to establish systems incompatible their way, unquote. Elias Palmer, another American of the Enlightenment, who wanted to make it even more outspoken. According to Christianity, he writes, God's quote, is supposed to be a fear to revengeful tyrant, delighting and cruelty, punishing his creatures for the very sins which he caused them to commit, and creating numbers of millions of immortal souls that could never have offended him for the express purpose of tormenting them to all eternity. The purpose of this kind of notion, he said elsewhere, quote, the grand object of all civil and religious tyrants has been to suppress all the elevated operations of the mind, to kill the energy of thought, and through this channel to subjugate the whole earth for their own specialty monument, unquote. Quote from him, educated, has hitherto being deemed a crime to face. Unquote, he asserts that his last men have a chance, he goes on, because they have finally escaped from, quote, the long and doleful night of Christian rule, and have grasped instead the unlimited power of human reason, reason which is the glory of our nature, unquote. Now, Alan and power are extreme representatives of the enlightenment attitude, I grant you. But they are representatives. There is the attitude which was new in the modern world, and which in a less inflammatory form was shared by all the founding fathers as their basic revolutionary premises. Thomas Jefferson thinks the attitude more sedated, with less willful provocation to religion, but it is the same essential attitude. Here is from a letter to a nephew of his book. Jefferson, quote, which takes reason firmly in her speech and calls for her time, she will have every fact, every opinion, questing with boldness even the existence of a god, because if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear, unquote. reason comes first. Observe the philosophic priorities of this advice. Reason comes first. God is a derivative if you can prove. The absolute which must guide the human mind is the principle of reason. Any other idea to be accepted must meet this test. It is in this approach, in this fundamental rejection of faith, that the irreligion of the Enlightenment intellectual lies. The consequence of this approach was the age's rejection of all the other religious priorities. In medicine, this world once again was regarded as real, as important, as a realm, not a miracle, but of impersonal, natural love. In evidence, success in this life became the dominant motive. The veneration of asceticism was swept aside in favor of each man's pursuit of happiness, his own happiness, on earth, to be achieved by his own effort, by self-reliance and self-respect, leading to self-made prosperity. But can man really achieve fulfillment on earth? Yes, the Enlightenment can. Man has the means, the potent faculty of intellect, necessary to achieve his goals and values. Man may not get the perfect for set at the time, but he is perfecting. He must be so because he is a rational animal. Such were the watchwords of the period, not faith, God's service, but reason, nature, happiness, man. Many of the founding fathers, of course, continue to believe in God and to do so sincerely. But it was a vestibular belief, a leftover from the past, which no longer shaped the essence of their thinking. God, so to speak, had been kicked upstairs by the Enlightenment. He was now regarded as a teach-age spectator, who neither responds to prayer, nor offers revelations, nor demands immolation. This sort of viewpoint is known as deist, and it cannot properly, speaking, be classified under religion. It is a stage in the atrophy of religion. It is the step between Christianity and outright atheism. This is why the religious men have enlightened, but worse up, were scandalized and even tainted by the deist atmosphere. Here's the Reverend Peter Clark of Salem, Massachusetts, in 1739, quote, quote, the former strictness in religion, that deal for the order and ordinances of the gospel, which is so much the glory of our fathers, is very much abated, yet disrelished by too many. And the spirit of licentiousness and neutrality in religion, so opposite to the ways of God, people do exceedingly prevail in the midst of us, unquote. And here, 50 years later, is the Reverend Charles Baggess of Springfield, Massachusetts. The threat to divine religion, he says, is, quote, the indifference which prevails, and the ridicule. Mankind, he warns, quote, are in great danger of being laughed out of religion, unquote. This is true. These creatures were not alarmists. Their description of the enlightenment atmosphere is correct. This was the intellectual concept of the American Revolution. Point for point, the founding fathers' argument for liberty was the exact counterpart of the purists' argument for dictatorship. But in reverse, moving from the opposite starting point to the opposite conclusion. Man, the founding fathers said, in essence, of course, the Lord's system, John and the others. Man, they said, is a rational being. No authority is human. Otherwise, therefore, can the man grind obedience from such a being. Not in the realm of thought, nor, therefore, in the realm of action either. By his very nature, they said, man must be left free to exercise his reason and then to act accordingly. In other words, on his own best rational judgment. Because this world is of vital importance, the added goal of the action should be the pursuit of happiness. Because the individual, not a supernatural power, is the creator of wealth, a man should have the right to provide the property, the right to keep and use his own product. And because man is basically good to health, there is no need to leash him. There is nothing to fear and that he treats a rational animal. This inevitable was the American argument for man's inalienable rights. It was the argument that reasoned to man's freedom. And this is why the nation of individual liberty, which is what the United States was, could not have been founded in any philosophically different century. It required what the Enlightenment offered, a rational, secular context. When you look for the basic sources of the historic idea, you must consider philosophic essentials, not the superficial statements or errors that people may offer you. Even the most well-meaning men can misidentify the intellectual roots of their own attitudes. Regrettably, this is my judgment of what the Founding Fathers did in one crucial respect. all men said, Jefferson, are allowed by their creator to certain unalienable rights, a statement that formally ties individual rights to the belief in God. Despite Jefferson's eminence, however, his statement, along with his counterpart, the law, is intellectually unwarranted. The doctrine of individual rights does not derive from or depends on the idea of God as man's creation. It's derived from the very nature of man and the requirements of his mind and his survival. In fact, as I have suggested, the concept of rights is ultimately incompatible with the idea of the supernatural. This is true not only logically, but also historically. Through all the centuries of the Middle Ages, there was plenty of belief in a creator. But only when that belief and religion as a whole began to fade, did the idea of God as the author of individual rights emerge as a historical nation-shaving force. What then deserves the credit for the new development? The age-old belief for the new philosophy? What is the real intellectual root and protection of human liberty? God or we? My answer is no, America, I hope, does rest on a code of values and morality. This, the new right, is correct. But by all the evidence of philosophy and history, it does not rest on the values or ideas of religion. On the contrary, it rests on their opposite. This completes the material on this side. Ladies and gentlemen, this tape is, well, I'm not exactly sure how long it is. But I am going to continue it until it runs out tonight. And if it doesn't finish tonight, then we will, of course, continue on Monday night. Now let me touch on a new point. Some of you are probably... I think I need to... I'll know in just a second. Here we go. Okay. Okay. If you'll be patient for just a couple seconds. It should be coming up momentarily with the continuation of Leonard Peikoff. Now let me touch on a new point. Some of you are probably wondering here, what about communism? Isn't it a logical, scientific, atheistic philosophy? And yet doesn't it lead straight to totalitarianism? The short answer to this is, communism is not an expression of logic or science, but the exact opposite. Despite all its anti-religious posturings, communism is nothing but a modern derivative of religion. It agrees with the essence of religion on every key issue, then merely gives that essence a new outward veneer or cover-up. The communists reject Aristotelian logic and Western science in favor of the so-called dialectic process. Reality, they claim, is a stream of outright contradictions, which is beyond the power of bourgeois reason to understand. The communists deny the very existence of man's mind, claiming that human words and actions reflect nothing but the alogical, predetermined churnings of blind matter. They do reject God, but they hasten to replace them with a secular standard. Society or the state, which they treat not as an aggregate of individuals, but as an unperceivable, omnipotent, supernatural organism, transcending and dwarfing all individuals. Man, they say, is a mere social cog or atom, whose duty is to sacrifice everything to and for his transcendent master, the state. Above all, they say, no such cog has the rights of faith by and for himself. Every man must accept the decrees of society's leaders. He must accept them because that is the voice of society, whether he understands it or not. In other words, communism, only as much as Tertullian demands faith from its followers and subjects. Faith in the literal, religious sense of the term. On every count, the conclusion is the same. Communism is not a new rational philosophy. It is a tired, slavishly imitative air of religion. And this, by the way, is why so far communism cannot come to power in the West. Unlike the Russians, we have not been steeped enough in religion, in faith, sacrifice, humility, and therefore in servility. We are still, even now, too rational, too disworldly, and too individualistic to submit to naked tyranny. In other words, we are still being protected by the fading remnants of our enlightenment heritage. heritage. But we will not be so for long if the new right has its way. Philosophically, the new right has the same fundamental ideas as the new left. Its religious zeal is merely a variant of irrationalism and the demand for self-sacrifice. And therefore, it has to lead to the same kind of results in practice, namely dictatorship. Nor is this merely my theoretical deduction. The new writers themselves tell it to you openly. While claiming to be the defenders of Americanism, their distinctive political agenda is pure statism. The outstanding example of this is their insistence that the state prohibit abortion, even in the first trimester. A woman, in this view, has no right to her own body, or even the most consistent new right if add to her own life. She should be made to sacrifice, to sacrifice her desires, her life goals, and even her very existence. At the behest of the state, in the name of a mass of protoplasm, which is at most a potential human being, not an actual one. Another example. Men and women, the new right tells us, should not be free to conduct their sexual or romantic lives in private. In accordance with their own choice and values, the law should prohibit any sexual practices condemned by religion. And, children, we're told, should be indoctrinated by state mandated religion at school. For instance, biology text should be rewritten under government tutelage to present the book of Genesis as a scientific theory on a par with or even superior to the theory of evolution. And, of course, the ritual of prayer must be forced down the children's throats. quote, is this not contrary to the Constitution, the state establishment of religion, you may ask, and of a controversial intellectual viewpoint? Not at all, says Jack Kemp. I quote from him. If a prayer is said aloud, it need be no more than a general acknowledgement of the existence, power, authority, and love of God, the Creator. Unquote. That's all. Nothing controversial or indoctrinating about that. And when the students finally do leave school, after all the indoctrination, can they then be trusted to deal with intellectual matters responsibly? No, says the new writer. Adults, adults, should not be free to write, to publish, or to read according to their own judgment. Literature should be censored by the state according to a religious standard of what is fitting as against obscene. Is this a movement in behalf of Americanism and individual rights? Is it even a movement in accordance with the principles of the Constitution? I quote Mr. Kemp. Quote. The Constitution establishes freedom for religion, not from it. Unquote. A statement which is shared explicitly by President Reagan and by the whole new writer. What then becomes of intellectual freedom? Are meetings such as this evenings, for instance, deprived of constitutional protection? Because the viewpoint I am propounding certainly does not come under freedom for religion. And what if one religious set concludes that the statements of another are subversive of true religion? Who then decides which, if either, should be struck down according to the standard of freedom for religion, not from it? Can you predict the fate of free thought and of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness if Mr. Kemp and associates were to get their hands fully on the courts and the Congress? What we are seeing is the medievalism of the Puritans over again, but without their excuse of ignorance. We are seeing it on the part of modern Americans who live not before the Founding Fathers' heroic experiment in liberty, but after it. The new right is not the voice of Americanism. It is the voice of thought control, attempting to take over in this country and pervert and undo the actual American Revolution. But you may say, aren't these new rightists at least champions of property rights and capitalism as against the economic statism of the liberals? To which I reply, no, they are not. Capitalism is a separation of state and economics, a condition which none of our current politicians or pressure groups even dreams of advocating. The new right, like all the rest on the political scene today, accepts the welfare state mixed economy created by the New Deal and affairs. Our conservatives now merely haggle on the system's fringes about a particular regulation or handout they happen to dislike. In this matter, the new right is moved solely by the power of tradition. It does not want to achieve any change of basic course, but merely to slow down the march to socialism and freeze the economic status quo. And even in regard to this highly limited goal, it is disarmed and useless. If you want to know why, I refer you to the published first draft of the recent pastoral letter of the United States Catholic bishops, men who are much more consistent and philosophical than anyone in the new right. The bishops recommended giant steps in the direction of socialism. They asked for a vast new government presence in our economic life, overseeing a vast new redistribution of wealth in order to aid the poor at home and abroad. And they asked for it on a single basic ground, consistency with the teachings of Christianity. Some of you may say here, but if the bishops are concerned with the poor, why don't they praise and recommend capitalism, the great historical engine of productivity, which makes everyone richer? If you think about it, however, you will see that valid as this point may be, the bishops cannot accept it. Can they praise the profit motive while extolling selflessness? Can they glorify the passion to own material property while declaring that worldly possessions are not important? Can they demand that men practice the virtues of productiveness and long-range planning while upholding as our model the lilies of the field? Can they endorse the self-assertive risk-taking of the entrepreneur while teaching that the meek shall inherit the earth? Can they unleash the creative ingenuity of the human mind, which is the real source of material wealth, while elevating faith above reason? The answers are obvious. Regardless of the unthinking pretenses of the new right, no religion. Ladies and gentlemen, we'll continue this on Monday night. Good night, and God bless you all. Good night. good Morning. Good night. Good night. Good night.