Mysticism Alive and Well
Alexander Marriott August 29, 2003

The United States of America was a country founded upon human reason by some of the most adept political and philosophical minds the world has ever seen and today it is a country mired in an almost barbaric mysticism from sea to shining sea.

There have been three stories in the headlines recently that illustrate this perfectly.

The first of course has been this controversy in the State Supreme Court in Alabama over a giant stone monument to the Ten Commandments. Of course many commentators have insisted that the Ten Commandments stand at the “Foundation” of American law and endorse no particular religion.

Are these claims in any way accurate or are they merely rewrites of history driven by mysticism?
The latter point these commentators make is utterly preposterous. One cannot find these Ten Commandments anywhere but in the Holy Scriptures of the Jews, Christians and to a lesser extent, the Mohammedans. The first four commandments are strictly religious and have nothing to do with American law and the others are so basic that for the Jews and Christians to claim that they came up with them when other cultures had them on the books before them is just foolish and historically wrong.

To say the Ten Commandments stand at the foundation of American law is also clearly wrong as they aren’t codified anywhere in our system. When the Founding Fathers decided to found a new government who did they look to for their inspiration? Did they look to the dictatorships of Soloman and David? Clearly not. They took their inspiration from the Greek city-states, primarily Athens, and the Roman Republic.

They also drew inspiration from the city-states of Northern Italy, but in no way do they ever point to the Judeo-Christian despots as model governments. Nor do they point to the Christian philosophers as authorities on politics, but to Aristotle and the other Greeks and Romans.

The clauses in the Declaration of Independence that modern mystics point to, in order to solidify their ridiculous claims, that mention our “Creator,” are references to the God of nature, not Yahweh, the God of Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Jefferson was a deist, which means he used God as a metaphysical base from which to start reasoning, but he didn’t rely on mysticism, commonly known as faith, to arrive at his conclusions.

In another more immediately fatal example, a young boy was allowed to die because his heinously negligent and foolish mother thought that by wrapping the boy in sheets and praying with her minister they would drive the evil spirits afflicting him out. The boy, who had autism, laid suffering as the stupid savages around him prayed. The result? The poor lad died of suffocation under the sheets. Fortunately the priest was arrested and will be charged with homicide, but the mother is equally at fault and should receive the same treatment.

Not all mysticism resides with the religious though. Communists are just as mystical about the state and collective to which they are willing to sacrifice everything. The Eco-Terrorist group, the Earth Liberation Front (ELF), has recently claimed responsibility for destroying a number of SUV’s on an auto-dealer’s lot. Of course environmentalists don’t worship or pray to the magical man in the sky, but to the earth and non-human animals instead.

It’s always a recurring theme in history, that barbarians have destroyed the civilizations of history periodically. But today, one might say, there are no more barbarians left running about causing destruction so that won’t happen anymore. But this is foolish. The savages are still here, but they are tearing the civilized world down from the inside instead of from without. They are the religious mystics who, while proclaiming to uphold the great intellectual legacy of this country, destroy it by latching onto it. They are the environmentalists who wish to return to the primitive barbarism that existed before we came here, which means just about everyone will have to die first.

Of course reversing all of this is really not as daunting as it may sound. To quote the philosopher, Leonard Peikoff, “To save the world is the simplest thing in the world. All one has to do is think.”