The End of Popes and Presidents
Over 500 years ago a German Theologian named Martin Luther eviscerated the authority of the Catholic Church with a few sentences.
“Unless I am convinced by Scripture and plain reason, my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and I will not recant anything, for to go against conscience would be neither right nor safe. God help me. Here I stand, I can do no other.”
Martin believed there was but one mediator between God and man, Jesus Christ. The Pope was a fraud.
With the fall of Roman Catholicism came a rebirth of civilization. The rennaisance, the Enlightenment, the scientific revolution, America, democracy, the end of slavery (1865) and the Industrial Revolution.
However, the spirit of dominance represented by the Pope and the Kings of Europe did not die. They merely transformed. In 1882 German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche declared “God is dead” and the philosophies that came out of Germany were no different than the ideas that came out of the Roman Catholic Empire. The labels only changed so radically that people didn’t see it. Psychologists out of Germany taught that man is an irrational being, that nature was full of contradictions, and that men needed an overseer to do good. They attacked man at his root, undermining confidence in logic, reason, and consciousness.
The result was the destruction of American freedom, not by conquest, but by intellectual suicide. 1913 was the year the United States adopted a central bank and a federal income tax, which raised a two prong attack on freedom. The Central Bank would create money for nothing and the Government would take money for nothing. The next century would be one of the bloodiest mankind has ever witnessed.
However, in the 1950s, a Russian novelist Ayn Rand started writing. She wrote about the glory of the human mind, how there is one mediator between man and reality and that is man’s capacity for reason. She believed that existence was fundamentally good and that force and compulsion were the only unlawful action someone can take against another man.
Throughout history there are two kinds of people in your life. Those who encourage you to trust your mind and to think for yourself and those who discourage this and declare you helpless and in need of help. You either follow people like Martin Luther and Ayn Rand, or you submit to institutions like the Pope, the King, or the Central Bank
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