Winning Hearts and Minds for Truth

Here's a really important book that needs to be put on college reading lists, if they still exist (must reads for any self-respecting B.A.):

10 BOOKS THAT SCREWED UP THE WORLD 

And 5 Others That Didn’t Help 

BENJAMIN WIKER, PH. D. 

Author of Moral Darwinism: How We Became Hedonists
Copyright © 2008 by Benjamin Wiker (Kindle Edition)

Some might accuse me of the equivalent of recommending the old "Cliff Notes" as a substitute for really reading English literature, but in an age where folks don't read much if at all this might be the book that makes a difference in terms of thought and right thinking.

Deep down what moves me is the desire to find and apply the sandpaper treatment to a world's callous which continues to keep consciences or hearts numb, dead, thick, uncomprehending, indifferent to the atrocity which is abortion. Read the book as a primer for appreciating Dr. Wiker's conclusions! 

I'm only going to quote two statements out of many I highlighted for myself from those conclusions:

By following the trajectory of these books that screwed up the world, we can wonder whether the advance of “science” over theology is an unmitigated good, and whether it is really progress. Perhaps it is bringing us to a new age of technological barbarism, wherein humanity becomes ever more religiously obsessed with health and sexual pleasure as pseudo-gods, sacrificing anything and everything to these twin deities.

The ideas of God and sin might all seem too mythical for this scientific age until we recall that whether the bad thinker is Hobbes, Rousseau, Marx, or Freud, the authors we’ve covered in this book were mythmakers. They were enthralled by entirely mythical states of nature, entirely fictional alternative Edens, entranced by entirely impossible utopian paradises. Tens of millions of lives were offered up to the twin fictions of an alternative Garden of Eden and an alternative paradise, each taken and presented (falsely) as scientific fact.

Wiker's great service in this book is not unlike that performed by the little boys along the road in the children's story The King's New Clothes. Dr. Wiker points a finger at what are supposed to be the reasoned pillars of common parlance and shows them to be neither, but rather a gaping abyss, which leaves us little to hope from any self-sufficient geek's laboratory and clamoring for a better life through science (when hospitals weren't so sterile you didn't catch megaviruses). 

In his Hitler chapter Dr. Wiker attributes a modicum of conscience to some of the henchmen who were carrying out the final solution. Personally, I seriously doubt if their alcohol abuse and listlessness came from qualms over what they were doing; they were lost and that is how lost people behave: killing didn't push them to despair; despairing of life and hope pushed them to kill.

The equation just does not work, minus our Creator and Redeemer.