1. Sign of Freedom (Remastered)

Sign of Freedom

R.J. Rushdoony

Our Scripture is Deuteronomy 5:12-15 and our subject, ‘The Sign of Freedom.’ Deuteronomy 5:12-15, the fourth commandment.

“Keep the sabbath day to sanctify it, as the Lord thy God hath commanded thee. Six days thou shalt labour, and do all thy work: But the seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, nor thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thine ox, nor thine ass, nor any of thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates; that thy manservant and thy maidservant may rest as well as thou. And remember that thou wast a servant in the land of Egypt, and that the Lord thy God brought thee out thence through a mighty hand and by a stretched out arm: therefore the Lord thy God commanded thee to keep the sabbath day.”

The fourth commandment has rather a strange history. Among the Jews it led to all kinds of absurdities at the time of our Lord’s birth, to intense and peculiar legal interpretations as to what constituted “labor” on the Sabbath. It reached the point where many of the Jews not only refused to go more than so many feet on a Sabbath day, but some of them scrupled over eating an egg because obviously that egg had been labored over by a hen on some Sabbath, and it would be a violation of the Sabbath to partake of something that had been a result of labor on the Sabbath. Similar absurdities have been apparent, sometimes in various Christian churches. I can think right now of one very prominent body of Christians, a denomination, that takes a great many other things lightly including a good deal of the Bible, but you dare not transgress their Sabbath requirements. You can be a socialist in the pulpit, in fact you’re better off if you are, but they still boast of being conservative because of their absurd Sabbath regulations.

And so it is this commandment is sometimes distasteful because of what people have done with it, the absurdities to which they have stretched it. On the other hand, this commandment concerning the Sabbath has been a target of attack from the opposition. Revolutionary movements have again and again sought to overthrow the entire concept of the day of rest. The French Revolution attempted to do it, the Russian Revolution abolished it for a time but found that it was impossible fully to do away with it. And it continues to be a target. In Red China, of course, it has been abolished. And even within the churches now, on the part of the left-wingers, there are revolutionary plans afoot to destroy the entire concept of a day of rest.

This morning we can do no more than to begin a survey of the subject, a very important one, because the Sabbath law is important for its prophetic significance as well as its legal aspects. At this point too, the two declarations of the Ten Commandments differ from one another. As the Ten Commandments are given to us in Exodus, we are not told to keepthe Sabbath day to sanctify it, but to remember the Sabbath the day to sanctify it. A minor difference, but it’s the one point of variation, this commandment, between the two. Then it goes on say: “for in six days the Lord created the Heaven and the earth, and on the seventh day he rested.” But in Deuteronomy, as we read it, it has no reference to the creation Sabbath. So we see a point of difference here in the two; the one declares that the pattern for the Sabbath day which they are to remember, or keep, is the creation Sabbath. There had been no Sabbath observance until Sinai, until the first Passover, which was established as the pattern at Sinai, they are to keep it now, why? Because God delivered them, “Therefore the Lord thy God commanded thee to keep the Sabbath day.” Thus, clearly, Sabbath represents redemption. It is the day of redemption for Israel, the first Passover, and each Sabbath commemorates it. The pattern is the seventh day of creation, the week of creation, but it commemorates the deliverance from Egypt.

There is no evidence for a Sabbath prior to the Exodus. There is no evidence anywhere in history of any kind of day of rest in all history outside of the Bible. Occasionally, in some cultures, such as in Rome or in Persia, and one or two other places, a King’s birthday would be declared a holiday. Or if the king were getting married, he would declare it that it would be a holiday or there would be two or three days of holidays for the entire people. But there was no regular day of rest. This, then, is unique, it is limited to the Bible, no day of rest in any other culture. Wherever you do find it outside of Christendom, you find it because it has been taken from the Bible. The Moslem observance of Friday is taken from the Bible, Mohammed wanted to establish something similar, but he did not want the Jewish Sabbath or the Christian first day of the week, and so he chose Friday. Where it is observed in Asia and Africa today, it is observed because Christians going there established the custom.

Now, one of the fallacies concerning the Sabbath is that it is seen very often as an infringement on man’s liberty. Most people regard it in terms of the old-fashioned “Blue laws.” We will deal with the significance of them on another day. And so they see it as some kind of limitation on their activity. But the Sabbath, in principle, is the liberation of man, the third Chapter of Hebrews makes this clear. The Sabbath represents the Promised Land as it were, but the Promised Land, Canaan, did not typify fully that Promise Land. Jesus Christ and the new creation set forth the fulfillment of the Sabbath, or the rest, of man. ‘Sabbath’ means rest. The purpose of the Sabbath, therefore, is to assert the principle of freedom under God, and liberty under law, God’s Law. The purpose is to free man from his work and from himself, and to establish him in the work of God, in God’s finished work in Jesus Christ.

Now, the Sabbath is disliked by humanism because humanism believes in the plenary ability of man, that is in the total capacity of man. Man is able, by his own efforts, to remake himself, to guide his own evolution we are told, to control the weather, to create paradise on earth. And therefore, the idea of the Sabbath, God’s work, God’s fulfillment, God’s deliverance of man into this paradise, is anathema. Man is going to do it himself. And so, the response of humanism to the Sabbath is to emphasize the worker and work, to ‘proletarianize’ the calendar.

Now, what is the proletariat? Marx based his entire appeal to the proletariat. “Proletarians,” or “workers of the world,” depending on what translation of the word you use, “unite!” This is his message. “You have nothing to lose but your chains,” but the chains sound strangely like the Bible, and the Sabbath and God. And the freedom sounds very much like total work. The proletarianization of man has been defined as “Fettering man to work” i and the proletarian is the man who is fettered, chained to the processes of work. The leaders of revolution want to chain man to work because they say “If you get in and work, if you dedicate yourself to this five year or ten year or twenty year plan, then the end result will be your deliverance into paradise. So first we free you from God and from the Sabbath, we chain you to work, and the result of that chaining will be your deliverance.”

And so their first target of attack is precisely God and the Sabbath, God and His Law. Stalin declared:

“If God exists, He must have ordained slavery, feudalism, and capitalism. He must want humanity to suffer, as the monks were always telling me. Then there would be no hope for the toiling masses to free themselves from their oppressors. But when I learned that there is no God, I knew that humanity could fight its way to freedom.” ii

So said Stalin. “Fight its way to freedom.” What he meant, of course, in application, as he went on to develop his thesis, was that the masses could work their way to freedom. And so, the idea of working eight hours a day five days a week, this was a capitalistic snare to the workers for Stalin. They had to work and work and work, not by the hour but by piece, they had to produce so much, they had to be driven to paradise. And what was going to happen when they got there, Stalin said?

“Each man, Stalin predicted, would be developed under socialism to a point at which he and all his fellows would surpass the giants of the pre-socialist past, such as Michelangelo, or Goethe.” iii

By chaining man to labor, we will enable man to create such a paradise that every coal miner and every ditch digger will then be a Michelangelo, he can go home and knock off another hour or two and whip out another work that will surpass Michelangelo or write a drama that will surpass Goethe’s “Faust.” Now, this was the dream; this is not limited to Stalin, in fact he borrowed this statement from Trotsky, and Trotsky, of course, borrowed it from Lenin and Karl Marx. This was their goal, every man they said would be equal to Paganini, the world’s greatest violinist, or equal to Michelangelo or Leonardo da Vinci, take your choice. Once you overthrow the chains of capitalism, once you become a proletarian chained to the processes of work, you’re going to come out of the coal pits the all-time genius.

Of course, what Stalin did was actually two things; he enslaved more men than any other single man in the history of the world, and he killed more men than any other tyrant in all of history, all this to deliver man to the true Sabbath rest, to the true paradise.

Now as we examine the various Sabbath laws a little more specifically, but still somewhat generally, the first thing we have to note with regard to the Sabbath legislation is this, that Sabbath literally means ‘rest’ or ‘a day of rest,’ not ‘a day of worship.’ This is an important point. Now, we as Christians have been enjoined:

“Not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together…” iv

That is, the New Testament makes clear in the book of Hebrews the tenth chapter, that worship is a duty for us, but the Sabbath law does not require worship, it requires rest. Under Christ, worship is now a duty rather than a law -- there is a difference. Moreover, in the Old Testament, there was no weekly worship. The seventh day was a day of rest within the family. Yes, there was family prayer, there was family worship, but this was daily in the home. Daily in the home there was a recital of various passages of Scripture and of the Psalms. So there was no weekly day of worship in the Sabbath law. The weekly day of worship came during the captivity, and developed especially between the Old and New Testament period in the synagogue. So that by the time of our Lord, many of the Israelites had become accustomed to a weekly day of worship in the synagogue, but the law itself does not require a day of worship, but a day of rest. And ‘rest’ here means confidence in God’s finished work. So that we cease from our labors in the symbolic representation of our total confidence in God’s accomplishment. God has declared His victory. He will create all things new and man shall rejoice and rest therein, and man in advance of the event rests in the anticipation of the glorious new creation of God.

The second point with regards to the Sabbath laws, we must note, is very severe laws enforced the Sabbath rest. There was no work to be done, no beast of burden could be loaded or worked, there could be no traveling, no fire kindled, no sticks gathered on the Sabbath. Life could be saved on the Sabbath, war could be fought on the Sabbath, because the essence of the Sabbath is the victory of redemption rest, and so the enemies could be defeated. There could be alleviation of hunger and of illness on the Sabbath. Our Lord made that emphatic with the law itself earlier had indicated that. But there could not be work, the penalty for violation was death. Now this clearly indicates the importance of the Sabbath law in the old covenant.

But third, we must make clear that there is not a trace of maintenance of the Sabbath penalties after the resurrection. The church had a clear mandate to regard this law in another light. St. Paul declared in Colossians 2:16,17:

“Let no man therefore judge you in meat, or in drink, or in respect of an holyday, or of the new moon, or of the sabbath days: Which are a shadow of things to come; but the body isof Christ.”

So clearly, with Christ’s resurrection, something changed about the law. Certainly the penalties were gone, the death penalty. On the other hand, what we must say is this, anything that at one time had a death penalty attached to it, which was a capital offense, is obviously so important, has embedded in it a legal principle so important that we can disregard it today at our peril. Next Sunday we will devote the entire time to an analysis of why there was a death penalty, what it involved. Here we get into legislation in the Mosaic law that is never discussed from the pulpit today, but which is basic to any understanding of God’s purpose for the world in every age. Thus, what deserves a death penalty involves a basic principle so that even though the death penalty is altered, the basic principle remains.

Now of course, we must then state further that the Sabbath would change from the Hebrew Sabbath to the day of Resurrection, the first day of the week. Therefore, to reject Sunday as the Christian day of rest is to reject Christ’s redemption and to seek salvation by another end; an inadmissible way. This must be stressed. Deuteronomy makes clear that the day that was kept was the day commemorating their deliverance from Egypt -- the Passover. Now, if our salvation is with Israel, then we celebrate the Passover. But if we feel that now there is none other name under Heaven by which men may be saved, and that the Passover itself only prefigures Christ, and it is Christ’s resurrection which sets forth our salvation our atonement from sin and from death, then it is the first day of the week we observe, or we are not of Christ.

Then fifth, we must state further that the Hebrew Sabbath and the modern Saturday cannot be equated. And here Mrs. White, the founder of the Seventh Day Adventists is so far wrong that her position is a monstrosity. There is no connection between Saturday and the Hebrew Sabbath. There is a connection between Saturday and the Jewish Sabbath today. But the Jews revised their calendar in the Christian era to conform with the Christian calendar. It made it easier for them to live in Christian Europe. And so now they observe Saturday as their day of worship. But the modern Saturday has no relationship whatsoever to the Jewish Sabbath. Why? Because, according to the Biblical calendar, the Sabbath fell upon the date, not upon the day of the week. In other words, the first month of the Jewish calendar, or the Israelite calendar was ‘Abib.’ The Sabbath fell every year, without fail on the first, the eight, the fifteenth, the twenty-second, and the twenty-ninth of Abib, without any exception. Now, figure that out and you realize what happens. Your birthday falls, let us say, on the fifteenth of January every year. But one year the fifteenth is on Sunday, the next on Monday, the next on Tuesday and so on so that every seven years you had a birthday on Sunday through Saturday, have you not? The date of your Birthday remains constant, the day of the week on which it falls is variable. Now the Hebrew Sabbath fell, without exception, without variation, every year, every month on the same day of the month. So in terms of the calendar, it was from Sunday to Saturday every seven years. And so, the idea of celebrating Saturday and believing that you’re keeping the Biblical Sabbath is an absurdity, it’s a monstrosity. And it was presented without any knowledge of the Bible, because when you go to the law you find very clearly in Leviticus in the various Chapters that deal with the Sabbath, that it spells out the days of the month, beginning with Abib, and that there can never be any variation. And when it tells you that the fourteenth of Abib is always to be a day of work and the fifteenth is always to be a day of rest, you know that it is not a day of the week that was the Jewish Sabbath, or the Israelite Sabbath, but a date of the month without variation.

Moreover, there were a number of extra Sabbaths, I might add, in the Hebrew Calendar. Their months were thirty days long. Twelve months of thirty days gives you three hundred and sixty days, does it not? So you have five extra days. Two days were added at the end of one six month period, and the other three days were added at the other six month period, at the finish and they constituted one Sabbath, so you had a two-day long Sabbath, or longer Sabbath. You could have in fact a two-year Sabbath, we will deal with that next week.

Then sixth we must say that the Sabbath, the day of rest, represented redemption and liberation and culminated in the Jubilee, of which more next week. But the great Jubilee proclamation, which was brought over to this country and written on the Liberty bell was this:

“…proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof…”

Leviticus 25:10.

We shall understand next week, as we deal with the death penalties and with the Jubilee, what this proclamation of liberty meant, why it is so important to any society, why it is so basic to life and violation of it is so closely tied to death. But the principle we must state now is ‘liberty.’ The Sabbath represents liberty, and the great Sabbath year, the Jubilee, was the proclamation of liberty throughout all the land and unto all the inhabitants thereof.

But the Bible also tells us there is a pseudo-liberty, and pseudo-Sabbath, as it were, a pseudo-rest. And what is it? Slavery, slavery. Slavery is cradle to grave security is it not? Slavery is the welfare economy carried to its logical conclusion. The slave has perfect social security. The Bible recognizes slavery as a legitimate system, as a legitimate way of life. It says, quite frankly, by its legislation, that a lot of people are by nature slaves. It provides for voluntary slavery, and it says that the man who doesn’t feel he wants to risk freedom can go and make himself a slave. And there are certain guarantees for the welfare of the slave. And slavery was, in the Bible, voluntary, except when there was enslavement for theft and the man was incapable of making restitution, he then had to be a slave temporarily and work off the amount he owed, make restitution.

But, since slavery is a pseudo-Sabbath, a pseudo-rest, a pseudo-liberty, the Christian, St. Paul tells us, cannot voluntarily become a slave. And in 1 Corinthians 7:23 and Galatians 5:1 the believer is emphatically told: “He has been bought with a price, you have been set free at a great price by Jesus Christ, therefore be not again entangled with the yoke of bondage, be not the servant or the slave of man.” The pseudo-rest of socialism and welfarism is a violation, therefore, of the Sabbath principle. Our Sabbath rest is to be in terms of liberty in Jesus Christ, not the pseudo-Sabbath of socialism and slavery. The Christian Sabbath is not the slavery of socialism, and no minister who declares he believes in the Ten Commandments and in the fourth commandment can be a socialist or a believer in a welfare economy without transgressing the Word of God.

Let us pray.

* * *

Our Lord and our God, we thank thee that thou hast, by thy grace, through the blood of Jesus Christ, delivered us into thy rest, into thy liberty. And we pray, our Father, that thou wouldst make us strong in Jesus Christ, that we may not again be entangled with the yoke of bondage, that we may not become the servants or the slaves of men. Enable us, O Lord, by thy grace to walk in terms of thy so great salvation and to proclaim the good news of liberty throughout all the land and unto all the inhabitants thereof, that they might come unto thy Sabbath and might rejoice and rest in thy work. Bless us to this purpose we beseech thee. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

* * *

Yes?

[Audience member] But surely we must primarily worship God on Sunday, it’s in the Bible. v

[Rushdoony] Yes, now, in the Old Testament, you see. Now, worship can be a rest when it is truly edifying, when it is a rest and a refreshing to our souls, when it frees us. Worship then can be a rest. But there is a difference between the two, between rest and worship, because there is a great deal of worship today, throughout the United States and throughout the world, and unfortunately, probably a very small portion of it is truly rest. So, you have to differentiate between worship and rest. True worship can be rest, true worship is a duty, but the rest that is required is the law you see. So, while you are right, what I was trying to do is to say there is a distinction and we cannot confuse the two. And today the average minister when he says: “Remember the Sabbath day and Sabbath rest,” he identifies it with coming to church. Now coming to church can be a rest, but you cannot identify the two you see. In other words, when you talk about the dollar you can mean a silver dollar but you can also mean a paper dud, or Johnson’s slugs. And there’s a world of difference between the two you see.

Yes?

[Audience member] What’s the purpose of having elections held on a Sunday? vi

[Rushdoony] Yes, there is a purpose, of course, in these elections on Sundays, just as there is a purpose in Union elections on Sunday. I recall, a few years ago, one person who was in a union they were having a difficult problem and the way to deal with the problem, finally, the union leaders kept postponing the issue week after week, trying to wear out people who were trying to come and bring a matter to a vote. So they started putting meetings on Sunday morning. This was to discourage especially the Catholic members of the union, who would feel they had to go to Mass at that hour and would not come. And of course they won out finally. Now, the excuse used in many foreign countries for holding elections on Sunday is that it is easier to get everyone out at that time. But this is definitely a specious reason, it has not made any difference really in the number of votes, it is, in part, in many of these countries an anti-Catholic or an anti-Protestant measure, and definitely in all of them anti-Christian.

Yes?

[Audience member] I’ve heard that it was the emperor Constantine who gave us Sunday as the Christian day of rest, and before that it was held on Saturday. vii

[Rushdoony] No, this is a statement that is often made by Seventh Day Adventists that not until Constantine or about then was the first day of the week made the day of worship and so on and so forth. And there is no evidence for this. Now, from the book of Acts we know that for a time the Christians did go to the synagogues, or the Temple, on the Sabbath. They very often went there, some of them out of piety, often to go there and to hold discussions. St. Paul, whenever he went to any city, he went to the synagogue first of all. But we also know from the book of Acts, the Christians gathered together in the evening on the first day of the week, in other words Sunday evening. They had to meet in the evening, because that was not a holiday, legally. Rome was ready to recognize, in order to have peace with the Jews, Saturday as a weekly holiday for the Jews. But the Christians had no legal status. And you recall young Eutychus who was sitting in the window in this upper room when Paul was preaching, and he had come from work, and he was tired, and he fell out of the window. And all the records we have indicate that this was the case, they were evening meetings. This also helped them. It was a practical necessity, but it also helped in that as persecution developed it made it easier to meet in the evening. After dark you quietly went along the darkened streets to the believer’s house at whose place it was held. And this made for a little more secrecy.

But there is nothing in the Church Fathers to confirm the Adventist argument that it was an invention. Like their bit about the calendar, it doesn’t represent anything but their own mythology. Ellen G. White, she blundered colossally here and since then when some have tried to argue the situation it seems to be the Adventists line that “This is a closed subject” you cannot get any of them into an argument concerning these texts in the Old Testament, in Leviticus that refer to the fixed days. But at that time, you see, at the time of our Lord, the Sabbath that was celebrated in the synagogue was not our Saturday. It was often Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, it changed. It was not until the third century, about the time of Constantine, a little later perhaps, but roughly around the same time, when there was a fixed Christian day, that the Jews had to change theirs to conform with that. But until that time, their Sabbath varied from Sunday through Saturday every year; it was a fixed day. So, you see, at this point the Adventist argument collapses entirely. The Christians couldn’t have celebrated Saturday in the pre-Nicene period because that was not the Jewish day of worship, it never was, until this particular Jewish council reformed the calendar. I can get that date for you if you’re interested.

Yes?

[Audience member] Is there not a clear seven-day pattern to the Sabbath? Is it not clearly to do with worship?

[Rushdoony] Yes, now the declaration in Exodus.

“Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work: But the seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates…”

Then to make it clear why there is this seven-day pattern it says:

“For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it…” viii

Now, here is the pattern, here is the type, the original. Then in Deuteronomy God declares through Moses that, “Why are they to observe it?” Because they were delivered, you see, from Egypt. The Passover was the first Sabbath, and on every Sabbath day they remember what God did for them, He delivered them from Egypt. And it was a pattern of God’s creation week and His resting. What was it when God rested? He surveyed the world, the Garden of Eden, and He saw that it was very good, and He rejoiced in it. Now, on the seventh day they are to rest and rejoice that God, who created all things, is re-creating all things, beginning with us, and we are a part of that re-creation.

Yes?

[Audience member] If people do claim to be under the Mosaic law at this point, aren’t they also making themselves liable to the Mosaic punishment for violation of the sabbath day? ix

[Rushdoony] If they claim to be under the Mosaic law, whether they are Jews, that is in the Old Testament sense, or Adventists, they are required to exercise the death penalty, or else they are not keeping the law.

[Audience member] Surely there was always a Sabbath kept since the Sabbath has its origins in the creation week? x

[Rushdoony] Yes but you see the Sabbath, the Hebrew Sabbath, doesn’t hark back to creation. In other words, the Adventist argument is that there were always Sabbaths observed from the day of creation so that the Hebrew Sabbath or Saturday is an exact continuation of the Seventh Day of Creation, that time has been kept regularly since then, there is no evidence of that. There was never a Sabbath before the Passover. But the pattern of a Sabbath week is there, you are to rest one day in seven, the six days of labor. Now, it could be any six, we could start tomorrow and say: “we will observe one day in seven and it will be this day” but it so happens we do commemorate a seventh day, which is the day of Resurrection. But it doesn’t hark back to a particular calendar and a particular weekday you see.

In other words, that was the first Sabbath, the resurrection day, and they began to observe the Sabbath from that. But the Hebrew Sabbath, until the third century was a commemoration of ‘Abibs’ a first, the Passover on the fifteenth of Abib, and so on.

[Audience member] Inaudible question.

[Rushdoony] Well, yes and no, yes and no. It is as far as the calendar goes. And here is where you get into problems. But you see, periodically they’ve had to add a few days to the calendar. In other words the year is 365 days and 6 hours and so many minutes and so many seconds long. Now, every fourth year, to regularize the calendar, they add leap year, but this does leave a number of excess minutes. Well, after a few centuries these excess minutes add up to a number of days. So, it was during the Colonial period I believe that they added, what was it, does anyone recall? Eleven days to the calendar to bring it up to date, because the addition to the leap year didn’t cover it. So you see, we are going by the day of the week, not in terms of an exact 24-hour span infallibly since then. How are the Adventists going to account for those eleven days that were added you see? And I believe we are running behind now, again. And sometime in the future, a little more time will have to be added to bring up the calendar by some international agreement they will have to say, “We will make up these days because we’ve lost them so arbitrarily on such a such a date, instead of being February the tenth it will be February the fifteenth.”

Ours is on a Biblical basis. The Jewish observance of Saturday is purely pragmatic, and the Adventist made the mistake of taking the Jewish observance without any relationship to the Bible.

Now our time is up and there are just a couple of things I’d like to share with you. One from the Oakland Tribune a front-page editorial on the Eldridge Cleaver case I’d like to read a few points from it.

“Many of the activists have the avowed purpose of overthrowing the establishment; educational, political, or economic, existing in our country today. If this be the issue, then indeed we have reached the point of the irrepressible conflict discussed in 1858 by William H. Seward in a speech prior to the outbreak of the Civil war Seward said: ‘It is an irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces.’ Since the campus activists have selected Eldridge Cleaver as their cause célèbre for a new series of confrontations and disruptions. It is well and kindly that the people of California know the leading man in the drama about to unfold. Who is this Eldridge Cleaver upon whom the academic forces and the students who believe that a university and a place for learning, and not for continual churning, are asked to stake the future of the university of California? In his book on Soul on Ice, Cleaver says: ‘I became a rapist. To refine my technique and modus operandi, I started out by practicing on the black girls in the ghetto, and when I considered myself smooth enough I crossed the tracks and sought out white prey. I did this consciously, deliberately, willfully, methodically, though looking back I see that I was in a frantic, wild, and completely abandoned frame of mind. Rape was an insurrectionary act, it delighted me that I was defying and trampling on the white man’s law, upon his system of values ,and that I was defiling his women.’ This year on Nov. 5 the people will vote a new bond issue for our higher institutions of learning. The amount is $250 million, and it appears as proposition three on the state ballot. One Jonah Slanger, professor of psychology, said to the student rally in Wheeler hall, that the course in social analysis 139X, where Cleaver has been booked for 10 appearances, would be given, notwithstanding the action of the regents. Another self-appointed advisor to the students on the Berkeley campus and to the educators of that institution is Black Panther party chairman Bobby Seal who was given a standing ovation when he said: ‘We are tired of having comic book administrators run our lives. Students should run this university, the only way they can stop you is by sending pigs into the classroom.’ Editor’s note, Panthers referred policemen as ‘pigs.’ The issue has been joined, the issues will not go away, it cannot be brushed under the academic rug. It will not be quietly laid aside until after November. The American public is fed up this year in a great referendum the voters are going to express themselves in our 50 states. Our nation is not about to repudiate majority government and surrender power to small noisy activist groups whose purpose is to disrupt all of our institutions.”

Now of course you’ve also seen the fact of the appointment of George Murray, another black Panther leader, as teacher at San Francisco state college. The whole point of this is to pick out the most flagrant violations of public decency, in order to as it were rub our noses in the dirt and say: “We’ve got you, we’re going to do as we please.” This is exactly its meaning, it’s designed to be as deliberately offensive as possible.

By way of conclusion, on a little milder note from one of my favorite sources of philosophy, the comic strip. “Out Our Way” last week was I think very choice, it shows the mayor in his office and the secretary coming in with the agenda for the day and she says:

“This promises to be an interesting day for you Mr. Mayor, like most of your days it will have its bright side and its dark side, a grievance committee will assemble on the front steps of city hall at ten o’clock this morning, while the irate citizens leak covers the rear exit and a tax protest group watches the escape hatch on the roof.”

And the Mayor says:

Alright now let’s hear the bright side.”

“Mr. Mayor, that IS the bright side!”

And with that we can adjourn.

i. Josef Pieper, Leisure, The Basis of Culture (New York: Mentor-Omega, [1952] 1963), p. 50.

ii. Stalin, in Finskii Vestnik (December 17, 1928), p. 11; cited by Francis B. Randall, Stalin’s Russia (New York: The Free Press, 1965), p. 65.

iii. Randall, p. 94. For Stalin on the future man, Finskii Vestnik (December 17, 1928), p. 41. Marx and Trotsky held to the same opinion.

iv. The Holy Bible: King James Version, Electronic Edition of the 1900 Authorized Version. (Bellingham, WA: Logos Research Systems, Inc., 2009), Heb 10:25.

v. Question added/modified for the sake of clarity and brevity.

vi. Question added/modified for the sake of clarity and brevity.

vii. Question added/modified for the sake of clarity and brevity.

viii. Exodus 20:11

ix. Question added/modified for the sake of clarity and brevity.

x. Question added/modified for the sake of clarity and brevity.