Gary North - Political Polytheism

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OldSchoolPresbyterian

Puritan Board Freshman
Would anyone happen to have a used hard-copy version of this book by Gary North? I know the PDF version is available online but I like to have hardcovers or paperbacks for longer books like this. I thought perhaps someone may have one for sale. Thank you.
 
Would anyone happen to have a used hard-copy version of this book by Gary North? I know the PDF version is available online but I like to have hardcovers or paperbacks for longer books like this. I thought perhaps someone may have one for sale. Thank you.

Sorry, I'm not parting with mine. :)

I haven't always agreed with all that Dr. North wrote, but when he is good he is pure genius. The introduction alone is worth the price of the book. Here's a short excerpt. Read it to the last word for the full effect.

From
POLITICAL POLYTHEISM
The Myth of Pluralism
Gary North​

A Parting of the Ways

What we find in the final decades of the second millennium after the birth of Jesus Christ is a growing realization on both sides of the political cease-fire line that the traditional ideological synthesis of political pluralism is collapsing. What we are witnessing is a slow but sure breakdown of the political cease-fire between humanism and Christianity. On each side, the defenders of the compromise system can no longer hold their own troops in line. Guerilla skirmishes are breaking out continually. The humanists are beginning to act like humanists, and a tiny handful of Christians are beginning to act like Christians.

The confrontation over the life-and-death issue of abortion is one obvious example of this irrepressible conflict. On the abortionist's table, there is no neutral position between life and death. This is why the inescapably political debate over abortion is so frustrating for those who want to steer a middle course. There is no middle course. There is no neutrality. The politician's left foot is being held to the fire by the pro-death-forces, and his right foot is being shoved in the coals by the pro-life forces. He has only one choice: accept the political fact of either one burned foot or two. He, like the political pluralist, deeply resents being forced to make this choice. He wants no burned feet. He longs for the simpler, cooler world of yesterday, when the common morality was implicitly Christian and officially neutral. He is not going to get that world; it is gone forever. So are .at least 25 million dead babies, all executed legally in the United States. Another example is Christian education. The humanists on the United States Supreme Court in 1963 banished prayer in the tax-supported public schools. This aided the cause of the more consistent.

Christians, who could then plausibly begin to call for the banishment of all public schools. For those in the middle - defenders of public education and defenders of government subsidies to private education - the skies grew dark. With the government subsidy comes the iron fist. There are no free lunches, not even school lunches. There is no neutrality.

It is one of those historical ironies that Gary Scott Smith should be a professor at the most famous non-cooperating college in America, Grove City College, whose refusal to take federal money led to its resistance to the imposition of federal educational regulations. The government then sued the college. The case went all the way to the U. S. Supreme Court, which ruled that unless Congress passed a law that specifically brought Grove City College under its regulations, the school was free to resist such controls. Congress immediately passed such a law over the President's veto, announcing publicly that even the indirect acceptance of federal funds through loans granted to students constitutes the "open door policy" to all government regulations over education. Nevertheless, Professor Scott continues to defend the legitimacy of the eighteenth-century "ideological synthesis." So does his Grove City colleague, historian L. John Van Til. l5 So deeply entrenched is the ideology of political pluralism that most of its Christian victims cannot perceive what is happening to them. The brainwashing by the humanists of the intellectual leaders of conservative Protestantism has been remarkably successful.

A Warning Shot

This book is a warning shot across the bow of the aging battleship, Ideological Synthesis. It argues that Christian defenders of political pluralism are now trapped by the necessary and inescapable implications of their own compromise. They have bet their futures (and yours) on the preservation of the political cease-fire between Christianity and anti-Christianity. But as Christians steadily retreated from this covenantal conflict, 1673 to 1973, turning in their weapons (e.g., Christian education) to a supposedly "neutral" police force, their covenant-breaking enemies have systematically taken over that police force. This cease-fire is beginning to resemble the cease-fire of the firing squad. It can end with one word: "Fire!"
 
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