Dakota Beacon

Milton’s Paradise Lost - Is Hypocrisy a Sin?

By Lynn Bergman

You may wish, for background, to read the article referenced below that was printed in the “Life and Tradition” section of the weekly (Jan 18-24, 2023) Epoch Times:

Lies Masquerading as Truth: Milton’s Satan Heads to Earth (theepochtimes.com)

Satan’s Children – Sin and Death

In Milton’s epic poem, “Paradise Lost”, Satan’s children, Sin and Death, agree to let Satan pass out of the gates of hell and begin the journey to God’s new creation, Earth. Sin’s main components are identified in the Ten Commandments of Moses.

Satan’s Hate is from Within

Milton explains that Satan came to hate God from within himself. Milton believed that the humans that Satan tempts, however, should be shown grace upon yielding to Satan’s temptations because they do not hate God from within themselves but instead are tempted to resist God because of Satan’s efforts. God then asks the other beings in heaven who will sacrifice themselves for the eternal life of humans? Only Jesus, God’s Son, comes forth and God praises Jesus for his love and compassion.

Satan’s Deception

Satan is deceptive in altering his appearance and in shifting what he represents from one evil to the next. Satan represents the opposite of truth and surely even the best among us can be deceived by lies. Satan is successful because he is a master of hypocrisy. Satan can pretend to be righteous in order to destroy what is righteous.

Hypocrisy is not only a sin… it may well be the trait that most defines Satan

The Difference between God and Satan

God is the truth of self-sacrifice for the sake of love. Satan is the falseness that seeks to destroy truth for the sake of pride.

Personal Torment

The source of Satan’s personal torment and depression is separation from God. Separation from God’s goodness causes us to live our lives as victims, finding more reason to complain than to simply be humble and grateful for what He has given us on this beautiful earth.

Satan destroys what is righteous by introducing us to “victimhood” and its accompanying discontent.

The above discussion of Milton’s classic “Paradise Lost” came to my attention simply due to providence. I had begun to write my review of Ibram Kendi’s bestselling book, “How to be an Antiracist”, but was jolted from that task by the Epoch Times article that perfectly set up the book review in a way that I never could have on my own. Devine Intervention has permeated my life so there is no reason it should not arrive abruptly at this endeavor.

HOW TO BE AN ANTIRACIST by IBRAM XOLANI KENDI

A book review by Lynn Bergman

The Author

Ibram Henry Rogers was born August 13, 1982, the son of Larry Rogers (a tax accountant and hospital chaplain) and Carol Rogers (a business analyst for a healthcare organization) living in the Jamaica neighborhood of Queens, NY. His parents are now retired and work as Methodist ministers. Ibram attended private Christian schools in Queens. At age 15, his family moved to Manassas, VA where he attended Stonewall Jackson High School, graduating in year 2000. He received his BS in African American Studies and magazine production from Florida A&M University. He received his MA and PhD in African American Studies from Temple University in Philadelphia, PA. Over one-fourth of Temple students (10,058 of 37,365 in 2020) are post-graduate.

Marital Bliss (they met on Match.com)

In 2013, at the age of 31, Ibram wed Dr. Sadiqa Adero Ihsan Edmonds-Myles, a pediatric emergency physician of Jamaican and Kenyan descent.  Her parents were B. T. Edmonds and Macharia Myles. The newlyweds chose the new last name Kendi, which is from the Meru people of Kenya. Additionally, Ibram changed his middle name to Xolandi. The couple held their wedding ceremony infused with both African and Christian traditions at a resort in Jamaica and currently reside in Boston, Massachusetts.

Socialist/Communist Mentors

Kendi’s doctoral advisor at Temple University’s College of Liberal Arts was Ama Mazama, a priestess in the Haitian Vodou religion. In his first published book, “Stamped from the Beginning”, Kendi shares the stories of historical figures, including W.E.B. DuBois and Angela Davis. DuBois believed that capitalism was a primary cause of racism and was sympathetic to socialist causes throughout his life. He was the first black to joined the white socialists who founded the NAACP in 1909. Angela Davis is a Marxist and feminist as well as a lifelong member of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA).

In the first paragraph of “How to be an Antiracist”, Kendi reveals his disdain for his former life as a preachers’ kid. He shares with the reader his “early life” understanding of black cultural problems. He looks at his early focus on individual responsibility as having been duped, a chump, for deciding that black people themselves might contribute to their problems. He subsequently came to see people as victims “ensnared by policies”. 

“Martin Luther King Jr. Oratorical Contest”

Kendi shares his subsequent shame in delivering his MLK Day 2000 speech that implored blacks not to climb the high tree of pregnancy and not to confine their dreams to sports and music. The theme constant in his book’s introduction is that he was once a racist, just like all the rest of us. This is his first trick… convincing the reader that he was “a racist, just like we are”.

First Impressions

As we who have lived life for a very long time understand, ”first impressions” are often the best impressions; a fact lost on Kendi as he has been indoctrinated in Black Liberation Theology and Marxist dogma. Early in the book, he stresses “equality of outcomes” rather than “equality of opportunities”. He states “If discrimination is creating “equity of outcome” then it is “antiracist”, an end justifying the means. And “If discrimination is creating inequity of outcomes” then it is “racist”. He places responsibility for success on government policies, removing any responsibility of individuals for their individual outcomes.

Later, in Chapter 17, he becomes slightly more optimistic, stating “SUCCESS. THE DARK road we fear. Where antiracist power and policy predominate. Where equal opportunities and thus outcomes exist between equal groups.” The only folks I know of who fear success are government program administrators for whom success may put them out of a job… a dark road only to the bureaucrat.

By striving constantly for equal opportunity for everyone, we ensure a maximum of equal outcomes due to opportunity; but it is each individual who must make the most of opportunities available.

Here are some examples of his logic:

• Do-nothing climate policy is racist.
• Black-white health disparities are racist.
• Incarceration is racist.
• Voter ID laws are racist.

The 2010 book, “Dark Winter” by John L. Casey explains how a cycle of reduced sunspot activity is causing a 30-year cold spell that he expects will lower the earth’s temperature by 2 degrees Celsius by the middle of this century. We are in the early period of this cooling which Casey expects will offset the 1.1 degree Celsius warming that has occurred since 1880, a period of 143 years. A “do-nothing” climate policy is the most economically sound approach for all of earth’s inhabitants. An exception is the relatively low-cost carbon oxide sequestration effort that directly address Carbon emissions; without destroying the world fossil fuel economy before viable alternative sources of energy are proven and developed. Climate does not differentiate between races.

Health disparities likely result from differences in genetic makeup, exercise & dietary choices, and access to preventive health care, not racism. People do not get sicker because someone different hates them.    

The vast majority of incarcerated individuals have actually broken laws intended to protect law abiding citizens. Prosecution attorneys do not discriminate in whom they target. We don’t blame entire communities for the actions of criminals among them, nor should we blame all police for the ineptitude of the few cowardly and poorly trained. Upholding the rule of law is not racist. What we can do better is to screen police recruits for selflessness and bravery through days (not only an hour) of psychological testing.

Voter ID laws encourage qualified citizens to vote once per election cycle and in accordance with established norms, including the secret ballot. Laws that encourage “harvesting” of votes in the hundreds and thousands from nursing homes, bars, etc. should be eliminated. “Vote by mail” is an invitation to fraud

In Chapter 1, Definitions, Kendi avoids the terms “institutional racism”, “structural racism”, and “systemic racism” in describing racist policies. He states “When I use them I find myself having to immediately explain what they mean.” He then proceeds to attack his preferred descriptor, “racist policy”, along with “racist policymakers”, those who hold “racist power”.

Kendi considers racial discrimination to be good or “antiracist” if it is used to produce equitable outcomes. He considers racial discrimination to be bad or “racist” if it is used to create inequitable outcomes. If you believe “Equality of outcomes” sounds like socialism… so did I.

Kendi states that his maternal grandparents moved from Georgia to New York City to get their children away from segregationists and picking cotton under the “increasingly hot Georgia sun”, a subtle inference that “climate change” was a factor. I do not remember “climate change” or even its predecessors “global cooling” and “global warming” being publicly discussed in the 1950s. Kendi then rambles on and on about the worldwide racial disparities of “climate change” in true Greta Thunberg fashion.

At the end of Chapter 1, Kendi is compelled to quote Audre (born Audrey Geraldine) Lorde (1934-1992), radical feminist and library science master degree recipient from Columbia University in 1961. She was a self-described “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet” who “dedicated both her life and her creative talent to confronting and addressing injustices of racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia.”

Kendi ends the chapter with Lorde’s quote from 1980: “We have all been programmed to respond to the human differences between us with fear and loathing and to handle that difference in one of three ways; to ignore it, and if that’s not possible, copy it… But we have no patterns for relating across our human differences as equals.” The mistake made in Lourde’s quote is a mistake made by even the best of mankind… we believe everyone else thinks as we do; for example, burglars often install bars on their widows. We know from experience that not all people have been programmed to respond to differences with fear and loathing. And many of us have learned ways of relating across cultural chasms.

Near the end of Chapter 4, Kendi reveals the true roots of his “antiracist” theories, saying:

              “Singular-race makers push for the end of categorizing and identifying by race. They wag their fingers at people like me identifying as black – but the unfortunate truth is that their well-meaning post-racial strategy makes no sense in our racist world. Race is a mirage but one that humanity has organized itself around in very real ways. Imagining away the existence of races in a racist world is as conserving and harmful as imagining away classes in a capitalist world – it allows the ruling races and classes to keep on ruling.”

In one sentence, Kendi links “conserving” with “harmful”, revealing a disdain for conservatism… and invokes “class warfare” exposing his distaste for capitalism. To his credit, he devotes the entire Chapter 6 to connecting poverty and unemployment to violent crime rather than implicating race.

In Chapter 8, Behavior, Kendi defines a Behavioral Antiracist as one who is making racial group behavior fictional and individual behavior real. This is inconsistent with his earlier preference to blame “policymakers” rather than “individuals” for societal problems.

In Chapter 10, White, Kendi no longer saw the United States as a “democracy” after the Bush presidential win in 2000 (due to a Supreme Court ruling). While this view is not unusual for Democrat Party politicians, it is unseemly for an “educator” who should know that our form of government is a “democratic republic” with elected representatives to legislate federally and with a bill of rights that protects minorities. The United States of America was designed as a democratic republic by the founders, as opposed to India, a pure democracy where there are few, if any, significant minority rights.

In Chapter 11, Black, Kendi explains that black racism, while not as powerful, is as wrong as white racism. He then references the 2004 Ohio presidential election results as a “fraud”, while also chastising those who called black fraudsters Uncle Tom, Sellouts, Oreos, Puppets… everything but racists. He also rejects the concept that “the powerless cannot be racist”. So Kendi, in his writing, has glimpses of clarity within a Black Liberation Theology and Marxist cloud of propagandism.

But in Chapter 12, Kendi goes off the rails, claiming that racism and capitalism were “born” in the “long sixteenth century” and that their offspring are inequality, war and climate change and that their grandchildren are the current inequities in poverty, unemployment and wealth. He equates racism with capitalism as if the new jobs in third world countries due to natural resource development actually place them “in bondage to work”. If that is so, we in the western world already have a name for it… “golden handcuffs”. When we have it so good that we do not even consider not working. True historical facts show that the forced subservience of one group by another is as old as oral and written world history, including the slavery described by Mesopotamian and Sumarian civilizations from 6,000 to 2,000 BC as well as ancient Greece.

To love capitalism, Kendi says, is to love racism. Kendi believes that fighting racism without fighting capitalism is naïve.

Chapter 13 Space discusses learning space. Kendi quotes Molefi Kete Asante (born Arthur Lee Smith Jr. in Valdosta, Georgia), who contended that objectivity was really “collective subjectivity”. Kendi’s doctoral advisor, Ama Mazama concluded from Asante’s work that “It is impossible to be objective”. She urged students to “Just tell the truth”. The dictionary defines three types of truth:

• Objective Truth is what exists and can be proven in this physicality; and it is independent of whether a “group” or “individual” provides the proof.
• Normative Truth is what we, as a group, agree is true; facts may substantiate or disprove normative truth.
• Subjective Truth is how the individual sees or experiences the world; again, facts may substantiate or disprove subjective truth.

Asante’s term, “Collective Subjectivity”, appears to be an attempt to replace fact-driven “objective truth” with “what a group’s observations and experiences agree is true”; a combination of Normative Truth and Subjective Truth. With Collective Subjectivity, a group or individual can, through shared observations and experiences, agree to a “Their Truth”, which may or may not have basis in fact. This is the Marxists’ next trick after convincing us to “identify” with them by stating that they were once “just like us”. Distort the language to alter the narrative.

In Chapter 13, Kendi rightly condemns the historic disparity in resources provided to “black spaces” and to “white spaces” due to differences in taxable property valuations and subsequent revenues. But he doesn’t offer the obvious game-changer… more qualified black teachers in ALL schools and competition between private and public schools. But competition is capitalism and capitalism is racism… according to Kendi.

The remainder of the book is a series of chapters representing grievances of various victim groups. Some of the Marxist originated terms used include the following:

• Praxis
• Intersectionality
• Critical gender theory
• Critical race theory
• Implicit Bias
• McCarthyism
• Diversity
• Equity
• Inclusion

Regarding the last three, when you see reference to “DEI” on university campuses, think Division, Elitism, and Indoctrination. Marxism must first destroy what exists by dividing us on as many issues as possible. Its staunchest advocates see themselves as the “Dictatorship of the Proletariat”. Indoctrination began at the Frankfurt School in Germany, continued to Columbia University, then to The New School in New York City, to UC Berkely, and ultimately to almost every college and university campus in America and, in recent years to the K-12 public schools of America. And they are not finished; they want to begin the indoctrination at age 2 or 3. Check out the education bills proposed in blue states and you will see that the Marxists are tasting and smelling victory throughout the “Land of the Free”. It is called “cradle to grave”.

McCarthyism

My last word concerning Kendi and his “fellow travelers” regards the period of the 1950s when Wisconsin Senator Joseph Raymond McCarthy almost singlehandedly exposed the communist infiltration of American government, society, and institutions. I have read three excellent books on McCarthy and suggest you do the same. Like too many good men, McCarthy struggled with alcoholism and died at age 48. He is responsible for saving our country from the internal rot of Marxist communism during the period after WWII.

McCarthyism was coined in 1950 in reference to his practices in rooting out communists. McCarthy was vindicated by the VENONA Papers released in 1995. VENONA was a secret program of the U.S. Army’s Signal Intelligence Service that began in 1943 to examine and exploit Soviet espionage efforts and was cancelled in 1980. The six releases of information represented approximately 3,000 translations of Soviet diplomatic messages.

Leftist media and leftist politicians have, for decades, consistently misidentified McCarthyism with the term “witch-hunt”. A witch-hunt is defined as “an attempt to find and punish a particular group of people who are being blamed for something, often because of their opinions and not because they have actually done anything wrong.” In the case of McCarthyism, and due to the analysis since the release of the VENONA intercepts, it is a proven fact that what McCarthy exposed was true.

Personal Experience

While attending a park board meeting in Bismarck years ago, one of the park board members called me an “anarchist” because I was questioning actions of the board. So, I know what it feels like to be falsely accused; I am not an anarchist… I am a conservative.

The next time you hear the term McCarthyism, PLEASE set the record straight. After reading the three books written after the release of the VENONA intercepts, I bristle with contempt every time I hear a leftist use the term. All you have to say is “McCarthy was right; it was not a witch-hunt!”

Love = Work + Courage