Why did racism become so popular? Ask a Darwinist.
Atheists and amoralists had good reason to welcome Darwinism as an excuse for their immoral behavior, as explained neatly by Aldous Huxley:
~~~~~~~
You can find all sorts of men of Darwin weighing in on this subject. One of my earliest posts asserted that Darwinism was a convenient excuse for men to engage in activity not approved by society because of the Judeo-Christian ethic. Remove Christ and replace with hedonism and humanism and stir vigorously = the real reason behind Darwinist teaching. The evidence doesn't support macroevolution at all but Darwinists put up this solid wall of resistance to any questioning of Darwinism, like a bunch of Musk Oxen protecting the weaker calves of the herd, and for much the same reasons. Darwinism cannot stand up to actual scientific scrutiny. So the NCSE, for instance, fights to keep people from investigating any other possibilities. What else can it be but censorship? PZ Myers and Eugenie Scott and Richard Dawkins and those of their ilk line up together, horns out, refusing to allow the weak and defenseless hypothesis to be challenged.
NCSE Staff photo, er, I mean Musk Oxen - image credit: Jo Keller, USFWS; license: public domain
By the way, do you think maybe Eugenie Scott's parents were fans of Eugenics? Was Ron Paul thinking of Ayn Rand when he named his son Rand? Just a thought...
A previous post concerning the philosophy that drives the pseudo-science of Darwinism
"There is a faction of scientists who exclude the supernatural from their possibilities not on the basis of science, but philosophy. Let's hear from some of them:
"Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually- fulfilled atheist." - Richard Dawkins, Darwinian apologist.
"I had motives for not wanting the world to have meaning; consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption ... For myself, as no doubt, for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation. The liberation we desired was simultaneous liberation from a certain political and economic system, and liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom." - Aldous Huxley, philosopher, author, lecturer -(REPORT, June 1966. "Confession of Professed Atheist."}
"We [scientists] have … a prior commitment to materialism [and] we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations… Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.” -Richard Lewontin, “Billions and Billions of Demons,” The New York Review, January 9, 1997, p. 31.
"The Christian church, in its attitude toward science, shows the mind of a more or less enlightened man of the Thirteenth Century. It no longer believes that the earth is flat, but it is still convinced that prayer can cure after medicine fails." - H. L. Mencken
“[I suppose the reason] we all jumped at the Origin [of Species] was because the idea of God interfered with our sexual mores.” - Julian Huxley, British biologist."
If you do not believe the loads of evidence I have presented that has demonstrably shown the links between Darwin and Hitler, Darwin and Eugenics, Darwin and Jim Crow Segregation and etc? If you do not believe the testimony concerning black men being hunted down and shot and then stuffed and presented as specimens for museums? Then apply your logic. Racial fears and hatreds have existed for many centuries. But most belief systems condemned racism. While Darwin was hard at work trying to destroy Christianity and confound science with his hypothesis, Christians in England and America were working hard to end slavery.
Post-Civil War in the United States saw various excesses and abuses as black men and women soon became fully engaged in government and business and academia despite the clusters of racists who held on bitterly to their twisted beliefs. The original Ku Klux Klan was formed more to fight the actions of carpetbaggers than to be a racist club and it disbanded before 1880. At the turn of the 19th - to 20th Century most textbooks proclaimed that the Universe had been created by God and segregation was illegal in the United States. The military was integrated and there were few "Jim Crow" laws in force. But Eugenicists and Darwinists were hard at work promoting Darwinism and, along with it, Social Darwinism. Before long the Ku Klux Klan was being re-formed in small groups across the South and even up into the East and Midwest. Even Wikipedia recognizes the changes in the American society brought about by Eugenicists such as Woodrow Wilson:
"...The phrase "Jim Crow Law" first appeared in 1904 according to the Dictionary of American English,[2] although there is some evidence of earlier usage.[3] [4] The origin of the phrase "Jim Crow" has often been attributed to "Jump Jim Crow", a song-and-dance caricature of African Americans performed by white actor Thomas D. Rice in blackface, which first surfaced in 1832 and was used to satirize Andrew Jackson's populist policies. As a result of Rice's fame, "Jim Crow" had become a pejorative expression meaning "African American" by 1838, and from this the laws of racial segregation became known as Jim Crow laws.[3]
Blacks were still elected to local offices in the 1880s, but the establishment Democrats were passing laws to make voter registration and elections more restrictive, with the result that participation by most blacks and many poor whites began to decrease. Starting with Mississippi in 1890, through 1910 the former Confederate states passed new constitutions or amendments that effectively disfranchised most blacks and tens of thousands of poor whites through a combination of poll taxes, literacy and comprehension tests, and residency and record-keeping requirements. Grandfather clauses temporarily permitted some illiterate whites to vote. Voter turnout dropped drastically through the South as a result of such measures.
Denied the ability to vote, blacks and poor whites could neither serve on juries nor in local office. They could not influence the state legislatures, and their interests were overlooked. While public schools had been established by Reconstruction legislatures, those for black children were consistently underfunded, even when considered within the strained finances of the South. The decreasing price of cotton kept the agricultural economy at a low.
In some cases, progressive measures to reduce election fraud acted against black and poor white voters who were illiterate. While the separation of African Americans from the general population was becoming legalized and formalized in the Progressive Era (1890s–1920s), it was also becoming customary. Even in cases in which Jim Crow laws did not expressly forbid black people to participate, for instance, in sports or recreation or church services, the laws shaped a segregated culture.[3]
In the Jim Crow context, the presidential election of 1912 was steeply slanted against the interests of Black Americans. Most blacks still lived in the South, where they had been effectively disfranchised, so they could not vote at all. While poll taxes and literacy requirements banned many Americans from voting, these stipulations frequently had loopholes that exempted white Americans from meeting the requirements. In Oklahoma, for instance, anyone qualified to vote before 1866, or related to someone qualified to vote before 1866, was exempted from the literacy requirement; the only Americans who could vote before that year were white Americans, such that all white Americans were effectively excluded from the literacy testing, whereas all black Americans were effectively singled out by the law.[6]
Woodrow Wilson, a southern Democrat and the first southern-born president of the postwar period, appointed southerners to his cabinet. Some quickly began to press for segregated work places, although Washington, DC and federal offices had been integrated since after the Civil War. In 1913, for instance, the Secretary of the Treasury William Gibbs McAdoo—an appointee of the President—was heard to express his consternation at black and white women working together in one government office: "I feel sure that this must go against the grain of the white women. Is there any reason why the white women should not have only white women working across from them on the machines?"[7]
President Woodrow Wilson introduced segregation in Federal offices, despite much protest.[8] Wilson appointed Southern politicians who were segregationists, because of his firm belief that racial segregation was in the best interest of black and white Americans alike.[8] At Gettysburg on July 4, 1913, the semi-centennial of Abraham Lincoln's declaration that "all men are created equal", Wilson addressed the crowd:
As Darwin and Eugenics became popularized and accepted, so also did overt racism. Darwinists and Eugenicists have concluded that people of color are "less evolved" than white men and therefore made a distinction betweem the value of the life of a black or brown or yellow person and the "more evolved" whites!
The outrageous concept above was the fundamental driver of Hitler's campaign to kill off the Jews and was the primary reason that, even to this day, most Planned Parenthood offices are located near poor and minority neighborhoods. Abortion was not only pressed upon us by judicial fiat, it was imposed upon society to try to kill off as many people of color or from less wealthy families as possible.
If you believe in Darwinism, you believe that man has evolved from some pool of magic mud somehow becoming a sophisticated organic world consisting of software and hardware harboring supernatural life and information and made up of billions of components and symbiotic organisms and that, along the way, the ancestors of man resembled apes and that people of color are not as far along on the journey to Ubermensch as are the white folks. Deny it if you like, but the actions of Darwinists in the 19th and 20th centuries have left behind tens of millions of graves - mute testimony to the ugly underside of Darwin.
Darwin says, in effect, that man is becoming more and greater over time and that there is no particular value to human life beyond that that other men assign to it. If the strong decide to kill the weak, so be it, that is the way of the Universe.
I prefer the language and philosophy of our Founding Fathers, who wrote this:
"When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness..."
4 For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but sent them to hell,[a] putting them in chains of darkness[b] to be held for judgment; 5 if he did not spare the ancient world when he brought the flood on its ungodly people, but protected Noah, a preacher of righteousness, and seven others; 6 if he condemned the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah by burning them to ashes, and made them an example of what is going to happen to the ungodly; 7 and if he rescued Lot, a righteous man, who was distressed by the depraved conduct of the lawless 8 (for that righteous man, living among them day after day, was tormented in his righteous soul by the lawless deeds he saw and heard)— 9 if this is so, then the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from trials and to hold the unrighteous for punishment on the day of judgment. 10 This is especially true of those who follow the corrupt desire of the flesh[c] and despise authority.
Bold and arrogant, they are not afraid to heap abuse on celestial beings; 11 yet even angels, although they are stronger and more powerful, do not heap abuse on such beings when bringing judgment on them from[d]12 But these people blaspheme in matters they do not understand. They are like unreasoning animals, creatures of instinct, born only to be caught and destroyed, and like animals they too will perish.
13 They will be paid back with harm for the harm they have done. Their idea of pleasure is to carouse in broad daylight. They are blots and blemishes, reveling in their pleasures while they feast with you.[e] 14 With eyes full of adultery, they never stop sinning; they seduce the unstable; they are experts in greed—an accursed brood! 15 They have left the straight way and wandered off to follow the way of Balaam son of Bezer,[f] who loved the wages of wickedness. 16 But he was rebuked for his wrongdoing by a donkey—an animal without speech—who spoke with a human voice and restrained the prophet’s madness.
17 These people are springs without water and mists driven by a storm. Blackest darkness is reserved for them. 18 For they mouth empty, boastful words and, by appealing to the lustful desires of the flesh, they entice people who are just escaping from those who live in error. 19 They promise them freedom, while they themselves are slaves of depravity—for “people are slaves to whatever has mastered them.” 20 If they have escaped the corruption of the world by knowing our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and are again entangled in it and are overcome, they are worse off at the end than they were at the beginning. 21 It would have been better for them not to have known the way of righteousness, than to have known it and then to turn their backs on the sacred command that was passed on to them. 22 Of them the proverbs are true:
“A dog returns to its vomit,”[g] and, “A sow that is washed returns to her wallowing in the mud.”
Aldous Huxley's hidden agenda: 'I had motives...'
In 'Ends and Means' (1937), Aldous Huxley confessed that his reasons for arguing against the message of the Bible were not unbiased and objective philosophical reasons. He 'had an agenda':"I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning; and consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption. The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in pure metaphysics. He is also concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do. For myself, as no doubt for most of my friends, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom. The supporters of this system claimed that it embodied the meaning - the Christian meaning, they insisted - of the world. There was one admirably simple method of confuting these people and justifying ourselves in our erotic revolt: we would deny that the world had any meaning whatever."
Famous writers, academics, and media figures, like Huxley, often 'have an agenda' behind their anti-Christian propaganda. We need to be aware of this, and to understand what their agenda may be, and be ready to respond to this underlying agenda as well as (- perhaps even instead of -) their surface arguments.~~~~~~~
You can find all sorts of men of Darwin weighing in on this subject. One of my earliest posts asserted that Darwinism was a convenient excuse for men to engage in activity not approved by society because of the Judeo-Christian ethic. Remove Christ and replace with hedonism and humanism and stir vigorously = the real reason behind Darwinist teaching. The evidence doesn't support macroevolution at all but Darwinists put up this solid wall of resistance to any questioning of Darwinism, like a bunch of Musk Oxen protecting the weaker calves of the herd, and for much the same reasons. Darwinism cannot stand up to actual scientific scrutiny. So the NCSE, for instance, fights to keep people from investigating any other possibilities. What else can it be but censorship? PZ Myers and Eugenie Scott and Richard Dawkins and those of their ilk line up together, horns out, refusing to allow the weak and defenseless hypothesis to be challenged.
NCSE Staff photo, er, I mean Musk Oxen - image credit: Jo Keller, USFWS; license: public domain
By the way, do you think maybe Eugenie Scott's parents were fans of Eugenics? Was Ron Paul thinking of Ayn Rand when he named his son Rand? Just a thought...
A previous post concerning the philosophy that drives the pseudo-science of Darwinism
That post included these quotes:
"There is a faction of scientists who exclude the supernatural from their possibilities not on the basis of science, but philosophy. Let's hear from some of them:
"Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually- fulfilled atheist." - Richard Dawkins, Darwinian apologist.
"I had motives for not wanting the world to have meaning; consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption ... For myself, as no doubt, for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation. The liberation we desired was simultaneous liberation from a certain political and economic system, and liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom." - Aldous Huxley, philosopher, author, lecturer -(REPORT, June 1966. "Confession of Professed Atheist."}
"We [scientists] have … a prior commitment to materialism [and] we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations… Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.” -Richard Lewontin, “Billions and Billions of Demons,” The New York Review, January 9, 1997, p. 31.
"The Christian church, in its attitude toward science, shows the mind of a more or less enlightened man of the Thirteenth Century. It no longer believes that the earth is flat, but it is still convinced that prayer can cure after medicine fails." - H. L. Mencken
“[I suppose the reason] we all jumped at the Origin [of Species] was because the idea of God interfered with our sexual mores.” - Julian Huxley, British biologist."
So allow me to take the thought to the logical conclusion. Woodrow Wilson or Thomas Huxley or George Wallace or Francis Galton could have paraphrased Dawkins and said, ""Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually- fulfilled racist."
Post-Civil War in the United States saw various excesses and abuses as black men and women soon became fully engaged in government and business and academia despite the clusters of racists who held on bitterly to their twisted beliefs. The original Ku Klux Klan was formed more to fight the actions of carpetbaggers than to be a racist club and it disbanded before 1880. At the turn of the 19th - to 20th Century most textbooks proclaimed that the Universe had been created by God and segregation was illegal in the United States. The military was integrated and there were few "Jim Crow" laws in force. But Eugenicists and Darwinists were hard at work promoting Darwinism and, along with it, Social Darwinism. Before long the Ku Klux Klan was being re-formed in small groups across the South and even up into the East and Midwest. Even Wikipedia recognizes the changes in the American society brought about by Eugenicists such as Woodrow Wilson:
"...The phrase "Jim Crow Law" first appeared in 1904 according to the Dictionary of American English,[2] although there is some evidence of earlier usage.[3] [4] The origin of the phrase "Jim Crow" has often been attributed to "Jump Jim Crow", a song-and-dance caricature of African Americans performed by white actor Thomas D. Rice in blackface, which first surfaced in 1832 and was used to satirize Andrew Jackson's populist policies. As a result of Rice's fame, "Jim Crow" had become a pejorative expression meaning "African American" by 1838, and from this the laws of racial segregation became known as Jim Crow laws.[3]
Origins of Jim Crow laws
During the Reconstruction period of 1865–1877 federal law provided civil rights protection in the South for "freedmen" — the African Americans who had formerly been slaves. In the 1870s, white Democrats gradually returned to power in southern states, sometimes as a result of elections in which paramilitary groups intimidated opponents, attacking blacks or preventing them from voting. Gubernatorial elections were close and disputed in Louisiana for years, with extreme violence unleashed during the campaign. In 1877, a national compromise to gain southern support in the presidential election resulted in the last of the federal troops being withdrawn from the South. White Democrats had regained power in every Southern state.[5] The white, Democratic Party Redeemer government that followed the troop withdrawal legislated Jim Crow laws segregating black people from the state's white population.Blacks were still elected to local offices in the 1880s, but the establishment Democrats were passing laws to make voter registration and elections more restrictive, with the result that participation by most blacks and many poor whites began to decrease. Starting with Mississippi in 1890, through 1910 the former Confederate states passed new constitutions or amendments that effectively disfranchised most blacks and tens of thousands of poor whites through a combination of poll taxes, literacy and comprehension tests, and residency and record-keeping requirements. Grandfather clauses temporarily permitted some illiterate whites to vote. Voter turnout dropped drastically through the South as a result of such measures.
Denied the ability to vote, blacks and poor whites could neither serve on juries nor in local office. They could not influence the state legislatures, and their interests were overlooked. While public schools had been established by Reconstruction legislatures, those for black children were consistently underfunded, even when considered within the strained finances of the South. The decreasing price of cotton kept the agricultural economy at a low.
In some cases, progressive measures to reduce election fraud acted against black and poor white voters who were illiterate. While the separation of African Americans from the general population was becoming legalized and formalized in the Progressive Era (1890s–1920s), it was also becoming customary. Even in cases in which Jim Crow laws did not expressly forbid black people to participate, for instance, in sports or recreation or church services, the laws shaped a segregated culture.[3]
In the Jim Crow context, the presidential election of 1912 was steeply slanted against the interests of Black Americans. Most blacks still lived in the South, where they had been effectively disfranchised, so they could not vote at all. While poll taxes and literacy requirements banned many Americans from voting, these stipulations frequently had loopholes that exempted white Americans from meeting the requirements. In Oklahoma, for instance, anyone qualified to vote before 1866, or related to someone qualified to vote before 1866, was exempted from the literacy requirement; the only Americans who could vote before that year were white Americans, such that all white Americans were effectively excluded from the literacy testing, whereas all black Americans were effectively singled out by the law.[6]
Woodrow Wilson, a southern Democrat and the first southern-born president of the postwar period, appointed southerners to his cabinet. Some quickly began to press for segregated work places, although Washington, DC and federal offices had been integrated since after the Civil War. In 1913, for instance, the Secretary of the Treasury William Gibbs McAdoo—an appointee of the President—was heard to express his consternation at black and white women working together in one government office: "I feel sure that this must go against the grain of the white women. Is there any reason why the white women should not have only white women working across from them on the machines?"[7]
President Woodrow Wilson introduced segregation in Federal offices, despite much protest.[8] Wilson appointed Southern politicians who were segregationists, because of his firm belief that racial segregation was in the best interest of black and white Americans alike.[8] At Gettysburg on July 4, 1913, the semi-centennial of Abraham Lincoln's declaration that "all men are created equal", Wilson addressed the crowd:
A Washington Bee editorial wondered if the "reunion" of 1913 was a reunion of those who fought for "the extinction of slavery" or a reunion of those who fought to "perpetuate slavery and who are now employing every artifice and argument known to deceit" to present emancipation as a failed venture.[9] One historian notes that the "Peace Jubilee" at which Wilson presided at Gettysburg in 1913 "was a Jim Crow reunion, and white supremacy might be said to have been the silent, invisible master of ceremonies."[9] (See also: Great Reunion of 1913)..."How complete the union has become and how dear to all of us, how unquestioned, how benign and majestic, as state after state has been added to this, our great family of free men![9]
As Darwin and Eugenics became popularized and accepted, so also did overt racism. Darwinists and Eugenicists have concluded that people of color are "less evolved" than white men and therefore made a distinction betweem the value of the life of a black or brown or yellow person and the "more evolved" whites!
The outrageous concept above was the fundamental driver of Hitler's campaign to kill off the Jews and was the primary reason that, even to this day, most Planned Parenthood offices are located near poor and minority neighborhoods. Abortion was not only pressed upon us by judicial fiat, it was imposed upon society to try to kill off as many people of color or from less wealthy families as possible.
If you believe in Darwinism, you believe that man has evolved from some pool of magic mud somehow becoming a sophisticated organic world consisting of software and hardware harboring supernatural life and information and made up of billions of components and symbiotic organisms and that, along the way, the ancestors of man resembled apes and that people of color are not as far along on the journey to Ubermensch as are the white folks. Deny it if you like, but the actions of Darwinists in the 19th and 20th centuries have left behind tens of millions of graves - mute testimony to the ugly underside of Darwin.
Darwin says, in effect, that man is becoming more and greater over time and that there is no particular value to human life beyond that that other men assign to it. If the strong decide to kill the weak, so be it, that is the way of the Universe.
I prefer the language and philosophy of our Founding Fathers, who wrote this:
"When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness..."
I therefore assert that Darwinists are not only anti-God, they are anti-freedom, for they deny the source of all life and liberty, the Creator God who has both made them and the world in which they live in a state of continual denial. Furthermore I assert that Darwinism goes hand-in-hand with racism and in order to completely stamp out racism we will need to erase Darwinism from both society and science. Therefore all so-called Christians who lead efforts to replace creation with Darwinist evolution are at odds with God and are thus aligned with lies and depravity, for if there was no original sin neither would there be a need or a use for a Messiah. Replace creation with evolution and in so doing you deny Christ!
I will end with giving God the last word -
2 Peter 2 (New International Version, ©2011)
2 Peter 2
False Teachers and Their Destruction
1 But there were also false prophets among the people, just as there will be false teachers among you. They will secretly introduce destructive heresies, even denying the sovereign Lord who bought them—bringing swift destruction on themselves. 2 Many will follow their depraved conduct and will bring the way of truth into disrepute. 3 In their greed these teachers will exploit you with fabricated stories. Their condemnation has long been hanging over them, and their destruction has not been sleeping.4 For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but sent them to hell,[a] putting them in chains of darkness[b] to be held for judgment; 5 if he did not spare the ancient world when he brought the flood on its ungodly people, but protected Noah, a preacher of righteousness, and seven others; 6 if he condemned the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah by burning them to ashes, and made them an example of what is going to happen to the ungodly; 7 and if he rescued Lot, a righteous man, who was distressed by the depraved conduct of the lawless 8 (for that righteous man, living among them day after day, was tormented in his righteous soul by the lawless deeds he saw and heard)— 9 if this is so, then the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from trials and to hold the unrighteous for punishment on the day of judgment. 10 This is especially true of those who follow the corrupt desire of the flesh[c] and despise authority.
Bold and arrogant, they are not afraid to heap abuse on celestial beings; 11 yet even angels, although they are stronger and more powerful, do not heap abuse on such beings when bringing judgment on them from[d]12 But these people blaspheme in matters they do not understand. They are like unreasoning animals, creatures of instinct, born only to be caught and destroyed, and like animals they too will perish.
13 They will be paid back with harm for the harm they have done. Their idea of pleasure is to carouse in broad daylight. They are blots and blemishes, reveling in their pleasures while they feast with you.[e] 14 With eyes full of adultery, they never stop sinning; they seduce the unstable; they are experts in greed—an accursed brood! 15 They have left the straight way and wandered off to follow the way of Balaam son of Bezer,[f] who loved the wages of wickedness. 16 But he was rebuked for his wrongdoing by a donkey—an animal without speech—who spoke with a human voice and restrained the prophet’s madness.
17 These people are springs without water and mists driven by a storm. Blackest darkness is reserved for them. 18 For they mouth empty, boastful words and, by appealing to the lustful desires of the flesh, they entice people who are just escaping from those who live in error. 19 They promise them freedom, while they themselves are slaves of depravity—for “people are slaves to whatever has mastered them.” 20 If they have escaped the corruption of the world by knowing our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and are again entangled in it and are overcome, they are worse off at the end than they were at the beginning. 21 It would have been better for them not to have known the way of righteousness, than to have known it and then to turn their backs on the sacred command that was passed on to them. 22 Of them the proverbs are true:
“A dog returns to its vomit,”[g] and, “A sow that is washed returns to her wallowing in the mud.”
Footnotes:
- 2 Peter 2:4 Greek Tartarus
- 2 Peter 2:4 Some manuscripts in gloomy dungeons
- 2 Peter 2:10 In contexts like this, the Greek word for flesh (sarx) refers to the sinful state of human beings, often presented as a power in opposition to the Spirit; also in verse 18.
- 2 Peter 2:11 Many manuscripts beings in the presence of
- 2 Peter 2:13 Some manuscripts in their love feasts
- 2 Peter 2:15 Greek Bosor
- 2 Peter 2:22 Prov. 26:11