By Christian Newswire ——Bio and Archives--August 5, 2008
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'In early democracies, as in American democracy at the time of its birth, all individual human rights were granted because man is God's creature. That is, freedom was given to the individual conditionally, in the assumption of his constant religious responsibility. Such was the heritage of the preceding thousand years. Two hundred or even fifty years ago, it would have seemed quite impossible, in America, that an individual could be granted boundless freedom simply for the satisfaction of his instincts or whims. Subsequently, however, all such limitations were discarded everywhere in the West; a total liberation occurred from the moral heritage of Christian centuries with their great reserves of mercy and sacrifice. State systems were becoming increasingly and totally materialistic. The West ended up by truly enforcing human rights, sometimes even excessively, but man's sense of responsibility to God and society grew dimmer and dimmer. In the past decades, the legalistically selfish aspect of Western approach and thinking has reached its final dimension and the world wound up in a harsh spiritual crisis and a political impasse. All the glorified technological achievements of Progress, including the conquest of outer space, do not redeem the Twentieth century's moral poverty which no one could imagine even as late as in the Nineteenth Century.'"The courage of Solzhenitsyn to boldly speak truth in the face of tremendous opposition touched the lives of many individuals, including myself. The name Alexander Solzhenitsyn was spoken almost daily in my home as a boy because my father, Howard Phillips, viewed Solzhenitsyn as 'the greatest man of the 20th century.' Dad required that we know Solzhenitsyn and his writings. Books like the 'Gulag Archipelago' and 'One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich' were an important part of my training as a boy. My own sister, Alexandra, was named after the Nobel Prize winning author. "The message of Solzhenitsyn's life was opposition to statist tyranny and the imperative of Christian morality to freedom. This message should be remembered as America approaches the Beijing Olympics. Communism is not dead. Nor is the world free from the ravages of statism and tyranny. Nor have we yet to understand the implications of Solzhenitsyn's life message and 'Warning to the West.' We will be a moral and Christ-loving people, or we will cease to be a people."
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