The Predator movie franchise is about a race of alien warriors, the Yutja, who travel the universe hunting. The mission of the Yautja is to prove their status as the universe’s apex predator, which they do by going on safari to kill the most formidable prey they can find – which occasionally includes human beings.
The warriors of Yautja live by one law only, the law of nature – the strong take from the weak. The opening of the most recent instalment in the franchise, Predator: Badlands, provides a savage demonstration of the law. A beetle-like insect emerges from the sand, only to be eaten by a scorpion-like insect. Immediately after its feast, the “scorpion” is devoured by a lizard-like creature. But the “lizard” isn’t the apex predator either. It is promptly crushed by Dec a Yautja warrior.
Eventually even Dec fails a test of strength and must face nature’s consequences. His own father Njohrr orders his brother Kwei to kill him. When Kwei refuses, Njohrr kills Kwei, because, “To accept weakness is to show weakness.” The Yautja live by the only law of nature: The fit survive, and the weak perish.
Contrary to media depictions, Mother Nature is not a benevolent goddess of bounty and sustenance. She is a heartless adjudicator of survival, granting survival to those who show no mercy to their prey. Yautja Prime is a global Serengeti in which violence is neither right nor wrong. It simply is. There are no morals, no laws, and no contracts, just the law of nature. Strength takes from the weak.
The law of nature is not unique to the fictional Yautja Prime. It is universal and guided the behavior of human beings for eons, until we took a different fork in the road than the Yautja – which I’ll get to shortly.
Ours is a history of warring tribes, killing and looting from each other to advance their own prosperity. For thousands of years, men killed for food, property, dominance, and even sport – one man taking a weaker man’s possessions, and another taking his life. The cave men made no moral judgement about the practice. It was simply the way life was lived.
That all changed when we started believing that we were not the apex predator – that a higher being governed us, and we lived only at his mercy. We began behaving as we thought our god(s) wanted. It started with altars, monuments, and sacrifices. Then it became the imposition of rules, based on what we presumed our god(s) wanted.
When Moses brought the Ten Commandments down from Mount Sinai, we suddenly had immutable rules to follow – unchanging laws carved into stone rather than scribbled in the sand. Most importantly, they were rules given to us, not presumed by us. We read the rules, and became civilized – followers of the law rather than devotees to violence. We turned away from “survival of the fittest” because we believed we had been ordered to respect each other, by something far more powerful than us.
Killing, cheating, and stealing ceased being acts of survival. They became anti-social behaviors subject to judgement and punishment.
But recognition of a higher authority than ourselves didn’t genetically alter us – violence was still in our nature. Rather, we chose to resist our impulses, because we believed our Creator would reward us for doing so. We changed our behavior, because we had faith in something greater than ourselves. Acceptance that we were not the apex creature, gave us a path to social harmony. The path to peace required respect for the rights of others, as prescribed by the actual apex creature – God.
But, if faith made us civilized, can we remain civilized without faith? Can civil harmony survive when the immutable becomes mutable? When morality ceases being a stone foundation, and becomes shifting sand, can it still support the structures of peaceful civilization?
The secularists have been preaching moral relativism since Protagoras proposed the theory 2,500 years ago. Proponents of moral relativism assure us that we have the authority to define good and evil, if we simply claim our place as the apex creature. Not surprisingly, the notion is aggressively pushed by the political left, which denies God’s role in our governance.
Moral relativism seduced us into declaring the separation of church and state, midway through the last century. Are we living in greater or lesser harmony since Everson v. Board of Education placed a wall between God and government in 1947? Now
- Lawlessness has become “sanctuary,”
- Stealing has become “making the rich pay their fair share,”
- Lying has become “fake but accurate,”
- Rioting has become “mostly peaceful,” and
- Murder is a matter of “context” – if the victim is an Israeli child.
We have been watching our civilization devolve on the nightly news, ever since we claimed ourselves to be the arbiters of good and evil. There is ample evidence that “flexible rules” have not given us social harmony.
After 80 years of testing self-governance with God at arm’s length, it should be obvious that we can have social order with faith, or secularism with chaos, but we cannot have peaceful coexistence without accepting our place in the universe – subservient to a higher being.
If we fail to re-embrace the laws of God, those with the swords will surely embrace the laws of nature. Then Earth will become Yautja Sectator. God will have given us the freedom to choose, and we will have chosen Hell.
This article appeared previously at American Thinker.
Author Bio: John Green is a political refugee from Minnesota, now residing in Idaho. He has written for American Thinker, The American Spectator, Convention of States Action, and American Free News Network. He can be reached at greenjeg@gmail.com.
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