August 30, 2017

Hugh Hefner

Playboy Mansion

16236 Charing Cross Road

Los Angeles, CA 90024

Dear Hugh,

Last month I wrote you about Milton Friedman and asked you if you ever met him. Today I want to return to the subject of Milton Friedman.

Again I am quoting from an interview your magazine did with Milton Friedman in 1973.

A 1973 INTERVIEW WITH MILTON FRIEDMAN – PLAYBOY MAGAZINE

February 21, 2010, 10:57 pm
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: economics, Milton Friedman

PLAYBOY: Even if a consensus of right and left could be achieved on a modified version of your flat-rate tax proposal, there are many critics—particularly among the young—of what they feel are your basic assumptions. How would you answer those who claim that capitalism cannot foster a just and orderly society, since it’s based on the emotion of greed?
FRIEDMAN: What kind of society isn’t structured on greed? As a friend of mine says, the one thing you can absolutely depend on every other person to do is to put his interests ahead of yours. Now, his interests may not be greedy in a narrow, selfish sense. Some people’s self-interest is to save the world. Some people’s self-interest is to do good for others. Florence Nightingale pursued her own self-interest through charitable activities. Rockefeller pursued his self-interest in setting up the Rockefeller Foundation. But for most people, most of the time, self-interest is greed.
So the problem of social organization is how to set up an arrangement under which greed will do the least harm. It seems to me that the great virtue of capitalism is that it’s that kind of system. Because under capitalism, the power of any one individual over his fellow man is relatively small. You take the richest capitalist in the world; his power over you and me is trivial compared with the power that a Brezhnev or a Kosygin has in Russia. Or even compared in the United States with the power that an official of the Internal Revenue Service has over you. An official of the IRS can put you in jail. I doubt that there is a person in the United States who couldn’t be convicted of technical violation of some aspect of the personal income tax.
One of the great dangers I see in the American situation is that there is a strong temptation in government to use the income tax for other purposes. It’s been done. When gangsters couldn’t be convicted under the laws they had really violated, they were gotten on income-tax evasion. When John F. Kennedy threatened steel executives in 1962 to get them to drive down their prices, there was the implicit threat that all their taxes would be looked at. Now, that is a much more serious threat—the power an official has in the pursuit of his self-interest—than anything Howard Hughes is capable of. We want the kind of world in which greedy people can do the least harm to their fellow men. That’s the kind of world in which power is widely dispersed and each of us has as many alternatives as possible.

_________

Looking back on your life it seems to me that you can see the evils of the power of a big government.

____

_

__

John Lofton noted: “DR. FRIEDMAN an evolutionist with ‘values’ of unknown origin but he said they were not ‘accidental.’ “

_____________

_

On October 19, 2015, I wrote my first letter to you and in it I wrote these words:

I have read up on you and watched a lot of your interviews on YOU TUBE and I am very impressed that you have been open about talking about the big questions of life and also your willingness to be interviewed by people such as William F. Buckley and Lee Strobel. It is my view that is because of your attempt to reconcile the Biblical teaching you got from Grace Hefner when you grew up to your beliefs now.

______________________

Hugh Hefner in High School

__________

Hefner family below:

Here is an excerpt of your interview that I found very interesting:

LEE STROBEL: If you could ask God any one question, and you knew
He’d give you an answer, what would you ask?

HUGH HEFNER: Oh I think the one question I’d really like to know is
uh the question related to an after life. And the other question is
the meaning of it all.

___________

In my last letter on July 30, 2017 I tried to point out that without God in the picture there can be no lasting meaning to our lives. I pointed out that Milton Friedman embraced evolution  but he did not want to admit that his values just came about accidentally. We can see this too in the life of Carl Sagan. Just like YOU,  HUGH,  CARL SAGAN WANTED TO GET DOWN TO THE MEANING OF IT ALL and to the answers to ULTIMATE QUESTIONS.

Rice Broocks in his book GOD’S NOT DEAD noted:

Astronomer Carl Sagan was a prolific writer and trustee of the SETI Institute (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) founded in 1984 to scan the universe for any signs of life beyond earth. Sagan’s best-selling work COSMOS also became an award-winning television series explaining the wonders of the universe and exporting the belief not in an intelligent Creator but in potential intelligent aliens. He believed somehow that by knowing who they are, we would discover who we as humans really are. “The very thought of there being other beings different from all of us can have a very useful cohering role for the human species” (quoted from you tube clip “Carl Sagan appears on CBC to discuss the importance of SETI [Carl Sagan Archives]” at the 7 minute mark, Oct 1988 ). Sagan reasoning? If aliens could have contacted us, knowing how impossible it is for us to reach them, they would have the answers we seek to our ULTIMATE QUESTIONS. This thought process shows the desperate need we have as humans for answers to the great questions of our existence. Does life have any ultimate meaning and purpose? Do we as humans have any more value than the other animals? Is there a purpose to the universe, or more specifically, to our individual lives?

Carl Sagan had to live  in the world that God made with the conscience that God gave him. This created a tension. As you know the movie CONTACT was written by Carl Sagan and it was about Dr. Arroway’s SEARCH FOR EXTRATERRESTRIAL INTELLIGENCE (SETI) program and her desire to make contact with aliens and ask them questions. It is my view that Sagan should have examined more closely  the accuracy of the Bible and it’s fulfilled prophecies from the Old Testament in particular before chasing after aliens from other planets for answers. Sagan himself had written,”Plainly, there’s something within me that’s ready to believe in life after death…If some good evidence for life after death was announced, I’d be eager to examine it; but it would have to be real scientific data, not mere antedote”(pp 203-204, The DemonHaunted World, 1995).

Sagan said he had taken a look at Old Testament prophecy and it did not impress him because it was too vague. He had taken a look at Christ’s life in the gospels, but said it was unrealistic for God to send a man to communicate for God. Instead, Sagan suggested that God could have written a mathematical formula in the Bible or put a cross in the sky. However, what happens at the conclusion of the movie CONTACT?  This is Sagan’s last message to the world in the form of the movie that appeared shortly after his death. Dr Arroway (Jodie Foster) who is a young atheistic scientist who meets with an alien and this alien takes the form of Dr. Arroway’s father. The alien tells her that they thought this would make it easier for her. In fact, he meets her on a beach that resembles a beach that she grew up near so she would also be comfortable with the surroundings. Carl Sagan when writing this script chose to put the alien in human form so Dr. Arroway could relate to the alien. Christ chose to take our form and come into our world too and still many make up excuses for not believing.

_

Lastly, Carl Sagan could not rid himself of the “mannishness of man.” Those who have read Francis Schaeffer’s many books know exactly what I am talking about. We are made in God’s image and we are living in God’s world. Therefore, we can not totally suppress the objective truths of our unique humanity. In my letter of Jan 10, 1996 to Dr. Sagan, I really camped out on this point a long time because I had read Sagan’s  book SHADOWS OF FORGOTTON ANCESTORS  and in it  Sagan attempts to  totally debunk the idea that we are any way special. However, what does Dr. Sagan have Dr. Arroway say at the end of the movie CONTACT when she is testifying before Congress about the alien that  communicated with her? See if you can pick out the one illogical word in her statement: “I was given a vision how tiny, insignificant, rare and precious we all are. We belong to something that is greater than ourselves and none of us are alone.”

_

Contact (movie) Jodie Foster Speech at Final Hearing

Dr Sagan deep down knows that we are special so he could not avoid putting the word “precious” in there. Francis Schaeffer said unbelievers are put in a place of tension when they have to live in the world that God has made because deep down they know they are special because God has put that knowledge in their hearts.We are not the result of survival of the fittest and headed back to the dirt forevermore. This is what Schaeffer calls “taking the roof off” of the unbeliever’s worldview and showing the inconsistency that exists.

__

In several of my letters to Sagan I quoted this passage below:

Romans 1:17-22 (Amplified Bible)

¹⁷For in the Gospel a righteousness which God ascribes is revealed, both springing from faith and leading to faith [disclosed through the way of faith that arouses to more faith]. As it is written, The man who through faith is just and upright shall live and shall live by faith.^(A)

¹⁸For God’s [holy] wrath and indignation are revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who in their wickedness repress and hinder the truth and make it inoperative.

¹⁹For that which is known about God is evident to them and made plain in their inner consciousness, because God [Himself] has shown it to them.

²⁰For ever since the creation of the world His invisible nature and attributes, that is, His eternal power and divinity, have been made intelligible and clearly discernible in and through the things that have been made (His handiworks). So [men] are without excuse [altogether without any defense or justification],^(B)

²¹Because when they knew and recognized Him as God, they did not honor and glorify Him as God or give Him thanks. But instead they became futile and ^[a]godless in their thinking [with vain imaginings, foolish reasoning, and stupid speculations] and their senseless minds were darkened.

²²Claiming to be wise, they became fools [professing to be smart, they made simpletons of themselves].

__________________________________________

Can a man  or a woman find lasting meaning without God? Three thousand years ago, Solomon took a look at life “under the sun” in his book of Ecclesiastes. Christian scholar Ravi Zacharias has noted, “The key to understanding the Book of Ecclesiastes is the term ‘under the sun.’ What that literally means is you lock God out of a closed system, and you are left with only this world of time plus chance plus matter.”

Let me show you some inescapable conclusions if you choose to live without God in the picture. Solomon came to these same conclusions when he looked at life “under the sun.”

1. Death is the great equalizer (Eccl 3:20, “All go to the same place; all come from dust, and to dust all return.”)
2. Chance and time have determined the past, and they will determine the future.  (Ecclesiastes 9:11-13 “I have seen something else under the sun:  The race is not to the swift
   or the battle to the strong, nor does food come to the wise or wealth to the brilliant  or favor to the learned; but time and chance happen to them all.  Moreover, no one knows when their hour will come: As fish are caught in a cruel net, or birds are taken in a snare, so people are trapped by evil times  that fall unexpectedly upon them.”)
3. Power reigns in this life, and the scales are not balanced(Eccl 4:1; “Again I looked and saw all the oppression that was taking place under the sun: I saw the tears of the oppressed—
   and they have no comforter; power was on the side of their oppressors—  and they have no comforter.” 7:15 “In this meaningless life of mine I have seen both of these: the righteous perishing in their righteousness,  and the wicked living long in their wickedness. ).
4. Nothing in life gives true satisfaction without God including knowledge (1:16-18), ladies and liquor (2:1-3, 8, 10, 11), and great building projects (2:4-6, 18-20).
5. There is no ultimate lasting meaning in life. (1:2)

By the way, the final chapter of Ecclesiastes finishes with Solomon emphasizing that serving God is the only proper response of man. Solomon looks above the sun and brings God back into the picture in the final chapter of the book in Ecclesiastes 12:13-14:

13 Now all has been heard;
here is the conclusion of the matter:
Fear God and keep his commandments,
for this is the whole duty of man.

14 For God will bring every deed into judgment,
including every hidden thing,
whether it is good or evil

__

The answer to find meaning in life is found in putting your faith and trust in Jesus Christ. The Bible is true from cover to cover and can be trusted.

Thanks for your time.

Sincerely,

Everette Hatcher, everettehatcher@gmail.com, http://www.thedailyhatch.org, cell ph 501-920-5733, Box 23416, LittleRock, AR 72221

The Evidence for Jesus’ Resurrection/Program 3

By: The John Ankerberg Show (from 2007)

Lee Strobel:

Yeah. I had a chance to go to the Playboy Mansion, interview Hugh Hefner for a TV program that I was doing. And I asked him about the resurrection. And he seemed confused. And I said, “What about the evidence for the resurrection?” and he said, “What are you talking about?” And I said, “What do you do with the historical data that support the return of Jesus from the dead?” And he said, “I have never heard this before.” And I gave him a copy of my book The Case for Christ. And he was looking through the Table of Contents and said, “This is fascinating. Nobody has ever told me this before.”

And then he said something very interesting. He said, “If this is true, this trips a whole bunch of dominoes that have a wonderful effect.” He said, “I am getting to be an old man. I wish it were true that there were eternal life.” And I said, “You know what, look into the evidence yourself. Come to your own verdict. But I am telling you there is convincing, there is powerful, persuasive, compelling evidence that Jesus did return from the dead. And when He tells His followers they will spend eternity with Him, we can believe Him as a result.”

Adrian Rogers: The Playboy’s Payday [#1001] (Audio)

_

Related posts: