Viktor Frankl, a Nazi Victim who Led Millions to Find the Meaning of Life

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Article #361

by Bill Nugent

 

Austrian psychologist Viktor Frankl (1905 -1997) suffered the horrors of internment in four Nazi concentration camps from 1942 to 1945. He was able to survive the unspeakable abuse and deprivation by focusing on the real purpose and meaning of human existence.

 

Born to a Jewish family in Vienna, Frankl developed a school of psychology in the 1930s called logotherapy in which he treated patients by causing them to search for and find the meaning of life. He regarded the meaning of life as the greatest and most basic human motivation. Frankl found the ultimate meaning of life in religious rather than materialistic values.

 

Frankl connected psychology to religion at a time when Sigmund Freud was focusing on sex and pleasure as the most basic human motive and Alfred Adler was focusing on power as the main motive.

 

Freud and Adler instituted the First and Second Viennese schools of psychology. Frankl’s logotherapy is considered to be the Third School of Viennese Psychology.

 

Frankl married nurse Tilly Grosser in 1941. The following year he and his family were deported to the Nazi concentration camps. Tilly was separated from him and she died at Bergen Belsen. Frankl was able to survive in the camps because of his tenacious grasp of the meaning of life and his desire to help his fellow prisoners endure the horrific treatment by focusing on the larger issues of life.

 

After liberation he wrote the book, “Man’s Search for Meaning” in a stunning burst of inspiration over a nine day period. This book became an international bestseller, published in more than 20 languages and had an incalculable impact on millions of people. The book is an autobiographical sketch of Frankl’s life and poignantly describes his struggles and triumphs during his time in the Nazi camps.

 

Shortly after World War II he married a Roman Catholic lady named Eleonore Schwindt. They attended church and synagogue and celebrated Christmas and Hanukkah. Frankl was very respectful of both Judaism and Christianity. Frankl saw no purpose in a secular, atheistic, materialistic world which claims humans evolved from apes, have no souls and have no conscious existence after death.

 

 

The Meta-Narrative of Civilization

 

 

Every civilization must have a meta-narrative. Frankl, wrote many books and gave many lectures and drew his meta-narrative from belief in God. “Meta-narrative” is a fancy way of saying “the over-arching reason why we live.” It’s the transcendent story or summation of values or worldview that guides a civilization.

 

The dominant religion of the ruling elite of Europe and America is a secular mishmash of ethical platitudes. This secular religion has produced no coherent meta-narrative.

 

Bible based Christianity has given us the true meta-narrative. The Westminster Shorter Catechism (1647) states that the purpose of man is to “glorify God and enjoy Him forever.”

The meaning of life which Frankl sought all his days is to receive Christ as Savior and follow Him as Lord. Frankl was a Jewish man who had a great deal of respect for Christianity. God knows if he ever received Christ into his heart. I hope he did.

 

The secular, politically correct cabal of woke culturists that currently rule the United States of America has no vision for the future of America. They have no meta-narrative. They’ve rejected biblical revelation. They have no transcendent narrative or story as a guiding light to produce a happy and productive society.

 

A meta-narrative can also be called absolute truth. Absolute truth is a code of morals or moral truths that are transcendent and are given from above. Absolute truth or absolute morals are morals that apply to all people in all cultures at all times. The reason why secularists do not have absolute truth is because they don’t believe in the absolute truth giver, who is the creator, God.

 

 

They Deny God as Creator Because of Darwinism

 

 

The whole edifice of secularism rests squarely on the foundation of atheistic Darwinian evolution. Darwinism is the origins myth of secularism. Their whole worldview goes back to their denial of God as creator. They claim that living things formed by accident.

 

If they deny God as Creator, they deny the authority of the Ten Commandments, the Sermon on the Mount and all the guiding lights of absolute truth that are given by divine revelation in the Bible.

 

Each of us has a smartphone. You might be reading this article on a smartphone. Let me start by saying that the simplest bacterial cell is more complex than a smartphone. A bacterial cell could never form by itself, by accident in the early earth.

 

A simple bacterial cell such as e-coli is composed of over 200 different types of protein. Each of these proteins is a complex compound composed of over 400 amino acids that must be sequenced in precise order to make each protein functional. The proteins then must be properly assembled to build a bacterium capable of life.

 

The secularists want us to believe that the first bacterial cell formed spontaneously in the primordial ooze of the early earth. They say it could happen without a creator.

 

There have been been numerous scientists, including microbiologist Harold Morowitz, who have run the numbers and done the math on the on the probability of even the simplest cell forming by unguided collisions of atoms.

 

The number they’ve worked out is less than one in ten to the 90 billionth power. This shows that a simple bacterial cell could essentially never form by random collisions of atoms. We see that spontaneous generation, or as it is more commonly called now, abiogenesis, is impossible. That’s just the first step of evolution.

 

The fossil record does not conform to what is predicted by evolutionary assumptions. We have fossils of complex organisms that are buried beneath fossils of their alleged ancestors!

 

All the evidence points to the need for a super-intelligent designer and builder of all living things: God!

 

Evolution is taught as fact in our public schools in the United States and in government-run schools in Europe, Asia and other parts of the world. Young children are being brainwashed into a secular faith that claims that life self-assembled and there’s no God and there’s no revelation, no absolute truth, no absolute morals, no meta-narrative and no purpose for life.

 

The secularists at the top of governments on Earth have been brainwashed by the school systems and the universities and trained to believe in secularism. This is why they believe that the only hope for humanity is to build a Utopia on Earth according to their materialistic precepts. Viktor Frankl was not fooled by the claims of totalitarian secularists. Neither should we.

 

 

The Great Reset

 

 

Right now the elite, including radicalized billionaires and some members of the World Economic Forum are pushing something called The Great Reset. The Great Reset is a radical agenda of implementation of totalitarian police state controls and digital surveillance to control the world population.

 

The radical secular elitists plan to reduce the standard of living of the world population so that human life can be “sustainable.” Climate change is the pretext for implementing radical controls to reduce human consumption to reduce pollution to reduce greenhouse gases.

 

The recent Covid pandemic and climate change alarmism are the two-headed Trojan horse to get people to embrace governmental surveillance through financial controls implemented through a digital one world currency. This is a central part of the Great Reset.

 

Once money is digitized and cash eliminated, every transaction must be done on a device and be trackable so they have complete surveillance of the people and complete taxation of the people. No money can be hidden. They’ll know what you spent, what you spent it on, where you traveled and what political conferences you attended.

 

When currency is digitized, then they can impose global taxation and a one world government with a global legislature, global executive, global judiciary, global martial law and global repeal of the Bill of Rights.

 

This would be enforced by confiscations, account freezes, negative interest rates, living standards reduced to sustainable levels to wipe out the middle class which consume too much in the eyes of the one percent. The 1% would have all the power and the wealth.

 

 

What We Must Do Now

 

 

The way to combat this is by taking seven definitive steps:

 

1) Warn people about about the elite’s plans. This is an information war. Get the truth out to friends and family in written form, video form, any form you can.

 

2) Vote every chance you get!! Vote for candidates who promote personal morality, freedom and power to the people. Vote in every off-year election, primary election and general election.

 

3) Volunteer to be a poll watcher and vote counter. The election board will pay you to do this! Elections are stolen largely because of one party precincts. There are precincts in the inner cities of America that are essentially 90% voters for socialism. This means all the poll watchers are members of the party of socialism. This is because there are just not enough members of the party of limited government in that precinct to have many poll watchers. The socialists control the whole process and they count the votes. They don’t report their totals until all the other precincts out in the suburbs and rural areas have reported. Once the rural precinct numbers are in and it’s on the news on election night, then they know how many votes they need to put their socialist candidate over the top. They do ballot box stuffing by printing fake mail-in ballots or by using electronic digital means to inflate the vote count for the socialist candidate. In order to counteract this we must be poll watchers in the one party precincts. It’s up to us to find out how to contact the election board and become poll watchers. You can go into the inner city precincts and do the actual vote counting yourself on election night. (see precinctstrategy.com.)

 

4) Serve on a jury. We must be willing to serve on juries. Juries make big decisions regarding controversial cases. You can preserve liberty through serving on a jury.

 

5) Call, write and visit public officials. Let’s inundate the mailboxes and voicemails of our senators, congressmen and mayors. They are moved by concerned citizens.

 

6) Run for public office or apply for work in civil service. Become the legislator, bureaucrat or police officer. You can drive public policy and the pay is good.

 

7) This is the most important step: PRAY, PRAY, PRAY and fast!!

Second Chronicles 7:14 says: “If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.”

 

Many secular people are seeing the vacuous nature of the claims of atheistic materialism and its lack of moral guidance and absolute truth. They are beginning to ponder and consider that there is something more to life. Secular people are taking a new look at Christianity. We can introduce them to Jesus. Jesus Christ is the promised Messiah of Israel and He is the only begotten Son of God.

 

We can show them that Jesus came in fulfillment of over 300 Old testament prophecies. No other figure in all of world history can make this claim. Jesus worked miracles and His followers work miracles of healing today. Jesus took the penalty of our sins upon Himself when he suffered and died.  Isaiah the prophet predicted this hundreds of years before the birth of Christ. “All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the LORD hath laid on him the iniquity of us all” (Isaiah 53:6).  Jesus rose from the dead to offer salvation and forgiveness of sins to all who call upon Him in repentance. I invite you to turn to Christ today to receive forgiveness of sins.

 

(c) 2022, William P. Nugent, Permission granted to email or republish for Christian outreach.

Steps to salvation:

Jesus said “Ye must be born again” (John 3:7).

  • 1) Believe that God created you and loves you and sent the Messiah (Messiah is Hebrew for Christ) to redeem you.
  • 2) Believe that Jesus Christ came in fulfillment of over 300 Bible prophecies to die for you, to take upon Himself the penalty of your sins (Isaiah 53:5-6, John 6:29, Romans 4:5, First Peter 3:18).
  • 3) Turn from sin and call on the name of Jesus to receive forgiveness of sins (Romans 10:13).
  • 4) Receive Jesus as Savior and experience the new birth (John 1:12, Acts 2:38).
  • 5) Follow Jesus Christ as Lord (John 14:21).

Prayer to receive salvation:

“Whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved” (Romans 10:13).

To receive the salvation that Jesus purchased for us at the terrible cost of His suffering and death on our behalf I invite you to pray this simple prayer:

“Dear heavenly Father, I thank you for sending Jesus, the promised Messiah, to die for my sins. I admit that I am a sinner. I repent of my sins and I ask for your forgiveness on the basis of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. I ask you to fill me with your Holy Spirit to empower me to serve you under the Lordship of Jesus Christ, Amen.”

If you prayed this prayer in the humble sincerity of your heart then you have received everlasting life, which includes power to live right in this life and entrance into heaven in the afterlife!



(C) 2016 William P. Nugent, permission granted to email or republish for Christian outreach.

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