The Establishment Religion: Secular Humanism

According to carly.baldwin@metro.us, at least one MTA board member has reservations about running religious advertising:

• “I don’t think that we should be having any religious ads on our facilities. I understand if you run one, you must run them all. The question is: Should we run any of them? Somebody is going to get offended.”

That’s true! Somebody is going to get offended, but is this a sufficient reason to curtail our freedoms of speech? I get offended by ads for TV shows that promote sexual license, the perfect body, the theory of evolution, and even our thirst for materialistic consumption. Should we ban all ads that might offend? And if the MTA removes the religious ads, atheistic or otherwise, then others will be offended. Where does this reasoning stop?

Actually, I’m not too concerned about the MTA ads. Their effect is probably miniscule compared to the impact of the media and the university, all proselytizing in favor their own religious/philosophical convictions, albeit covertly.

Increasingly, these monopolistic sources of “truth” have successfully resorted to clever means to push their own worldview agendas to the exclusion of others. They too contend that religion shouldn’t have a seat at the table. Religion is about faith, and consequently it should remain personal and private. In line with this thinking, the late Christopher Reeves told a student group at Yale University, “When matters of public policy are debated, no religions should have a seat at the table!”

Why not? Why should the secular humanistic (atheistic) perspective be the only one – the establishment religion? This peculiar and unbalanced thinking has become enshrined as sacred within Western civilization. In this regard, Leslie Newbigin writes,

• “The sharp line which modern western culture has drawn between religious affairs and secular affairs is one of the most significant peculiarities of our culture, and would be incomprehensible to the vast majority of people.”

Many atheists/secular humanists will counter that public discussion should be based upon the common language of facts, not faith. Sadly, we have heard this thinking so often that it begins to ring true. However, this position is based upon several false assumptions:

1. That Christianity is without factual/evidential support.
2. That public discussion can be or is divorced from the sticky moral, value and heart considerations.
3. That the secular position isn’t essentially religious. Even the evolutionist and philosopher Michael Ruse admits, “Evolution came into being as a kind of secular ideology, an explicit substitute for Christianity…an ideology, a secular religion—a full-fledged alternative to Christianity, with meaning and morality... Evolution is a religion.” (The three above quotes are taken from Nancy Pearcey’s Total Truth.)

Indeed, all belief systems are religious. All contain notions of justice, truth, morality, and values. It’s not just those which worship God who are religious. Certainly Buddhism and Confucianism are godless religions, at least in some of their forms, but they are still religions! David Noebel writes that even secular humanism has a “religious creed:

One holy god (mankind) offers a plan of salvation (Humanism) that ensures a future paradise (the global community).”

Being religious is inescapable. It is therefore arbitrary and prejudicial to malign those religions that have a god, while giving the “green light” to those that deny a higher being. Why should monotheism be denied a place at the conversational table, while other religions that affirm the supremacy of Self or the intellect are welcomed?

I post essays on cyber-sites that deal with mental health issues. My essays attempt to show that trusting in Christ bears good mental/emotional fruit as opposed to trusting in self. Occasionally, a respondent will protest, “You’re proselytizing!” OK, maybe I am, but if I am, so too is everyone else with their “you can do it; you got what it takes” religious messages. The atheist George Bernard Shaw had famously stated that all good art is propaganda. I would go one step further – all conversation is propaganda, even if it’s only propaganda to promote oneself.

It is astounding that atheism has been able to pull off perhaps the greatest propaganda-coup of the 20th century by convincing both public and professionals that science is about naturalism – that everything happens according natural, not supernatural laws. However, there isn’t one shred of evidence that things happen because of natural laws. Yes, things happen formulaically and predictably. Objects fall and move in predictable ways according to unchanging laws, but it makes far more sense that these laws proceed supernaturally and intelligently from the mind of God. Nevertheless, the mention of the supernaturalistic paradigm is prohibited in the classroom, while naturalism is blindly assumed and enthroned. Now that’s what I’d call the establishment of a State Religion!

Here is the sad outcome of this silent coup. God cannot be mentioned without ridicule. The militant atheists now are arguing that society should treat with contempt those who spout contemptuous opinions. If you are ridiculous, you should be treated with ridicule! For instance, many evolutionists now argue that they shouldn’t even debate creationists. This would only succeed in giving some semblance of respectability to the creationist position, according to this perverted, uncivil position. Instead, these militants advise showering the creationist or ID theorist with the scorn they “deserve.”

In order to convert their coup into an absolute rout, they argue in favor of silencing Christianity by comparing Christians to Nazis, Jihadists and White Supremists, conveniently forgetting that Western Civilization and everything that the atheist values had been built upon the pages of the Bible. God help us!