Should Religious Dogma be Left at the Door

Does religion or religious conviction have a place in public conversation? Many secularists insist that religion is of faith and science is of facts that can be publicly evaluated. Therefore, religion should be kept at home or just among the faithful. 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? One secularist tried to justify this position by claiming that religious assertions are not amenable to reason, therefore shouldn’t be taken into the public:

·       [Religious] dogma should be checked at the door, as it is inappropriate for a philosophy discussion. Dogma has its place, but that is not in a philosophy discussion. One of the eternal truths within philosophy is that appeals to authority [like the Bible] are logical fallacies - our appeals within philosophy should be limited to reason.

However, secularism - secular humanism - is also religious in nature, containing its own foundational values:

·       BERTRAND RUSSELL: “The greatest danger in our day comes from new religions, communism and Nazism. To call these religions may perhaps be objectionable both to their friends and enemies, but in fact they have all the characteristics of religions…”

·       THE FIRST HUMANIST MANIFESTO (Paul Kurtz, 1933): “Humanism is a philosophical, religious, and moral point of view.”

·       JOHN DEWEY, WHO SIGNED THE MANIFESTO: “Here are all the elements for a religious faith that shall not be confined to sect, class or race…It remains to make it explicit and militant.”

·       THE US SUPREME COURT (Torasco v. Watkins – 1961): “Among religions in this country which do not teach what would generally be considered a belief in the existence of God are Buddhism, Taoism, Ethical Culture, Secular Humanism and others.”

Some secularists still admit that their beliefs are religious. Evolutionist Michael Ruse admits that:

·       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.

Even atheists are now creating their own churches! They are just as religious and even as evangelistic as the rest of us. They are also:

1.     Secular Humanists

2.     Moral Relativists

3.     Materialists

4.     Naturalists

Are any of their beliefs evidentially or reasonably supportable? No! Although we all engage in moral reasoning, a set of values must first be accepted before reason can assist in applying them. However, reason alone cannot derive values.

If this is so, the Christian should not be rejected because of his values, while the secularist or other religionists are given a free-pass. This is just outright discrimination! For instance, the courts have hypocritically ruled against the teaching of ID (or even any mention of it), claiming that ID is “religiously motivated.” But aren’t we all motivated by religious assumptions! We all have our values!

The secularist often argues the Christian should be marginalized and disqualified because his values come from a book he believes is of divine origin. Does it make any difference that our values/morality come from a book - the Bible?  The secularist argues that it should – that it constitutes an illegitimate appeal to authority. But perhaps by being explicit about our source of authority, we are behaving more professionally, transparently, and with more integrity. And perhaps by denying that they too have their own sources of authority, their inculcated, unprovable assumptions, they are acting less transparently and with less integrity.

Are secular values more amenable to reason and therefore more acceptable in the public sphere? I don’t think so! Secularists are almost exclusively moral relativists. They gladly admit that their values are made-up and reflect the culture that has raised them. Yet, whenever they sit down to discuss a policy or a moral issue, they behave in an illogical manner, treating their created values as if they carried some sense of gravitas. These values can only be justified pragmatically, in terms of beneficial outcomes. But what makes these outcomes beneficial? Moral relativism is incapable of objectively declaring anything as beneficial.

Let’s look at an example. Let’s say the secularists decided that everyone deserves equal health care, but why? They argue that we are all equal and therefore deserve the same health care. However, this argumentation includes many unprovable assumptions:

1.     That we should be healthy.

2.     That we deserve anything.

3.     That there is an objective moral truth of equality.

Besides, all of their reasoning depends upon the existence of objective moral truths or laws, something that moral relativism denies.

Therefore, if the secularists were honest, they would say, “Well, we have nothing substantial to say on this issue or any issue, so let’s all go home and eat a good meal.”

Reason? In its deepest sense, it has been rejected. Meanwhile, there are many objective proofs for the divinity of the Bible – the miracles, fulfilled prophecies, wisdom, life-improving track record, and internal and external consistency. Who then is lacking in rationality?

Even if all of the secularists saw the light and decided that I was correct, and they invited me to sit at their table, I probably wouldn’t slap my Bible down on the table. Instead, I would probably want to speak a language that they could understand. This is also a matter of respect. However, I wouldn’t want to be told that “religious dogma should be checked at the door.”

MORAL RELATIVISM AND ITS COSTS

The educated and the university community are largely committed to moral relativism. As such, morality is something we just make up according to the way we were socialized and the way we feel. From this point of view, there are no moral laws apart from our own thinking. Therefore, morality is not absolute, objective, universal, and unchanging. Consequently, the “evil” of torturing babies is no more than a temporary human convention.

What are the implications of moral relativism? Do we realize the great price we are paying by making evil into a merely subjective feeling or decision? Here are some of the costs:

1. We cannot coherently criticize any evil or unjust act if there is no actual, objective right and wrong.
2. There is nothing objectively wrong with genocide, rape, torture or any form of criminality or injustice.
3. Life becomes meaningless apart from lower animalistic pleasures.
4. Human life and all of our commitments are minimalized.
5. The common moral language that binds us together is dissolved. Saying you are sorry then becomes meaningless and a mere tool to manipulate others.
6. Such a belief system is utterly unlivable. 

Socially, we should expect moral and legal chaos and collapse. Even the secular humanist and atheist Max Hocutt warned:

• “To me [the non-existence of God] means that there is no absolute morality, that moralities are sets of social conventions devised by humans to satisfy their needs…If there were a morality written up in the sky somewhere but no God to enforce it, I see no good reason why anyone should pay it any heed.” (Understanding the Times) 

Serial killer Ted Bundy understood this reasoning and took it to heart:

• “Then I learned that all moral judgments are ‘value judgments,’ that all value judgments are subjective [it just depends on how you think about them], and that none can be proved to be either ‘right’ or ‘wrong’…I discovered that to become truly free, truly unfettered, I had to become truly uninhibited. And I quickly discovered that the greatest obstacle to my freedom, the greatest block and limitation to it, consists in the insupportable “value judgment that I was bound to respect the rights of others. I asked myself, who were these ‘others?’ Other human beings with human rights? Why is it more wrong to kill a human animal than any other animal, a pig or a sheep or a steer? Is your life more to you than a hog’s life to a hog? Why should I be willing to sacrifice my pleasure more for the one than for the other? Surely, you would not, in this age of scientific enlightenment, declare that God or nature has marked some pleasures as ‘moral’ or ‘good’ and others as ‘immoral’ or ‘bad’? In any case, let me assure you, my dear young lady, that there is absolutely no comparison between the pleasure I might take in eating ham and the pleasure I anticipate in raping and murdering you. That is the honest conclusion to which my education has led me – after the most conscientious examination of my spontaneous and uninhibited self.” (Christian Research Journal, Vol 33, No 2, 2010, 32) 

Bundy’s conclusion was honest. If there is no God in whose image we are created, then there is no objective difference between us and hogs. We are all animals and can be treated as such!

There is only one possible basis for an unchanging, objective, and universal moral order – an unchanging, universal, and transcendent God!

Debating the Atheist

 

The debater tries to give his opponent the smallest target possible. This is why the militant atheist [MA] will claim that his belief is JUST a matter of rejecting the sufficiency of the evidence for God.

His tiny target frees him up to attack you. How? Christian revelation is not complete. There are many areas of perplexity. In fact, God warned us that certain knowledge has not yet been given to us. This allows the MA to find many targets:

• How can your God of love send people to hell? Couldn’t an omnipotent God have created his “good” creation without so much suffering? You believe in myths like talking snakes and virgin births.

There are many things that we don’t know, but this does not invalidate our faith, no more than the gaps in science invalidate science. Science cannot even define the basics – light, matter, space, and time – with any satisfaction.

However, we believe in science, not because of what we don’t know about it, but because of what we do know. Likewise, we do not believe in Christ because of what we don’t understand about the faith but because of what we do understand.

Meanwhile, MAs have their own RELIGIOUS beliefs – secular humanism, moral relativism, materialism, and naturalism. But just say that to an MA, and you’ve got a fight.

The Empty World of Atheistic Humanism

We can put a positive spin on anything. Atheists embrace a flat and monotonous world –one devoid of moral values, meaning or purpose. However, this doesn’t stop them from celebrating it and thinking that they can fill the emptiness with self-created meaning. The Humanist Manifesto II claims that:

• Humanism can provide the purpose and inspiration that so many seek; it can give personal meaning and significance to human life.

After rejecting God and any intrinsic higher purpose and meaning of life, humanism boasts that it can provide the very things that it has eliminated, like filling an empty apartment with furniture, albeit make-believe furniture.

Meanwhile, some atheists have the courage to look at the emptiness endemic to atheism. The brilliant mathematician, Bertrand Russell claimed that the emptiness of an “accidental collocations of atoms… destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system” is the only “meaning” we can embrace:

• Only on the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built. (Why I am not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects, 107)

Surrendering hope of any meaning was Russell’s only “habitation… safely built.”  Later in life, Russell realized that atheism was unable to offer anything that could possibly overcome the “accidental collocations of atoms” that inevitably would result in “unyielding despair.” Russell understood that creating meaning and purpose out of a purposeless world is like imagining having a wife and kids where there are none – a mere exercise in self-delusion and escapism.

However, for the younger atheist, the pursuit of pleasure and sensuality seems to be able to fill the void, at least temporarily. In The Pleasures of Cocaine, Adam Gottlieb writes:

• If there is any teleological purpose to man’s existence on earth and in his power to progress, it is that he should achieve a successful form of decadence and learn to live in harmony with it. The life-game then would be, at least in part, to sustain a decadent situation for as long as one might expect any civilization to last…

For Gottlieb, life is about decadence, and decadence is about immediate self-gratification. Evidently, he found little appeal in humanism’s promise to “give personal meaning and significance to human life.”  

However, the pursuit of sensual pleasure has a short shelf-life, as King Solomon had concluded:

• Remember your Creator in the days of your youth, before the days of trouble come    and the years approach when you will say, “I find no pleasure in them.” (Ecclesiastes 12:1)

Solomon advised that our investments had to be far-sighted, and this required an eye to the Creator.

As we Think, so too Do we Live: The Case of Atheism

The way we think determines how we feel and respond to the world. A woman was convinced that the man at her door was a thief until she found out that he was the postman delivering a long-awaited package. When her thinking about him changed, so too did her feelings and her behaviors, and she happily greeted him.

This principle also pertains to our philosophical worldview thinking. If we believe that humans are just another animal, it is inevitable that this will color how we feel and treat the members of our species. Regarding the connection between our ideas and our behavior, evolutionist Karl Giberson, in Saving Darwin: How to be a Christian and Believe in Evolution, wrote:

• [Evolutionist] Ernst Haeckel nudged the racism of the Third Reich along its malignant road by suggesting that the various human races were like stages in the embryonic development of the fetus…”You must draw [a line] between the most highly developed civilized people on the one hand and the crudest primitive people on the other and unite the latter with animals.” (76)

• How shocking it is today to acknowledge that virtually every educated person in the Western culture at the time …shared Haeckel’s ideas. Countless atrocities around the globe were rationalized by the belief that superior races were improving the planet by exterminating defective elements…there can be little doubt that such viewpoints muted voices that would otherwise have been raised in protest.

Meanwhile, many are singing the laurels of secularism, claiming that its denial of all transcendent moral truth has created a better world. I try to remind them of the unmitigated horrors of the secular-atheistic-communistic experiments. Characteristically, they respond:

• Secular atheism is merely the denial of any sky-daddy. It therefore has no impact on morality.

However, this denial has had broad philosophical implications, especially in the area of morality and the one hundred million exterminated under atheism. In fact, there isn’t even one example of a communist state which didn’t have an appalling human rights record. Why? Perhaps these communistic states where merely acting out their philosophical baggage. Here are some examples of philosophies that are almost inseparable from atheism and their moral failures:

Atheists are almost invariably evolutionists, and they require a creationism substitute  - the one that evolution provides. Rather than positing a sharp distinction between the human and animal world, the evolutionist sees a continuum which denies any meaningful man-animal distinction. Historically, blurring this distinction has had a profound effect on our treatment of humanity. Those who have been considered more evolved have received better treatment. Those considered less evolved have been treated more like the rest of the animal kingdom. Besides, if we are all animals, there no longer exists a rationale to oppose treating us as animals.

Atheists are invariably secular humanists. Consequently, there is nothing higher than human cognition, and so there is no higher transcendent truth to which to defer. Morality, therefore, is strictly a matter of human creation. As such, it changes and is relative to our culture. Because of this, it is hard to take our moral determinations very seriously. After all, they will simply change tomorrow. Why not get ahead of the changing fashions and create our own personal morality according to our own desires! This was exactly the tact of serial killer Ted Bundy:

• Then I learned that all moral judgments are “value judgments,” that all value judgments are subjective, and that none can be proved to be either ‘right’ or ‘wrong’…I discovered that to become truly free, truly unfettered, I had to become truly uninhibited. And I quickly discovered that the greatest obstacle to my freedom, the greatest block and limitation to it, consists in the insupportable value judgment that I was bound to respect the rights of others. I asked myself, who were these ‘others?’ Other human beings with human rights? Why is it more wrong to kill a human animal than any other animal, a pig or a sheep or a steer? Is your life more to you than a hog’s life to a hog? Why should I be willing to sacrifice my pleasure more for the one than for the other? Surely, you would not, in this age of scientific enlightenment, declare that God or nature has marked some pleasures as ‘moral’ or ‘good’ and others as ‘immoral’ or ‘bad’? In any case, let me assure you, my dear young lady, that there is absolutely no comparison between the pleasure I might take in eating ham and the pleasure I anticipate in raping and murdering you. That is the honest conclusion to which my education has led me – after the most conscientious examination of my spontaneous and uninhibited self. (Christian Research Journal, Vol 33, No 2, 2010, 32)

Although, the Maos, Stalins, and Pol Pots didn’t justify their moral innovations in terms of their personal pleasures, the absence of any higher moral truth similarly gave them the freedom to morally innovate.

Without any transcendent and absolute moral law, moral relativism becomes the default. Since moral law doesn’t exist, we create our own pragmatic set of morals. Consequently, the supposed ends will always justify the means – the most horrible human atrocities. Lenin had been asked, “What is the good and the bad under atheistic communism?” His answer reflected the thinking of other communists:

• Whatever promotes the Revolution is what is good; whatever interferes with it, that is what is bad.

Such pragmatic, non-moral-law thinking can be used to justify any moral atrocity and was routinely used in this way.

Atheists are materialists and deny the existence of anything outside of matter and energy. Consequently, humans are no more than complex bio-chemical machines. What then do we do with machines that don’t behave in ways we regard as useful? We either change them or destroy them, perhaps for their parts. Humans then become expendable in favor of the “higher good.”

In addition to this problem, materialists can find no basis for freewill if everything occurs according to physical laws. Consequently, our thinking and choosing is merely the product of prior bio-chemical reactions. This means that we are not morally accountable. One atheist friend confessed to me that he found this understanding very liberating, freeing him from feelings of guilt. However, we have been equipped with such feelings because they are socially necessary. Once dulled, we are free to act in immoral ways.

Atheists are also naturalists. This means that we are the product of chance and natural processes rather than of purpose and design. Consequently, the naturalist is not accountable to a Creator. He owes no allegiance to anyone, just to his own welfare.

Of course, the naturalist will protest:

• I feel grateful for my family and for my fellow human beings. I therefore feel that I am accountable to them. I don’t need God to be moral.

While many atheists might be sincere about their feelings, feelings and intuitions are not enough as the communist experiments have proven. We also have very negative feelings and even our wholesome feelings are subject to change. In light of this, we also require a mental rationale – a transcendent moral-law rationale – to decide among our competing feelings.

Atheism has big pockets, and these contain its many philosophical children, all of which undermine morality in any objective sense. However, most atheists distance themselves from communism in favor of some form of socialism, pointing approvingly to the successful secular Northern European nations.

There are a number of problems with these examples. Besides the fact that their fruits are beginning to sour, they certainly don’t reflect anything like the full-blown secularism of the communist nations where secularism has been militantly enforced, where pastors and priests had either been exterminated or sent away for “re-education.” Therefore, Northern Europe retains many vestiges of their Christian culture – the culture that had once made the West great.