joshuadylan:
From a Christian perspective, what is the struggle with humanism in our culture? In Western humanism as we know it, the ethics or values of Christianity were borrowed by the humanists and then ripped off their Christian foundation (which is the character of God and the person of Jesus Christ). It is important for us as Christians to be compassionate to the sick and to the poor. We have a duty, a moral obligation, to minister to those people. God has commanded it. But humanism retained these concerns while denying their theological foundations. They want to retain much of the ethic of Christianity while rejecting the Christ of Christianity. They select a portion of Jesus’ message while rejecting Him. The humanist lives on “borrowed capital.” He rejects the foundation upon which his values are established.
Francis Schaeffer said, “The humanist has both feet firmly planted in midair.” Schaeffer went on to warn, “Unless humanism is stopped, it intends to beat to death the [Christian] base which made our culture possible.”
Basically, the true humanist does not worship. The consistent modern humanist is atheistic. Consistent humanism must be atheistic. Those who still try to worship are often found in groups such as the Unitarian Church. Unitarianism is a clear example of humanistic philosophy blended with religious liturgies. But humanists also worship in the mainline denominational churches. Humanism has had such an impact on our culture that many church members have embraced it without being aware of it.
Humanism is fundamentally irrational. Once its values are stripped from their theological foundation they have no platform upon which to rest except sentiment. The irony of our culture is that humanism has become the dominant philosophy of the intellectuals. This is a strange turn of events. It is not by accident, however, that the loudest critics of humanism have been the pessimistic existentialists. Their judgement upon humanism is focused in one word: naive. It is a harsh judgement, more than implying that humanism as a philosophy is the quintessence of stupidity. Why?
Examine for a moment (that should be all it takes) the central themes of humanism:
Man is a cosmic accident. He emerges from the slime by chance. He is a grown-up germ. He is moving inexorably toward annihilation. Yet man is the creature of supreme dignity. He lives his life between two poles of meaninglessness. He comes from nothing; he goes to nothing. His origin is meaningless, his destiny in meaningless. Yet, somehow, between his origin and his destination he acquires supreme dignity. Where does he get it? Out of thin air.
The thinking humanist (if there is such a thing) must be a nervous humanist. He suffers the tension of the small child who has already eaten his came and wants it too. What reply can the humanist give to the critic who asks. “What difference does it make if black germs or white germs sit in the back of the bus? Why should we care about the poor? Dignity is an illusion. It is at best a sentimental dream. If I am a cosmic accident why should I not just sleep in tomorrow?”
Humanism is intellectually untenable, but it is emotionally attractive. Why? Because we are anthropoids; we are men and women and we want to believe that life has some meaning for us. To the thinking person, humanism gives no reason, ultimately, for ascribing value and values. Values become preferences rather than principles. The modern humanist recognizes that. He says flatly, “That’s what we have. We don’t have any principles, we have preferences.” My fear of humanism is this: When preferences become ultimate, then whose preferences become ultimate? Historically, in every case, values based simply on preferences end in some form of statism.
R.C. Sproul, Lifeviews
What a load of pseudo-intellectual rot.
Let’s start out by pointing out the strawman — that all atheists are necessarily nihilists and believe that without some kind of supreme being that existence is meaningless. For the Humanist, we give our own lives meaning…whatever meaning we choose. Given the meaning from the above description, your meaning, such as it is, is simply that “God commanded it.” I refer you to the great wisdom of this wall graffiti for you to contemplate.
I’m sick of arguing that there is no way that “morality” or “purpose” could exist without a god. I refuse to believe that people are actually so ignorant that they can’t stretch their mind to see that love, kindness, and empathy actually have value without a god to reward good and to punish evil. Stretch your brains. Use your imagination. Just try a little.
And let’s look at another falsehood stated above…that Humanist morality is attempting to mimic Christian morality without a god to worship. This is another load pure of drivel. The most moral thing to come out of Biblical teachings is Jesus’s golden rule. Except that it is not Jesus’s golden rule, as it preceded Jesus by at least 500 years and more than like preceded him by millennia.
The other great commandments…not killing…not stealing… Gee! Those sure are tough! I really can’t imagine how anyone could have come up with those ideas without a god to impose them. Except that they have been part of the rules of every culture, no matter what their gods were or whether they had any at all, since basically the beginning of history. You see, if I were to kill your loved one, you would probably get upset, and you might gather other people together to stop me from killing their loved ones too. You might kill me! Or you might take away my liberty and my way to support my own loved ones. Or, if you didn’t, anarchy might arise and someone might kill my loved ones. Gosh! That was tough to figure out! Better have a god etch it in stone or we mere humans will never figure out something this freaking obvious.
And Jesus or the Bible or the Koran…they never really said a word against slavery, did they? Humans kinda had to figure out that one on their own, didn’t they? The morality of slavery is one of the simplest moral questions that could be asked. Funny how the western religions consistently didn’t get the very simple and obvious message out that slavery is an abomination.
Morality is an emergent condition caused by individuals competing for limited resources in finite time frames. As time goes on…as we learn more about psychology and about ourselves…our morality slowly improves. When we thought that demons were the cause of aberrant and anti-social behaviors, we logically treated people who suffered in a way to drive out the demons. Now that we know of mental disorders, we have far more effective ways of dealing with these behaviors. (Incidentally, it was pretty awesome of Jesus to point out that these people weren’t actually possessed by demons…oh wait…that was someone else many, many centuries later…my bad. Jesus in fact perpetuated the idea that people with mental disorders were possessed by demons.)
What we seem to have today are religions that lay claim to being the source of morality when indeed it is the religions that are the primary source of immorality. Mankind is pretty flawed, but it takes true religious conviction to justify the marginalization of people because of gender, race, or sexual orientation with such bombastic fervor as to believe that men who love other men are the reason for earthquakes and hurricanes.
Religion has, to be sure, allowed some people who actually tried to follow some of Jesus’s teachings to be loving and kind. But how can you look at the grotesque injustices of history perpetrated by religion and not say that it has been largely an obstacle to overcome. When one can justify any atrocity with the conviction that “God” endorses it, true morality goes out the window. With people finding ways to excuse the murder of babies in the OT by claiming that God saw their brains being smashed as an “infinite good” (thank William Lane Craig and no doubt many others for that idea), what crime can be too heinous not to receive endorsement if believed to be proclaimed by a god.
So this author’s smug little jibe at, “the thinking Humanist” is little more than vacuous pseudo-intellectual masturbation. ”Look at how wonderful our religion is, and how inferior these silly Humanists are.”
It might be true that the Humanist can look at religion and use it as a guide to morality, but by and large the Humanist can do this by looking at the disgraces perpetrated by many of the religious and doing the exact opposite.
And have an awesome freakin’ day. :)
~ Steve
