The Washington Post is upset. Last year, Congress slipped a restriction into the Education for Economic Security Act which the Post just found out about.
Congressional liberals are always appropriating more money for schools, despite the proven inverse correlation between federal funding and quality education. So, last year, Congress voted some funding for magnet schools.
The Post just discovered that, in order for a school district setting up a magnet school to get these federal grants, the school must make a commitment NOT to use any of the money to teach “Secular Humanism.” The Post calls this proviso an “eccentric and offensive prohibition.”
Now, wait a minute. I thought the Post was against anyone imposing any religion on us in schools (or anywhere else). Suppose the law had said that, in order to get the federal funding, the school would have to promise NOT to teach Christianity, Judaism, or Islamism.
Surely the Post would have approved of that! So why the flap? The religion of Secular Humanism should be subject to the same restrictions as are on Christianity, Judaism, and Islamism.
In 1981 the U.S. Supreme Court stated in Torcaso v. Watkins, “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.”
The creed of the secular religion of Humanism was enunciated in the Humanist Manifesto I of 1933 and reiterated in the Humanist Manifesto II of 1973. Its views on current trends are made known in the publications and journals of the American Humanist Association.
The Humanist Manifestos are just as dogmatic as the fundamental statements of other religions, such as the Apostles’ Creed. Here is a summary of the dogmas of the religion of Secular Humanism, as revealed in these published Manifestos.
Humanism denies a personal God, all divine purpose or Providence, and all religion which places “God above human needs.” Humanism rejects faith, prayer, the existence of life after death, a supernatural Heaven and Hell, “traditional religious morality,” and religious attitudes about sex.
To replace the tenets of traditional religion, Humanism proclaims its own set of self-serving, unproved dogmas. Humanism asserts that the universe is “self-existing and not created,” that man is the product of evolution, that the “joy of living” and the “satisfaction of life” are the supreme goals of man, and that ethics comes from “human experience” and not from God.
The core of Humanism’s ethical system is situation ethics, which means that the goodness or badness of an act depends on the situation. Is it wrong to lie, steal, cheat, or have extra-marital sex? The humanist answer is, “it all depends.”
Humanism rejects all moral absolutes of right and wrong in favor of moral relativism. This is the ethical system which recognizes and accepts abortion, euthanasia, suicide, and all varieties of “sexual exploration” and immoral “lifestyles.”
Humanism works for the establishment of a “secular society,” a “socialized economic order,” world government, military disarmament, and population control by government. Humanism is antagonistic toward “national sovereignty” and a “profit-motivated society.”
The secular humanists offer no proof for their dogmas. They accept no final arbiter of governmental or moral standards except their own arrogant elitism. They wrap their ideology in the word “scientific,” but use it as a witch doctor uses a magic talisman, to confer a fake prestige on their mythology.
The teaching of Secular Humanism in the classroom involves inflicting children with supposedly non-judgmental discussions of social, moral, and legal dilemmas so the pupils can make their “own” decisions.
The Humanist Manifestos, like the Rosetta Stone, provide the key to decipher the code languages of progressive education, values clarification, sexuality curricula, and the various rationales that have caused the public schools to eliminate prayer, moral training, and the teaching of the basics. Many parents believe that Secular Humanism has become the Established Religion of U.S. public schools, and that’s why the new law properly prohibits teaching it in the public schools.
