I received a telephone call recently from a byline reporter for a major metropolitan newspaper. “I’m not calling for an interview,” he said, “but just for some information, and I thought phoning you would be the easiest way to get it.” Then he blurted out his questions.
“What is humanism? What’s wrong with it? And what has it got to do with politics? I always thought that it had something to do with being humanitarian or with studying those college courses called the humanities.”
I explained that, no, the humanism he was inquiring about doesn’t have any relation to either of those things. Humanism is a secular “religion” professed by humanists whose creed is enunciated in the Humanist Manifesto I of 1933, the Humanist Manifesto II of 1973, and the Secular Humanist Declaration of 1980. Its views on current trends are made known in the publications of the American Humanist Association.
The Humanist Manifestos are just as dogmatic and unequivocal as that statement of fundamental Christianity, the Apostles Creed. Here is a summary of the dogmas of the religion of Secular Humanism, as revealed in its published Manifestos.
Humanism denies and rejects God, theism, deism, faith, prayer, all divine purpose or Providence, all religions which “place God above human needs,” the existence of life after death, a supernatural, Heaven and Hell, “traditional religious morality,” religious attitudes about sex, “national sovereignty,” and a “profit-motivated society.”
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 1iving” and the “satisfactions of life” are the supreme goal of man, and that ethics comes from “human experience” not from God.
Humanism 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 pooulation control by government.
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 and hope that simple people will fail to discern that it is empty of evidence.
What lifts Secular Humanism out of the class of an obscure cult is the big names who have publicly signed the Manifestos, thereby witnessing to its religion. The list includes some of the most influential names in education and philosophy in the Jast half century: John Dewey (father of progressive education), Alan Guttmacher (pre- sident of Planned Parenthood), Vashti McCollum (famous for her Supreme Court case which removed “released time” religious classes from public schools), Lester Mondale (brother of the Vice President), B.F. Skinner (Harvard professor of psychology), and Lester A. Kirkendall (known as the father of the sex education movement).
The reason Humanism has become something reporters need to be informed about is that alert parents have discovered that Secular Humanism has become the Established Religion of the U.S. public school system. Many parents believe that the Humanist Manifestos, like the Rosetta Stone, provide the key to decipher the code 1anguage$ of progressive education, values clarification, sexuality curriculums, situation ethics, and the various rationales that have caused the public schools to eliminate prayer, moral training, and the teaching of basics.
Humanism doesn’t deal diréct]y with politics, as the reporter’s question implied. But Humanism has everything to do with public school education, and it is clear that the remedy for the wrongs in that area is at least partially political.
The particular election-eve timing of the 1980 Secular Humanist Declaration indicates that the Humanists themselves are reacting politically to the threat to their ideology posed by the emergence of fundamentalist Christian groups as a force in the 1980 elections. The Humanists should be worried — because the public has begun to see through their hypocrisy in fastening their atheist ideology on the public schools, all the while the Humanists are loudly proclaiming as “imperatives” not only “the separation of church and state” but even “the separation of ideology and state.”
