Toxic Humanism
"Making the world better" with no direction or assistance from God is a faith that rests on the belief that science and reason can deliver humanity from evil. It is a faith that spawned a "humanism" that for over two hundred years has caused confusion and chaos concerning justice, wisdom, responsibility, love and hate, responsibility, the value of life...all the most important things in life...which are playthings to reason and impenetrable to science.
While the earlier humanism of the Renaissance magnified the importance of humans as humans, it acknowledged the necessary connection between human beings and their Creator. But secular humanism abolished that link and trashed what is sacred in human life. This faux humanism gave us the Humanist Manifesto of 1933 (updated in 1973 and 2003) and the Secular Humanist Declaration of 1980. Manifest in these documents are distortions of reality that have been internalized by a great many people. This should hardly surprise us, considering that secular humanism entered the field of education in the first quarter of the last century, through the public schools, acting as a wedge between past and present and putting America on a course toward a collective society – thanks to activists of the benighted left.
These are historical facts. We are living with their consequences. Among the saddest is that public school kids, "our future," are schooled in the framework of the secular humanist religion[i] and are taught not how to think clearly and wisely but how to act correctly, according to state-defined criteria ("political correctness"). The purveyors of God-free secularism don't care if public schools dull the moral sense, common sense, and the ability to think clearly, in the mission to establish a collectivist society in an amoral "humanistic" world.
The tug between the morality we taught our own children and the amorality imparted to a great number of societal drifters pushed one of our children to the brink of suicide. Joining a herd of mixed up kids of the late 1980s, she took a crooked path of unending trouble...
...a road paved by educators of the political left obsessed with building a new social order by turning young minds away from their heritage and from their parents, purging their minds of a belief in God, and training them for a life of diminished quality in an amoral, state-controlled collectivist society. Caught in the crossfire between two incompatible views of the world and of people, even children of stable families continue to risk losing their identity and their way and getting swept in the wave of drifters and mixed up kids unleashed by "progressive" schooling.
By the time our youngest child got to middle school, the intensifying toxic indoctrination of false humanism made it hard for her and other pubescent children to accept their richer heritage and deeper moral orientation. Routine exposure to a worldview that contradicts home training regarding basics of right and wrong, replacing Judeo-Christian morality with do what you want ("situation ethics," which in reality is no ethics), is a hazard to the mental and emotional development of a child. The problem has led many to homeschool their children and many to fight the culture wars.
Are we now within reach of that "golden age" that "progressives" have promised themselves, an age likely to resemble a world of contented dummies having little heart and no soul?
Please let no one be fooled by partisan and advocate media that ignore history or distort it, while mindlessly (maliciously?) pushing flawed, outdated agendas of former socialists and Marxists. Most don't know the history of their own beliefs and convictions. Teachers, editors, and other voices for society have swallowed the nonsense that the "enlightenment" they were taught to embrace and the faux humanism driving their ambitions will bring about a world free of want and war and name-the-evil-to-be-banished – a stand that betrays a degree of ignorance that voids any claim to enlightenment or authority to lead in any valid sense of justice.
[i] Not all religions center on God and follow divine inspiration. In addition to the usual meaning of religion, the Merriam-Webster dictionary includes "a cause, principle, or system of beliefs held to with ardor and faith." Creeds like Marxism, Darwinism, secular humanism, and scientism are religions also. That any zealously held belief can be a religion should be sobering, not surprising.