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By Lee Duigon
April 17, 2014
NewsWithViews.com

“Jesus was a humanist!” declares a person whose opinion I do not respect.

For one thing, I’m not sure he knows what a humanist is. Do you? But we can easily find out from the humanists themselves. We need only visit the American Humanist Association website and read their prize exhibit, Humanist Manifesto II.

This extraordinary document, composed in 1973 by Paul Kurtz and Edwin H. Wilson, is by no means out of date. It’s every bit as asinine today as it was 41 years ago. It was signed by all the smartest people in the world, including dozens of Nobel Prize-winning scientists and not a few addled churchmen who wanted the scientists to think well of them.

In their own words, the humanists tell us what they’re all about.

“…[H]umanists still believe,” says the Preface, “that traditional theism, especially faith in the prayer-hearing God, assumed to live and care for persons, to hear and understand their prayers, and to be able to do something about them is an unproved and outmoded faith. Salvationism, based on mere affirmation, still appears as harmful, diverting people with false hopes of heaven hereafter.”

So humanists, by their own admission, are atheists. They cut themselves off from God—they’d cut us off, too, if they had their way—repudiate the gift of prayer, and erase the afterlife. As God and hope and prayer have been part of being human from the beginning, you’d think these people would more accurately call themselves “inhumanists.”

What do we get in return for confessing ourselves to be worms’ meat on the hoof? You guessed it—earthly paradise.

Science will do all the things that God could ever do, they promise us: “control our environment, conquer poverty, markedly reduce disease, extend our life-span, significantly modify our behavior, alter the course of human evolution and cultural development, unlock vast new powers, and provide humankind with unparalleled opportunity for achieving an abundant and meaningful life.”

Wow! I mean, who needs God? I can’t wait to see what Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, Bashir Assad, Al Sharpton, and Nancy Pelosi do with vast new powers. And as long as they’ve got scientific humanists to counsel them, behind the throne, we know they’ll do a bang-up job of altering the course of human evolution and modifying our behavior. Heaven on Earth is just around the corner!

Of course, having jettisoned the Ten Commandments, and all the rest of God’s word, we might be kind of stuck for a basis of morality. Not to worry: the humanists promise “to fuse reason with compassion in order to build constructive social and moral values.” I wonder if Eric Holder will do some of the building. Aren’t you anxious to see what new values they come up with?

On Page 2 they repeat their credo that there’s no such thing as the supernatural, nothing but stark materialism. “No deity will save us; we must save ourselves.” No eternal life, no afterlife. Such notions are “obstacles to human progress.”

All right, I know this is getting rather sickening. Try to remember that “Jesus was a humanist.”

As for ethics, we will create our own meaning, simply by employing “reason and intelligence”—always providing we can find anyone who possesses those qualities.

Page 4 discusses sexuality, especially our universal “rights” to birth control, abortion, and divorce. All sexual activity between “consenting adults” will be permitted, with a profound respect for all “proclivities” and “lifestyles.”

See? They will leave us with the freedom to sin—as if we needed any encouragement from humanists to do that.

Page 5 gives us their vision of a “democratic society,” in which the “right” to suicide and the “right” to euthanasia feature prominently. These people are in love with death.

Finally, to make sure everything turns out hunky-dory, we are promised, on Page 6, “world law, world order, and a transnational federal government.”

This is the devil’s Book of Revelation, and these are Satan’s prophets.

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Yes, the manifesto is full of hifalutin language about how everything is going to be oh-so-nice for everybody, once we resign ourselves to godlessness and death, and let the Experts rule us. Can you imagine a human mind so puffed up with pride, so intoxicated with delusions of its own infallibility, as to believe this stuff? But as St. Paul observed, “Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools.” [Romans 1:22]

For persons who say they don’t believe in salvationism, they sure are serving up a heaping helping of it. What Christ couldn’t do from the cross, they claim, they’ll do in their laboratories.

How unsearchable are the depths of pride and folly! How inexhaustible the treasuries of sin!

Esau traded his birthright for a bowl of porridge. At least he got to eat it.

We’re being asked to trade ours for a bowl of warmed-over scientific socialism.

Any takers?