When students successfully graduate high school and embark on their tertiary studies, it is a time of pride in what has been achieved and hope for what lies ahead. Regrettably, most students and their parents are oblivious to a great danger about to be faced at this crucial time in their lives when students work out where they stand on so many political, social, and religious issues.
Students will typically be mentored by inspirational and devoted academics who are genuinely interested in their educational, vocational, and personal development. But these same academics, particularly those in the social sciences, hold a seductive, superficially attractive, but damaging, secular humanist ideology that challenges many previously held beliefs and traditions.
While this ideology may be confronting to students from religious backgrounds, secular humanism is equally harmful to non-religious and unaffiliated students. It is important students have the intellectual tools needed to debunk the ideology. This begins with an understanding of what it propounds.
Modern secular humanism espouses the laudable objectives of universal fraternity and benevolence contending that these can be achieved by man’s inherent power of reason coupled with his supposed innate ability to act ethically and justly, but specifically rejecting religious doctrines as a basis of morality and behaviour.
Students will be encouraged to form or review their opinions on social, political, and religious issues by logical reasoning. The ideology appeals to their vanity by flattery, because it suggests they are innately able to distinguish between the great social polarities of right and wrong (good and evil) and can therefore be their moral arbiters. However, the ideology is deeply flawed in the following respects.
One of the core principles of humanism is the erroneous belief that man has an innate ability to act ethically and justly. A humanist is faced with a paradox. How can this core principle be reconciled with the fact that the world is awash with unethical and unjust behaviour, such as the despicable and depraved murders of innocent Israeli citizens by Hamas terrorists we have recently witnessed in Israel’s southern border communities?
A humanist can more readily understand such behaviour by attributing to the perpetrator a valid reason that justifies or apologises for it. In short, the victim is blamed for being victimised. This moral inversion is a means by which the secular humanist can explain away real evil while preserving his core beliefs. It also explains why many academics blame Israel for the ongoing conflict with her Palestinian neighbours, even though Israel is the only liberal democracy in the Middle East.
Because humanism espouses universal fraternity and benevolence, all peoples must be regarded as equal. No religion or culture may be regarded as superior to, or more generous than, any other. The humanist is therefore faced with a second paradox. How can this core principle be reconciled with unprovoked violence and brutality by any one particular religious group? Indeed how can it be reconciled with the humanity and generosity of other religious groups, such as the Jewish State sending emergency medical teams to Haiti, Rwanda and Turkey?
In order to preserve this unsound core belief, violence and brutality are excused as part of a ‘cycle of violence’, a pernicious term that attributes equal blame and similar behaviour to the victim without any honest attempt to analyse and attribute blame where it is due. It ignores the distinction between (and hence morally equates) an immoral or evil act and a moral or justified one. The best contemporary example is the clear distinction between the intentional unprovoked rocketing by Hamas of Israeli civilians and the tragic but unintentional deaths of Palestinian civilians caused by legitimate defensive measures taken by the Israeli army.
But religions and cultures are not equal. Until the early 1900s, suttee was a widespread religious funeral practice among many Hindu communities in which a perfectly healthy widow, either voluntarily or by coercion, was immolated on her husband’s funeral pyre. Colonial powers recognised the practice as barbaric and primitive compared with their own religion and culture and had the moral courage to ban it.
We live in a supposedly more enlightened age, yet where is the humanist outcry against other barbaric and primitive practices, such as female circumcision, honour killings, or the subjugation of women in many Middle Eastern countries? The core humanist belief that no religion or culture is superior to any other helps explain the deafening silence.
All humanists are subjectively moral, but so too, arguably, were Nazi death camp guards as are their modern incarnation, Palestinian terrorists. In both cases, they were taught that innocent Jews were vermin and that exterminating them was and remains, a moral imperative. In the absence of an objective moral code, there is no right and wrong and what is considered ethical or moral behaviour will vary with the times and from one society to another.
Ironically, today’s secular humanists were raised by a generation steeped in Judeo-Christian values hence their subjective notions of right and wrong are likely to be consonant with those traditional values. The same cannot be said of tomorrow’s secular humanists who will inhabit a different world in which those values are progressively disappearing, thanks to the radical secular obsession of purging society of every vestige of its Judeo-Christian heritage in the name of separating Church and State. Tomorrow’s humanists will therefore be less likely to be able to discern actual right from actual wrong as those polarities are traditionally and objectively understood.
Our secular laws cannot satisfactorily serve as our moral code because laws simply reflect society’s temporal social mores and customs. Laws are constantly amended or repealed and new laws are enacted. Even the insidious Nuremberg Laws were lawfully enacted. We need something far more enduring. That is why some avowed, but intellectually honest theists have concluded, ironically, that the Judeo-Christian religious moral code actually safeguards modern secular society. In Dr. Anthony Daniel’s words (aka Theodore Dalrymple), ‘It is impossible for us to live decently without the aid of religion … that is the ambiguity of the Enlightenment.’
Secular humanism at tertiary institutions is rife and will continue to influence students for generations to come. Prevention may be better than cure. Our schools, our youth movements and our homes all have important roles to play. Our youth should be provided with the intellectual tools needed to meet and resist the collision of ideologies that await them at university. An understanding of the ideology of secular humanism and its inherent flaws, together with a proper and balanced understanding of our Judeo-Christian heritage, will enable them to forge into the future with optimism and confidence.
