22 February 2008
Our New State Religion
Posted by Joy Bischoff under: Constitution in Peril .
What is secularism and how has it become our new state religion?
This is Part Two of a six-part series called Dialogue of Freedom
Our new state religion is Secular-Humanism. Secularism is defined as follows:
Religious skepticism or indifference – The view that religious considerations should be excluded from civil affairs or public education.
Humanism is defined as followed:
A system of thought that rejects religious beliefs and centers on humans and their values, capacities, and worth.
Humanists hold the human up as the only god and encourage egocentric pride.
The mandated creed of this religion is enforced by political correctness through the mediums of the press, entertainment, and school text books.
A perusal of the tenants of the religion of secularism show that they focus on: fear (opposite of faith), instant gratification (opposite of hope), qualified love (the opposite of charity, which is the pure love of God). They love only each other, the helpless and hate all who disagree with their beliefs.
Humanists have no tolerance for any who disagree with them and through liberal politics, they do all they can to force compliance with their creed. They preach tolerance but that is a one-way street. Religious people are taunted as intolerant when we speak out against laws that support sin. Many conservatives are intolerant of individuals, but for the most part, we believe we should love the sinner but hate the sin. This is not good enough for Humanists. They do not want to allow us to have the legal right to hate the sin. Hate crimes are beginning to not only apply to crimes against people. We have seen effort to extend these crimes to applying to thought. For example, Orwellian thought crime of disagreeing with the tenet of homosexuality, is now being suggested as a crime in and of itself.
Self-worship has taken the place of humility as Secular-Humanism gains ground in schools. The number one tenet is, there is no God, and therefore, no life after death. It is this very concept alone that inevitably leads to socialism. Only when we understand where socialists are coming from ideologically, can we shed our blinders regarding the freedoms being burgled right from under our noses.
If you believe this life is all we have, then the purpose of government must be to preserve that life at all cost, and the ensure that every individual has every need met. Enforcement of an immediate paradise on an earth that was designed as a schooling ground for eternal life, brings us to the irreconcilable differences of secularism and Judeo-Christian values. Satan’s plan is one of control and domination; a pretense of benevolent big brother making sure we do not have to experience the trauma of (good versus) evil, (light and) dark, (sickness and) health, (pleasure or) pain. In essence, no strengthening of spiritual muscles, no personal growth, just dumb sheep following a shepherd who will devour us when he becomes hungry. This is why he is called the devourer. He leaves no room for self-actualization in a society that tries to smooth every bump so no one stubs a toe. The enforcement of laws that support secularism, is socialism. In Part Three, we will take a quick look at what we have learned from history; that with time, every government based on socialism will be devoured by want as people lose their motivation to work hard.
As most of us know, the separation of church and state is not a part of the Constitution. Thomas Jefferson penned the idea in 1802 as follows:
Believing that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their Legislature should “make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” thus building a wall of separation between Church and State (Letter to the Danbury Baptists, 1802).
Even though this was not in the Constitution, we value this attitude which stemmed from Jefferson’s belief that there should be no official state religion to usurp our freedom to worship God as we choose. He never meant for God to be taken from the public square like something to be ashamed of.
The shameful fact is, liberal revisionists have swung the pendulum so far to the other side that they have pushed us into a state religion that is diametrically opposed to God. We are now living beneath the lash of a harsh, enforced religion called Secular-Humanism.
Roots of Secular Humanism
In 1930, Charles Francis Potter authored HUMANISM, A NEW RELIGION, in which he boasted: “Education is thus a most powerful ally of humanism and every American public school is a school of humanism. What can the theistic Sunday schools meeting for an hour once a week and teaching only a fraction of the children, do to stem the tide of a five-day program of humanistic teaching?”
Three years later, Potter signed the first HUMANIST MANIFESTO (1933) as did John Dewey, the “Father of Progressive Education.” The MANIFESTO’s first affirmation stated: “Religious humanists regard the universe as self-existing and not created.” Secondly, it affirmed that man is a product of naturalistic evolution. Humanist Sir Julian Huxley, UNESCO’s first director-general, would later explain that humanism’s “keynote, the central concept to which all its details are related, is evolution.”
In 1954, former president of the American Humanist Association Lloyd Morain, and his wife Mary (a director of the International Humanist and Ethical Union, which has 4 million members), authored HUMANISM AS THE NEXT STEP, which declared that “Humanism is the most rapidly growing religious movement in America today.” With all of these references to humanism as a “religion,” it was no surprise when the U.S. Supreme Court in Torcaso v. Watkins (June 19, 1961) listed “secular humanism” as a non-theistic religion.
THE HUMANIST (January-February 1976) published an article by Sheila Schwartz expressing her thankfulness “the crazies (fundamentalists) don’t do all that much reading. If they did, they’d find out that they have already been defeated.” Then, the very next issue of THE HUMANIST (March-April 1976) contained an article by Paul Blanshard, in which he remarked : “I think the most important factor leading us to a secular society has been the educational factor. Our schools may not teach Johnny to read properly, but the fact that Johnny is in school until he is 16 tends to lead toward the elimination of religious superstition. The average child now acquires a high school education, and this militates against Adam and Eve and all other myths of alleged history.” Textbooks followed this same philosophy, as in the early 1970s, PERSPECTIVES IN UNITED STATES HISTORY informed students that “the God of the Judeo-Christian tradition was a god worshipped by desert folk…clearly man-created.”
Humanists have not hidden their agenda, as John Dunphy’s prize-winning essay was published in THE HUMANIST (January-February 1983), and proclaimed that “the battle for humankind’s future must be waged and won in the public school classroom…between the rotting corpse of Christianity…and the new faith of humanism…(and) humanism will emerge triumphant.”
Meridian Magazine
Following is a selected portion of an article by Maurine Jensen Proctor, Editor-in-Chief of Meridian Magazine:
Most scholars agree that the cultural war that is raging comes down to this: What we think about God influences everything else. The essence of the culture war is the great rift over the issue of God. That is why the secularists so often rage with fuming hostility against religion or the mention of God in society, why lawsuits are mounted against Ten Commandment plaques or the words “under God” in America’s Pledge of Allegiance.
That is why they will not be happy until every last vestige of God and his sovereignty is annihilated with enthusiasm and persistence. Not until God is utterly dethroned are they completely free to create a new order.
As Daniel Peterson and William Hamblin describe it, “Morality becomes relative. (Atoms don’t care one way or the other.) Personality is nothing more than a fleeting by-product of biochemical interactions. There is no real meaning in a universe indifferent to human hopes and dreams, and all will end with our personal deaths and, ultimately, with the death of the universe itself.”[ii]
If we descended from God, we have one set of expectations and laws to follow, if we merely arose from primeval sludge, the most evolved of the animals, we have quite another. Our core assumptions affect every behavior and every institution.
Once society was structured around the belief that right and wrong are absolute, unchanging, and that these laws are communicated to men and women by God. This view of truth and morality formed the basis for much of Western civilization.
But as David F. Wells said, “A certainty about the existence, character and purposes of God — a certainty about his truth — that seems to have faded in the bright light of the modern world. They were convinced that God’s revelation, of which they were the vehicles and custodians, was true. True in an absolute sense. It was not merely true to them; it was not merely true in their time; it was not true approximately. What God has given was true universally, absolutely and enduringly.”[iii]
In contrast, relativism is the belief that man is the author of truth; one man cannot tell another man what is true for him. Truth is individually defined not externally existent. To the relativist, one man’s truth is just that — one man’s truth; it can be nothing more, unless agreed upon by society or enforced by law.
The catch phrase for the relativist to stop cold any conversation about the nature of things is, “That’s only your opinion.”
Who then prospers in this relativistic world? How do we settle things when two claims about issues of value clash? It is not by an appeal to a higher law or by an appeal to right and wrong. Instead, the winner is the one with the most power to wield, the most will, perhaps the most money. Raw tyranny becomes a dominant feature of society, powerful forces that take it upon themselves to dictate truth for everyone else.
Here lies the hidden and dirty secret of a morally relative viewpoint. Once the sense of morality and right and wrong have been abandoned, people are ripe to be dominated by others exercising sheer will. If whatever a man does is no crime, “mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”
So, as we have watched the Judeo-Christian tradition trampled and marginalized, we can assume that there is a similar pattern. The battle of ideas is not between religion on the one hand and bland neutrality on the other. It is between religion as exemplified by the Judeo-Christian tradition and another religion. It is not called a religion, but it has every characteristic.
Call that other religion Political Correctness or the New Age or merely the assumptions of the cultural elite, but it is a movement and an ordered system of thought. It inspires enthusiasm and blind acceptance of its tenets. It begins with many of the assumptions of relativism, but moves on from there to be dictatorial. It desires the destruction of Western civilization as we once knew it.
The cultural elite who embrace this new order will be tolerant of everyone except the religious for whom they often express disdain. Their technique for all of those who do not comply or conform is vilification and intimidation. This, of course, means the death of the free exchange of ideas. Some subjects cannot be discussed or debated. We have become a muzzled generation who can shout obscene things on television but can’t mention our feelings about Christ at Christmas in school.
How ironic that this new morality mandates charity, but punishes student study of the Lord of Charity; that it makes legal blasphemy, vulgarity and obscenity (things offensive to people of all faiths), but outlaws “hate” speech that offends favored groups and their political issues.
Some would suggest that our problems are political — that if we can only get the right people elected we’ll see a turnaround. Some see our problems as cultural — the erosion of our souls through the constant intake of media rot. Certainly, both political and cultural problems must be addressed. Yet at the heart of it all is a spiritual darkness that we have allowed to creep into our world and dominate our discussion and our social institutions.
It is time to awaken and reclaim our world. Time to cast our lines deep to find the new strategies and personal spirituality that can help win this new battle for the souls of men.
Can we do it? The stakes couldn’t be higher.
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16 Comments so far...
Joy Bischoff Says:
22 February 2008 at 10:29 am.
I’m aware that this article is long but the information is crucial and part of our stated purpose here; to learn the principles of freedom and understand the forces working against those freedoms. We cannot protect what we do not understand. We would encourage you to share this with your children so they learn to filter the information they are given in school and in entertainment. Part 2 is broken up into three sections and could be read and shared separately to make it easier to assimilate and because of time constraints.
Jesse Says:
22 February 2008 at 11:40 am.
This secularism crap is one of my major pet peeves. I am glad it is part of the information you are trying to teach people. Will this be a permanent article up top?
Stumpy Says:
22 February 2008 at 11:46 am.
I bout strained my arm pattin myself on the back for reading my whole lesson teacher. Then I saw a whole nother lesson down here but I gotta have recess first. Im tired.
Carrie Says:
22 February 2008 at 12:14 pm.
I didn’t know most of this. I am so mad about all the secular teachings they are sneaking into the schools. Why doesn’t everyone know about this? People have been saying the things you quoted from the humanists so why didn’t I know about this?
Joy Bischoff Says:
22 February 2008 at 12:27 pm.
I removed the comment by Chuck C. regarding Hamilton. It was very important information but it deserves its own blog which it will have tomorrow.
Peter Says:
22 February 2008 at 12:33 pm.
Come on guys, don’t attack the schools. Teaching is a calling and they are heroes in my book. This is the kind of thing that is definitely found on the conspiracy sites.
Matt Says:
22 February 2008 at 12:49 pm.
I’m swamped with work today so I only read the first third but I loved it. It’s great to see my own feelings put into words. Can’t comment on Peter’s accusations since I haven’t read it all. I’ll read the rest tomorrow.
M.G. Says:
22 February 2008 at 12:55 pm.
I get weekenditis on Fridays so I’m not working too hard today. I read it all and loved it. Peter, since the comments about secular-humanism being in schools all came from the horses’ mouths, how can you argue with that? It isn’t a theory when the people who are doing it admit to it themselves.
CindyL. Says:
22 February 2008 at 1:03 pm.
I know all this but didn’t have it in a format that summed it up so well. I think everyone should share this. I use this like glasses to look at everything I read in my textbooks. It helps keep things in perspective.
Jan W. Says:
22 February 2008 at 1:21 pm.
At first I didn’t want to read this because it was so long but I am so glad I did. I agree with CindyL. This just puts it in a nutshell. I’m glad it will be part of the dialogue of freedom so we can access it and share it. I am going to print it off and talk to my kids about it. They need this information to be easy to understand so they will recognize this kind of thing in school.
Peter, nobody is saying anything at all about teachers. We all respect teachers and what they do. It isn’t their fault this kind of thing is being done. Probably almost none of them know about it.
Peter Says:
22 February 2008 at 1:31 pm.
What’s that picture of the men around the monument about?
Joy Bischoff Says:
22 February 2008 at 1:36 pm.
Good question, Peter. This is a picture of a monument of the ten commandments being forcibly removed in Montgomery, Alabama. Chief Justice Roy Moore was removed from his position because he would not comply with the order to move this.
Hank Says:
22 February 2008 at 1:41 pm.
I remember how mad I got when that happened to Judge Moore. This whole thing makes me mad. I didn’t really know a lot of this but I know its true when I read it. It is obvious once its pointed out.
Chuck C Says:
22 February 2008 at 2:10 pm.
My daughter’s elementary school in Sandy, UT had no Christmas programs this year. Her teacher told me they were going to do a take-off on ‘Hamlet’ instead.
I telephoned the school and asked why there was no program and asked if it was a district decision. I was told it was not, but was a school decision.
Here we have teachers caving into the agenda of that other religion and they don’t even know it. How sad. (I have a call in to the director of the school area).
E.E. Says:
22 February 2008 at 2:14 pm.
Good for you, Chuck. Things have gotten out of hand.
Peter Says:
22 February 2008 at 2:17 pm.
All right now that situation with Judge Moore was different. I thought that was ridiculous. No doubt there are some wrong-headed things going on.
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