Humans behaving like Animals
I visited the American Humanist Association website to find out how humanists define themselves. Here’s an interesting part of their definition.
Free of supernaturalism, it recognizes human beings as a part of nature and holds that values?be they religious, ethical, social, or political?have their source in human experience and culture. Humanism thus derives the goals of life from human need and interest rather than from theological or ideological abstractions, and asserts that humanity must take responsibility for its own destiny.
Sounds good, except that it depends on humans to come up with the standards. From a Christian perspective any attempt by fallen humans to create their own standards is likely to fall far short of God’s standards. This is clearly evident today.
Marriages are falling apart because men and women want to please themselves more than they want to love and serve their partner. Families are falling apart because both parents want to live all they can be in their careers and leave society to raise their children. Abortions are killing babies by the thousands because men and women want to fulfill their sexual desires outside marriage and don’t want to interrupt their life with children. Sex and violence becoming more graphic in our media as people are no longer satisfied with wholesome entertainment, but would rather indulge their senses. Global warming is destroying the earth because of our rapid culture of consumption and progress. Industrialization satisfies our material desires at the expense of the planet. Obesity and heart disease is at a peak because we have evolved to such a high level of conveniences that we can just sit around, suck in the corn syrup, and enjoy every minute of it.
Of course, humanism doesn’t outright state that this is where it leads, but it’s inevitable that men will become more like animals when they stop looking towards God and instead look towards themselves and nature for the answers. James Boice has a very insightful analysis of humanism and where it leads.
Although man is a mediating being, created to be somewhere between the angels and the animals, in Psalm 8 he is nevertheless described as being somewhat lower than the angels rather than as being somewhat higher than the beasts, which means that he is destined to look not downward to the beasts, but upward to the angels and beyond them to God and so to become increasingly like him. But if we will not look up, if we reject God, as secularism does, then we will inevitably look downward and so become increasingly like the lower creatures and behave like them. We will become beastlike, which is exactly what is happening in our society. People are acting like animals, and even worse.
Over the last few decades I have noticed that our culture is tending to justify bad human behavior on the ground that we are, after all, just animals. I saw an article in a scientific journal about a certain kind of duck. Two scientists had been observing a family of these ducks, and they reported something in this duck family that they called ?gang rape.? I am sure they did not want to excuse this crime among humans by the comparison they were making, but they were suggesting that gang rape among humans is at least understandable given our animal ancestry. The inference comes from the evolutionary, naturalistic worldview they espoused.
A story of a similar nature appeared in the September 6, 1982, issue of Newsweek magazine. It was accompanied by a picture of an adult baboon holding a dead infant baboon, and over this there was a headline that read: ?Biologists Say Infanticide Is as Normal as the Sex Drive?And That Most Animals, Including Man, Practice It.? The title is as revealing in its way as Carl Sagan?s ?The cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be.? It identifies man as an animal, and it justifies his behavior on the basis of that identification. The sequence of thought goes like this: (1) Man is an animal, (2) Animals kill their offspring, (3) Therefore, it is all right (or at least understandable) that human beings kill their offspring.
The argument is fallacious, of course. Most animals do not kill their offspring. They protect their young and care for them. But even if in a few instances some animals do kill their offspring, this is still not comparable to the crimes of which human beings are capable. In the United States alone we kill over one and a half million babies each year by abortion?usually just for the convenience of the mother.?6? And the number of outright murders is soaring.
For more crazy humanist quotes, read on.
A belief that when people are free to think for themselves, using reason and knowledge as their tools, they are best able to solve this world’s problems.
Society of Western New York
Looks like they have a lot of problems to solve. And would you trust a finite man, with limited reasoning and knowledge to solve the world’s problems? I prefer to trust an infinite and all powerful creator of the universe. I thank God that he has already overcome the world and solved the most challenging problem of eternal life and freedom from bondage to sin.
Humanists seek to understand the universe by using science and its methods of critical inquiry?logical reasoning, empirical evidence, and skeptical evaluation of conjectures and conclusions?to obtain reliable knowledge. Humanists affirm that humans have the freedom to give meaning, value, and purpose to their lives by their own independent thought, free inquiry, and responsible, creative activity.
Steven Schafersman
Again, it is very arrogant to assume that humans can come up with standards and ethics that are reliable. Ask three different people their opinion and you can get three different answers. Human nature easily distorts the truth and comes up with twisted logic that fits the framework of a life that they want. The logic may sound exhaustively thorough and foolproof, however, when the starting and ending point of the logic is independent and contrary to God, then there is always going to be found some distortion of the truth.
In the place of the old attitudes involved in worship and prayer the humanist finds his religious emotions expressed in a heightened sense of personal life and in a cooperative effort to promote social well-being.
Humanist Manifesto
What exactly are these emotions that they talk about? In worship and prayer we have the added expression of love and adoration to God. Are the humanists trying to say that they experience life better than we do because they have cut worship and prayer out and substituted a heightened sense of life? I’m not sure how heightened that could be when compared to the Christian. The Christian believes he has gained eternal life while the Humanist believes he will just die and become nothing. The Christian believes that he is alive in not only a physical sense, but also in a spiritual sense. The humanist only believes that his body is alive, they deny the existence of the Spirit. The Christian believes in a holy and awesome God that permeates all of His created universe. The Humanist believes that only the created world we see around us exists. The humanist doesn’t appear to have a heightened sense of anything to offer.
Man will learn to face the crises of life in terms of his knowledge of their naturalness and probability. Reasonable and manly attitudes will be fostered by education and supported by custom. We assume that humanism will take the path of social and mental hygiene and discourage sentimental and unreal hopes and wishful thinking.
Humanist Manifesto I
What’s the point of hoping for anything good if your just rolling the dice and taking changes based on probability. They really have a silly and meaningless sense of hope, they might as well say that they reject the existence of hope.
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