Are you a Secular Humanist?

The “boogeyman” today on several “right wing” talk show programs as they echo each other is those damn members of the secular humanists religion are destroying America, like Madalyn Murray OHair kicking prayer out of public schools.

First the mistakes in the above accusation – Madalyn Murray O’Hair was an atheist, not a secular humanist.   She was not the person who brought the case that the Supreme Court decided – she filed a case called Murray v. Curlett which raised similar issues challenging a rule by the Baltimore Maryland School Board (Schumpp was a Pennsylvania law).   The Supreme Court decided Abington School District v. Schempp, which was brought by a Unitarian, not an atheist and not a secular humanist.  Later she would accuse the Court of combining the cases to avoid giving credit to her Atheist movement, instead featuring the objections of Unitarians [details]

The case was about compulsory reciting of Bible Verses in Public Schools and reciting the Lord’s Prayer out loud.   The case was decided by Supreme Court 8-1, it wasn’t some really close decision that needed emanations from a penumbra.   A state requires children under penalty of law that they must attend school, then requires that while at that school they read from religious texts and recite a statement of religious belief.

Both case were following up the case the previous year of  Engel v. Vitale, which was brought in New York, primarily by Jewish groups opposed to recitation of a prayer written by a local school board.   That case was decided 6-1, during a time when Hugo Black was the chief Justice – Hugo Black had been appointed to Supreme Court by FDR.

If you truly believe that’s the kind of laws the Founding Fathers intended, then it’s just one tiny step to say “Let’s have the students at our school recite the Apostle’s Creed”.    The strongest case you can make to suggest that Abington v. Schempp was wrong is that the U.S. Constitution limits what the Congress can do, not what laws States and cities or rules a school board can pass.    That idea is called the “incorporation doctrine”, which grew out of the Fourteenth Amendment passed at the end of the Civil War.   Like it or not, amendments are just as much a part of the Constitution as the document agreed to by the Founding Fathers.   They are not an “optional” part of the Constitution you can close your eyes and ignore.   If you want to fight that the incorporation doctrine is wrong and win, then states and cities can pass laws banning all possession of guns.

So what are the key ideas of Secular Humanism and where did they come from?

http://www.secularhumanism.org/index.php?section=main&page=sh_defined

The term “Secular Humanism” was originally created by  William Temple, an Anglican Bishop who wrote a book in 1942 called “Christianity and Social Order“, and Secular Humanism was the straw man he created to describe the people opposed to his idea to marry socialist principles  with religious faith.

The man who popularized the term “Secular humanism” in American culture was a TV advertising guy named Rosser Reeves, who became well known in part for producing the TV advertisements for that radical presidential candidate Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952.   His ideas about the purpose of TV ads and how they should be produced to get people to buy things influenced most of us most of our lives.

My only memory of Secular Humanism was it was a useful demon for a few years to wave around by the likes of Jim Bakker, Ernest Angley and similar TV evangelists in the 1970s to get TV viewers to send in money.   “The Secular Humanists” are in the same category as “The Illuminati”, “The Council of Rome”, “The Shadow People” and the like of some evil force that out to destroy God and rule the world.

The core idea of Secular Humanists is that it is possible for people to be moral and build a strong society without reliance on religious doctrine and “revealed knowledge” to guide human behavior, overseen by a God ready to punish those who violate his rules.

Instead of relying on faith, secular humanists rely on logic, science and reason to decide how human society should function.    “Thou shalt not steal” is a good idea on its own because respect for property rights is necessary for a stable and just  society, not because an ephemeral being hovering in the sky sending people to hell if they steal.

Secular Humanists do exist.   Their Facebook page has 6000 likes.  Today they seem to be a mix of Libertarians, Atheists and “Free Thinkers”.   They are hardly a secret shadow government controlling the world.   If you have evidence otherwise from a credible source, I’m all ears.