Apologetics
3. Secular humanism holds that most human differences can be solved if humanity is sufficiently enlightened. However, I don't think more enlightenment is the issue. When I do something wrong, when I treat another person badly, it's not because I lack the knowledge of how to treat them right. I'm perfectly enlightened; I know exactly what I should do, but I choose not to do it for various reasons, usually because it benefits me. It's not that humans need to become more advanced. It's that humans need to be completely changed at the heart level so that they want to stop being selfish, and want instead to treat their fellow man better. Obviously this is quite impossible, apart from God, because only God can change a heart. Even those who follow Christ still struggle with selfishness, even after being enlightened into the knowledge that it's bad. Enlightenment is not the remedy; heart change is the remedy.
I'm sure that people here in Orlando know perfectly well how to treat me safely and respectfully on the road, but that doesn't stop them from driving like idiots. They problem is that they don't see any reason why they should treat me as anything other than an obstacle, especially when they feel that it benefits them to cut me off or pull out in front of me. The secular humanist assertion - that people must behave well simply because it's the right thing to do - is worthless and will not convince many people. Try that argument in a room full of seventh-graders and see how far you get. Nothing about secular humanism, with its relative morality and denial of eternal punishment or reward, can make a person WANT to sacrifice his own gain for me.
4. Secular humanism has proven utterly unable to actually solve any of the major problems that it claims humanity should be able to solve. Let's examine its track record in this area, shall we? Secular humanism was the driving force behind the establishment of the United Nations, which embodies a great many humanistic notions. It was founded on a basic declaration of human rights, such as the idea that every human has the right to vote and to equality, without explaining why any of these things should be true (see point #2). It features every nation on earth gathering together to collectively solve problems, proof that real progress can be made if everyone works together - at least in theory. The reality is quite the opposite.
Indeed, the United Nations, the humanistic vehicle for world peace, the best that 20th century enlightenment could give us, is an international forum exclusively dedicated to nations selfishly arguing their own personal interests, refusing to compromise when doing so would disadvantage them. If we were to judge secular humanism by its fruit, namely the success of the United Nations, we would conclude that the philosophy is a miserable failure which can never work as long as humans remain fundamentally flawed - which is to say, forever, until Christ comes back. The belief that humans can ever transcend their inherent selfishness is a complete joke. Everyone knows this, and the United Nations proves it, but secular humanists stubbornly continue to insist that, sometime and for some impossible reason, everyone will suddenly decide that it's better if they all get along.
Epilogue: It's for these reasons, and others which I cut out for brevity, that I say that secular humanism is a failed philosophy. It states that humanity can solve every world problem, but that 80% of humans are so gullible that they follow religions which are primitive and untrue. It asserts that all humans are equal, united by some powerful pan-human bond, but can give no reason apart from genetics why this should be the case. Humanism argues that most problems can be solved if humans are sufficiently enlightened, but enlightenment has never given me the desire to do the right thing, only the knowledge of what I should be doing as I'm doing whatever I want to do. Lastly, any attempts to solve world problems from a secular-humanist framework have met with miserable failure, most notably the United Nations, which has devolved into the largest, most expensive, and most elaborate proof of why humanism is, to use a technical term, a load of hooey.
In spite of these many flaws, it continues to be the strongest agnostic and atheistic world view, and is grasped desperately by people in search of some explanation for life, any explanation, which does not include God or Jesus Christ. Although this essay has been uncompromising in tone, we must adopt a Christlike attitude of compassion and love when dealing with those who are still imprisoned by false ideas, by their own selfishness, and by a refusal to admit that God even exists. He loves such people, in spite of their hatred for him, and we must love them as well. Yet we must also know why they are wrong, so that we can counter their lies with the truth, and I hope that this essay has been valuable to that end.
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