The fruit of secular humanism in the public schools: Terrified children who no longer feel safe

As reported by NBC Chicago, "When a 13-year-old Chicago boy wrote a letter to Santa asking simply for 'safety' this Christmas, he didn’t expect to get a response from the president of the United States.

Malik Bryant, who lives in a high-crime neighborhood on the South Side called Englewood, didn’t ask for your typical Christmas toys when he participated in a charitable Letters to Santa program in the city.

“All I ask for is for safety. I just want to be safe,” his letter read, according to Direct Effect Charities' website."

What is this but the fruit of secular humanism?

Secular Humanism has all the characteristics of a religion. The Secular Humanist places man at the center of things. In the Humanist Manifesto II, which was released in 1973, humanists called for a new faith: "...traditional theism, especially faith in the prayer-hearing God, assumed to love and care for persons, to hear and understand their prayers, and to be able to do something about them is an unproved and outmoded faith. Salvationism, based on mere affirmation, still appears as harmful, diverting people with false hopes of heaven hereafter. Responsible minds look to other means for survival." (Humanist Manifesto II, The Humanist; September/October 1973, p. 4). Humanism is, therefore, fundamentally at odds with Christianity which regards God and not man as the supreme value of the universe.

Because Humanists recognize the importance of the public schools in advancing their man-centered religion, they do everything in their power to ensure that children are indoctrinated into the tenets of Humanism even as they attack faith-based schools. It was Paul Blanshard, writing in The Humanist, who said, "I think that the most important factor moving us toward 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 American child now acquires a high school education, and this militates against Adam and Eve and all the other myths of alleged history." (The Humanist State, March/April 1976, p. 17).

Humanist John Dumphy, also writing for The Humanist, said "I am convinced that the battle for humankind's future must be waged and won in the public school classroom by teachers who correctly perceive their role as the proselytizers of a new faith: a religion of humanity that recognizes and respects the spark of what theologians call divinity in every human being. These teachers must embody the same selfless dedication as the most rabid fundamentalist preacher, for they will be ministers of another servant, utilizing a classroom instead of a pulpit to convey humanist values in whatever subjects they teach regardless of the educational level - preschool daycare or large state university. The classroom must and will become and area of conflict between the old and the new - the rotting corpse of Christianity, together with all its adjacent evils and misery and the new faith of humanism resplendent in its promise of a world in which the never realized Christian idea of 'love thy neighbor' will finally be achieved." (The Humanist, January/February 1983, p. 26).

Has the last fifty years of secular humanist agitprop resulted in love of neighbor and a peace-filled environment where children feel safe?

How many school shootings must we endure before we realize where secular humanism is taking us? How many Sandy Hook style episodes before we realize we're on the wrong track?

The atheist is crippled by an intellectual insecurity. He must strive continually to convince others - and even himself - that God does not exist. But he is always haunted by the fear that he has not really banished the presence or power of the Divine Other. This canker of insecurity, which gnaws at his heart unceasingly, manifests itself in the incessant need to propagandize against belief in God.

For example Richard Dawkins, an atheist who authored "The God Delusion," devotes much if not most of his time attempting to convince others that belief in God is even dangerous. This charge is most ironic since, as Fr. Vincent Miceli, S.J., reminds us, "When man becomes his own absolute center, then God becomes his hell, because God sets limits to man's greatness. But once having attained autoerotic sovereignty, a monstrous metamorphosis takes place in atheist man. He begins to feed on his fellow men, for they now are his hell, threatening to rob him of his freedom. When God is rejected because he is seen as man's hell, then man, whom God loves, suffers the same fate and for the same reason. There is a frightening resemblance between the atheist humanist as a cell of society and a malignantly cancerous cell in the human body. Both cells have thrown off any service of subordination to the health of the communities in which they thrive. They act and grow according to their own uncontrolled ravenous appetites feeding parasitically on the whole organism. As runaway cells they invade and destroy every healthy cell in the body until they extinguish life and speed to completion the total disintegration of the unity of the body. Atheistic humanism is a psychic cancer. It shares two major characteristics with physical cancer. Both these human cancers arise from the arbitrary rebellion of a subordinate cell against the established social harmony of the whole. Secondly, both these cancerous rebellions are metastatic and messianic in their aggression to the death against organism and community." (The Gods of Atheism, pp. 463-464).

Gilbert Keith Chesterton reminded us that when man denies God he does not believe in nothing. Rather he will believe in anything. Moreover, he will not do nothing but as a fanatic he will do anything:

"There are men who will ruin themselves and ruin their civilization if they may ruin also this old fantastic tale. This is the last and most astounding fact about this faith; that its enemies will use any weapon against it, the sword that cuts their own fingers, and the firebrands that burn their own homes...He [the atheist fanatic who is crippled by his own insecurity] sacrifices the very existence of humanity to the non-existence of God. He offers his victims not to the altar, but merely to assert the idleness of the altar and the emptiness of the throne. He is ready to ruin even that primary ethic by which all things live, for his strange and eternal vengeance upon some one who never lived at all." (Orthodoxy, pp. 238-239).

Atheistic fanatics have a long history of unmatched violence. Today, fanatical rhetoric from atheist fanatics has resulted in actual violence against the Church as well as calls for such violence. And secular humanist propaganda has produced

 a public school system rife with violence where students simply cannot feel safe.

God is not the delusion. The myth of the atheistic humanist who truly values reason and peace is the real delusion.