Capitol Ideas/Humanists and Heretics
Bethell, Tom
CAPITOL IDEAS HUMANISTS AND HERETICS At the time of the Pope's visit the secular humanists met in conference at the American University, barely a mile from where I live. There was to be "dialogue"...
...Sidney Hook of the Hoover Institution says that Kurtz is "the number one secular humanist in America," reserving for himself the number two position...
...Partly I'm a cultural Catholic in the same way that I'm an American—and I despise an awful lot that my country represents...
...Speaking from the podium, Paul Kurtz said that next year the Humanists would perform "sort of an exorcism," putting "all of our condemnations in a box and letting them go over the [Niagara] Falls...
...And still say publicly, 'I am a Catholic?' And if so, what does it mean...
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...Moreover the pastor, Father Philip Koufos, took me behind the icon and there was nothing to be seen except the thin (dry) plywood backing of the icon—no contrivance was or possibly could have been hidden there...
...One man wondered how Maguire could both call himself a humanist (as Maguire had), and yet believe in God...
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...There was to be "dialogue" with Roman Catholic theologians, discussions of humanist values, and an awards banquet, complete with an unmasking of those notorious weeping icons...
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...He babbled on about re-envisioning the world, about "mystery in personal terms," and the "God option," concluding that he would never call himself "exclusively" Catholic anymore because he was "comfortable with other groups...
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...He had brought with him a picture of the Mona Lisa thick enough to conceal some contraption in the back, canvas stapled over it...
...I had assumed that secular humanists were first cousins to libertarians, but this turned out to be a mistake...
...He added superfluously: "the labels are meaning less and less...
...There must not be these crises...
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...Man has to solve his own problems without the help of the deity," said Richard Dean...
...I'm inclined to ask you this...
...Because if I am going to hell, all of you are going to hell too...
...See, for example, "The Right's New Bogeyman," by Kenneth Woodward, Newsweek, July 6, 1981...
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...A professor of philosophy at the State University of New York (Buffalo), Dr...
...Someone suggested that the humanists might want to embrace the libertarian solution to such educational dilemmas: vouchers...
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...But, Carlson told the secular humanists assembled, this didn't worry him...
...Nicholas Albanian Orthodox Church in Chicago as a "not-so-miraculous miracle" (a representation of the Virgin Mary, painted in 1962, "wept" an oily substance for seven months, from December 6, 1986, to July 7, 1987), Carlson said he could reproduce the effect...
...All other considerations are subordinated to that...
...In the all-too-short "dialogue" time left over after academic speeches, it was interesting to note the frustration the humanists evidently felt trying to pin down the elusive Maguire...
...Young people in the church say to her: "This liberal religion is okay, but what sustains you in a time of crisis...
...Religion gives us consolation that we will not...
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...The defining characteristic of secular humanism is the espousal of a world-view from which God is excluded...
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...A table was loaded down with humanist literature, Tom Bethell is The American Spectator's Washington correspondent...
...I told Shawn Carlson this and he said: "I am not saying that weeping icons are not miracles...
...Referring to the recently weeping icon at St...
...One would be inclined to call the Maguires heretics if it weren't so clear they would take it as a compliment...
...D. in physics at U. C. Berkeley, was the concluding speaker...
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...But you must ask that person why he or she finds life empty...
...These people have a hidden `must,' " said Albert Ellis, award-winning sexologist, now heading something called the Institute for Rational-Emotive Therapy...
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...for example a booklet entitled "A Humanist Funeral Service," by Corliss Lamont...
...He added that it was hard to give a starry-eyed answer...
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...I found myself rather admiring their unflinching adherence to their bleak worldview...
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...Most of my Catholic friends are more like you...
...Another questioner asked why those on the panel weren't Protestants...
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...They are in this sense "card-carrying," like equally old-fashioned Communists who believed you had to join the party in order to promote the millennium...
...Kurt Baler, a professor of philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh, may have even slightly shocked this crowd (of about 200) when he said: "It could be worthwhile to snuff out the fag-end of a life...
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...Secular humanists often refer to their small membership, sometimes to their considerable influence...
...At the end of one session, a woman came to the microphone and said she by Tom Bethell was a Unitarian...
...Kurtz drafted "Humanist Manifesto II" (1973), wrote the "Secular Humanist Declaration" (1980), edited the Humanist, and published a collection of his articles under the title In Defense of Secular Humanism (1983...
...The moderator then said that we were out of time but that "we will come back to this question of the meaning of life," which "needed to be addressed more fully...
...His thick, smothering smokescreen of words seemed to have meaning because his sentences parsed, but in fact they had no real meaning at all...
...and so his claim to be a believer, without ever having to say what he believed in, drove the humanists to distraction...
...The real one had...
...I t was not a young audience—a good many of them wearing Block Bork buttons—and of course secular humanists are old-fashioned in insisting on identity and truth-in-labeling: actually "orthodox" values...
...At the Awards Banquet on Saturday night Richard Dean at my table told me he was a member of Friends Free of Theism, a group that meets in Minneapolis on solstices and equinoxes...
...is left to the secular humanists to step forward and insist on a little clarity and definition...
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...It seems that when the bishops shrink from excommunication, or (as in the U.S...
...Such a reaction in turn leads Christians to suspect that what appeals to humanists about the U.S...
...It's nice to have a big daddy to lean on," said another...
...Yet these were "totally in opposition to humanism...
...I decided to confirm their existence with my own eyes...
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...Their first date, one might say...
...The claim by all its leading exponents that humanism is not a religion must be taken as conclusive...
...As it happened I had visited this Chicago church in February and the icon indeed was "weeping" when I was there...
...Baier, from Austria, and an award-winner that night as a "defender of our humanist frame of reference," said this was a "very important question...
...How would the panel respond...
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...The conference was organized by Paul Kurtz and Free Inquiry, the quarterly magazine he has edited since 1980...
...Well, the question is a difficult one," said Dr...
...Indeed, fundamentalists are wasting their time trying to claim that Sec-Hum is a religion, its ideas thus excludable from schools on First Amendment grounds...
...I could understand why Sidney Hook, number two in the Sec-Hum hierarchy, was so disgusted with liberated theologians and would rather debate old-fashioned Thomists...
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...I heard that same statement when I was debating members of the Moral Majority," said the complacent Maguire...
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...Science itself had "sometimes brought evil...
...So," Carlson concluded, "see you in hell...
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...Paul Kurtz said at the outset: "Free Inquiry represents a point of view held by tens of millions of secularists and humanTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1987 ists in the United States: non-religious people, independent free thinkers, nominal Catholics, Protestants, Jews, and others...
...That way the Christians could have their schools and the atheists theirs...
...Only that he could reproduce the same effect...
...Among them were ex-priest Dan Maguire and his wife Marjorie (once a novice in anunnery...
...Here indeed, they surely felt, was an ally, a "soul" mate, a non-believer ready to repudiate almost any doctrine...
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...What is so baffling to many secular humanists, especially those that came out of the church," he said, "is that we're hearing from you all of these wonderful stories about how much room for dissent there is in the church, following your reasoning wherever it leads...
...But the humanists weren't interested...
...They enjoy being heretics in the Catholic Church...
...system of public education, from which religion is now so zealously excluded, is precisely its compatibility with the atheist worldview: training grounds, presumably, for more secular humanists...
...Still, there is a recurring emptiness...
...Did the laughter have a somewhat hollow ring to it...
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...Kurtz himself gave me a friendly welcome, telling me that Free Inquiry has 30,000 subscribers...
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...To their credit, secular humanists insist on definition, so that the notions "true" and "false" still have meaning in their philosophy...
...There is no limit to the pursuit of truth at this university...
...By some Vatican oversight or Jesuitical chicanery, Dan is permitted to teach theology at Marquette University...
...A doctor from Boca Raton told me that "once you get rid of the repressive tenets of religion, you get rid of the cause of war...
...Baier...
...But the humanists could not easily follow Maguire's mind...
...But she remained embarrassingly dry-eyed...
...F red Edwords of the American Humanist Association and tireless scourge of creationists came to the microphone next...
...They say, 'I don't believe in the Trinity, in the Resurrection.' I say why the hell are you a Catholic, then...
...Maguire, without a doubt, understood that he enjoyed the subversive leverage of teaching at a (nominally) Catholic university...
...One man from Minnesota told me later that they would view such a proposal with as much suspicion as a constitutional convention...
...Whining and screaming about crises," someone said...
...A dean of the university opened the proceedings: "We are with you in your quest for inquiry and openness and development...
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...Humanist Manifesto I," published in 1933, oddly purports to found a "vital, fearless and frank religion .. . shaped by the needs of this age...
...A few years ago there was a halfhearted pretense that secular humanists, like unicorns, really don't exist...
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...Maguire boasted that the academic vice-president at Marquette had told him: "Dan Maguire is free to follow his mind wherever it leads him...
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...Dan likes to say that he was in the confessional one day when his future wife came in and said: Don't knock sin...
...Maguire: "There's no unity, there are multiple Catholicisms...
...The nature of the universe depicted by modern science makes unacceptable any supernatural or cosmic guarantees of human values...
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...But there was no pie in the sky for John Dewey, Lester Mondale (Walter's brother), and their thirty-six co-signers...
...And this made him useful to the forces of secularism, but only so long as he remained inside the church (just as Malcolm Muggeridge probably had more pro-Christian influence outside it...
...The secular millions are more in tune with their soft gibberish than with the hard-edged choices the Humanists would force on us...
...Sometimes that question comes from neurotics who are self-centered...
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...Looking at the different doctrines you have rejected, can you be a Catholic and reject them all...
...Yet he rejected labels, eluded definition, assumed different shapes, believed his words to mean whatever he wanted when he uttered them...
...When you say 'reject the doctrines,' I still keep hearing kind of nineteenth-century dogmas," said Maguire in reply, "and worrying about the natural versus the supernatural and then ticking off elements of the old Creed...
...There is a real and intriguing division here between the Heretics and the Humanists and I regret to say that the Heretics represent the wave of the future...
Vol. 20 • November 1987 • No. 11
