No, Secular Humanists Don’t Owe Their Morals to Christianity
Lambasting Tom Holland’s specious remarks on liberalism and the American culture war
In his book Dominion, Tom Holland argues that what we think of as modern secular societies are still much more beholden to Christianity than liberals and humanists would like to admit. According to Holland, our humanitarian values are saturated in Christian ways of thinking and may not even be justifiable without some recourse to the old theological underpinnings.
Siding with the darkest atheists
As I show at length elsewhere, Holland’s way of telling Western history to establish that thesis is riddled with fallacies and specious insinuations. Given the weakness of his case, then, why did he bother to write a 600-page book to try to establish it?
Although Holland was raised as a Christian, he’s no longer one. Indeed, he seems to share John Gray’s conceit that he’s one-upped the average secular humanist or naturalistic atheist. In Straw Dogs, Gray argues that naturalism is lethal to liberalism, and that Eastern pragmatists and nihilists are far more enlightened than the so-called early-modern Western rationalists who were too blasé about what Friedrich Nietzsche rightly called the social catastrophe of…
