Values, Humanism, and the Same ‘Ol Same Rhetoric
Attorney General William Barr, during a speech at the University of Notre Dame perfectly sums up several persistent Christian prejudices. I will quote the speech at length to demonstrate several cliches. Barr said this:
The Founding generation were Christians. They believed that the Judeo-Christian moral system corresponds to the true nature of man. Those moral precepts start with the two great commandments — to Love God with your whole heart, soul, and mind; and to Love Thy Neighbor as Thyself.
But they also include the guidance of natural law — a real, transcendent moral order which flows from God’s eternal law — the divine wisdom by which the whole of creation is ordered. The eternal law is impressed upon, and reflected in, all created things.
From the nature of things we can, through reason, experience, discern standards of right and wrong that exist independent of human will.
Modern secularists dismiss this idea of morality as other-worldly superstition imposed by a kill-joy clergy. In fact, Judeo-Christian moral standards are the ultimate utilitarian rules for human conduct.
….
We are told we are living in a post-Christian era. But what has replaced the Judeo-Christian moral system? What is it that can fill the spiritual void in the hearts of the individual person? And what is a system of values that can sustain human social life?
The fact is that no secular creed has emerged capable of performing the role of religion.
Scholarship suggests that religion has been integral to the development and thriving of Homo sapiens since we emerged roughly 50,000 years ago. It is just for the past few hundred years we have experimented in living without religion.
We hear much today about our humane values. But, in the final analysis, what undergirds these values? What commands our adherence to them?
What we call “values” today are really nothing more than mere sentimentality, still drawing on the vapor trails of Christianity.
This is the sort of un-informed and half-informed nonsense that American Humanists, freethinkers, and atheists have gotten accustomed to in the not-quite civil discourse in our not-quite-secular nation.
(I’ll ignore that “all the fomenters of revoluton were Christian” thing. It’s dumb.)
Look closely — Barr acknowledges the age of Homo sapiens — something on the order of 50,000 years — then asserts that “religion” has been part of the life of Homo sapiens since the beginning. In broad terms this assertion appears to be true, but how is it that “religion” as a relative term is important for the first 45,000 years or so, but then the Jewish and Christian religions — jumbled together in the discredited term “Judeo-Christian” — somehow apparently became the only legitimate choices in “religion”?
Barr then asserts, “What we call ‘values’ today are really nothing more than mere sentimentality.” Hmmmm — why would the choice not to steal or commit murder be merely “sentimental” nowadays when at one time it was not? And I wonder: What’s the antonym for “sentimental” in this context? Is Barr saying that people at one time avoided stealing and murdering because they were more . . . what? Pragmatic? Un-emotional?
And, again, if Homo sapiens was serious about religion 50,000 years ago, but presumably not Jewish or Christian, then why is it that now the same species is merely “drawing on the vapor trails of Christianity”?
Couldn’t Homo sapiens by now have evolved a religion of another sort? Perhaps by reinterpreting those two great commandments Barr loves — to Love God with your whole heart, soul, and mind; and to Love Thy Neighbor as Thyself.
After all, Barr claims that values can be derived from the guidance of natural law — “a real, transcendent moral order which flows from God’s eternal law.”
And, in perhaps the most egregious slight-of-hand here, Barr clearly defines the word “god” in a very specific historical and cultural context. Can’t pantheists derive the same moral laws, even if they believe that “nature” is god? And what is it about nature’s laws that atheists can’t see? Oh, and what “moral order” exists only within two of the many religions of Homo sapiens?
OK. We’ve heard all this before. Barr’s speech is the boiler-plate of conservative American political and theological discourse. It’s part of the “godless atheist” malarkey that goes back to — at least — the beginnings of the Western atheist tradition.
We all know that many theists accuse those who operate from a naturalistic understanding of reality of having no foundation or grounding for ethical principles.
We know this is far from true, and one bit of good news is that research into the beliefs of millennials indicates that less than half (46 percent) “believe it is necessary to believe in God to be moral.”
So. We freethinkers are doing something right that is slowly changing American prejudices.
Couldn’t come too soon, could it?
www.FirstUnitarian.org--First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis is a Humanist congregation.
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