If someone comes to me claiming to offer me salvation I see no reason to condemn the person yet others will. If the government claims to offer me happiness by taking my money I’ll know it is hypocrisy yet others will gladly offer someone else’s money to the government in the cause of peace and happiness. The former seems to be less annoying than the latter. When the government is taken for God it seems natural for secularism. Why? This is what I want you to tell me. Why does it seem so reasonable that the government becomes the God of secularism to the degree that any other perception must be scorned with the greatest expression of intolerance by those claiming to be tolerant?
Consider the following link which explains the intolerance of secular humanism. It doesn’t matter whether you agree or disagree. My question is why are these opinions so repulsive that they will inspire the greatest degree of intolerance? Why on philosophy sites like Philosophy forum which should encourage the exploration of “meaning” do they also defend and protect the most divisive expressions of secular intolerance?
Again, my question is not whether you agree or disagree with religious concepts but why they raise such nastiness from people claiming to be intelligent?
http://www.catholiceducation.org/en/cul ... anism.html
I’ve learned through sad experience that sane discussions on the question of secular intolerance must be condemned anywhere secularism is dominant and protected.………………………That secular humanism is akin to religion is reflected by the fact that it has its own set of dogmas. These include denial of any moral authority greater than the individual human will, the primacy of personal satisfaction, the relativity of moral values, etc. all unjustified assumptions most of which have been refuted time and again by the sages of human history, those men who have really thought about such things.
Indeed, the writings of the Fathers of secular humanism are replete with dogmatic assertions. Rousseau is a case in point. In The Social Contract, he emphasizes the need for a civil religion which he describes as follows:
Now, it matters very much to the community that each citizen should have a religion. That will make him love his duty; but the dogmas of that religion concern the State and its members only so far as they have reference to morality and to the duties which he who professes them is bound to do to others
Further on, Rousseau argues that tolerance should be given to all religions that tolerate others, so long as their dogma contain nothing contrary to the duties of citizenship. In other words, it is for the sovereign state to determine what religious beliefs are acceptable and which are not.
Another example can be found in John Dewey, who might properly be considered the father of contemporary progressive education. Dewey often used religious terminology to describe his own secular beliefs. In a statement first published in 1897, entitled My Pedagogic Creed, he argued that in helping children to become members of a secular society the teacher is always the prophet of the true God and the usherer in the Kingdom of God. For Dewey, the true God is not, of course, the God of Abraham or of Christians, but rather the human community. Similarly, the true kingdom of God is not Heaven, but rather secular society developed through progressive education. Dewey believed that public schools, in pursuing this objective would succeed in doing what traditional religion had always strenuously sought but miserably failed to do, namely provide universal happiness………………………………..
……………………….But why is secular humanism intolerant? It is because it views each human person as a creature of society rather than of God. If God does not exist or if we cannot know anything about Him, then the only possible source of authority is society. Human nature, in other words, is not to be viewed as having been created and made subject to certain divine laws, but rather as able to be developed and shaped by society, i.e. the Almighty State. That is why secular humanists usually have no qualms about supporting totalitarian experiments in societal control. (Who among them has criticized Chinas forced abortion policy?) That is also why they have no qualms about redefining what all traditional religions have held as natural. They will argue, for example, that homosexual relations represent merely an alternative approach to sexuality. Or that basic male and female roles can be redesigned according to societys desires. Or that the unborn child is not human.
Secular humanism refuses to deal with values and morals because it perceives them as being a matter of mere opinion, of personal preference. It denies the existence of a natural law, i.e., of any objective moral norm. The only thing that counts is scientific knowledge, which is precisely what Rousseau, Marx, Fichte, Nietzsche and other Fathers of secular humanism claimed they were expounding. They opened the way to the great social engineers of our century the Lenins, Hiders, Maos and Pol Pots, etc. all of whom have been acclaimed, at some point or other, by secularist intellectuals.
In short, the acid test of the true humanist is the claim not to believe, but to know, and to know scientifically. As Walter Lippman, the epitome of American secular humanism, put it in A Preface to Morals, we must live ... in the belief, that the duty of man is not to make his will conform to the will of God, but to the surest knowledge of the condition of human happiness (my emphasis). The problem, however, remains: the proposition that the scientific method is the only sure source of knowledge and that it can be applied indiscriminately to human affairs is an act of faith. It cannot itself be scientifically proven. Even the staunchest secular humanist must admit that he has given assent to a kind of dogma………………………………….
Tell me honestly; if you find secular intolerance gratifying as so many do in these times, what does it do for you? What are the satisfactions of emotional secular intolerance?