Monday, 28 November 2016

Secular Humanism and Sin

Secular humanism is the standard modern belief system, supposedly derived from science and the ideals of the French Revolution but actually a sort of perversion of Christian ideals which has taken a part of the truth and puffed it up out of all proportion in the context of the whole, at the same time neglecting, if not categorically denying, other more important parts. But whatever its initial inspiration, it is now clearly driven by forces seeking to separate Man more and more from God, to lead him to deny his source and restrict himself to the material world. For the last few decades one of the key ways these forces have been doing this is by attempting to deconstruct the human form in terms of its fundamental identity as two distinct and complementary sexes. Once this reality is lost the human being is disconnected from spiritual truth and its nature can be reassembled from below.  If this sounds a little excessive to you that merely shows how far the process has already gone. Previous generations, or maybe even you a few years ago, would not have thought so.

Secular humanism, which is fundamentally atheistic, has taken much of its moral code from Christianity but it leaves out the most important part, and the one which is the bedrock of all else, which is to love God.  It also misinterprets the commandment to love your neighbor, taking it as affirming egalitarianism and rejecting discrimination. However, as the Masters said to me, human beings are by no means equal on the earth plane (they are equal as human beings but not as expressed forms of the human being), and the wisest course is to treat people with fairness and justice but not necessarily equally, a subtle but crucial difference. This demands judgement which secular humanism doesn't like, always preferring, theoretically at least, to treat everyone the same. 

Truth can be represented by a cross with a vertical and a horizontal axis and it should never be forgotten that the latter hangs on the former. But this is precisely what secular humanism does forget (or deliberately ignore), treating the horizontal axis is if it were all there is. However when you expand your parameters beyond the second commandment to include the first you see that loving God necessarily demands loving truth, and that means that you are obliged to condemn falsehood where you see it and not simply support your neighbour in his acts and beliefs regardless of what they are. The humanist way, which is relativistic, thinks that loving your neighbour means accepting him whatever he does or thinks as long as it doesn’t cause obvious harm to others but this can easily amount to the denial of God and absolute truth. This is not love but sentimentality and moral relativism.

For the injunction to love the sinner does not mean that you don’t recognize his sin as sin or that he is a sinner. You cannot use the theory of love to deny the reality of objective truth, and if you do you will have neither for love, real love, always goes hand in hand with truth. True love does not forbear to point out right from wrong. After all, what is the greater love, to encourage someone happily walking towards the edge of a cliff or to pull him back?

So the way love approaches the reality of sin is to say that, yes, it is sin but there is the possibility of repentance and forgiveness. It does not simply deny that the sin is sin because if it did it would be complicit in keeping the person in the sinful state without offering him a way out to the life more abundant, the life of joy rather than pleasure. Does love make a prison more comfortable or offer a way of escape?

When it comes down to it secular humanism can only end in one thing and that is nihilism. You might not think so at the moment because people are often better than the belief system they espouse since God is within us whether we acknowledge him or not. But the more the West uses up its moral inheritance from Christianity, and the further its morals come from their true source, the more nihilistic it will become until its morality will be just a matter of utilitarianism. Secular humanism cannot stretch us or help us grow out of our limited self-enclosed state. It cannot encourage the God within to come out for it does not acknowledge him. The only way it can go is down.

N.B. Many people dislike the word 'sin' because it implies unworthiness, condemnation and all sorts of negative things. But the reality is that it is a perfectly good word to describe that which separates the human being from its Maker and its proper spiritual destiny, and that's a serious matter.


7 comments:

  1. It is wonderful that you can express yourself with such love, while still explaining traditional morals and truths.

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  2. It's very kind of you to say so, Nathaniel, but I'm really only just passing on what I've learnt from my teachers and elsewhere.

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  3. Hi William,

    Thank you for your regular posts. I am still reading and contemplating your output fairly regularly. I have a question that has precipitated for me in recent times and feel moved to seek your perspective. "Why is the fact of life after death 'concealed' from us?" I find myself thinking at time how comforting it would be to so many to "know" that death is not extinction and that many this knowledge would cause many of our percieved problems in mortality simply to dissolve. Imagine a world where a post-death life was known to occur?!the implications would be unprecidented and all of the falsehoods discussed on this blog and others would be blown away in one fell swoop. And yet this is not what we find. Instead it is concealed from us both by ourselves but also, in fairness, through a lack of transparent and varifiable 'contact' with another spiritual world. Now of course your personal experience of the masters is v compelling and I imagine especially to you but most of us are not 'allowed'? this kind of viscerally affirmative experience and I am inclined to wonder why this is? Surely if these kinds of contact experience where more universal and commonplace much of the 'doubting Thomas' character of this era of history would be simply blasted away and also inspire a resurge in productive interest in spirituality and an earnest pursuit to understand our relation to the Universe, life in a meaningful context and ultimately God himself by extension (the proof of an afterlife finally settling the debate on 'is there a God?' and instead focusing us on the arguably more important questions of 'what is he like in character?' and 'what character should I aspire to become in relation to God?'

    Many thanks,


    David

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  4. Incidentally, your original post makes a fine point that often gets deliberately swept aside:

    "For the injunction to love the sinner does not mean that you don’t recognize his sin as sin or that he is a sinner. You cannot use the theory of love to deny the reality of objective truth, and if you do you will have neither for love, real love, always goes hand in hand with truth. True love does not forbear to point out right from wrong. After all, what is the greater love, to encourage someone happily walking towards the edge of a cliff or to pull him back?"

    I know I am a sinner and I struggle every day to acknowledge my sins and turn away from them. I fail repeatedly and am regularly disheartened by my lack of progress. That much is perhaps par for the course but what makes it all the harder to fight is when the world whispers (or shouts) in your ear in the media, in the attitudes or expressed daily opinions of everyday people..."Why worry about that...that is ok now and is not bad anymore...relax and enjoy your sins...sins are not even real anyway. Its just a silly old word made-up by stuffy old men from a time before we knew better thanks to science and evolutionary theory, etc." I must admit at times I give in and go along with the collective pressure because standing outside of the torrential flow of "progress" is a difficult thing to do actively and requires a strong 'swimming up stream' and when you do try to swim up stream others will gang-press you to relent by enforced social ostracism, alienation, mockery, hostility, etc. Imagine a world where at least we could share a vision of our acknowledged faults not distracting us from also acknowledging the ideals. We need to help each other stay on the path or those whose moral compasses have gone awry will never be corrected through the neglectful or harmful effects of ones neighbours.

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  5. Hello David
    Nice to hear from you again.

    Regarding your question about why we don't know about life after death, it's a bit of a poser isn't it? But I think there are good reasons for it. First of all, we have to accept that this is the result of the Fall, that event, whether intended or not, when we fell away from truth and became completely Immersed in the material world. Now this may have a good side in that we are more able to develop our sense of a self and our intellect but it separates us from truth in its wholeness.

    But then there is the question of the need for faith. It is through faith that we make our decision whether to accept God or not. If we absolutely knew there was an afterlife and a supreme being there would be no need for faith but also we would have had the possibility of a choice freely made removed. And we must make this choice in freedom for it to be ours. After all the point of human beings is for God to have companions not mindless slaves.

    That is why I believe there is just enough evidence in the world to point to God but not enough absolutely to prove his existence. We have to make the choice and faith is required. But the thing about faith properly understood is that it opens the doors to higher intuitive perception in a way that not having it doesn't. If you absolutely knew with your normal everyday mind that God was there you would have no reason to develop your spiritual faculties. They would remain stunted. They need the stimulus of faith to bring them out.

    So the uncertainty is a test and an opportunity. We have to make the effort to believe and not have that belief unearned, as it were, if we are to reap the full benefit of it. After all, people obey a dictator because they have to, through fear and coercion. But God wants us to follow him through love not fear, and that must be our decision not something forced on us.

    Finally I would say are you do sure there is no proof of life after death? God has not left us comfortless. The teachings of religion are there to show us the way. That may not be proof but it’s a pretty good indication. We can dismiss them if we want to but that’s not God's fault, it’s ours.

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  6. Thank you for your reply William. Suffice it to say on here that I have my reasons but I would prefer to discuss via email if that's OK. I know we have corresponded that way before and that seems better on this occasion. I do value your insight and wisdom on spiritual matters and I feel as though I can trust your honest and heart-felt guidance from a more mature and experienced person than myself.

    I will write again via email as soon as I have time to write a considered reply that does your points and questions justice.


    Best wishes,

    David

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