Humanism which, in one form or another, is the assumed belief system of the modern era is fundamentally anti-human. Despite its avowed aim of ennobling man, it actually degrades him because it denies that in him which raises him beyond the natural world. Its rejection of God takes away our status as a spiritual being come to Earth and at a stroke abolishes the sense of higher and lower (closer to God or further away from him), reducing the human soul to a mere by-product of material forces. Then, with its goal of seeking to eradicate suffering, humanism isolates man in this world, banishing him from his true home in the spiritual realm. This is because the reality of tragedy in this life which so offends the humanist comes from the fact that we are part animal and part angel. It is the conflict between these two aspects of our being that is responsible for suffering at a level beyond the purely physical. If you get rid of tragedy, you get rid of the spiritual. It is obviously not wrong to address the fact of suffering but to seek to remove the possibility of it altogether as seems to be the humanist end goal would be to kill the human soul. This is not meant as an excuse to ignore suffering but an attempt to show the inner cause and even, up to a point, spiritual necessity of it. Suffering is mysteriously tied up with love. If you remove the possibility of the one you also remove the possibility of the other. It is possible that we only love to the degree that we either have suffered or are able to suffer. I have often remarked on the fact that the faces of the people I regard as the most spiritually aware are those that have suffering etched into them. Suffering gives depth, not inevitably but it can do depending on how one reacts to it.
When Man tries to become more than Man by himself he becomes less than Man. Without the idea that he is a son of God, in his deepest nature a being not of this world, he can never go beyond himself. And yet the essence of true humanity is that we can go beyond our earthly selves. That reality lies behind all our greatest achievements and best ideas of ourselves and our place in the universe. However, if we are to go beyond ourselves we cannot do that as ourselves as we experience ourselves to be now. We have to see ourselves as spiritual beings not earthly ones. The great mistake of many religious people is to think that they can take their earthly self, their normal human self, intact to heaven. Not so. All spiritual teachers who know what they are talking about have proclaimed that it is not change but transformation we need. In the humanist conception of man transformation is impossible because the human being is a material being only. Matter cannot change into spirit unless spirit is already present as the underlying reality.
Humanism has led to the smashing of the hierarchy of good. We no longer recognise the higher as higher or the lower as lower because we no longer recognise God as God and what the reality of God actually means. Without God as the highest reality the ladder of being is levelled to the ground and qualitative differences are negated. Humanism, which ostensibly sought to raise man, has only succeeded in dragging him down. Looking at the present situation in the world that process is still taking place. We are being dragged further down. If man does not know himself to be potentially a god does he then become just another beast? It would seem from current events that may be precisely what happens.
Some humanists think we will evolve to a higher state of consciousness but fail to understand that evolution in this sense only brings out what is already there. It doesn't come from nothing as the higher cannot come from the lower. Even more foolish, indeed inhuman, are the transhumanists who imagine that by melding man and machine they can create a higher being. If they ever succeed in this unholy operation they will find they have only created a living hell.
Human beings have tried innumerable ways to reach heaven without acknowledging the reality of God and Christ because they have not been willing to make the sacrifice this entails. But it is a good sacrifice that only requires the giving up of our spiritual sickness. The unrepentant ego is like a cancer and it must be cut out. There is some pain in this but the alternative is death. Humanism is the path that leads to death. Yes, man is a noble creature with unlimited potential but only when he takes his place as a son of God. Without God man is nothing but a vainglorious braggart swollen with self-importance but inwardly empty.
I particularly appreciated this post. Too many of my "secular spiritual" friends want their modernist cake and eat it too.
ReplyDeletethanks ted. One of the tests of the current time is that we have to reject the idea that we can have our cake and eat it too. You cannot serve God and Mammon and if you try to it will be Mammon you end up serving (meaning this world not just money).
ReplyDeleteThank you for a very profound post. Two comments in reaction to passages:
ReplyDelete"It is possible that we only love to the degree that we either have suffered or are able to suffer... the faces of the people I regard as the most spiritually aware are those that have suffering etched into them.... Suffering gives depth, not inevitably but it can do depending on how one reacts to it."
Comment 1: Perhaps suffering--like that of Job--makes clear a choice: submit ourselves (ego) to God and His Will, or curse Him and be cursed (like Satan). This brings to mind a story about Father John from "Everyday Saints and Other Stories." Apparently, he was sent to work camps by the Soviets, but there--with suffering all around--he reported that God was "very close." His suffering seemed to have a purifying effect.
"Even more foolish, indeed inhuman, are the transhumanists who imagine that by melding man and machine they can create a higher being. If they ever succeed in this unholy operation they will find they have only created a living hell."
Comment 2: This captures what I felt, but could not articulate. I have always felt this hubristic drive to "live forever" with technology to be deeply unsettling. And, I think this connects with the largely missed opportunity you've written about in the West that we could have grown and evolved in the ways that matter--closer to God.
Thank you for your writings. In this late hour, I am happy to have found this resource. God Bless!
Suffering comes from refusing to accept the realty that all in human life is impermanent. We want the loved person or thing to stay with us, but that can never be. To love and let go at the same time is not easy, but it is the only way to meet the reality of life without delusion. The question is: how to do it? To bow to God's will means to accept that God has determined that we should suffer: that we should be drawn to love and then have the object of love taken away. It seems cruel and if there is God that has ordained this cruelty, then why should we love Him? He does not appear to love us. We can say that our suffering is just punishment for our sins, yet there are problems with this calculus, in that innocent people often suffer while wicked people don't,and this has led to many theologies. Camus said that we have the choice of accepting that man is guilty, his suffering justified and to submit to God, or to say that man is innocent and God is guilty and rebel. For most people these days, God is a concept, an abstraction. And if His reality were granted, His nature remains problematic. Most people just don't see how God matters, or how He can be more than our particular conception, which often conflicts, sometimes violently, with other conceptions. I understand your criticism of humanism, but posing belief in God as its antidote would seem to require a sharper focus on what is meant by God.
ReplyDeletethank you for your comment, Magnus. I think you are right. Suffering is an inevitable part of life but it is our reaction to suffering that determines whether it will cleanse us and leave us naked before God which is how we must eventually be or embitter us if we resist and rebel against it.
ReplyDeleteedwin, I think we don't understand suffering because we don't really believe in God. If we did then we would accept that it may be a cleansing agent and that though it may be a mystery now all would eventually be revealed. But imagine a world without suffering. Would we have anything to drive us to a higher state? Might we just remain satisfied with the material world and thereby cut ourselves off from the deeper truths of the spirit?
@William - It has been argued by 'humanist' moral philosophers (such as Judith Shklar) that the alleviation of suffering ought to be the primary duty of men - especially of public policy; and that this is what characterises what Americals call Liberalism and we call Leftism (socialism, feminism, antiracism, pro-sexual-revolution etc.).
ReplyDeleteThis superficially seems like a biologically validated ethic for those who believe only in this life; but in practice this ethic is only very selectively and inconsistently applied (and the suffering of many people is disregarded) - also, take to the extreme (which it will be, over time) it leads to a system that is keen to implement euthanasia in all kinds of situations, as being preferable to continued suffering.
Furthermore, suffering is not objectively detectable nor is it measurable - which means that in practice it is meaningless; and we observe massive infliction of suffering being justifed as a strategy to reduce suffering - simply because the power to inflict suffering goes with the legal-official power to define and quantify suffering.
In brief, humanism cannot truly justify an ethic of reducing suffering - that was merely a transitional phase from Christianity to the current moralising-amoral atheism - because humanism destroys all possible basis for any kind of genuine morality.
Interesting, Bruce. You are right that such a policy would be taken to the extreme because each new advocate of this approach wants to apply it further and deeper than before. That's how they validate themselves.
ReplyDeleteThe thing is that even if the alleviation of suffering was a valid end in itself it could never be done because we suffer on many more levels than just the material, be that physical, emotional or psychological. I regard myself as suffering from the atheistic state of the world today. How is that going to be cured from the humanist position except by some mind-numbing drug?
@William "How is that going to be cured from the humanist position except by some mind-numbing drug?"
ReplyDeleteIndeed. And at the extreme, by death now as a way of avoiding the near-certainty of future suffering. Why not, if suffering is the worst thing?
And, to link to another of your themes, this is pretty much how Eastern Religions (Hinduism, Buddhist etc) translate to the Western situation - where they have shed their detailed and onerous cultural and ritual aspects (including their punitive doctrines relating to reincarnation).
This is, indeed, why this kind of partial-pseudo-Eastern spirituality is so popular in the modern West (in the New Age) - by selecting only the West compatible aspects, the advocate can, for example, be free to engage in any kind of sexual practice, can be a fanatical leftist etc. Sex and politics remain primary, and the religion is fitted around them.
I agree with that. The rise in spiritual evil over the last few decades has shown that the only way to combat these things is through a spiritual approach centred on Christ. The Eastern religions cannot help in this as they can be too easily accommodated, at least in the water-down forms Westerners adopt them, to the 'truths' of the secular world. Of course, even Christianity can be adapted to secularism and often is but Christ cannot be.
ReplyDeleteThe avoidance of suffering seems the prime motivator of both leftist politics and spirituality. I think this is because nature is seen as an evil thing - in which suffering has no purpose. But as you said, imagine a world without suffering? I think we can imagine it. A world where the main focus of spirituality is to 'escape' the body through psychedelic trips, meditation and technology. A complete integration of the human and planet with virtual reality, in which people are continuously sedated. So from the POV of 'metaphysical leftism', the point of spirituality is to leave the body and become disembodied spirit. From the Christian POV, the whole point is that the divine has descended into the physical and contracted into the particular, which gives suffering meaning. So Christ is the guarantor that we stay firm on the ground in this world that seeks to abolish both nature and our souls.
ReplyDeleteI think that sums it up very well, Eric. Suffering, properly responded to, is the key to real spiritual freedom. Without it we would be slaves of nature. I particularly like your phrase that "the divine has descended into the physical and contracted into the particular, which gives suffering meaning. "
ReplyDeleteThanks! I recently finished Jeremy Naydler's book "The future of the ancient world". In the concluding chapters, he describes how in the ancient world, the spiritual aspirant would leave the earthly plane, ascend into the spiritual realm and meet the gods on their terms (Perhaps psychedelics is literally a short-cut into this?). The incarnation of Christ meant instead that the divine descended into man and thereby redeemed nature, which means that spiritual realization now may take place within the Self, on our own terms - here on earth! New Age spirituality seems to want to escape this, and once again return into communion with the gods, or a return into the Platonic realm of spirit. Effectively this means saying no to the work of Christ.
ReplyDelete@Eric describes something that I’ve not been able to articulate. But he offers only part of the picture. Nature is not seen as an evil thing by those who adhere to ‘new age’ and other spiritualities.For some of them nature is seen as All There Is, emanating from Source. This is mostly a pagan point-of-view, that is pagan with a God – called Source or the Divine Field, or several other names. These are the folks that believe in ‘ascension’ and ‘going to 5D’. These are the people that claim to be in contact with aliens and interplanetary races. It’s not so much that they want to ‘escape the body’ as they want to escape the planet. They believe the human race is raising its vibratory level and that will transform 3D earth-life into 5D. But you are right in so far as they do not want to suffer here, and look not so much to a humanity transformed by AI, but to an ascended state where they have telepathic powers, and are ‘Connected-to-Source’. So, they do want to escape, but not in the same way that Buddhists want to be free from suffering. Many of these people are not ‘leftist’ in the sense that they are opposed to the Globalist agenda and materialism, but they reject the mystery of suffering and think that message is all part of the control mechanisms of the ‘matrix.’ (To William) Since I don’t see that kind of thinking discussed here much, I am wondering where this kind of thinking fits into humanism or leftism? It’s true that most of the people who think this way reject Christianity and Jesus as the only way, truth and life, but they are not exactly humanist, transhumanist in the AI sense, or leftist. And could it be that some of the people who are exploring consciousness in this way could be adding to our spiritual knowledge, or is this just a demonic dead-end?
ReplyDeleteAstraea, the way I would describe such people is spiritual materialists by which I mean that they seem to want to deify the human rather than sacrifice the self in love. I don't think they love God so much as desire heaven and so they are a form of humanist, just a different form. Does that make sense to you?
ReplyDeleteYes, that makes sense, but sometimes it is difficult to make the distinction. Thank you.
ReplyDelete@Astraea
ReplyDeleteThat's correct. Such people presumably don't even believe in an active evil, but what I mean is that they see nature as an unnecessary burden of suffering. So the spiritual rationale becomes to 'escape' suffering, by alleviating the mundane mind. But you are right that they might not want to escape the body as much as use it as an experimental vessel for supernatural purposes. They are opposed to materialism on a surface level but in practice are easily swayed by artificial intelligence and utilitarian morality. If you have no concept of evil the world must come off as a playground of hedonic and spiritual licentiousness.