Decomposing Humanism: Why Replace Religion? – Humanists are right to think that there is more to life than atheism but wrong to think that they are the ones to provide it.
As I have said before, I rather like reading informative and insightful articles about humanism and atheism. I think it is prudent once in a while to visit their worldview and note their struggles, internal divisions, worries and contradictions. All is not as rosy for them as it would first appear.
If you have stumbled onto this blog and are not a Christian, get yourself a hot drink, pull up a comfy chair and then tuck into the following article written by one of the best in the business:- All Of Grace by Charles SpurgeonMeet the latest critics of the new atheists: the old humanists. It is not enough, they say, to take a stand against religion—we must stand up something in its place. Humanists are right to think that there is more to life than atheism but wrong to think that they are the ones to provide it.
Just to show you how serious I am, I’ve christened a new fallacy to give a name to this mistake in thinking: I call it the fallacy of decomposition. The fallacy of decomposition is the mistake of supposing that as the estate of religion collapses there must be a single new institution that to arises to serve the same social functions it served—that the social space vacated by religion must be filled by a religion-shaped object. Instead, it could be that in the lot once occupied by faith there springs up a variegated garden, a patchwork of independent institutions, each of which fulfills one of those functions. Out of one, many.
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Let me be clear. I am not criticizing humanists for getting together to fight for the ideals of a secular, open society. For the better part of a decade, I proudly worked for an organization—the Center for Inquiry, publisher of Free Inquiry magazine—that does just that. But even there, I encountered tension between those of us who saw the Center primarily as a think tank and advocate addressing the general public in the marketplace of ideas, and those who saw it primarily as a congregation whose purpose is to gather up all the self-identifying refugees of traditional religion and offer them a secular alternative to everything it did for them. Compare: you might support Medecin San Frontieres because you believe in their work, but you wouldn’t expect them to officiate your wedding. I always maintained that the point should be to make the mainstream culture more secular and humanistic, not to create a new secular humanist subculture.
Neither am I arguing against disorganized secular humanism, of which I am both perpetual student and ardent lover. For disorganized secular humanism is practically identical to the ethos of modern, liberal democracy. Here lies the real embarrassment of the fallacy of decomposition. When humanism is equated with organized humanism, an entire civilization is reduced to a fringe group of dyspeptic rationalists who gather once a year in hotel ballrooms (as Sam Harris observed a few years ago before a group of dyspeptic rationalists gathered in a hotel ballroom). According to this impoverished self-concept, humanist “literature” does not embrace the better part of all letters but instead only the relatively few writers like Kurt Vonnegut or Isaac Asimov who have turned up at conferences of the American Humanist Association to accept awards.
Apparently, in thinking about what might come after religion, it is hard for humanists to see beyond a kind of telecom model, in which a conglomerate bundles together all of these services, so that the same people who put us in touch with metaphysical truth also provide us with community and morality.
It is all the more ironic that this model itself is an invention of religion, a sort of meta-dogma. It is a vestige of the contingent historical fact that after giving up its dreams of theocratic control, Western Christianity contented itself with claiming for its territory everything that fell outside of the civil sphere of government and politics and the commercial sphere of market activity. Why else would learning, art, food, sex and the meaning of life all be handled by the same religious monopoly?
Tags: Christianity