In Denver, a woman with a fake ID was denied entry to a country music show. Her response was to pull a gun and start shooting other people in line, hitting five. Makes perfect sense.
At a 49ers vs. Patriots game, a brawl erupted because of (insert idiotic "he stepped up to me" excuse) which ended with behemoth-sized drunk men pulling women around by the hair. Tough guys, one and all.
In Florida, a couple visited Daytona Beach with their five and seven-year-old kids, where the parents promptly downed a bottle of whiskey and several beers before passing out. When police arrived hours later to wake them up, their kids were nowhere to be found. Did they drown? Were they kidnapped? Rather than ponder these questions, the man's first priority was to resist arrest, which led to a well-deserved "fall".
In New York City, onlookers stood and did nothing as a woman was mugged in broad daylight. The unarmed muggers were one male and one female. At least six onlookers can be seen, with probably more off-camera. Only a nearby hotel doorman, who probably makes less than every one of those onlookers, stepped in to help.
In Colorado, eleven men vied for Father of the Year by charging a little league field and brawling, while their horrified seven-year-old children fled the field. The reason for the brawl? There was a disagreement about a call made by the 13-year-old umpire.
And in Alabama, a wife going through a toxic custody battle with her estranged husband for their two-year-old son and five-year-old daughter decided the best possible course of action was to drown the two children in the bathtub before hanging herself. The daughter put up too much of a struggle, so the mother cut her throat before resubmerging her in the water.
These examples are the logical consequences of "live your truth" moral relativism. For the stadium brawlers, their personal pride took moral precedence over not physically beating women. For the beach couple, their personal pleasure took moral precedence over parental responsibilities. For the mugging witnesses, their personal safety took moral precedence over helping another human being in distress. And for the murderers, their personal vengeance took moral precedence over the sanctity of human life.
Their objects of worship were their own comfort, feelings, and ego. And whether intentional or not, this is the logical consequence of what is commonly known as secular humanism.
I remember way back in my high school years, popular culture witnessed a drift of youth from their parents' monotheism towards Eastern religions and philosophies. The great monotheistic traditions were derided as too dogmatic, too judgmental, too rules-based. Loafers, pot-heads, and slaves to their vices searched for sacrifice-free religion which would allow them to maintain a degree of spirituality without actually having to, you know, grow as a person or engage in any sort of self-discipline.
I remember my peers' brief embraces of Buddhism and Hinduism ending as quickly as they began, as these meandering souls soon realized that these religions, too, had rules and emphasized self-denial rather than self-indulgence. So the drift continued into Wicca, Gaianism, and other neo-pagan earth worship, which, it was hoped, would offer the practitioner an "I'm fine just the way I am" escape route from moral responsibility.
But these were spiritual dead ends, offering nothing outside bonfires, chants, and the late-night D&D tournaments at Denny's. They provided no more of an escape from deistic wrath (deluges, famine, disease, death) without repentant behavior (recycling, driving electric cars, purchasing indulgences carbon credits) than was required by the religions from which the practitioners originally fled.
Atheism struck them as a bit too harsh, what with all the "survival of the fittest" implications that rewarded the toughest linebackers and the hottest cheerleaders over the soy boys and granola girls. Where, oh where could they find a pseudo-spiritual ideology that sidestepped both evolutionary competition as well as a God-based transcendent moral code?
Enter: Secular humanism.
My purpose here is not to convince anyone to believe in God but to reiterate the irrefutable point that has been made by minds far greater than mine, i.e. if the creation of the universe occurred by chance and happenstance, then morality is simply a social construct. Morality doesn't exist outside the subjective, fleeting opinions of each individual, tailored to the individual's needs and desires at any given moment.
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"Of course murder is wrong," says the secular humanist, as if this were self-evident. But you only think this because the foundations of our society have been immersed in the Judeo-Christian ethic for over two millennia. "Of course human sacrifice and cannibalism are virtuous," said the Aztec tribesmen to the horrified Spaniard explorers.
Secular humanism behaves morally not for the sake of morality itself, but because it is practical to do so. The well-to-do suburban secular humanist benefits immensely from law-abiding neighbors, from vigilant police, from free-market capitalism, from intellectual meritocracy, from military deterrence, and from the religiosity of their countrymen, all of which work to keep the forces of social Darwinism at bay. Secular humanists are "good" because it makes no sense to rock a stable boat.
Secular humanism is comfortable. If it were uncomfortable, it would cease to be secular or human. Secular humanism is above shopping at WalMart; do you think it's gonna kneel down and wash the feet of backwater fishermen? Are secular humanists the ones lining up to volunteer at the orphanages and women's shelters? Are they giving up their holidays to work the inner city food banks?
Secular humanists mock the religiosity of overseas missionaries as a false front, knowing full well that they themselves are utterly devoid of the same spiritual confidence to risk life and limb in some third-world hellhole to spread their message. Few and far between are the secular humanists in the camps of Auschwitz or Magadan who paid the ultimate sacrifice by defending their fellow man, much less their supposed beliefs.
Like campus radicals who exploit the freedom of speech provided to them to attack the freedom of speech of others, secular humanists exploit the societal protection provided to them by its Judeo-Christian foundation to attack the very idea that such a foundation even exists. It's illogical enough for the leaf to argue that the tree to which it's attached does not exist. Far more fallacious is it for the leaf to maintain that the botanical laws that guide its behavior are a product of its own innate superiority, independent of any tree. A consistent atheist will at least acknowledge that the concept of moral universalism and the concept of God (the leaf and the tree, respectively) are inseparable, that you can't have the former without the latter, and that without them we're all just brutes fighting in the mud below.
Atheism is not the same as secular humanism. Among atheists who are honest about the ethical implications of a godless universe, there is an acceptance that social Darwinism is the ultimate arbiter in nature. To them, there is no right or wrong, no good or evil, and any peaceful cooperation amongst human individuals or human groups is conducted only out of pragmatic calculation. Darwin himself was a racial eugenicist. This is harsh, but consistent with the ideology.
Secular humanism, on the other hand, tries to shoehorn Judeo-Christian morality into a godless universe. Or, more accurately, the other way around. The result is a loose Western cadre of self-important narcissists who, if they ever prayed, would pray that their pampered, first-world existence will hold steady at least throughout their own lifetimes, without any cracks in the social dam which might put the strength of their devotion to the test.
But cracks there are, and the cracks are widening. Incidents like those listed above are becoming the norm, and the rest of society's ills that were once confined to the other side of the tracks are creeping not only into our own neighborhoods but into our own culture. Both the religious and the atheist predicted this. The secular humanist is still in denial.
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