Investment Advice for Secularists

No Future

The mindset of our secular age is incurably religious.  It's just that the objects of its fealty and devotion are other creatures.  Other humans--or humanity in the abstract.  Instead of a theocracy, secular humanism has erected a humanocracy, which is profoundly religious and worshipful.  As secular humanism has waxed so its tolerance of contrary beliefs has waned; as its power has grown, so its fear of, and anger against, contrary beliefs has burned more intensely.

In pre-modern Christendom it was believed that all of society was linked to, and dependant upon God.  If heretics were tolerated, evil consequences would fall upon the community in general.  Charles Taylor puts it this way with respect to the pre-modern age:

So we're all in this together.  This has two consequences.  First, it puts a tremendous premium upon holding to the consensus.  Turning "heretic" and rejecting this power, or condemning the practice as idolatrous, is not just a personal matter.  Villagers who hold out, or even denounce the common rites, put the efficacy of the rites in danger, and hence pose a menace to everyone. . . .

The idea died hard that a society containing heretics, even unbelievers, must fall into disorder.  It even hangs on in a semi-rationalized form into the Age of Enlightenment, in the view, for instance that oaths of allegiance would have to be null and void for atheists, who by definition fear no retribution in the after-life.  Locke thought so, and even Voltaire came close to it.  [Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 42f.]

Secularism insists upon man as semi-divine, because man alone is the dominant personality on the earth.  This leads to an intractable paradox.  On the one hand, secularism insists that all reality--literally and comprehensively--is subject to exceptionless natural law.  These laws are comprehensively impersonal.  Matter, which is governed by natural laws, is equally impersonal.  Yet, secular man still frames his doctrine of man as if he were not subject to brute, blind, impersonal natural law.  Taylor again:

Now even if we are theoretically committed to treat the human world in the same "scientific" way, we don't manage ever in practice to frame our interaction with others in this mould.  In fact, we live the domain of human action as one in which a big difference can be made by an exceptional effort of will, or charismatic appeal, or superlative judgment irreducible to rules or formulae.  And so we often see outcomes as arising from exceptionally effective (or ineffective) action, without being able to state them all as instances of a single set of laws. [Ibid., p. 40.]

The collective celebration of the will and wishes of man is the secularist equivalent of deity.  There is no higher authority.  Therefore, to traduce the will of men is to place the entire secularist community under threat.  Those who would question or oppose or seek to limit human wilfulness and exceptionalism pose a menace to the entire society, to public order, and to everyone. 

Those who oppose human wilfulness can expect to face blind fury--sometimes from extremist fringe groups (greenists, animal rights activists) but increasingly from the community at large.  So Christian tradespeople who refuse to join in celebration of the wilfulness of man to defy the natural order and publicly celebrate homosexuality face irrational fury.  Why?  Because they question the prevailing consensus of worshipping human wilfulness, and thereby threaten the established order.  Opposition to abortion also arouses fury well beyond, say, public anger over crime.  The wilfulness of particular females and males is threatened; therefore the entire secularist order is undermined in principle.  Abortion rights become a ditch in which to die in defence of religious secularism.  How dare anyone question the right of a woman to control her own body!  How dare any question or limit the right to die! 

Secularism produces a religion of human exceptionalism, where above the blind regimen of natural laws rises the glory of the purposeful will of man.  It is the secularist version of resurrection.  Any who oppose must be, first marginalised, then exiled from the secularist community, and then made to pay the ultimate price for heresy.

Secularism will insist upon holding to the secularist consensus.  It will die in this ditch.  To admit the possibility of a non-secularist alternative is heresy and threatens the very foundations of the secularist order.  Battle has been joined.  It is a battle that the the Risen Christ will most certainly win.  Our advice is to quit all  investments in the secularist enterprise and its humanocracy as soon as possible.  Its doom is sure. It has no future.