The Fruits of Secular Humanism

Crisis of Faith

John Stuart Mill, utilitarian, disciple of his father, James Mill suffered a crisis of secular faith in later life.  He describes what it was like to find that his atheistic beliefs failed to satisfy his soul.

I had what might truly be called an object in life: to be a reformer of the world . . . . This did very well for several years, during which the general improvement going on in the world and the idea of myself as engaged with others in struggling to promote it, seemed enough to fill up an interesting and animated existence. 

But the time came when I awakened as from a dream . . . . In this frame of mind it occurred to me to put the question directly to myself: "Suppose that all your objects in life were realised; that all the changes in institutions and opinions that you re looking forward to, could be completely effected this very instant; would this be a great job and happiness to you?"  And an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered: "No!" 

At this my hearts sank within me; the whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down.  All my happiness was to have been found in the continual pursuit of this end.  The end had ceased to charm, and how could there every again be any interest in the means?  I seemed to have nothing left to live for.  [Cited by John Gray, Seven Types of Atheism (London: Allen Lane/Penguin, 2018),  p. 35.]  

This reference occurs in Gray's exposition of the atheism reflected in Secular Humanism--which has now become the virtual universal religion of the West in our day.

Utilitarianism Versus Faithful Christians

The Sweet Sugar Trade a Bitter Poison

We are familiar with England in the eighteenth and nineteenth leading the charge against the slave trade.  William Wilberforce and the Clapham sect have been rightly celebrated for their lifelong labours in putting slavery to death.  

What we tend to overlook in these days, however, was how easily England got into the trade in the first place.  Benthamite utilitarianism was/is a godless philosophy.  It allowed calculation of principles and ethics on an abacus made up of human beings.  "The Greatest Good for the Greatest Number" was a convenient, soulless doctrine where the good of one's own always outweighed the good of "other" human beings.  It remains so to this day.

It was relatively easy, then, for England to accept the development of a slave trade--the evils of which reverberate to this day.  If utilitarianism provided the general moral justification, how did it all start?  What need drove it?   What led English ships to capture and enslave Africans and transport them elsewhere around the world into enforced labour?  Even as we write these words, the incredible  evil of such policies and practices strike us afresh.  We repeat, whilst nothing could justify it, what perceived need drove it?

Robert Tombs reminds us of how slavery came about on an industrial scale.

Letter From America (About the Slow-Suicide of Liberalism)

Death Rattles

Campus protests against the ACLU are a sign that American 'liberalism' is being destroyed by the forces it unleashed and its own inherent contradictions.

Robert Tracinski
The Federalist


The far left, under the banner of Black Lives Matter, is protesting a campus speaker again. Who is it this time? Some neo-Nazi like Richard Spencer? An unscrupulous provocateur like Milo Yiannopoulos? Just a garden-variety scary conservative like Ben Shapiro? Nope, it’s the American Civil Liberties Union as represented by Claire Gastañaga, executive director of the ACLU of Virginia.

Students took to the stage just a few moments after Gastañaga began her remarks. At first, she attempted to spin the demonstration as a welcome example of the kind of thing she had come to campus to discuss, commenting ‘Good, I like this,’ as they lined up and raised their signs. ‘I’m going to talk to you about knowing your rights, and protests and demonstrations, which this illustrates very well. Then I’m going to respond to questions from the moderators, and then questions from the audience.’

It was the last remark she was able to make before protesters drowned her out with cries of, ‘ACLU, you protect Hitler, too.’ They also chanted, ‘the oppressed are not impressed,’ ‘shame, shame, shame, shame’… ‘blood on your hands,’ ‘the revolution will not uphold the Constitution,’ and, uh, ‘liberalism is white supremacy.’

The moderate left has spent the past few years running interference for Black Lives Matter and Antifa, and some of us have been warning them that the far left hates the liberals, too. They’re now finding that out up close and personal, and I hope it terrifies them.

This, along with similar incidents at other universities, is a sign of the final death of American “liberalism.” It is death by suicide, because liberalism is being destroyed by the forces it unleashed and by its own inherent contradictions.

The Worldview of Playboy

The Playboy Philosophy

Buckley on the philosophy behind Hugh Hefner’s sexual revolution and the magazine that started it all

By William F. Buckley Jr.
National Review Online

Editor’s note: This is William F. Buckley Jr.’s On the Right column of October 1, 1966. It also appeared in his essay collection The Jeweler’s Eye, published by Putnam in 1968.


I bring the news, which I had from Hugh Hefner’s own lips, that the last issue of Playboy magazine sold 4,000,000 copies and ran $2,000,000 worth of advertisements, a phenomenal achievement; indeed, it is just possible that Mr. Hefner is making more money from Playboy and related enterprises than any other publisher in the country, at least from a single magazine.

Mr. Hefner’s Playboy is most widely known for the raciness of its prose and the total exposure of the female form. It is more than that, Mr. Hefner insists — and many agree, including professors and ministers and sociologists. It is a movement of sorts, and its bible is an apparently endless series, published monthly by Mr. Hefner, entitled “The Playboy Philosophy,” the key insight of which is that “a man’s morality, like his religion, is a personal affair best left to his own conscience.” The phrase sounds harmless enough, and the tendency is to cluck-cluck one’s agreement to it.

The trouble with Hefner’s law is that society is composed of nothing more than a great number of individuals, and if each man’s morality is defined merely to suit himself, then everyone will endure the consequences of the individual’s autonomously defined ethics. Mr. Hefner’s philosophy notwithstanding, there is such a thing as the public morality, and that morality has throughout civilized history been primarily sustained by religion.

The so-called sexual revolution, of which Playboy is the slickest harbinger, asks in effect that sanctions be removed against what used to be known as “illicit sexual behavior.”

Pagan Practices

No Place For Torture In a Just War

We have the rather unusual situation where a sitting US president publicly claims that torture is ethical, whilst his Secretary of Defense says it is counter-productive and of no use.  James "Mad Dog" Mattis is reported as adopting a pragmatic position (implying that if were to work, he would endorse torture).  President Trump says he will abide by Mad Dog's greater experience and wisdom in matters military and engaging in war.  

This is hardly a satisfactory position.  One can easily foresee a particularly gruesome terrorist attack on US soil with many deaths and casualties (think Twin Towers) and with evident extensive conspiracies attached (think 1605 Gunpowder Plot in England).  Expect Donald Trump in fear and anger and frustration to order the use of torture out of retaliation and anger more than anything else, whilst justifying it by the supposed information it would reap.

The sad and unacceptable thing is that both Trump and Mattis appear to base their moral position on pragmatism, or, to put it in a wider philosophical context, on utilitarianism.  It has long been a fatal flaw of that particular philosophy that the end most certainly does not justify the means.  The Christian position is clear: both ends sought and means employed must be holy, just, and good.  The West--particularly the Anglo-Saxon West--has suffered under the barren amoral wasteland of utilitarianism far too long.

More Utilitarian than Christian

Christian Ethics In the Public Square

Christian leaders in the Republican Party, who have supported Ted Cruz, are deserting him--or so we are told.  They believe he has violated a fundamental ethical principle, a Christian standard.  He has acted in an ungodly manner.

Several things immediately spring to mind upon hearing this--and we will evaluate the particular stumbling block shortly--but in the immediate let us be clear, if the charge against Cruz is true, Christian leaders in the Republican Party would be acting as conscientious disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ.  Their stand would be commendable and to be imitated by all.

But if it were not true, what then?  Well, sin being sin, and human beings being fallen creatures, there would be two possible camps amongst the Christian critics.

It is possible that one group (Group Number One) are not seeking to ground their judgment of Cruz in Scripture at all, but have merely fallen for a good dose of Republican Party hubris, which demands submission to the Party, for the good of the Party, and calls all good men to the aid of the Party.  Lenin would have been at home amongst such a group.  In fact he would have comfortably led such a party.

It is also possible that a second group have thought about the matter scripturally, and believe that Cruz has indeed violated the Law of the Living God.  This group would have withdrawn their support until he repents and is restored.  That would be the Christian way, right?

Group Number One are not worth debating in this piece.

The End Unjustified by Means

The Fallacy of Utilitarianism

Show us not the aim without the way. 
For ends and means on earth are so entangled 
That changing one, you change the other too; 
Each different path brings other ends in view. 
Ferdinand Lassalle: 
Franz von Sickingen

Utilitarianism Rides Again

Honorable Intentions Used To Justify Many Evils

The utilitarian theory of ethics and morality has become so deeply embedded in the public mind that few are even aware of it any more.  It's just obvious, self-evident.  Who could or would dispute it?

Utilitarianism is the belief that human actions ought to be judged by their consequences.  In particular, they are to be judged by whether they produce a greater good for a greater number.  (Utilitarianism historically put the ethic in a more absolute frame, as in "the greatest good for the greatest number".  But the procedurally impossible calculus devolves down to a more indefinite, simple "good outcome" test.)  This moral compass is as barmy as one could imagine, but what can you do when all moral absolutes are dismissed as having no foundation whatsoever (except of course the absolute ethic of utilitarianism).

Utilitarianism has reared it ugly head recently in a prosaic case in New Zealand.  A crusading "journalist" wanted to show how easy it was to purchase a firearm illegally in this country.  She deliberately and willfully broke the law, providing false information, and duly ended up owning a .22 rifle.  Then she broke the story.  What a slam bam whizzo of a story it was.

"Just" Causes Justify Lawbreaking

Superior Mortals Have More Rights

Self-righteous precious petals are at it again.  There are plenty of folk making up the ranks of those who have "higher causes" which justify the suspension of employment obligations it would seem.  A senior emergency doctor, working at the Whanganui Hospital, recently took part in a public protest against the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) presently being negotiated.  No problems so far.

But the self-righteous doctor had a higher calling than ordinary mortals.  He presented at a demonstration clothed in his work uniform, clambered up on top of a vehicle (not his own) and sat on it, refusing to move.  He was arrested by the police and later discharged with a formal verbal warning.  His employers (the District Health Board) summoned him to a meeting where they told him to cease and desist.  His union is now protesting the draconian, lawless, oppressive behaviour of his employer.  This from Stuff:

What do Hacking and Torture Have in Common?

Conflicts of Interest

The moral vacuity of Unbelief has been on display in recent days.  Firstly, the prurient frenzied delight over the hacking of Sony digital property, the breathless headlines about who said what to whom (to sell more newspapers and subscriptions) and the joy in seeing senior executives at Sony shown up to be nasty little people.  Hollywood and the gossip columnists (virtually the entire media set) are all atwitter.  Yet, in the same breath said media will condemn hacking as theft and an egregious crime.  Recall the moral outrage and self-righteous fulminations of the media and the Chattering Classes at the phone hacking undertaken by Rupert Murdoch's News of the World. But that was "them" not "us".  It makes all the moral difference in the world, apparently.

We have seen the same phenomenon in New Zealand.  One self-righteous moral pygmy receives stolen e-mails from notorious "right-wing" blogger, Cameron Slater and the media engage in an orgy of prurient, sensationalist twittering.  Quietly ignored is the fact they were profiting from the proceeds of a crime.  Ah, well, everyone was doing it, so we could not afford to ignore it.  The end (making a dirty profits) justified the means (exploiting stolen property).

Doubtless the media would be sniffy nosed at an individual hacking into, say, hospital patient records in the attempt to profit from their theft.  But in their own case and when it concerns their own book, they grandly ignore their complicity in crime because they tell themselves are operating "in the public interest".  Self-righteous, hypocritical mendacity. 

But crimes being committed "in the public interest" are pretty acceptable these days.

Nothing Wrong With a Little Torture

If It Works, It Has to Be Right

Torture has its apologists.  A US Senate committee released a report about CIA interrogation methods following the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon exposing and condemning the CIA's use of torture to get information from enemy (Al Qaeda) combatants. 

Its opponents have condemned the Senate report as misleading, inaccurate, and wrong.  Blogger Patterico provides a summary of their objections:

Three former CIA directors — George J. Tenet, Porter J. Goss and Michael V. Hayden — as well as three Deputy CIA Directors, took to the pages of the Wall Street Journal to dispute the Democrat-penned torture report released yesterday:

What is wrong with the committee’s report?
First, its claim that the CIA’s interrogation program was ineffective in producing intelligence that helped us disrupt, capture, or kill terrorists is just not accurate. The program was invaluable in three critical ways:
• It led to the capture of senior al Qaeda operatives, thereby removing them from the battlefield.
• It led to the disruption of terrorist plots and prevented mass casualty attacks, saving American and Allied lives.
• It added enormously to what we knew about al Qaeda as an organization and therefore informed our approaches on how best to attack, thwart and degrade it.

The current CIA Director is reversing his previous declarations of agnosticism on the subject to agree that torture provided critical information.

Who is telling the truth?

The Senate report claimed that the information  gained under duress was of little worth, implying that if torture were useful in providing vital information it would somehow have been acceptable.  The supporters of the programme point out, on the contrary, how successful it was in providing information to combat the Islamist terrorists.

Both the detractors and supporters of torture are operating out of a profoundly degenerate moral abyss.

New Zealand's "Interesting" Election

Crypto-Anarchists and Easy Dupes

This election season in New Zealand has been historic, unlike any previous election.  It had been distorted by a multi-millionaire German seeking to take control of the national political process to benefit his own voluminous pockets and to keep himself from incarceration in the United States.  We have not seen the like in New Zealand since Baron d'Thierry came to Hokianga in late 1837 on the Nimrod attempting to start a French colonial outpost in the face of British interests.  Herr Kim Dotcom is a latter day Baron d'Thierry, equally megalomaniacal.

And then we have had the hard left joining Dotcom in a madcap party which has combined capitalists in their most greedy, exploitative, and egregious manifestation with weird Maori and hard-left radicals deeply into Marxist ideology.  The chutzpah of the constituent  elements of this new Potemkin party has been breathtaking.  Their followers consist of the duped, the desperate, and the gullible. 

And, not to be outdone, we have had the hacking of a privately owned website and the theft of thousands of e-mails and private communications, followed by a breathless book authored by New Zealand's leading conspiracist once again publishing stolen information.  The book, Dirty Politics has the author's normal new-maths fingerprints all over it.  In Nicky Hager's world two plus two makes seventy-five.

Most of the media have been agog and aghast, unable to calm their febrile pens and stuttering tongues for a moment so as to make sense of it all.  Except for one or two scribblers.  Fran O'Sullivan, writing just before the election, had this to say:

That's Not What I Meant At All . . .

Vaunted Moral Principles

Poor old Richie Dawkins is getting lots of bad press these days.  Most unfair.  The recent furore is over his general advice to any woman pregnant with a Downs Syndrome child to abort--that is, kill--the child immediately.  How odious for anyone to criticise such a patron saint of evolutionism, our established religion.

The Telegraph summarises the "incident":

Richard Dawkins, the atheist writer, has claimed it is “immoral” to allow unborn babies with Down’s syndrome to live. The Oxford professor posted a message on Twitter saying would-be parents who learn their child has the condition have an ethical responsibility to “abort it and try again”. . . .

Now, of course, Professor Dawkins has always suffered from a grossly enlarged sanctimony gland.  One cannot criticise him for this affliction.  It's the way things roll and who can criticise Nature?

One mindless critical response to his "abort it and try again" gaff suggested that he was making killing a Downs Syndrome victim in-utero a moral equivalent to killing a Downs Syndrome adult.  Not at all, insisted the good professor.  Don't you know that infants when born start to have "feelings" and that makes all the difference. Anything that is "unfeeling" is not a human life; once a Downs Syndrome baby has feelings, then he she or it deserves the protection of the law proscribing infanticide.  Whew.  Glad we got to hear that.

The Overreach of Stupid Science, Part V

The Eclipse of Ethics

[Part V of  The Folly of Scientism by  Austin L. Hughes

Originally published in The New Atlantis ]

Perhaps no area of philosophy has seen a greater effort at appropriation by advocates of scientism than ethics. Many of them tend toward a position of moral relativism. According to this position, science deals with the objective and the factual, whereas statements of ethics merely represent people’s subjective feelings; there can be no universal right or wrong. Not surprisingly, there are philosophers who have codified this opinion. The positivist tradition made much of a “fact-value distinction,” in which science was said to deal with facts, leaving fields like ethics (and aesthetics) to deal with the more nebulous and utterly disparate world of values. In his influential book Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977), the philosopher J. L. Mackie went even further, arguing that ethics is fundamentally based on a false theory about reality.

Evolutionary biology has often been seen as highly relevant to ethics, beginning in the nineteenth century. Social Darwinism — at least as it came to be explained and understood by later generations — was an ideology that justified laissez-faire capitalism with reference to the natural “struggle for existence.” In the writings of authors such as Herbert Spencer, the accumulation of wealth with little regard for those less fortunate was justified as “nature’s way.” Of course, the “struggle” involved in natural selection is not a struggle to accumulate a stock portfolio but a struggle to reproduce — and ironically, Social Darwinism arose at the very time that the affluent classes of Western nations were beginning to limit their reproduction (the so-called “demographic transition”) with the result that the economic struggle and the Darwinian struggle were at cross-purposes.

Partly in response to this contradiction, the eugenics movement arose, with its battle cry, “The unfit are reproducing like rabbits; we must do something to stop them!”