Freud, Marx & Darwin: The Trinity of Secular Humanism?

The loons over at Liberty Counsel apparently know more about secular humanism than I do, and I'm a secular humanist.

The Holy Trinity

They've been a-scared of secular humanism for some time, having stated that secular humanism is "a religion with no God," and claiming that it has become the established religion of the United States of America. I must have missed both of those memos.

Oh, and by the way, guys, secular humanism is not a religion. It's a philosophy, a worldview. And it happens to reject anything resembling what you might describe as religion, but let's not get caught up in semantics.

Today, on Liberty Counsel's 'Faith & Freedom' radio show, Shawn Akers stated that secular humanism has its own Holy Trinity: Freud, Marx, & Darwin.

I'll tell you something that's really interesting, Ron. There was a poet by the name of William Butler Yeats wrote a poem called "The Second Coming" around the early 1900s and his idea was that every two thousand years, a new God arises. And it was kind of striking that, after two thousand years after Christ, about the time that Yeats wrote this poem, no new God was to be found, or at least we didn't think so.

But it was about that time Darwin came on the scene and told us that you really created yourself by dragging yourself out of the primordial ooze and evolving faster then all the other species. And Marx came along and told us really that religion is the opiate of the masses, that if you're going to be fed, you're going to feed yourself. And then Freud came along and said if you don't feel good about yourself, don't look to a god to heal you, you got to dig down deep in yourself through psychoanalysis and you're your own counselor.

What I find interesting about that, Ron, is that we took the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit - the father that told us where we came from, that I created you in the beginning, we took the Son that said I'll tell you that I'm going to feed you and heal you and tell you how to find your substance, and we took the counselor, the Holy Spirit, and we put Freud in his place and said you counsel yourself.

In other words, the new god that arose under Yeats' scheme was secular humanism. It was making man god.

Funny thing is, as a secular humanist, I don't claim to know very much about Marx at all, and all I really know about Freud is what I learned in an introductory psychology course in college. I haven't read works by either. (I'm not really bragging about this, it's just the ugly truth.) I know plenty about Darwin, but mostly because he stumbled across the most one of the most important scientific concepts ever generated, and because I am very interested in biology.

See, the idea that we should seek to maximize human fulfillment through science, reason, and secular values does not require any particular figureheads. Sure, there are individuals who, through their discoveries, philosophies, and teachings, help to make sense of the universe as we navigate our lives. But that's all they do. They are not messianic. They are not martyrs. They are simply other human beings whose insights may or may not augment our non-religious approach to life.

So if this is my Holy Trinity, I am probably going to flunk my secular humanism confirmation classes.

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