a Guest Article...
Hello out there, I'm just an anonymous hacker (from the time when that was honorable) who happened to be surfing about the web the other day. Just on a lark, I went looking for Humanist pages, just to see what mischief was afoot. I stumbled across the AHA home page, then perused various other related Humanist Web pages. After sampling the intellectual wares, a desire arose to put together a monograph to see if this "august" philosophical society was really as freethinking and open-minded as the advertising would have one believe. While the above urge may more accurately be described as a diatribe, perhaps this missive can be kept on a civilized level and maybe - though I doubt it - even have a salubrious impact upon the "open minded" deliberations of the society. Miracles can happen.
What you (the Humanist) are about to read will make you angry and offended, but there's no help for that, so just get over it. If this body of criticism is taken seriously, the Humanist movement will be brought to some semblance of sanity, and many future horrors may yet be prevented. Already you (the Humanist) don't like where this is headed. That's OK, a little taste of your own medicine may be just what the doctor ordered. Humanists are quite expert in marginalizing Christians and turning Christianity into the boogie man which is responsible for all the world's ills, or so you imagine. Consider all of the horrors inflicted in the modern world by Communism and Fascism, for they are truly yours, this is what you are capable of when people (like Christians) get in the way of your pet little political agenda's. You don't like this thought I would suppose, but it can be well documented, why don't you go look and see. One writer justly calls you "the Coercive Utopians." What are you willing to do to achieve your dreams? Read on...
FOND MEMORIES OF INDOCTRINATION, BRAINWASHING, MIND RAPE, LIBERAL (read: humanist influenced) EDUCATORS AND LIBERAL COMMUNITIES...
Time for the obligatory personal anecdotes, or as your favorite class of people would say, testimony. How about that high school social studies teacher who insisted that any opinion or view point that didn't line up with his was single sided, narrow minded and just plain wrong? Had a few of those, and the more liberal they were, the more pronounced the phenomena. Upon making my way to the hallowed halls of the University this trend seemed to get worse.
At freshman orientation, the liberal inner college had the best sales line (of bovine excrement it turns out) for an idealist with stars in the eyes. The liberal college offered a way around the obligatory freshman tutorials, where tyrannical professors intimidate students into the correct usage of the English language and the acquisition of acceptable writing skills. In retrospect, suffering the resulting stress and indignities of the normal English track would have been preferable to the extra time and effort spent over the years rectifying my "liberal" education. I digress, so on to more about the liberal college alternative. The freshman were divided into small classes, lead by an upper class man adviser, in this case a sophomore. Grades were strictly pass or fail, and of course were assigned by the individual students themselves. We allegedly studied the process of education, wrote a few innocuous papers and spent large quantities of time making up juvenile skits that no one ever saw. All that I can say, it was an easy 8 credits.
In the interest of democracy, self actualization and other lofty pursuits of the human spirit; mass meetings were held from time to time to discuss the life, direction and goals of the college. This noble gathering of advanced thinkers cum scholars was truly an example of Mob (demos) -ocracy at work. The attention of the group was often focused on strange fads. For example, there was the occasion of the obsessive search for "elitism" in the ranks. One could charitably call this self examination a witch hunt; but alas, in the end the members of the community leading the charge ultimately found the enemy was themselves. One of the great experiments of the college in self determination occurred in my senior year; we had our own Haight Ashbury going. Seems that about 80-100 students signed a petition demanding that a small dorm be set aside for the individuals in question to manage their own affairs. This included the running of food service and maintaining the facility, in return for which the students would be granted appropriate reductions in housing fees, the real reason. After the University calculated up the potential revenue loss, the blackmail proved to be efficacious, and the glorious experiment was off to a running start. Initially things ran smoothly, but as the school year moved on, less and less people participated in doing the work and in carrying their responsibilities. As the relative proportion of "free loaders" to workers (suckers) increased, considerable friction was produced, and the level of habitability of the facility markedly decreased. Things like this put a bit of a strain on one's belief in the innate goodness and responsibility of people.
ON EDUCATION (or the lack thereof)...
Anyone remember Alan Bloom and his book "Closing of the American mind?" He was not a Christian by the way; just a humble professor of Philosophy at a name brand university who loves to provide students with a classical education. He journaled the decline in the average quality of student that he taught during his relatively long tenure in teaching. The contempt and derision to which he was treated by many members of the Humanist fraternity, and their respective liberal constituents, was shameless, and certainly could not be representative of tolerance and freedom of rational inquiry. Many salient facts could be marshaled to support the professor's contentions concerning the declining academic and intellectual progress of American students, but consider the following. One has to get to the second year of graduate school in order to achieve parity with a world class standard.
On average, American high school graduates are two years behind much of the world, including some countries that could be called "third world." Prior to the 1930's, students were given an exam to graduate from the eighth grade, which typical high school graduates couldn't pass today, because it's too difficult. One modern social commentator educated during this era, has remarked that "even the 'F' students could read." The kind of things that literate people need to know hasn't really changed enough (at a primary and secondary level anyway) that this phenomena is justified. The vast increases in the relative number of "leaning disabled" students, and the resulting loss of human potential, is just sickening. The bulk of the responsibility for these massive, tragic declines in education can be laid at the feet of the leaders of the Humanist education community. Their obsessive meddling with the basic process and pedagogy of education, conducted in their zeal to make education more philosophically (e.g. "modern" Humanist) and politically correct, is the primary cause of the decline. John Dewey and his successors (ala' Bill Spady's Outcome Based Education) have pretty much had their way, but the excuses are wearing pretty thin. Where's the famous skepticism of traditional Humanism? Does it apply to everyone but those in the Society? On issues like this, we seem to have a stereotypical thinking group, not the alleged freethinking group.
ON MUTUAL ADMIRATION SOCIETIES AND EGO...
Strong, perhaps even fighting, words I realize, but take an honest consideration of the rhetoric and world view that permeates the contemporary writings of the society and allied Humanist groups. There are other caring and intelligent people in America and around the world, even the religious. These people may not happen to agree with many of the major tenants of the society, but that doesn't mean that they should be dismissed and shut out. I am reminded of a friend that left a MENSA chapter, because of the attitude that was too strong for his taste; about how the genius' needed to take over and fix the problems that the mensch - - you know, the intellectually challenged, great unwashed masses - - had caused and couldn't fix.
In the beginning of the American republic, what made it great was the unique, eclectic blend of Protestant, fundamentalist Christianity with eighteenth century enlightenment Humanism. This balance tempered American society and propelled it to heights that Humanism was not able to accomplish on the European continent. The Unitarians gravely upset this balance when they seized the levers of power over American politics and culture; starting with their control of Harvard, which they seized from the Puritans through chicanery in 1805. The Unitarians of this era are arguably a Christian heresy, continuing to share the bulk of theological and moral beliefs of their Puritan counterparts. From the second generation Unitarians on we have a different story. These folks jumped on German Humanism with a vengeance, adopting many a practice and belief out of spite for Puritanism., from which they were estranged. This tendency remains strong in American Humanism today. Much of the decline of American culture can be traced to this dynamic, including massive levels of Sociological dysfunction during the past 25 years. Thus, these effects parallel fundamental changes (e.g. declines) in the moral beliefs and practices of American Humanism. It seems to me that the goal (at least the end result) of our Social Engineers is to have the alleged enlightened, Humanist elite riding the backs of a sea of drones. Listen closely around the Society and you will hear things like this, or various other sundry Neo-Platonian drivel.
OF RELATIVISM AND EPISTEMOLOGY
Operating to a great extent out of spite for Christianity leads Humanism to some rather Schizophrenic / contradictory logic and beliefs and actions. Basic principals which have guided civilizations around the world for thousands of years are being trashed just because they have the "taint" of Christianity. It's quite enlightening for example, to notice the similarities between the legal codes of the Old Babylonian empire king Hammurabi and the Mosaic (Jewish Torah) law; many themes of which have been echoed in civilizations around the world through out time. With the Humanist penchant for sophistry and twisting of the language as a method to supplant old ideas in favor of the alleged "new" Humanist ideas, who knows what is true anymore. One is reminded of the English politician in times of old, quoth he, "Words, don't bother me about words, they mean what I choose them to mean."
Concerning objective "Truth", the Humanist argues that what is true is relative to the situation at hand, and is determined by human reason. But let's ask a simple question, what guides and informs this process of reasoning? What's to prevent outcomes that are simply barbaric? After all, if the concepts of Locke's natural law are overthrown, then who has any rights, such as "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?" If human reason can be seen as a logical, consistent process, then it may be likened to a mathematical operator which represents semantical transformations for the synthesis of concepts and ideas. In the mathematical sense, first principals, often assumptions, are developed through successive steps or levels into belief systems / world views. If there is no constancy in first principals (such as linguistic definitions), then no society or group of people can exist or be cohesive, and individual freedoms and rights must surely fall. As a corollary, we simply cannot have scholarship or science that has any meaning.
Reflect also on the problem of who makes the value judgments as to what is an experimental "success" and who prevails in the empirical interpretation of ambiguous data. This is especially an issue outside of the physical sciences. These are things determined by personal bias and/or fundamental assumptions, often unquestioned and unprovable in the strictest sense. Issues which flow from the particular world view or Philosophical school, such as Humanism, that one subscribes to. This question of epistemology should be of great concern to thinking people, as Humanism / Liberalism now dominates entertainment, education, large amounts of the media and many of the institutions of American life. This control of the market place of ideas is dangerous for a truly open and pluralistic society. In this context, one must also ask who's to be the final judge and arbiter of what's best for the human community, for moral relativism must surely lead to elitism and tyranny; which I don't believe is consistent with the highest ideals of traditional, Western Humanism.
I would like to refer the interested reader to the editorial "Barbarians at the gate" in the May issue of American Laboratory by Gabor B. Levy for a similar perspective on this section, but with several interesting twists. While this may not be an eminent journal, it is a learned one.
SCIENCE, SACRED COWS AND OTHER HUMANIST ARTICLES OF FAITH...
For those of you Humanists concerned about SCIENCE (whatever that means anymore), let's consider it's abuse in many Humanist circles. First off, science is a proven, efficient process and method for determining Truth about the physical world. It has been used with lessor successes in other applications, but still is the best basis (from a strictly secular perspective) we have to determine what should be believed about the world we live in. Science consists of a step wise procedure of experimental observation, data collection and analysis, pattern recognition, information synthesis and abstraction, hypothesis and theory generation, followed by subsequent experimental validation of the resulting theoretical predictions. Science is not the current collection of accepted theories and dogma, although these are associated with the teaching of science and what is believed by particular communities of scientists.
Near the top of the list of science abusers is the good Humanist, environmentalist community. As an example, let me cite a special I saw recently on national public (liberal) television. The narrator was deploring the EPA working definition of acid rain and the definition of threatened bodies of water as having a pH below a threshold value of 5, due to fish kills happening at pH's as high as 4-4.5. Sounds kind of close doesn't it? To those who are science literate this is ridiculous, as the difference between a pH of 4.5 and 5 is a factor of 5, owing to the logarithmic scale of pH's. One needs to also have a feel for the role of Carbon Dioxide in air on pH to complete the picture of this absurdity. In deionized water saturated with air, the CO2 concentration is about 1.07 x 10^-5 M, which translates to a pCO2 of 5, which gives us a pH of about 5-5.5. This can be readily seen by letting DI water stand in the air awhile, hence the reason for the definition that the EPA choose.
When the environmental doomsday folks go from hand wringing over the incipient ice age (late 1970's) to the current hysteria over global warming, which a significant number of respected scientist point out can't be demonstrated, how can they continue to enjoy any credibility? Sure there's some name brand humanist scientists that have concocted esoteric computer simulations, which predict doom and gloom. One must ask where's the validation data and experimentation, or if you will, the scientific test of the resulting hypotheses and models. It's pretty tough to take these kind of atmospheric models seriously, when the state of the art in weather prediction becomes suspect for forecasts as few as 7 days out. Why do educated people just turn off their brain with respect to things concerning environmentalism? Again I would like to refer interested parties to the March 1994 issue of American Laboratory for the editorial "Another red herring perchance?" by Gabor B. Levy.
Let's consider another representative vignette that can be cited from personal experience. I have occasion to use small quantities of concentrated mineral acids, which I neutralize the resulting residues with baking soda, NaH(CO3) to you chemists out there, so as to make the disposal problem more tractable. Well this process releases some CO2, that dread green house gas. When an engineering colleague remarked on this dastardly assault on the environment, I inquired as to what he thought he was releasing when he exhaled. It was nice to see the light bulb go off as some original thought occurred, as opposed to the indoctrination with which he was victimized. Responsible environmentalism is certainly subscribed to by virtually all intelligent members of our society, so let's get some real science back into this Humanist issue, instead of the fear mongering and the anti-technology bias practiced by extreme elements of the Humanist community.
That brings us to another Humanist sacred cow, namely evolution; it's just a theory, not holy writ. While evolution may be the lynch pin of much of the contemporary Humanist philosophical system, neither evolution, nor Humanism can be put forth as the definition of science. Evolution's' main value to the Humanist community has been it's use as a bludgeon to attempt to destroy Christianity and as an "article of faith" for the pseudoscientific justification of a plethora of mountebank social theories. Trouble is that when considering a number of facets of evolution, we enter into the region of Metaphysics and Ontology, areas which are not amenable to scientific inquiry in it's strictest sense, although still an area amenable to rational inquiry of other forms.
Humanist proofs of evolution such as "Ontogeny recapitulates Phylogeny" are damn poor excuses for science. No competent scientist can take this piece of fiction seriously anymore. It used to be taught at the University that we could see the our evolutionary past in the gill slits that observable in the early developmental stages human embryos. Too bad these folds of tissue (alleged gills) were just an intermediate stop on the way to the ear canals. This is the same kind of science that turns a pig's tooth into a brand new genius of primal man - the Nebraska man - or hoaxes like Piltdown man. It would be nice to give the Nebraska man scientists the benefit of the doubt for an honest mistake, but it's just too good of an example of the quasi-religious faith that is attached to evolution and how good old fashion scientific skepticism is defenestrated.
Then there's the metaphorical Humanist that zapped the gasses under glass and got some amino acids; to him conclusive proof that he had the recipe for the primordial soup from whence we got spontaneous generation. There's many serious problems with this "proof" based upon sound thermodynamical and statistical mechanical principals, which are far more established scientifically. First of all this guy didn't cheat the second law of Thermodynamics, as he had to do work on the system to beat diffusion and collect this particular gaseous mixture all in one reaction vessel. Subsequently he had to put energy into the system at the correct rate, his guess not necessarily what the actual level was, and to collect the resulting species in a safe place, not necessarily representative of what existed in the past. From this experiment one might infer the possibility of such an atmosphere existing on the earth, but it is simply illogical to accept this as proof that this was the exact case, in the absence of more direct evidence. Obtaining this direct evidence is going to be extremely difficult unless somebody can find a gas pocket somewhere which can be dated reliably and can be shown not to have been contaminated in the large time frame involved.
So let's say that we can get amino acids; simple combinatorial probability calculations of even modest size proteins (100-200 amino acid units), without which life would be impossible for any given species, yield probabilities that are so low as to be practically impossible to have formed with chemical kinetics. The typical dodge around this problem is to invoke billions of years of time, which even with simple reaction rate calculations, given unrealistically optimistic assumptions, would show there has been no where near enough time. If you aren't convinced yet, please tell me why a simple organic polymer such as 6,6 Nylon, which forms peptide bonds with a condensation reaction just like proteins, didn't spontaneously evolve an an abiotic manner? Why don't the Adipic acid and Hexamethylene diamine constituents (monomers for you chemists out there) of this polymer occur in abundance naturally if the molecules evolve? Doesn't this begin to sound like Lamarkian blathering and like spontaneous generation, a piece of silliness real science has discredited?
As far as seeing evolution in progress, we don't, so they say it's slow a slow process. This seems a convenient rationalization and is not testable in the conventional scientific fashion. There are a few examples trotted out as support for evolution in real time, such as a particular species of English moth going from light to dark in color, but a careful examination of the data would simply show a system in equilibrium reacting to an external stress, according to the principle of Le Chatelier, to seek an new equilibrium. In other words, species cited in such examples do not develop new genetic information, but simply bring forth existing genetic possibilities inherent in the gene pool, which are simply recessive traits. In order to bring new information or possibilities into the gene pool, one needs to invoke mutations, which are almost inevitably detrimental to the survival of the species, as such things with three heads don't survive very well.
That brings us to natural selection, which one could just as reasonably postulate as a mechanism to prevent change (e.g. evolution) from occurring by suppressing mutations and other Entropic system decay, as it could be seen as the primary mechanism by which a random walk to increased system complexity occurs. The idea of biological systems magically changing into more and more complicated entelechies, just flies in the face of a universe ruled by Entropic processes. Living things get sick and die, species become extinct, our abodes get dirty, mechanical contrivances degrade and break, social systems are prone to chaos and anarchy. The list of things that touch our everyday experience goes on and on.
Statistical calculations similar to those cited above for spontaneous generation, yield extremely low probabilities of occurrence. Biological systems may use Entropic processes to survive, but it's a real stretch to say that random processes must surely lead to ordered systems. The mechanical contrivances of Man also use Entropic processes to perform their function, but the damn things just break, so where's the mechanical evolution except as a Teleological process? I know it's pretty unrealistic to expect a hard core group like Humanism to significantly modify it's profound faith in evolution, but on the other hand it's canting hypocrisy to denounce Creationists, while practicing the slip shod science that is used to support the Humanist faith.
IMITATION COMPASSION, JUNK FOOD FOR THE HUMAN SOUL...
After 4-5 trillion bucks, give or take a few billion, we should have made it to Nirvana by now, so what happened? Why has the relative poverty rate increased since the prodigious outflow of cash in the 1960's? Why the massive sociological dysfunction that has occurred since this time? Should a hand be amputated in order to remove a wart? Is there no proportion left? Surely some of you folks have lived long enough to see the radical decline in quality of life in American culture. An ancient aphorism (not even European for you multi-cultural die hards) goes "feed a poor man a fish and you will have fed him for a night, teach him to fish and you will have fed him for a lifetime." The Socialist dogma of British Humanism and excesses of French Enlightenment Humanism that dominates contemporary American Humanist thinking hasn't lead us to paradise. In fact, these modes of thought may be likened to the proverbial story of the doctor whose toxic medicine is killing the patient, but rather than lose face or have a sacred cow gored, will pontificate that the patient needs increased levels of the medicine. Socialism may have had relevance to the early industrial age and the age of kings, but it is a hopeless dinosaur in the modern era. What we've been brought is the morally juvenile, soft, narcissistic personality, the bane of our age and culture.
Let's revisit some Humanist thinking of a generation ago in "The Art of Loving" by Erich Fromm; and if I'm not mistaken, he was selected something analogous to Humanist of the year: "In contemporary capitalistic society the meaning of equality has been transformed. By equality one refers to the equality of automatons; of men who have lost their individuality. Equality today means "sameness," rather than "oneness." It is the sameness of abstractions of the men who work in the same jobs, who have the same amusements, ad the same newspapers, who have the same feelings and the same ideas. In this respect one must also look with some skepticism at some achievements which are usually praised as signs of our progress such as the equality of women. Needless to say I am not speaking against the equality of women; but the positive aspects of this tendency for equality must not deceive one. It is part of the trend toward the elimination of differences. Equality is bought at this very price: women are equal because they are not different any more. The proposition of Enlightenment philosophy, l'ame n'a pas de sexe, the soul has no sex, has become the general practice. The polarity of the sexes is disappearing, and with it love, which is based on this polarity. Men and women become the same, not equals as opposite poles. Contemporary society preaches this ideal of unindividuallized equality because it needs human atoms, each one the same, to make them function in a mass aggregation, smoothly, without friction; all obeying the same commands, yet everybody being convinced that he is following his own desires. Just as modern mass production requires the standardization of commodities, so the social process requires standardization of man, and this standardization is called "equality." "
Pithily put, contemporary Humanism wants everybody to be the same, regardless of the social cost. When understood, the above analysis is a sobering warning, almost prescient, of the rending of the social fabric that has occurred in the intervening time since these words were penned. I am reminded of a book perused at the book store, sorry I can't give a direct reference. Therein, two Liberal sexual therapists protested that they never meant for the Sexual Revolution to destroy the beauty of life time bonding in the context of sexual love, or that people should switch partners like one would change a dirty shirt, but that human sexuality should become something wonderful and unpolluted by juvenile social mores.
IF YOU WANT PEACE FOR MINDS THAT HATE, BROTHER YOU'LL HAVE TO WAIT
How can the personal or general human experience be enriched by a group so obsessed with a mindless hatred? The current Psychobabble term "codependency" has interesting applications in this regard. What does Humanism have to offer outside of the "bogeyman" made out of religion in general and Christianity in the specific, whose hysteria is in the process of extinguishing great features and records of the human soul and culture? The Humanist movement can never realize it's full potential, or think clearly for that matter, while it's collective and individual consciousness is clouded by a negative obsession with Christianity.
Consider the following analysis, or if you will warning, by Eric Hoffer in "The True Believer"... "Mass movements can arise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil. Usually the strength of a mass movement is proportional to the vividness and tangibility of its' devil. When Hitler was asked whether or not the Jew should be destroyed he answered: "No... Then we should have to invent him. It is essential to have a tangible enemy, not merely an abstract one."... Common hatred unites the most heterogeneous elements. To share a common hatred, with an enemy even, is to infect him with a feeling of kinship, and thus sap his powers of resistance.... It seems that, like the ideal deity, the ideal devil is one. We have it from Hitler - the foremost authority on devils - that the genius of a great leader consists in concentrating all hatred on a single foe, making "even adversaries far removed from one another seem to belong to a single category." When Hitler picked the Jew as his devil, he peopled practically the whole world outside Germany with Jews or those who worked for them.... Again, like an ideal deity, the ideal devil is omnipotent and omnipresent.... Every difficulty and failure within the movement is the work of the devil, and every success is a triumph over his evil plotting. "
Does any of the above sound familiar??? Fact is, a strong case can be made for linking Communism and Fascism - especially the German version of National Socialism, the Nazi's - as direct offshoots of mainstream European Humanist schools of the 18th and early 20th centuries. At least one of the Societies' WWW lists of "famous Humanists" claimed Karl Marx and Lenin as members. Humanist logic would tag Christianity as a whole as being responsible for the Inquisition and similar perfidies and insist that such things are implicit within the system itself. If this logic were consistently followed, then Humanism should have credit for all of the monstrous evils committed by the above groups. The American Humanist ideal to have moral relativism at any price (just to spite Christianity), should scare the Hell - figuratively speaking ;<) - out of any thinking person, because of what then becomes possible in society at large.
OF CHOICE, OBFUSCATION, SOPHISTRY, HUMAN WEEDS AND GENOCIDE...
In the 20th century the Society has been lead around by the nose by it's most extreme members, especially that b**ch Sanger (sorry, I got carried away, I just couldn't help myself) and her associated toadies. Is there anybody out there with enough moxie to know about the Malthusian solution, Eugenics and the Sanger gang/Nazi connection? Malthus was the grandfather of the ZPG folks. He had a hysterical belief that there was too many people in Europe and that the rabble (e.g. the poor) were polluting the human species. From a modern view point, this Chicken Little fantasy seems to be simply nonsensical, since more than a 150 years has passed and the population density of Europe is far, far greater than at this time, and the sky still hasn't fallen. Malthus' proposed solution was for the government to force the rabble into crowed tenements, preferably near swamps, so that disease would run rampant and thus eliminate this drag on society. This clown was typical of many of the excesses of the French Humanist school. This Bozo is virtually the patron saint of the Church of Scatology (e.g. Sanger gang). Ask Thomas Payne if the French Enlightenment school was so great, as he surveyed it's grandeur from his special guest accommodations in the Bastille. (Note: actually Malthus was an Englishman, but same difference...)
Sanger was certainly rabid about the Eugenics business and likely taught the Nazis a thing or two on this score, as may be seen by several leading Nazi theoreticians being published in her journal. Sanger could also lead religionists around by the nose, also as may be seen by a small vignette George Grant's "Grand Illusions: the Legacy of Planned Parenthood." By the way, this book is worth reading, having some sobering points to ruminate on. Hopefully, some of the more intrepid members of the Society could wade through the book's Christian packaging without having a case of apoplexy. Seems that the Sanger gang talked a Southern, White, fundamentalist church into inviting some Black churches to a revival; which of course they were eager to attend as they thought it a signal honor. The catch was that the Black folks had to be afflicted with a Sanger gang pitch on birth control before they could get a seat. It's tough to tell which group should be held in the higher contempt, but sometimes politics creates strange bedfellows.
As a charming counterpoint, let me offer the early twentieth century tale of (found in either "Cheaper by the Dozen" or "Belles on their toes") Frank and Lillian Gilbreth and the local Sanger gang, ahem, Birth Control League representative. By the way, Frank was a staunch Unitarian, so I hope you see the humor of this anecdote. The Gilbreth family had 11 children; 12 if you count the one that died. The Sanger Gang rep was soliciting about town for support of the BCL, when she was referred, facetiously, to the Gilbreth family as prime candidates to be sympathetic with the cause. This women dropped by and made her support pitch to Lillian, who listened with great amusement. When the crowd of children began to fill the porch to check out what was happening, the BCL lady began to get the feeling she had been had, to the great entertainment of all but her. One final note about this family was that the children adored Frank and Lillian. The children were all college graduates with a deep love of learning and education. They were all highly virtuous individuals and enjoyed great success in life. Without apologies to extreme, Humanist Feminism, this is the kind of family that is nurturing, which every child should have the privilege of being raised in. But alas, Frank would be called a tyrant and child abuser by many modern Humanists, because he used corporal punishment and ran a tight ship.
On the pro-life issue, I did see one point of light in the generally dismal landscape formed by the Humanist web pages. It was an interesting monograph by a pro-life, Humanist, Feminist. Almost seems like an oxymoron, but this courageous lady really has the sense of the best of Humanism, which still struggles for Human rights around the world. I do also have to admit that the Web pages I saw concerning the human rights Humanist subgroup was also encouraging. Returning to the subject at hand, it's interesting to note that early Feminists uniformly considered abortion to be a reprehensible invention of "Male Chauvinist Pigs." Think of the waste of human potential which is being slaughtered in the name of convenience and political correctness.
With all of the increases in medical technology and embryology, there can be no doubt that the smallest, most defenseless member of the human community is fully that at a much earlier stage of development than allowed by Roe V Wade. An open minded viewing of Bernard Natheson's "Silent Scream" video, should give even hardened proponents of abortion something to think about. The debate has never been about choice, but has been about money, power and forcing acceptance of the Planned Parenthood agenda for sexual mores, as exemplified in the "Sexual Revolution." Sanger gang issues are losers as Humanist issues go; they're just driving conservative Christians, conservative Jews, and Catholics together, at least politically speaking.
PARTING GEMS (or maybe parting shots)...
To our Unitarian-Universalist colleagues with their shrill, Pecksniffian squeal for tolerance: "Physician heal thyself." Seems to me that since the Unitarians have stomped the Puritans into the ground and jumped up and down on the dirt, that they ought to lighten up for a change. I'm inclined to agree with the Humanist of the Secular arm, that the Unitarian-Universalists should get over their need to be a grotesque parody of Christianity. If the U-U's are so great, why don't they advertise and tell people what they're really about, instead of hiding it behind pseudo-Christian rhetoric.
To our bibliophile friends at Prometheus (or Icarus?) books: "Have a nice day !" - Hermes.
To the social engineers in the crowd, whose incessant, inept meddling has really mucked things up, why do you think that you can do better than thousands of years of social evolution?
For the good socialist, environmentalist fraternity, where were you when your group trashed Eastern Europe?
For those of you disenchanted with Science and Technology, remember that Humanists helped to lead the charge.
For those environmentally conscious Humanists who are wringing their hands that bovine is a green house gas, you should have been here when the Dinosaurs let them rip.
To our good animal rights citizens, should we all convert to Hinduism and do fruit flies have rights?
To those who are really non-theists out there, your hard work has been rewarded with the rise of the New Age phenomena, created by the religious vacuum due to your relentless assault on the Christian church, so enjoy.
April 3, 1999.