The Secular Abolition of Hope for the Future
The Humanist Manifesto of 1933 (actual title: A Humanist Manifesto), was signed by the famous educator John Dewey and R. Lester Mondale (elder half brother of former U.S. VP Walter Mondale) and several dozen academics. This document openly claimed that a human being has no conscious existence after death. They basically claimed that there is no hope for anyone.
If you have no conscious existence after death, you have no future after death. Secularism, whether it’s called Secular Humanism or atheism, is the belief that there is no God and no accountability to God in the afterlife. The secular humanist believes there is no human spirit or soul. A human being consists only of a material human body. As Carl Sagan once said: “The material world is all there is.” To the secularist, there is no future for the individual human being and there is no future for humanity as a whole, when all human life ceases, when the universe goes into heat death.
All that you’ve learned and experienced through relationships, work, play, education, love, pain and pleasure evaporates at death. This is the secular abolition of the future. It is the abolition of hope. This view is not isolated to avant garde ivory tower types but permeates our society. The abolition of hope has resulted in the philosophical pessimism and purposelessness of our youth and it drives the drug culture.
Many of you reading this are probably thinking that the denial of life after death is a belief held only by radical secularists. Unfortunately, it’s secularists and their fellow travelers who are the gatekeepers of society.
Secularism is the de facto state religion of the United States and virtually all of the Western World. One can include nominal Christians under the term “secularist” because nominal Christians generally live a secularist lifestyle. Christianity has been largely banished from the government run schools in the US because of several U.S. Supreme Court decisions..
Education is by far the largest public forum and if Christianity is kicked out of public education then it is, in essence, marginalized. Christians are forced to pay taxes to support schools that indoctrinate children in the secular origins myth called evolution. Evolution is the foundation of atheistic secularism. Evolution is scientifically falsified because genetic mutations, the alleged mechanism for uphill evolutionary change, are proven to be destructive errors to DNA that add no useful information to DNA that would cause increased adaptive complexity of life forms. There are many other scientific flaws in evolution. Children are taught that they evolved from apes and this leads to the implicit conclusion that humans have no souls.
Each subject in the secular, public schools is taught from a perspective of philosophical atheism. My niece was assigned the book, The Da Vinci Code, as a reading assignment by her school. The Da Vinci Code is a blasphemous book that gives a scandalously distorted view of church history and denies the deity of Christ. I could give other examples of public school assignments that actively undermine the Christian faith.
The secularist faith has taken over public education. Secular education is not neutral as often claimed but is aggressively biased. Secularism denies the existence of God as transcendent lawgiver. If there is no transcendent lawgiver there is no law above man’s law, hence all things are permissible.
World famous secular philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) said “If there is no God, there is no right or wrong or absolute morality, only opinions as to right and wrong.” Secularism is the negation of law, morals, ethics and values. Secularism is amoral and purposeless. It is anarchy. The postmodern concept of the self has replaced God as lawgiver. Self with its relativistic and shifting opinions of right and wrong is the only lawgiver. Society is the collision of selves with no guiding philosophy or religion to unite the whole.
Young people who’ve been robbed of their Christian faith and hence robbed of their hope for a future beyond death, live only for this life and its passing pleasures. Many turn to sex and drugs to obtain pleasure in a life that is brief and purposeless. There are currently over thirty sexually transmitted diseases extant in the United States. Many of these, like herpes, are incurable viruses. The HPV virus causes cervical cancer — it is sexually transmitted cancer. We all know of the devastating death toll of AIDS. We also see that out-of-wedlock births and paternal child abandonment are rampant. Legalized abortion has resulted in the mass murder of millions of the preborn.
Secularists have promoted assisted suicide for the terminally ill. Christians believe that all human life is sacred and even the very elderly have futures that stretch to eternity. All human souls live forever after death. All human life has a future and has meaning in relation to God.
Secularism is a religion. It takes great faith to believe that life came about by chance as the secularists claim. Secular Humanism is recognized as a religion by the US government. It is a religion without a moral code. Radical secularism has all the coerciveness of any fundamentalist faith but without any inherent moral restraint.
There is only one true religion. The laws of logic, specifically the law of noncontradiction, determine that there can only be one true religion. This is because all of the world’s religions contradict each other and no two contradictory statements can both be true. If Hinduism is true then Christianity is false and vice versa. God has given authentication to the one true religion by miracles.
The one true religion is the one religion authenticated by the best and most miraculous events. To be blunt, the religion with the best miracles wins. Christianity is the one true religion because Jesus came in fulfillment of over 300 predictive prophecies and worked miracles never performed by anyone else since the beginning of time. Jesus miraculously gave sight to the blind and gave strength to the limbs of the handicapped. Miracles continue to happen today in Christian meetings. No other religion or philosophy compares with the supernatural authentication of the Christian faith. Christianity gives us hope and a future.
In the Old Testament, the prophets foretold that Christ would come and suffer and die for the sins of the people, thereby making atonement. They foretold that Christ would rise from the dead to offer forgiveness of sins to those who turn to Him in repentance. I invite you to call upon Jesus Christ today to receive forgiveness of sins!
Steps to salvation:
Jesus said “Ye must be born again.” (John 3:7)
1) Believe that God loves you and sent the Messiah (Messiah is Hebrew for Christ) to redeem you.
2) Believe that Jesus Christ came to die for you, to take upon Himself the penalty of your sins (Isaiah 53:5–6, John 6:29, Romans 4:5, First Peter 3:18).
3) Repent of your sins and call on the name of Jesus to ask for forgiveness of sins (Romans 10:13).
4) Receive Jesus as Savior and experience the new birth (John 1:12, Acts 2:38).
5) Follow Jesus Christ as Lord (John 14:15).
Prayer to receive salvation:
To receive the salvation which Jesus purchased for us at the terrible cost of His suffering and death on our behalf I invite you to pray this simple prayer:
“Dear heavenly Father, I thank you for sending Jesus, the promised Messiah, to die for my sins. I admit that I’m a sinner. I repent of my sins and I ask you to forgive me on the basis of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. I ask you to fill me with your Holy Spirit to empower me to serve you under the Lordship of Jesus Christ, Amen.”
If you prayed this prayer in the humble sincerity of your heart, then you have received everlasting life, which includes power to live right in this life and entrance into heaven in the afterlife!
Bill Nugent, Overcomer Ministries of Fort Mill, South Carolina, USA
© 2019 William P. Nugent, permission granted to email or republish for Christian outreach.
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