Secularism likes to promote itself as rational and moral. The problem is that it does not stop there but it seeks to impose its secular morality on others, while complaining that religion does the very same thing with its morality. “It takes one to know one.”

Human beings try to control others from the moment that the younger sibling appears on the scene to interfere with the two-year old’s life. Secularists are no different.  They complain that religion interferes with their lives, while they themselves want to interfere with religion in public life.

There is a difference between humanism, secularism, atheism and anti-theism.  However, they each want to push religion out of public life into private life, and having done so, the anti-theists want to interfere with private life by campaigning that parents are abusing their children by raising them as members of their religion. Secularists want to take control of children on the basis of a nationalised secular morality. This is the same philosophy as communism with the same inherent weaknesses and dangers.

Secularism has had an easy ride opposing aggressive muslims and various controlling sects, but it has not found it so easy against anaemic forms of Christianity so it has picked on ‘fundamental’ Christianity to hold it up to ridicule.  More generally, as a catch-all theme, secularism complains about the  ‘privileges’ given to various religions. However, there are many non-conformist religious groups who, far from having privileges, are persecuted for being non-conformist. Christianity is currently the most persecuted religion on the planet. The secularist agenda joins this persecution of those who will not conform to their secular morality. Yet non-conformists have often been the champions of liberty of thought and behaviour. Secularists are no such champions; they want conformity to their beliefs by secular repentance, otherwise known as coercion or control-freakery.

Secularists have difficulty with non-conformists, just as main stream religion did and still does.

Former chief rabbi Jonathan Sacks in a debate with Richard Dawkins claims that he questioned the world’s best moral philosophers during his time working in moral philosophy and whereas they could define ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ as words, they could not tell him what right and wrong were as concepts.  This is because there are different moral opinions and standards against which to measure right and wrong.  In other words, moral philosophy is value-deficient and we must find our values from elsewhere.  Step forward secular morality to replace Christian morality.  Richard Dawkins is quite ready to use the word ‘wicked’ for those parents who teach their children that they are Christian, and in his book The God Delusion he calls it child abuse.  So the secularist has morality, but it is different from Christian morality and some of them acknowledge this, predicting  the demise of Christian morality.

It is not uncommon to discover that ‘the Emperor has no clothes’. I have questioned modern biblical scholarship under academic exegesis, but this is not confined to religious scholars but one finds it in secular circles also.

The Humanist website has a quiz to determine to what degree one is a humanist. It is not very good and some of the options are banal. As a Christian I can answer more than one of the options provided and some questions provide no option that a Christian can answer. So I answered with as Christian an answer I could for each question, picking the best of a bad selection, and I still ended up 28% humanist! The point is that humanists promote themselves as rational, scientific and, by implication, clever. Even if humanists should concede that you do not need to be clever to be humanist, yet one would expect something better than this on its website. It looks like a tool to try to persuade people that they are ‘more secular’ than they thought.

Meanwhile, the National Secular Society (NSS) goes one stage further than the Humanist website with the exclusive claim that it is “Britain’s only organisation working exclusively towards a secular society”.

Secularists are pushing hard to abolish religion but they might as well try to change human nature.  Man is a religious being and man’s problem is wrong and false religion. The solution is true religion, not no religion. The secularists are fighting a losing battle, but many people will suffer along the way.

Jesus Christ said about false religion: ‘The thief comes only to steal, to kill, and to destroy: I came that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly’ Jn 10:10.

Updates:

4 Dec 2017: secular morality imitates Christian morality.

16 Mar 2023: putting the sexes against each other, replacing masculinity with feminity, with “the death of religion”.

6 Apr 2023: others are recognising the secular religion.