Secular Theology and Humanistic Theological Literature

QUESTION: Secular Theology – Humanistic Theological Literature

ANSWER:

Secular Theology’s primary publishing arm is Prometheus Books, located in Buffalo, New York. Among other things, Prometheus publishes atheistic children’s books, including What About Gods? by Chris Brockman. This book is designed to indoctrinate children with dogmatic atheistic sentiments like, “Many people say they believe in a god. Do you know what a god is? Do you know what it means to believe in a god? A god is a mythical character. Mythical characters are imaginary, they’re not real. People make them up. Dragons and fairies are two of many mythical characters people have made up. They’re not real....”¹

Prometheus also publishes atheistic literature geared toward adult audiences. Paul Blanshard’s Classics of Free Thought was published, “to keep atheism before the public.” Critiques of God, edited by Peter Angeles, contains 371 pages supporting Humanist theology’s denial of the existence of God.

In Critiques, Angeles explains that belief in the supernatural has all but vanished from our culture. He says that God has lost His spatial location as a monarch in heaven and His temporal precedence to the universe as its Creator ex nihilo. “It is not that God is being relegated to a remote region,” Angeles insists. “It is not that God has become a bodiless abstraction (a sexless It). It is the realization that there is no God left to which to relate. Without God, what is left? Man and the Universe. That should be enough. That has to be enough because that is all there is.”²

Secular Theology – Paul Kurtz and Free Inquiry
When it comes to Secular Theology, the Secular Humanists’ 1980 declaration does not diverge from their earlier Manifestoes (1933, 1973) or their latest published in 2000. Written by Paul Kurtz and published in Free Inquiry, it contends that “Secular Humanists may be agnostics, atheists, rationalists, or skeptics, but they find insufficient evidence for the claim that some divine purpose exists for the universe. They reject the idea that God has intervened miraculously in history or revealed himself to a chosen few, or that he can save or redeem sinners.”³

Humanist theology, start to finish, is based on the denial of God and the supernatural. This denial, however, leads the Humanist to another necessary theological conclusion: humanity is the Supreme Authority. (It is possible that Humanism’s deification of humanity preceded its atheistic assumptions because the existence of God becomes a decided nuisance after one has declared oneself sovereign.)

Notes:

Rendered with permission from the book,Understanding the Times: The Collision of Today’s Competing Worldviews(Rev. 2^nd ed), David Noebel, Summit Press, 2006. Compliments of John Stonestreet, David Noebel, and the Christian Worldview Ministry at Summit Ministries. All rights reserved in the original.

¹ Chris Brockman, What About Gods? (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1978).

² Peter Angeles, ed., Critiques of God (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1976), xiii.

³ Paul Kurtz, “A Secular Humanist Declaration,” Free Inquiry (Winter 1980/81), no. 1, 5.