Why Rational Secular Humanism Is Stupid

The problem with the secular humanist movement is almost identical to the problem with libertarianism. It doesn't account for how human beings actually live.

This was made crystal clear to me during the debate between Richard Dawkins and the newly Christian Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Dawkins kept insisting that he pursued truth and rationality at the expense of every other aspect of culture. While the pursuit of truth is laudable, it is also out of the reach of most people.

As Edna St. Vincent Millay pointed out, Euclid Alone Has Looked on Beauty Bare. Logic is incredibly hard. Emotion, on the other hand, is easy. People emote reflexively. People cannot help but feel emotion, no matter what situation they are in, no matter what other response may be required. Mankind responds first, is ruled first, by his emotions. 

Reason, on the other hand, can only be employed as a result of rigorous training and a certain level of intelligence. Even then, the most rigorously trained and intelligent individual cannot consistently and reliably employ the rules of reason. 

It is just as impossible to live a purely rational life as it is impossible to live a sin-free life of grace. Secular humanism simply substitutes one completely impossible standard with a different one, the one difference between them being that everyone admits the life of grace is impossible to live purely, while many people fail to understand, or at least refuse to admit, that the rational life is similarly impossible to live. 

Given that Christianity teaches God is pure Rationality and pure Truth, secular humanism is clearly an offspring of that same Christian faith.  When a man like Dawkins insists that he will follow the standard of Truth and Rationality at the expense of religion, he merely teaches, and embraces, a Pelagian form of Christianity. He argues that mankind has the power within himself to always live rationally. That is an absurd proposition.

Half of mankind has an IQ below 100. Half of mankind can never excel at the rigorous logical training necessary to even begin living the rational life. But the half who have an IQ above 100 are not much better off. While they may train themselves and each other in the ways of rational discourse, it is impossible for them to consistently live their self-training. They will always be buffeted by the winds of emotion and non-logic.

This is not bad. Having an emotional response to a beautiful mathematical proof or a beautiful sunset is a fine and noble thing, it is a human response. But beauty is not a lemma of logic. It is a quality that, if not beyond logic, is at least not of the same class as logic and/or rationality. 

Just as the Christian's insistence on living the life of grace is laudable, so secular humanism's insistence on rationality and truth is laudable. But neither can be a consistently lived human experience. We are simply not capable of living either life purely.