It is the religion of anti-religion — one in which man displaces God as the lawgiver and the mind of reality. This God-is-dead school of humanism laid the conceptual groundwork for governments to kill hundreds of millions of people in the twentieth century. Go back through the writings, speeches, and correspondence of that century's totalitarian thugs and you will find Cohen's canard about organized religion as the “cause, not the cure, of what ails much of the world.”
Hitler used that specious point frequently to bludgeon the Catholics and Christians of his time. So did the Soviet despots, who, schooled on Marx's assertion that religion is the “opiate of the masses,” scoffed at the devotionally simple.
Like the good hubristic humanist that he is, Cohen takes joy in organized religion's failures. “It is always useful to see faith run amok, because it offers, well, religious instruction,” he writes. Reveling in the Taliban's recent destruction of Buddhist statuary, he writes, “Afghanistan, you see, has a faith-based government. As is often the case with the pathologically pious, there is no reasoning with the Taliban.”
Nevermind that there is no reasoning with humanists either. Even as America careens from Columbine to Santee, the humanists of the press insist on a culture of death that kills children at the beginning of life and old people at the end of it and laughs at the Eminems in between.
Cohen gets on his high horse about the Taliban, but is he all that different from them in his thinking? After all, he agrees with them in principle about violence. They favor violence against Buddhists; he favors legal violence against the innocent unborn. A bleeding heart statist, Cohen is all for the “little guy,” except for the little guy in the mother's womb.
Humanists care about everything, save humans. Far from helping humans, they dominate them, demanding, first of all, that they turn their back on the theistic God who designed their humanity.
To discredit religion, they must present violations of religion as though they represented the essence of religion itself. The Cohens of the world think it is perfectly fair to lump Christians in with the Taliban.
Read this outrageous Cohen passage; “I am appalled by the Taliban. But I can see no more reason to argue with them than with the Talibanic Pat Robertson, who warned the city of Orlando, Fla., that it would suffer some sort of natural catastrophe if it allowed a celebration of gay pride. I would not quibble, either, with William F. Buckley Jr., who wrote in his 1997 book, “Nearer My God,” how the older Buckley children were summoned in 1938 to England, where their parents then lived, because as he later learned, their mother might die in childbirth. She had been warned, but had proceeded with her pregnancy anyway. It was her 11th. Such is faith.”
Did you catch that last slur? Cohen is, in effect, implying that Catholic family life is an irrationality on par with the Taliban. To Cohen, procreation is irrational, while a culture of abortion and sterility is the height of reason. Is it any wonder people say anti-Catholicism is the anti-Semitism of the East Coast elite?
Cohen even implies that religion is one of the reasons for America's high crime rate: “We are now in an awfully pious period in our own country; to point out that intolerance and religion often go hand-in-hand can be a perilous undertaking. We are a churchy nation — far more so than any other Western country. The Swedes, the Brits, even the Italians seldom go to church. Americans go regularly. Those nations have lower rates of violent crime and other social maladies…”
Cohen's ruminations are hideous, but they do serve a useful function: They provide a window into the true thoughts and feelings of the scribblers of the nation's tony salons. The most intolerant people in the country are the very people who pride themselves on “tolerance.”
This much is clear: The good of the human race is too important to be left to the humanists.
