In my last post on the subject, I mentioned that naturalist humanism has to borrow from religion in order to function in real life. I found the following bit in an Answers Research Journal article on the philosophy of Stanley Fish:
Fish’s aim is yet again accurate when he takes on liberalism’s failure to invest human life with meaning. Fish relates a story philosopher Jürgen Habermas tells about his own life. Habermas had a Swiss friend who, though never a religious believer during his life, elected to have a church funeral. Habermas says his friend
had sensed the awkwardness of non-religious burial practices and, by his choice of place, publicly declared that the enlightened modern age has failed to find a suitable replacement for a religious way of coping with the final rite de passage.
But Fish himself can do no better. Although he knows the Bible fairly well, he has yet to recognize that all the foundations of all the interpretive communities in the world must beg, borrow, and steal from the biblical foundation to have morality, a telos, or other things that all worldviews require. Fish has not seen (or will not admit) that every one of the masons who constructed those foundations did his work with at least some—albeit suppressed and twisted—stones of Christian truth.
I read the following definition of an “atheistic” funeral on a funeral planning website:
The humanist view rejects the idea of an afterlife and interprets death as the end to an individual’s consciousness. They believe that human beings are simply another part of nature — and that death is nature’s way of cleansing. Through death, we clear the way for new life.
Humanists view life as a chance to have stimulating, joyful experiences and to live an ethical and good life. The humanist’s funeral affirms these beliefs and celebrates the passing life.
Look at the incongruity here. An atheistic funeral is the celebration of the fact that a loved one’s life has been eradicated by nature in order to “clear the way for new life.” Life itself is described as a chance to have joyful experiences and live an ethical life. Think about it. To a naturalistic humanist, joy is just a chemical reaction designed to promote positive actions. Ethics without an external source are relative to each person’s personal belief. Even the desire to be ethical is just another chemical reaction promoting positive social interaction for the benefit of the group. The entire description above is personally degrading and philosophically useless – unless one borrows from religion the meaning of joy and ethics and good.
Consider the thieves on the cross. They were stripped of their property, their wealth, their families, their liberty, their dignity, their health, and their future. They literally had nothing left except the company of a man so badly beaten that he could not be recognized as one. He suffered under a sign: The King of the Jews. In any other circumstance, this man being crucified with them would have been mocked or ignored. He claimed to be the Messiah, but he was on a cross! At first they did revile him. But the words and attitude of that man witnessed to who he was. It must have seemed a slim hope for the thieves, so slim that it would have at any other time been passed over without thought. But the thieves were stripped. No matter how slight a chance that he was who he said, he was the only thing left. Still, one thief continued to mock him. It was not enough. But the second thief responded. “Lord, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” The thief acknowledged his sins and recognized the sinless character of the God Man. He called him Lord and accepted that he had the power of death and life and was heir to the kingdom of God. Jesus responded, “This day you will be with me in paradise.” Not just restored to, but with: a statement of relationship. The stripping became a blessing.