A Christmas Card
from Mary
Does Contraception Minimize the Incidence of Abortion?
Secularism, Culture of Death Hothouse
What Religious
Liberty?
The Incredible Ever-Expanding Dead End
Anti-Cure, Anti-Life
Whose Values in
Education?
Toppling
Dominos
Anti-Christians
don't have to be Hypocrites but Many Volunteer
Intolerant Tolerance
The Emperor's
Clothes or a Cheap Tuxedo
The Myth of
Hitler's Pope, Part I
The Myth of
Hitler's Pope, Part II
Embryonic
Stem Cell Research Again
The Madness of
Secularism
"Don't Impose Your
Religion on Me"
Dictatorship of Relativism
Two Babies at Christmas
Living Will or Death
Warrant?
Court Ordered
Slow Motion Torture-Death Sentence
Men in Black
A Lot of Hot Air
The Culture War
Battles
"Stay with us, Lord"
Secular-to-English Dictionary
Moral Guidance for
Catholics in this Election
Christians
Losing America
Stem Cell Wars
Catholic
Pro-Abortion Politicians and Communion
Useful Idiots
Who Killed Jesus?
A Primer on Gay
Marriage
Whose Side are You
on?
Vouchers Revisited
Real and Fake
Cloning Bans
Broken Compasses
No Room in the Inn
Killing Fields
Revisited
Gay but not Merry
Adam and Steve?
The Battle for the Court
Victimless Crimes
More Salt, Please
The Next Big Fight
When Religion
Becomes Evil
Virginity Making a Comeback?
You've Come a Long Way,
Baby
The Incarnational
Approach
The Many Meanings of ACLU
Things Your Media Never Told
You
A Nasty Little Secret
Two Points of View on the Birth of Jesus
You Gotta Kill Them. How Else
Are They Going To Learn?
Perplexing Christmas Questions
How Do You See Christ Today?
Now that there is Another Ewe, will there be
Another You?
What is Conscience Anyhow?
Divorce of Love and Life
What Counts as a Mass?
What is a Covenant?
I Wish I had Your Faith
Are there Too Many Decrees of
Nullity?
Dutch Treats
Ecumenism
Going from Baby Doe to Granny Doe
Comments of Evangelium Vitae
The Exception Corrupts the Rule
Good Morality or
Good Medicine
Generation-X'ers Smart in Every Way But
One
A Matter of Good Breeding
Herod and Pontius Pilate at the
Polls
Hitler's Pope or Righteous Gentile?
The Unknown God
What exactly is wrong with
homosexuality?
Ideology Trumps Science, Reality,
and Common Sense
What Exactly is an Indulgence?
Infallibility and Error in the Church
Pilate Asked, "What is Truth?"
The Truth about Families
New Killing Fields
Choice of Language and Language of
Choice
A Lexicon for Our Day
Why are there so many bodies?
Marijuana, Medicine or Menace?
Medical Research and Ethics
Meditation
"You Taught me well,
Mommie dearest"
Moral Fallout
Neutral on the Wrong
Side
"These are the
Nineties After All"
Many are Wed but Few
are Married
"...Prepare him for
additional obligations"
A Useful Lie
A Partridge in a
Pear Tree
Religious Persecution in
the U.S.?
What Makes a Person a
Person?
The Point of a Point of
View
Politically Correct,
Morally Depraved
Population
Controllers out of Control
Practical Dreamers
Social Progress
through Immorality
Shall we Do Evil for
Goodness Sake?
Reason and Faith
Resurrection Glory
Same Sex Marriages?
Pearl of Great Price
"I used to be
schizophrenic, but we're all right now"
Sexual Morality
Irrelevant in Judging Public Officials?
Undesirable Side Effects
Some News is Good News
SOSSLQ's, not POSSLQ's
Spoils of Splits
Why Attend Mass
Every Sunday?
Is it All Right to Pull
the Plug?
An Appeal for Intolerance
Topics Catechetical
A Voting Catechism
A Moral Guide to
Voting
Vouchers: Has Their Time Come?
What Child is This?
What did they die of?
You are the Man
You may be a liberal
if...
Get Rid of that Worthless
Relative
Planned Un-Parenthood
Weighing Pro-Life Issues
Prior to Voting
|
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by Monsignor James C. Brunner |
Faith Points |
The Madness of Secularism
If madness is correctly described as a failure to accept reality many secularists are mad. Here is some evidence.
A recent New York Times article claimed that Adult Stem Cells (ASCs) have proven ineffective in curing human illnesses and therefore scientists must resort to Embryonic Stem Cells (ESCs) to seek cures. The truth is that one web site, www.stemcellresearch.org, lists 58 therapies using ASCs derived from various organs and bone marrow of the patient. It is not an exhaustive list. ESC proponents who insist that we must kill embryos in order to harvest their stem cells say that, unlike ASCs, they can become any kind of cell that is needed. Actually there are fourteen types of ASCs that can become any type of cell required and so there is no justification for using a procedure that destroys human life for the benefit of others. To date ESCs have cured no one and have caused harm such as causing teratomas (tumors) in 20% of the mice into which they have been injected. Why do secularists ignore or belittle ASCs? Not to do so would play into the hands of religious people and give embryonic life a value of greater than zero. That in turn could bring “abortion rights” into question. A characteristic of madness is that reality is not permitted to modify preconceived notions or, in this case, secular ideology.
Many secularists refuse to face reality in their objection to the Church’s teaching that prohibits the use of condoms. They blame the Church teaching for deaths in Africa resulting from AIDS. The charge is rather stupid in that it ignores a further Church teaching that sex is confined to marriage. If someone is willing to practice promiscuity will he suddenly develop scruples about condom usage? Besides, condoms have been wholly ineffective in minimizing the incidence of AIDS in Africa. The only program that has cut the number of AIDS infections is found in Uganda where the emphasis is on abstinence and fidelity rather than latex. Once again secularists cannot accept the obvious reality that the AIDS epidemic could be stopped by practicing abstinence outside marriage (it works 100% of the time) and fidelity within marriage.
Secularists with extreme environmental views refuse to face the reality of the deaths that their policies cause. They oppose hydroelectric projects in third world countries ostensibly to preserve animal habitat. Meanwhile the area humans are mired in poverty, wretched sanitation, malnutrition, and disease. On September 9, 2003 15,000 French citizens suffered heat wave deaths. The temperatures in France were no higher than in Detroit, Baltimore, or Chicago, yet France suffered many more deaths because air-conditioning there is rarer. Why? To address the alleged threat of global warming the French government raised the price of electrical power so that fewer greenhouse emissions would take place in its generation. French citizens who typically have lower incomes than US citizens economized by eliminating air-conditioning, the most power hungry appliance in their homes. That divided French citizens into two classes: the air-conditioned well-to-do versus the overheated poor. The latter died from environmentalism gone mad.
A particularly lethal bit of secular madness is its attitude toward DDT. Insect borne diseases like typhus and malaria claim millions of lives each year. In the 1930s Paul Herrmann Müller noticed that DDT killed many insects with which it came into contact. The substance was used extensively. In World War II it was sprayed on troops, dusted on beaches, and on concentration camp survivors with no ill effects. Indeed it saved thousands of lives because it eliminated typhus and other diseases. It was also employed in a worldwide malaria eradication campaign. In India malaria deaths plunged from a million to fewer than 50,000 cases of malaria infection. In 1948 Müller was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in medicine. The favorable outlook toward DDT changed in 1962 with the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. She claimed that DDT entered the food chain, accumulating in bodies of animals especially birds. The chemical, she alleged thinned their eggs leading to threats of wiping out of entire species. She also suggested that DDT also represented a carcinogenic danger to humans. Carson declared the common robin “on the verge of extinction” and forty other species imperiled because of DDT. The refutation of these claims would require another article if not several. An article of this sort may appear in the future. Suffice it to say that all the alarmist claims have been debunked, but under pressure from the environmental lobby the substance was banned. The conduct of flip-flopping William Ruckelshaus, EPA director, who banned DDT in spite of hearings, which he never attended, that showed that DDT used correctly was safe and beneficial, is a textbook case of insanity. This eventually led to a worldwide DDT ban. Not surprisingly deaths from malaria and other insect borne diseases increased. In Sri Lanka in 1948 there were 2.8 million malaria cases and 7,300 malaria deaths. With widespread use of DDT malaria cases fell to 17 and no deaths. After DDT use was discontinued Sri Lankan malaria cases rose to 2.5 million in the years 1968 and 1969, and the disease remains a killer to this day. After South Africa stopped using DDT in 1996, the number of malaria cases in KwaZulu-Natal province multiplied from 8,000 to 42,000. By 2000 there was an approximate 400% increase in malaria deaths. Now that DDT spraying has been reinstated deaths in the region have dropped from 340 in 2000 to none in February 2003.
There is not enough space here to describe secular madness with respect to genetically modified foods. Gene-splicing techniques have produced higher yields, lowered impact on the environment, allowed no till conservation that lessens soil erosion as well as need for pesticides. Eighty percent of the processed foods on supermarket shelves now contain gene-spliced ingredients. Americans have collectively consumed more than a trillion servings of genetically modified foods without suffering so much as a sniffle or a headache. The fears of the secularist environmentalists about “frankenplants” and unsafe foods are entirely unfounded and their opposition to them is another evidence of secular madness.
Secularists who are eugenicists want to restrict the use of the planet and the number of people upon it. They cannot do this directly and so they do it indirectly by allowing diseases to run rampant and by preventing improvements such as the introduction of effective pesticides and genetically modified foods. Exaggerations of the dangers of these improvements and suppression of contradictory evidence are acceptable practices to advance the secular holy cause of minimizing world population. DDT saves lives and thereby brings on the wrath of population controllers. Alexander King, founder of the Malthusian Club of Rome, wrote in 1990, “My own doubts came when DDT was introduced. In Guyana, within two years, it had almost eliminated malaria. So my chief quarrel with DDT, in hindsight, is that it has greatly added to the population problem.” Dr. Charles Wurster, one of the chief opponents of DDT reportedly said, “People are the cause of all the problems. We need to get rid of some of them, and this [malaria] is as good a way as any.”
The madness called secularism is the ideological basis of what Pope John Paul II called the culture of death. Perhaps secular ideology and its supporters should be institutionalized before they harm anyone else.
(Printed July, 2005)
St. Mary's Church Pastor & Vicar
