A petition gathered by the Humanist Association of Canada was presented in the House of Commons on June 8 by the NDP’s Svend Robinson, calling for the removal of references to God from the constitution, as about 15 humanists demonstrated in front of the Commons carrying placards, including my personal favorite for creativity – “A Person Without God is Like a Fish Without a Bicycle.” The humanists object to the constitution’s preamble, which states that, “Canada was established upon principles that recognize the supremacy of God and the rule of law.”

“I believe it renders the document discriminatory to people who hold no religious beliefs,” said Ray Blessin, of Kamloops, B.C., editor and publisher of The Canadian Atheist. “It’s our constitution, too.”

The notion being hustled by Mr. Blessin and his friends is that secular humanism is religiously “neutral.” But the truth is that to affirm atheism or agnosticism is to take a religious position. Secular humanism is a religious stance, as explicitly acknowledged by advocates of the “Humanist Religion” in the Humanist Manifesto.

Humanism is the apotheosis of man. “Their God is themselves, (or) random chance,” says Canadian astronomer Dr. Christopher Morbey. “That is their belief. They say there is no God, but in fact, their no-God is logically their God. Excluding any reference to God or faith is not a neutral position; it is merely another God and another faith.”

People who buy into the secularist delusion fail to grasp that Christianity was instrumental to creating the sort of civilization that allowed liberal ideas to develop and scientific investigation to flourish in the first place. You can have civilization without Christianity, but what we recognize as modern Western civilization cannot be sustained without continual re-affirmation of the Christian principles that created it.

The very democratic structures we take too much for granted are directly based on Christian values like the dignity and worth of each human being in the eyes of God. Remove those values, and this society unravels. Freedom House’s 1998-99 survey of political rights and civil liberties around the world found that of the 88 countries rated as “free,” “79 (or 90 per cent) are majority Christian.”

“Our land was built up by people who generally believed in God,” says Dr. Morbey. The native peoples had and have a very deep sense of Something more powerful than they. Why take away from the culture of all Canadians?” The principles that founded and sustained our traditional system of law and government are based in Christian ideas. The central underlying concept (as affirmed in the constitution) being that any legitimate civil authority must derive from God – as defined by Heraclitus (ca 513 BC) in his dictum: “All law is nourished by one law, which is divine.”

Principles substantial enough to sustain democratic culture and functional social order must derive from something more profound than the variegated subjective suppositions of human reason. If people think they want to revert to a paganized, non-Christian culture, they need to be aware of the inevitable consequences of such a policy.

The father of modern moral relativism, Friedrich Nietzsche, was driven by an abiding hatred of Christianity. His objective was to purge human consciousness of belief in Christian ideas, which he considered an inhibition to the realization of human greatness and superiority.

However, Nietzsche was much more intellectually honest and consistent than latter-day humanists, who imagine that they can retain the advantages of Christian social morality without acknowledging their source.

Nietzsche eloquently described the consequences of ditching Christianity. His approval of those consequences and his hatred of Christianity give force to his argument. If Christian faith was to be denied, Nietzsche maintained, then Christian morality must also be spurned. Or, as the great Russian novelist Dostoevsky put it: “If there is no God, then everything is permitted.”

Blessin and company prefer to think that there would be no consequences – that the social and moral orders can continue without affirmation of the Creator. Nietzsche showed that if God is merely a superstitious construct, then so is the Judeo-Christian concept that every individual has dignity and worth.

Fr. Tony Van Hee, a Roman Catholic priest and Ottawa pro-life activist, said of the humanists’ petition, “With the best intentions and the best will in the world, without God we self-destruct. Without God, there is no hope.”