Date: Wed, 7 Mar 2001 12:11:41 -0500 From: busterhl@centerforinquiry.net (BusterHL) Subject: CSH Electronic Newsletter, Wednesday, 7 March 2001
Federal Appeals Court Overturns Caps on Ownership, Further Undermining Democratic Freedoms by Paul Kurtz Chairman, Council for Secular Humanism
In an incredible decision a Federal Appeals Court rescinded FCC regulations which limited media conglomerates from controlling more than 30 percent of the cable- and satellite-TV market. It also lited the ban on broadcasters owning TV stations that exceeded 35 percent of the total national viewership, or from dominating more than 40 percent of the programming.
These regulations were based upon the 1992 Cable Television Consumers Protection and Competition Act that empowered the FCC to set ownership caps. The new FCC chairman, Michael Powell, has indicated recently that he thought that there should be few if any limits on ownership - and that the "free market" alone should decide the limits.
The court decision was hailed by spokesmen for AT&T and AOL/Time-Warner, the two largest cable operators in the United States. An AOL representative said that the ruling was "a great day for cable operators' First Amendment rights."
This is a form of doublespeak, for it guarantees unprecedented power for huge conglomerates to further dominate the free market of ideas. What about the First Amendment rights of the rest of Americans whose outlets for expression will be further narrowed? The Court's decision will undoubtedly set off a new wave of consolidation; and will further limit diversity at a time when the scientific and rationalist viewpoint is all too rarely heard in the mass media, and when programming appeals more to popular entertainment than to accurate scientific information and education.
The United States already lacks adequate forums for scientific naturalism and humanism. There is insufficient opportunity for skepticism to challenge untested pseudoscientific, paranormal, or spiritual claims. This is a sad day for the ideal of the open society. By having fewer and fewer alternative voices heard in the media, democracy is bound to suffer.
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Alert! New Major Attack on Secular Humanism by Paul Kurtz Chairman, Council for Secular Humanism
Secular humanists should be aware of a new book recently published, Mind Siege: The Battle for Truth in the New Millennium, by Tim LaHaye and David Noebel. This book is a call to arms of evangelical Christians against secular humanism. LaHaye is coauthor of a series of eight Left Behind tribulation novels, best sellers today, for some 23 million copies of these books are in print.
This new book, providing a kind of theological-political sequel, is issued by a major publisher, World Publishing, a Thomas Nelson company. It carries endorsements on its back cover by Senator Tim Hutchinson (Ark), Congressman Mark Souder (Ind), Bill Bright (Campus Crusade), Reverend James Kennedy, and others on the religious right.
LaHaye is founder of the fundamentalist Creationist Institute and the conservative Heritage Foundation. His wife, Beverly LaHaye, heads "Concerned Women of America." David Noebel is the head of Summit Ministries and an outspoken opponent of secular humanism. Incidentally, Free Inquiry published an exchange with him a few years ago.
The book repeats the litany of libelous charges against secular humanism first aired by LaHaye in his earlier book, Battle for the Mind (1980). This book was influential two decades ago is opening up major fusillade against secular humanists; and it helped to galvanize both religious and political opposition to secular humanism during the early Reagan years. The attacks on secular humanism subsided in the 1990s, as the religious right turned to other enemies. Is this book a harbinger of another major assault on secular humanists?
The main theses of LaHaye and Noebel is (a) that secular humanism is a "religion"; (b) that the secular humanist ideology dominates all of the major institutions of American life - including the ACLU, NOW, NEA, the National Association of Biology Teachers, the major TV networks, the major foundations (Ford, Rockefeller, etc.), the National Council of Churches, the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, the UN, UNESCO, Harvard, Yale, and 2,000 other colleges and universities, etc.!; (c) that secular humanists have "undermined the moral fabric of America"; (d) that evangelical Christians (80,000,000 strong) need to gear up for an all-out battle to root secular humanists out of public life; and (e) that the bottom line is: "No humanist is fit to hold office."
What is unique this time around is that Mind Siege concentrates on Humanist Manifesto 2000, which was first published in Free Inquiry in the fall of 1999, which is held to be, along with Humanist Manifestos I and II, "the bible of humanists." LaHaye and Noebel deplore "scientific naturalism" and "planetary humanism" as undermining Christian faith and American patriotism. Their scholarship is highly questionable, for they shift ack and forth between the various Manifestos, even though the older ones were written decades ago when global political and economic conditions were different.
The Council for Secular Humanism has explicitly and repeatedly denied that it is a "religion," and we have affirmed that secular humanists can lead a moral life and be a good citizen without religious faith. Secular humanism is an ethical, philosophical, and scientific outlook. I have called this a eupraxsophy - good wisdom in practice - and explicitly denied that it is a religion. Yet in this broadside, all humanist organizations in the United States are equally condemned.
The five tenets of humanism that they attack are (1) atheism, including nontheism and agnosticism; (2) evolution - Darwin is their archenemy; (3) "amorality," which they characterize as pre- and extramarital sex, the feminist and gay agendas, abortion, euthanasia, and the right to die; (4) autonomous man - the view that it is possible to lead an ethical life without belief in God, the right of privacy, the confidence that humans can solve problems by their own resources, or that there are positive human powers for doing good that can be untapped; and (5) globalism - the concern with the planetary rights of all humans in the world community.
One reason why the critics of secular humanism sought for years to pin the religion label on secular humanism is that they sought to extirpate it from the schools as a violation of the anti-establishment clause of the First Amendment.
Secular humanists should be apprehensive about this new vicious attack. Let us hope that it is not the beginning of a major new assault, and that it will not be used by the religious right or their cohorts in the Bush administration and the conservative media to restrict the rights and freedom of secular humanists.
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Council for Secular Humanism Condemns President's Effort to Funnel Public Money to Faith-Based Religious Institutions
The Council for Secular Humanism condemns efforts by President Bush to transgress the boundary between church and state by funneling billions of dollars to religious institutions for charitable work. The entire past few hundred years of Western civilization has been a progressive severing of the bonds between the civil authority of the state and religious institutions that characterized most of the preceding centuries in human history. The United States Supreme Court has firmly held for more than 50 years that no branch of government may single out any religion or religious institution for special favoritism or government approval. Moreover, no branch of government can favor religious belief over nonbelief.
"Religion in our nation should be left up to the individual to embrace or reject," said the Council. "It is not the business of government to promote or to strengthen religious institutions by delegating functions that are properly the domain of government to faith-based churches and other religious bodies."
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