ATTACKING SPIRITUALITY The Humanist Manifesto Assault

In the spiritually challenging decades between the two world wars, psychiatry and psychology flourished. John Dewey, an adherent of psychologist Wilhelm Wundt, designed the 1933 Humanist Manifesto , which stated, �There is great danger of a final, and we believe fatal, identification of the word religion with doctrines and methods which have lost their significance and which are powerless to solve the problem of human living in the Twentieth Century.� Rather, religion should be a �human activity� in the direction of a �� candid and explicit humanism.�

A list of 15 precepts was drafted, including:

Religious humanists regard the universe as self-existing and not created.

The distinction between the sacred and the secular can no longer be maintained.

Humanism will take the path of social and mental hygiene and discourage sentimental and unreal hopes and wishful thinking.

In 1973, �Manifesto II� delivered an even more savage blow to the sanctity and validity of religion: �Humanists still believe that traditional theism, especially faith in the prayer-hearing God, assumed to live and care for persons, to hear and understand their prayers, and to be able to do something about them, is an unproved and outmoded faith.�

�� [T]he total personality is a function of the biological organism transacting in a social and cultural context. There is no credible evidence that life survives the death of the body.�

In 1980, a �Secular Humanist Declaration� stated that people could lead meaningful lives without the need of religious commandments or the clergy.

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