Having been declared by both secular and religious social philosophy to be The Meaning of Life, human relationships, the bonds we have with each other, are the areas of our lives that receive everyone’s closest attention. At every turn, we are prompted to cherish, to revere (even to worship), what we’ve identified as God, namely, Love. “God is love” quoth the religious and “Love is god,” saith the secular humanist. And thus we see how handily, how easily, we can dispose of divisive notions of deity when we unite around a god called “Love.”

“All you need is love!” sang the sixties, and we all became believers. It felt so good to say it, it made us feel righteous, and it affirmed our secret faith in our own potential glory. If we only have love, we will not have war. Yes, of course, Hitler did what he did because of love, and so did Stalin, but we’ll pretend they didn’t because only good guys (us) have love. We have The Answer to all the evils in the world, and this discovery proves our moral superiority to capitalist greed, imperialistic powerlust, and to all the oppressive religious belief that preceded us.

 

 The flower children grew up but didn’t outgrow the deep need for emotional sap, for righteous supremacy (expressed now as “social justice”), and most of all, for the victory of humanism. Victory over what? Good question—odd no one ever thought to ask it. It was along about this time, that I became misanthropic. “Love,” I had begun to notice, is the justification of all sorts of exploitation, cultural destruction, bigotry, abuse, cruelty, emotional terrorism, and even murder.

 

When I was in school, I took a course or two in advertising and worked one summer writing copy. It’s not a surprise, I know, to learn that most advertising exploits our fears. But what fear are we talking about? Fear of suffering and death? No. Nor is it the fear of being unloved—not exactly. It’s the fear of being unlovable—which is not the same thing as unloved. In fact, there’s a world of difference, and it’s that difference that reveals the horror at the heart of the secular humanist’s mantra, Love is God.

 

To get a revealing snapshot of a society (what’s going on, what are its beliefs and values, what does it perceive as “good” and “bad,” etc.), take a look at children’s cartoons. Gone are the days of Bugs Bunny or Tom and Jerry—when cartoons were meant simply to be funny. Now they’re meant to instruct, to form our children. It’s as if the producers know that parents are too busy to raise their children and so they’ve taken on that job themselves. Anyway, it takes the whole village to raise a child, and cartoon producers are part of the village.

 

Children in cartoons are always seen in groups, and their friends are always represented in multiple ethnicities—white Anglo-European, African-Carribean, Asian, Hispanic, etc. So we’re teaching inclusiveness of all races and cultures—good, but you might notice also that there are no “individual” story lines, except insofar as some child has been excluded from the group. If he is rightfully excluded, it’s because he’s been selfish and must learn his lesson in order to be re-admitted to the group (the happy ending). If he’s wrongfully excluded, it’s because the group must learn the lesson of inclusivity (the alternate happy ending). Either way, the plotline is social justice, and it varies almost not at all. Together, the group overcomes some evil difficulty or obstacle. “Together,” the keyword of the concluding action and rhetoric, is always spoken with enormous emphasis, often accompanied by rousing music. Most parents actually DO monitor what their kids watch, so all this redundancy meets their approval, indicating that it’s the creed of the parents. The kids probably don’t even understand it. But it’s served up to them over and over and over anyway.

 

With all this bonding, we should be a pretty strong society, yet most marriages end in divorce: First, the absence of God precludes any notion of the sanctity of marriage, so most people don’t bother with marriage any more. Then, having turned love into a god, men and women demand more of human love than human beings can deliver.

 

Our bonds become our bondage. I once saw a humanistic film, much applauded in religious circles, in which a family is forced to accept the homosexual “marriage” of one of its members. Families do not, contrary to social justice films, exclude practicing homosexuals from their midst; rather, the homosexual threatens to leave the family unless the members not only accept, but also ratify and affirm their activity. (It was cartoon plot number two, above.) At the end, the family sat around a Christmas tree (no one saw that irony) and declared, “We’re all each other has.” The scene, much admired by viewers and critics, was co-dependency on steroids. After all, it’s unspeakably lonely being gods.