By Mxolisi Masuku (Zimbabwe)
The topic of cults, especially here in Africa comes ripe with scandal. The normal temptation that came to me as a non-religious writer was to give you a generic expose about some ridiculous cults doing some weird stuff down here in Zimbabwe, but hey, I thought you deserved more than that.
How do you feel about cults? What if someone said Humanism is just a cult that is going mainstream? What clever words and ideas would weave up to defend your life stance? For me, this problem isn’t just a hypothetical one. There is only a handful of humanists in Zimbabwe, and the Christians here can barely stand 2 minutes of a conversation with us. To them, humanism is a cult – a well-funded, politically motivated cult!
This whole article rotates around how we can distinguish humanism from a cult – especially the higher-order cults which attract most of these young intellectuals to pseudo-science.
The problem of using scientific arguments against cults
The key difference is that humanism uses science right? This objection is cool, but it falls short when you consider that lots of cults out there in the world have managed to warp and twist people’s understanding of science to their benefit.
It is important here to understand that it’s not the science that’s warped, it’s the people’s understanding of science.
Our perception of the world is more important to us than the world itself. Whoever shapes our understanding of something has complete control over how we view the world about that thing. This is why it is difficult to convince someone to abandon their religious beliefs based on scientific arguments alone. Unless we can completely change their understanding of science, which can take many years, they can always argue that our interpretation of science is flawed and influenced by evil forces.
Meet one of the oldest Christian pseudo-science cults in the world
See, the key characteristic of cults is their absolute control over a person’s perception.
One such cult here in Zimbabwe is the church of Christian Science. It’s an old cult from the 19th to 20th century and what’s fascinating about it is it was founded by a woman named Mary Baker Eddy and has a ridiculous amount of wealth.
I first came across it when I was wandering in Harare CBD which was very strange for me – you don’t just get real estate in Harare unless you have real power and resources. Around it, is the National Art Gallery, Roman Catholic Church and the most striking feature of all, the Old Parliament Building close to the city park. In less colourful words, this cult was there at the birth of Zimbabwe’s key social structures and has existed quietly and regardless of its dangerous ideas.
Christian Science is a “science” which believes and studies God as an infinite principle. It makes arguments that are weaved in unexpected mythology across medicine, science and theology. The long story short of its origins is that Mary Baker Eddy had a life-threatening accident and doctors said she would die, but she didn’t. On her supposed deathbed, she read the bible, got healed and **understood** that miracle healings weren’t really miracles. For you to get healed you must be in sync with the laws of God and use them to overcome sickness which is a sign of sin.
Mary Baker is a dangerous cult leader whose teachings brainwash her followers into believing that hospitals and modern medicine are tools of the devil and that the only way to heal is through faith. She used her claims of being healed of life-threatening injuries through her faith to encourage her followers to follow her example. Her reckless and misguided beliefs have put countless lives at risk, and her cult must be exposed for the danger it poses to its members and society as a whole.
As per the beliefs of Christian Scientists, using scientific discoveries such as the Big Bang theory or evolution to deny the existence of God indicates a lack of understanding of the essence of Science itself. To a Christian Scientist, Science is not just a study of the physical world, but a study of God, who is the main principle behind all the other principles that govern the world.
You simply can’t reason with them!
Even worse, this is an eloquent cult which is extensively documented and was organised by people who are clearly of a high quality of education. Beating them won’t be a walk in the park.
Now, enough about that.
Let’s play a game. Imagine you were in the same position as a member of the Christian Science church and you had just read this “twisted” understanding of your faith. Imagine someone defines Humanism in the following erroneous way. How would you defend it?
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A sneak peek into the modern attack against humanism as a pseudo-science cult
There is a global cult called humanism. It’s a powerful cult with members in over fifty countries and is gaining momentum with the UN and many governments. Its whole foundation is it makes a lot of assumptions about science and this greatly affects your ability to have a pure scientific conversation with a humanist.
The modern humanist uses our inability to understand consciousness in science as a basis for his arguments.
He assumes that brain and biological death is the end of life simply because scientists haven’t been able to answer the question, *”What happens to consciousness when we die.”* You’ll hear humanists say this is the one life we have. How do they know? Are we our bodies or we are our consciousness? Crazy isn’t it?
Lots of the great thinkers of our time have been calling them out too, especially the liberal humanists. Yuval Noah Harari notes how humanism isn’t rational because it makes lots of assumptions like any religion. Take, for instance, the humanist emphasis on equality and the construct of rights. What scientific experiment can a humanist conjure up to prove the equality of human beings? Rights and equality are philosophical concepts which we like because they try to approximate fairness but they are deeply rooted in metaphysics, not science but the humanist uses them as a basis for his scientific cultic thinking.
To compensate for this ideological inadequacy, the humanist, much like the Christian imagines a saviour construct like Jesus to save all of humanity and make everyone prosper. Where the Christian says accepting Jesus is the answer to building a utopia, the humanist says accepting his constructs called rights and making them accessible to all is how you build a utopia.
It gets worse.
For some reason, human rights and animal rights are different even though there isn’t any proof of the differences in human and animal consciousness. Are you aware of that argument that since everything in the universe is connected to the same energy system then either everything is conscious or nothing is conscious? The humanist doesn’t quite get that, and for that reason, humanism is bad for human progress.
Your Challenge
“The real battle is between the humanists and the extinctionists. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it” – Elon Musk
Humanism is not a cult and it’s absurd for anyone to think that, but can you articulate and deconstruct the source of this absurdity? Its survival and improvement rely on its capacity to anticipate such arguments – if we can call them that. Over the years, new pseudo-science movements like Sentientism have been rising making attacks on humanism and its supposed inadequacies
One notable case, although anecdotal is the Genetically Modified Skeptic’s video Why as an atheist, I am no longer a humanist. Check it out, it’s worth your time.
Two things to take away from this article: Some make arguments against humanism as a cult, and some pseudo-science cults are emerging from humanism. How do we respond to them? And in our responses, how different are we from our opponents from these other cults we look down upon for whatever reason?
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Humanism as we intend to shape it here in Zimbabwe, and hopefully in Africa and around the world is a movement which looks to cultivate the human capacity to enhance ecological harmony through the use of science and reason.
And yet, Christian Scientists and Scientologists can make the same arguments. The only reason why we can’t classify these two as cults is their enormous followers, power and money. In the global context, humanism is too big to be classified as a cult, but here in Africa humanism has only a handful of members, just like a cult.
I believe the next wave of anti-humanism, isn’t from religion but from pseudo-science. Your challenge should you accept is to peel down your appreciation of humanism down to its smallest axioms. The better we can articulate these axioms in their closest relationship to the fundamental laws of science the more likely we can save our movement from being called a **Western cult based on the white man’s misunderstanding of science**, just like every other cult and religion that’s flourishing in Africa right now.”
Good luck.
Recommended read: George Santayana – Reason in Religion