Keys of This Blood (49 page)

That exclusivity about the importance of material man in a world defined by its material bounty is directed against even the notion of God as worshiped by Christians, Jews and Muslims. It is directed against any notion of divinity that does not make God an integral part of this exclusively
human cosmos. Beings loosely called spirits or devils or devas are not necessarily excluded. In fact, they are essential to New Agers. But because they, too, are conceived as constituent parts of man's universe, they are tolerated even by Humanists.

Concerning the strategy for action by which these globalist groups put their ideas of the world into serious play in the international arena, each of them has hit on a variation of the same action model. They do not seek to get rid of the colorful little diversities among the world's religions or cultures. That would only be counterproductive; for it would mean dismantling the structures upon whose backs they ride. And in any case, some individual traits turn out to be useful.

Nevertheless, it is not too much to ask in the sweet name of universal reason that all national, religious and cultural groups modify their traits so that everyone—every nation, every religion and every culture—can be accommodated as a division or subdivision of the future one-world community that is both the aim and the justification of each of these three groups.

For such globalist community builders as these, there is no earthly use in perpetuating any element that has historically divided human society into distinct, separate and sometimes warring parts, or that might do so in the future. Their chosen task is to hasten the day when all will be one in a materially comfortable world community, now abuilding, and to assist us all by teaching us how to become members of that global community of contentment.

The maps, action models and documents John Paul peruses in the first of these three situation rooms belong to the Humanists. Everything he sees here brings home to the Pontiff how very far their quiet, bloodless and altogether humanly pleasant revolution has come within a relatively short time. A glance at just one map shows him, for example, that there are sixty Humanist organizations flourishing today, in twenty-three countries.

The opening salvo of this group's ambitious assault on the world was heard in 1933, with the publication of the Humanist Manifesto I. Given great vogue and credibility by American educational philosopher John Dewey, and by other luminary cosigners of the document, HM-I put forward the basic Humanist proposal: Human perfection is to be attained by human efforts in this cosmos. By any measure, HM-I was a clarion call to work for no less a result than a real revolution. It was Humanist Manifesto II, however, that really made headlines. And with good
reason. Written by University of Buffalo philosophy professor Paul Kurtz and published in 1973, HM-II was presented as a mere updating of HM-I. But it was so much more explicit that it deserves a special place among the action models in the Humanist command post.

HM-II clearly stated the goal of the Humanists with regard to all institutions, and with special emphasis on religion. It was not liquidation the Humanists should seek, said Kurtz, but “the transformation, control, and direction of all associations and institutions…. [This] is the purpose and the program of Humanism. Certainly, religious institutions, their ritualistic forms and ecclesiastical methods must be reconstituted as rapidly as experience allows.”

In all their efforts toward such “transformation, control, and direction of all associations and institutions,” Humanists were instructed by Kurtz to advocate “a socialized and cooperative economic order, autonomous and situational ethics, … many varieties of sexual exploration, … and the development of a system of world law and order based on a transnational federal government.”

Piggyback tactics were not merely vindicated by HM-I and HM-II; they were positively mandated and on as global a basis as possible. Humanists everywhere promoted their revolution, as they still do, through the vital arteries of public education; federal, state and municipal administrations; publicity, advertising and entertainment; churches, cultural and political associations, colleges and universities. Nothing could be exempt.

In general, Humanists have always been adept at making their revolution as pleasant-sounding and as humanly appealing as possible for most of their targets. But when it comes to Christianity, the gloves are off. Pope John Paul read and reread the words of one enthusiastic author published in the January-February 1983 issue of
Humanist Magazine:
“The classroom must and will become the area of combat between … the rotting corpse of Christianity … and the new faith of Humanism.”

John Paul does not brush such Humanist assaults aside lightly. He has real cause for concern that the Humanists represent a threat to his Church. In fact, he knows that Humanism has made converts even among his highest Church officials.

In 1986, for example, delegates from the Vatican traveled to Paris, without the Pope's blessing, to attend the World Congress of Humanists. There they joined the general omnium-gatherum of representatives from Soviet-dominated Eastern European countries and from Western Europe and the Americas. For they were all enmeshed in the anti-Catholic drumbeat of Humanism. At the very least, their example caused confusion among the faithful.

In September of 1988, again without papal blessing or by-your-leave, Roman Catholic Cardinals Poupard of Paris and Daneels of Belgium headed an eight-man delegation of Catholic theologians from France, Canada, Yugoslavia, India and Norway to participate with an international group of professional Humanists in a conference in Amsterdam. Among those professional Humanists were Dr. Paul Kurtz himself and the virulently antipapal Robert Tielman of Utrecht University.

There can be no doubt for John Paul that Their Eminences and the Catholic theologians accompanying them had all read and understood HM-II. And, informed as they are, it would seem virtually impossible that they were unaware of one recent and most public enterprise undertaken by Tielman. He had made a special trip to San Francisco during Pope John Paul's visit there just one year before, in September of 1987, in order to organize, coordinate and sharpen the homosexual demonstrations against the Holy Father's papal person.

Most Catholics will not lightly forgive those demonstrations, because of the open blasphemy committed against the Eucharist on the streets of San Francisco. Yet neither the Cardinals nor any of the theologians present at the Amsterdam gathering appeared unduly troubled by Tielman's attitude or his actions. In fact, the open joke repeated at their expense in stage whispers among the delegates was that Humanists sat on both sides of the conference table in Holland!

The year 1988 was a bumper year for the Humanist harvest, it would seem. For by that year as well, they succeeded in organizing the Church of the Good Humanist in the United States. And they succeeded in attracting representatives from the Catholic Church establishment in America and from several mainline Protestant churches as members. One major project in which they will all have a hand, surely, is the planned launching of the Vision Interfaith Satellite Network (VISN), which will beam the message of HM-II even more effectively over America's airwaves.

Not surprisingly, Pope John Paul's assessment of the effect of the Humanist assault on the world from its position in the globalist arena is a sober one. He sees the Humanists' revolution, which has succeeded beyond even their most sanguine expectations, as the cruelest and most radical kind of revolution imaginable. For it has not only denuded public education and university studies of any positive religious content. As Italian editor and commentator Alver Metalli wrote in 1989, it has affected “that point of human conscience, inviolate up to now, where desires, aspirations and one's life plans are formed.”

John Paul has no need to look at any action models that might be open
to view in the Humanist situation room in order to see into the future they prepare for us all. For that future is already upon many of us. Though their process advances at varying speeds in different quarters of the world, the Humanist ideal of the happy consumer enters the home and the personal life of every individual.

Cultures remain diverse, and the world's religions remain distinct. But that diversity is of secondary importance. According to the Humanist principle, in fact, the only true difference between the various cultures and religions is merely a chronological one. Each of them simply happened to develop and flower at different moments in history. Each represents no more than a different step along our common path toward material happiness and fulfillment. Whether you are talking about nations or religions—about America or Europe or Asia, or about Christianity, Judaism, Islam or Buddhism—it is a fact of the Humanist view of life that each simply needs to be synchronized with all the others. Once they are all brought up to speed, as the current saying has it, it will be clear to all that there is nothing to squabble about.

True to the Humanist formula for progress, little by little men and women of every culture and faith are now marked increasingly by the same characteristics in all areas of their lives. Whether in New York or Bangkok, Warsaw, Palermo or Buenos Aires, Addis Ababa or Nairobi, all have the same Humanistic aspirations. Everywhere, vital institutions and activities—sexuality, marriage, family planning, religious practice and preference, public rituals, public and private education—change and recolor themselves continually according to the Humanist principles of synchronization. And everywhere, culture and religion alike bow before the goddess of happy consumerism, kowtowing to her promise of the equitable distribution of luxury items and convenience goods for all.

As single-minded and effective as they are, the Humanists pale in many respects by comparison to their upscale counterparts, the Mega-Religionists. Take the sheer number of groups involved, for example. Where the Humanists have a respectable sixty or so groups around the world, the Mega-Religionists have some five hundred.

Or take their ability to ride piggyback on the structural setups of governments, religions and associations already in place around the world. Where the Humanists must seek the control and direction of such institutions in the best way they can, Mega-Religionists are very often expected to—and do—control and direct those institutions as a matter of course.

Or take the flavor of acceptability each group can foster on the basis of the names it can bandy about. The wish lists of the Humanists are the actual membership rolls of the Mega-Religionists, some of the most distinguished, widely known and wealthy men and women of the past sixty years, people whose names are frequently household words around the world.

In one Mega-Religionist group alone—the Temple of Understanding, centered in the United States and most often referred to by its initials, TU—there are more than six thousand such names: Nobel laureates, prominent individuals who hail from sixty-two countries on all five continents, people who, in one way or another, live their lives as though all political borders were already extinguished, who are as easily recognized east of Suez as west of it, who are as likely to turn up north of the equator as south of it and may do so for vacation or for business—or to attend a Mega-Religionist gathering, like as not. People who call themselves—and were for a while called by the world—the “beautiful people” are Mega-Religionists, people of the caliber of Yehudi Menuhin, Carlos P. Romulo, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John Foster Dulles, Henry R. Luce, George Meany, Queen Elizabeth II, the Duke of Edinburgh, Earl Mountbatten, Spyros Skouras, Teilhard de Chardin, Thomas Merton, Pierre Trudeau, Robert McNamara, John D. Rockefeller IV, Pearl Buck, Leo Cardinal Suenens.

Given the noticeable difference in the membership of Mega-Religionist groups as against those of the Humanists, something of a difference in purpose inevitably shows up as well.

Humanists are still preoccupied with what they call the “bane of religion.” The Mega-Religionist mind, by contrast, is devoted to the proposition that comfort is not always as exclusively physical as Humanists like to insist. Religion, too, is essential to the comfort of human civilization, and to the comfort of its differing cultures. It's just that separate religions are neither necessary nor desirable. In fact, for the sake of peace, all religions must fuse into one great religion—one mega-religion—as quickly and painlessly as possible.

According to the University of Buffalo's Paul Hutchinson, once that fusion takes place, “the whole of Humanity shall remain a united people, where Muslim and Christian, Buddhist and Hindu shall stand together, bound by a common devotion, not to something behind, but to something ahead, not to a racial past or a geographical unit, but to a dream of a world society with a universal religion of which the historical faiths are but branches.”

It is to just such fusion between all religions that the Mega-Religionists
are principally dedicated. A fusion that is to be accomplished in a world of plenty; there is no quarrel with the Humanists about that. But the Mega-Religionists will entertain no question of liquidating the more harmless elements of each religion; for these have a folkloric and colorful function, and perhaps a certain function in terms of appeasement and camouflage. Still, all such details must be “absorbed,” as the vocabulary of such groups puts it, into a “higher dimension” according as mankind matures in its own godliness.

The aim of this process of fusion was set out by a man of many interests. Writing in 1948, the Marxist, millionaire, publisher and Mega-Religionist Victor Gollancz said, “The ultimate aim should be that Judaism, Christianity and all other religions should vanish and give place to one great ethical world religion, the brotherhood of man.” Farther, said Gollancz, that aim should be achieved by “believers with different opinions and convictions … [who] are necessary for each other … [and who] work out the larger synthesis.”