What Do We Do?

By Sally Morem
I wrote the following in response to a humanist web site’s request for
responses to the terrorist attacks on America on September 11, 2001:

We now know that the terrorists have tried to do very serious damage to
America many times in the past, each time thwarted by our security forces.
This time the terrorists succeeded. I am very sad and extremely furious.

The terrorists ripped into America, erasing thousands of our fellow

Americans’ lives from the universe.

As secular humanists, we can’t give their families religious comfort by

promising life after death for their loved ones. We can only give meaning to
this horrendous travesty by accepting the challenge history and the terrorists
have flung at us: The systematic tracking down and destruction of every
terrorist organization in the world. We are the only power with the military
and technological know-how for the job. We must take the responsibility.
We can’t duck it the way we did after World War I and the beginning of
World War II. I believe our Jewish friends will not mind if we borrow their
saying, “Never Again.”

Appeasement is dead. Pacifism is dead. Cultural relativism is dead. Moral

relativism is dead. Equivalence theory is dead. We know evil when we see
it. The Islamic extreme fundamentalists are evil. They would kill every
single American if they could, Israel or no Israel. They would stop at
nothing. Why? Because we Americans are sinners in their eyes with our
freedom, our wealth, and our free-wheeling culture. We stand in their way
merely by existing.

So, they believe Allah orders genocide.

We are at war. What, besides donations to survivors, can we do?

We can engage in a secular humanist wartime propaganda blitz. At every
opportunity, we can use our humanist connections around the world to
spread the word against promises of God’s virgins in heaven for murderers
of Americans. We can repeat over and over again how secular America is
the force for good in the world, for freedom, democracy, and a satisfying
moral life. We can link ourselves again and again to the moral virtues of
secular America. We can end any semblance of anti-Americanism we’ve
ever engaged in. We may remain critical of specific problems, but
America—after accounting for all the normal human frailties—must be
named by us directly as secular humanists to be the grandest political,
economic, cultural and social invention in human history. Why? Because it
will help our movement, it will help us defeat the terrorists, and it is true.

We are at war. This war will take years. We secular humanists must take
sides. Folks, I tell you, cultural evolution has brought us to this. The world
can either choose the Enlightenment West led by America, or it can choose
the terrorists with their promises (threats) of theocratic tyranny. There is no
longer a third way.

I realize humanists usually consider the Christian religious right as our

ultimate enemy. This is no longer true, if it ever was. Our religious right is
a pitiful joke. Witness Falwell’s and Robertson’s recent sick statements,
practically excusing those attacks on our country. Our new ultimate enemy
is the Islamic religious right. They are the ones who are willing to slam
airplanes into buildings full of people. Falwell and Robertson are only
willing to flap their yaps.

It is time we secular humanists choose America—our beloved democratic

and secular nation. Our beloved home.

The bad news is that secular humanist organizations and leaders rejected
my vision. They are (at least most of them) leftists. They preferred to do
nothing to aid our fight against terrorism, seeing America itself as one of
their greatest enemies. In short, they were leftists first and Americans last.
Secular humanism itself rated a far distant second in their political
priorities.

As a pro-American, politically conservative, philosophical agnostic, I

couldn’t tolerate this attitude any more, and dropped out of the movement
soon after their fundamental anti-American stance became apparent to me.