At the heart of abdication of responsibility and all-consuming passion for personal so-called freedom, is the principle of self-gratification as life’s highest goal. This form of atheistic humanism denies any need for God and places man or woman in his or her so-called goodness on center stage. It endorses the individual’s right to modify or abandon the customs, traditions and standards of behavior in the Judeo-Christian tradition, thus making good and evil relative to a particular time and place. Men and women answer only to themselves and can live life selfishly, having personal desire and emotional satisfaction as their major goals. This is merely a repetition of that period of time in the Old Testament when “every man did what was right in his own eyes.”

The anti-God effects of the self-oriented belief of humanist philosophy are everywhere to be seen. Unrestrained materialism, for example, with its ruinous economic and ecological consequences, is the logical fruitage of the secularist doctrine that the ultimate reality is matter rather than spirit. The West is now experiencing in a transnational way the consequences of the inflationary spiral and the realities of over consumption. Men and women work diligently to maintain affluent lifestyles at the expense of the physical and emotional well-being of themselves and their children.

Pornography, which has a baleful effect on children as well as adults, is licit in a permissive, secular society since absolutes no longer command universal respect. The television medium, firmly entrenched in the American home and mindset, brings prime-time programs of sex and violence to viewers of all ages.

Last, but not least, alternate lifestyles in the form of both homosexual and heterosexual deviations are endorsed signs of progress in the upward movement of evolution and toward humanistic perfection.

In the family, any humanism which leads to accompanying relativism has left many parents either unable or unwilling to provide their children with consistent moral/ spiritual oversight. As a result, parents have increasingly left this aspect of their children’s upbringing to outside institutions such “as the public schools. But public education now is increasingly controlled by the secular humanist viewpoint. In case after case, the courts have undercut and removed from the educational system, Bible reading, prayer and the teaching of creationism. Today children are systematically exposed to an atheistic humanism that leads to hedonistic and unbridled lifestyles. Parents often experience concern and confusion about what is happening to their children.

Under the protecting influence of today’s alleged enlightenment thinking, the family is rapidly becoming little more than a collection of people living in the same household, seeking a distinctly, personal definition of self-fulfillment–no questions asked, no judgments rendered.