Bart and Tony Campolo
Recently the Associated Press ran a story about a former United Methodist youth minister who had come to the conclusion that he did not really believe in God or Christianity. Nonetheless, he still felt a need to help people and fellowship with like minded individuals like he had done for years in church. Therefore, he applied and was hired by the University of Southern California as its “Humanist Chaplain.”
Apparently, his job is to minister to, and provide social programs, for USC students who are atheists or agnostics. According to the Chaplain, Bart Campolo, 51, his goal is to help students to answer the “big” questions”: “How do you live a good life? If this life is the only one you have, how do you make the most of it?” Campolo is the son of prominent best selling Christian author, speaker, and sociologist Tony Campolo.
Campolo is just one of a growing number of such humanist ministers working on campuses around the country. According to Roy Speckhardt, executive director of the American Humanist Association, other universities with humanist chaplains include Harvard, Yale, and Columbia. How ironic that those colleges were all begun with the purposes of providing Christian higher education and training ministers. Speckhardt claims that his organization now has 30,000 members nationwide.
Of course, if atheist or humanist chaplains were honest with themselves (and most of them are not), they would realize that they really have nothing to offer students but empty platitudes. They want to help young people navigate the seas of life, but they’re steering a rudderless boat. With no divinely inspired guidance, a humanist chaplain has no basis upon which to provide any kind of moral council.
This is the fallacy of secular humanism. Its advocates claim a moral high ground and may even assert it is superior to theistic ethics. The truth is, however, without a divine foundation any moral assertions are built on nothing but the capricious theories of fallible men. Ultimately it all ends in moral confusion, death, and despair.
For more on this problem read my articles on The Secular Ten Commandments on our website under Non-Christian Worldviews titled The “Secular 10 Commandments” and the Fallacy of Atheist Ethics – Parts 1 and 2.