Here's another great gem from Sheen:
If we want our forest, we must keep our trees. If we want our perfume, we must keep our flowers. If we want our rights and liberties, we must keep our God.
The ultimate problem with secular humanism is that it dismisses the very first premise that establishes the rights and liberties that secular humanists themselves claim to hold so dear. It claims that rights do not come from any source that is greater than human. But if they do not come from a source that is greater than human, then from where do they come? They cannot come from nowhere, for from nothing nothing comes. If we say that they come from human society, then the rights have not a sufficient foundation. For a society which gives away rights can just as easily take them back, as history has amply demonstrated.
There is, admittedly, an element of insecurity built into the proposition that rights come from above. That insecurity has its roots in the fall of man in Genesis 3, when Satan invited Adam and Eve no longer to trust their Creator. That mistrust continues today with modern secularism.
The fundamental misconception of the secular humanist world is that the notion of God and relationship with him (i.e. religion) is at its core hostile to real human freedom. But all it is truly hostile to is complete moral autonomy, i.e., the ability to determine for ourselves whatever we please to be right and wrong. Because religion (when it is good) embraces a real objective moral code. But to embrace that real objective moral code is to accept the truth about that to which human beings are called, namely: life in Christ, which is the one true freedom. Therefore the further we get as a society from relationship with God the closer we get to a society that has lost all sense of the origins of its rights and liberties. Therefore the denial of adoration of and relationship with God may lead not to extravagant liberties but to the disintegration of the very rights in the name of which people attacked religion in the first place.
The problem ultimately is one of fear. Secular humanism is above all else fearful of allowing God in, allowing him to direct the workings and discernments of the human community. And what is needed is to address that fear on the part of secular humanists, to encourage them to "be not afraid." And this can be done only through love.
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