Humanist funerals

Letter: Humanist funerals

3 May 2017

Sirs,

Over the past few days I met different people, Christians and non-Christians alike, who attended a so-called ‘humanist funeral’ in Inverness. Without exception they were all appalled, some traumatised, by what they heard and witnessed. One man told me that it was the ‘worst funeral I ever attended. It was quite a pathetic performance!’

Why the outpouring of dismay and confusion? Well, apparently, no mention was made of God, Jesus Christ, sin or the afterlife. The Bible was not read and no reference was made to any Word of Divine truth.

No prayer was heard, and neither was there any psalm of praise sung. There was not one single word of Biblical comfort, nor an expression of spiritual sympathy, for the mourners present. Even the word ‘Amen’ was omitted, after this bizarre so-called ‘non-religious ceremony’ was over.

Yes, all this was a ‘pathetic performance’ indeed. God calls it idolatry and religious sacrilege: ‘They changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen’ (Romans 1:25).

I daresay the ‘humanist celebrant’ would rather, if it were at all possible, say nothing even about ‘death’ and bury it in the coffin if they could. Alas, it couldn’t be evaded: this cold ‘last enemy’ was staring everyone right in the face. It always will, for sin pays high wages: ‘the wages of sin is death.’ As we are all sinners, so we must all (humanists included) die one day: ‘it is appointed unto all men once to die and after death the judgment.’ Yes, there is, looming round the corner, a Day of Judgment and a Judge, before whom we must all appear. The Bible exhorts us all: ‘Prepare to meet thy God.’

One cannot but have profound pity, and feel deep sorrow, for humanists. They have nothing to live for and nothing to die for. They tragically reject all and everything that relates to God. They delude themselves into thinking that everything ends at death. What madness, what folly, what blindness, what delusion. Sadly, both Mr & Ms Humanist fail to grasp that there are no atheists in hell - they now all believe.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Russian Nobel Prize winner, who witnessed horrifying atrocities in Stalin’s Gulag labour camps, reminds us that humanism offers no solution at all to mankind’s desperate condition. He once said: “If humanism were right in declaring that man is born to be happy, he would not be born to die. Since his body is doomed to die, his task on earth evidently must be of a more spiritual nature.”

Yes, our greatest need is a spiritual one, which God can graciously and mercifully meet in the person of the Lord Jesus Christ. This need is forever fully met when we ‘repent, of our sins, and believe the gospel.’ Humanism is then exchanged, by God’s grace and mercy, for eternal salvation.

History records that Friedrich Nietzsche, a German philosopher, detested everything that Christianity represented. The world knows him, after the title of a book he wrote, called God is dead. Days after he died in Austria words on a wall, in graffiti said: ‘God is dead: Nietzsche!’ Someone else wrote under it, ‘Nietzsche is dead: God.’ Yes, it is man that dies, not God.

Mr Donald J Morrison

85 Old Edinburgh Road

Inverness.