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Humanist Doomsday Myth Scares Children

The airwaves today, and the print media, are full of apocalyptic visions of humanity polluting and consuming and reproducing itself into oblivion.

Lee Duigon
  • Lee Duigon
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“One in Three Children Fear Demise of Planet,” announced a recent press release from Habitat Heroes (www.HabitatHeroes.com).

The demise of the planet? Well, that would scare anybody. And apparently it’s scaring children.

We see “the demise of the planet” as secular humanism’s End Times prophecy.

It has often been observed that secularists imitate Christianity. They have scriptures—the writings of Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, John Dewey, etc. They have a priesthood—public school teachers, college professors, the news media, and others. They have their own strange equivalents of saints and martyrs, holy places, holy days like Earth Day, and so on.

Now they have an End Times scenario, too: the human race just goes on driving SUVs, eating meat, using incandescent light bulbs and toilet paper, and all of Planet Earth goes down the chute. All life goes extinct, starting with polar bears.

The Findings

Habitat Heroes hired a marketing research firm, CARAVAN Opinion Research Corporation, “to find out what the concerns were of kids, what they thought about the survival of the planet,” said Habitat Heroes spokesman Michael Salort. “We were surprised by all the answers.”

Habitat Heroes has refused to release the survey itself for public examination, but Mr. Salort was willing to discuss the findings with us.

“This report presents the findings of a telephone survey conducted among a national sample of 500 PRE-TEENS comprising 250 males and 250 females 6 to 11 years of age, living in private households in the continental United States,” says the press release. The survey “finds that one out of three children ages 6–11 years old fear that the planet won’t exist when they grow up and more than half (56%) believe that the Earth will not be as good a place to live.”

Also, “Minority children worried the most—with 75% of Black children and 65% of Hispanic children fearing the planet was going to deteriorate before they grow up.” And, “67% of girls ages 9–11 versus 60% of boys ages 9–11 worry that the earth won’t be a good place to live when they are grown up.” Girls aged 6–8 are more “worried” than boys (57% vs. 43%) in the same age group.

Frightened or “Concerned”?

“I think it would be more accurate to say that kids are concerned,” Salort said, shying away from words like scared or pessimistic. “After all, there is a volume of scientific research out there that suggests something—that there are potentially climactic environmental changes going on that we have to be concerned about. So it’s pretty clear that kids have something to be concerned about; but we’re not saying anybody should be frightened. Our study was never meant to frighten children.”

Where is the fear, then, coming from?

“Oh, there are all those media reports out there; and kids pick up on what they hear adults talking about,” Salort said. “It’d be very easy for children to see some of the news reports [about climate change] and say, ‘Oh, my goodness!’

“It’s similar to the 1950s, when the media overplayed the threat of nuclear war—even though the threat was real. Yes, someone could have dropped an atomic bomb. But the media went overboard and a lot of kids were scared.”

Habitat Heroes, he repeated, has no interest in scaring children. “We’re all about how to teach kids how they can help by doing little things to clean up their environment—like recycling, and cleaning up litter,” he said. “Ours is basically a program to empower kids, not scare them.”

Who’s Scaring the Children?

But the survey findings indicate that children are being frightened, and we wonder how that’s happening. Maybe if we turn on the TV set…

In April the History Channel launched a new series: Life After People—“Welcome to Earth. Population Zero.” 1 This was inspired by a 2007 best-selling book, The World Without Us.2

Here we have secular humanism’s darkest fantasy—the total extinction of the human race. That ought to be enough to frighten children. But the airwaves today, and the print media, are full of apocalyptic visions of humanity polluting and consuming and reproducing itself into oblivion.

On one level, this is motivated by what R. J. Rushdoony called “a horror of humanity”—the humanists’ loathing of the human race. Rushdoony wrote, in 1970:

“The inscription on Cyrus’ sepulcher moved Alexander [the Great] deeply, ‘filling him with the thoughts of the uncertainty and mutability of human affairs,’ i.e., the horror of being human. Man today is filled with the same horror, and through science seeks to escape creatureliness, and by politics to create an eternal order. This horror of humanity, developed in antiquity, has come to sharper focus and formal power in the post-Roman states, wherein legalistic man hopes by legislation and by laboratory to enter into the kingdom of the gods.”3

Promises, Promises…

Darwinism teaches humanists that there is no human soul, no life after death, no God, no transcendent justice. Nevertheless, humanism offers its believers a scheme of salvation—by means of an all-powerful state. Rushdoony wrote:

“No state can avoid making itself the divine touchstone of truth and character if it departs from the primacy of God and His word and law.”4

The purpose of humanism’s End Times prophecy of “man-made climate change” and total catastrophe is to scare people—not just children, but adults, too. The message is simple: “If you don’t put total power in our hands, and do what we tell you to do, you’re gonna wreck the world and everybody’s gonna die!” It sounds very like an unbeliever’s superficial parody of a Christian End Times message which, being an unbeliever, he doesn’t understand.

To be saved, we must empower the government to tax our carbon footprints (shorthand for “virtually everything we do”), force us to travel on bicycles, little clown cars, or pogo sticks, abort our babies, turn off our air conditioners, teach our children to be sodomites, and anything else it has a mind to do. The motif of global warming is new—forty years ago, it was the threat of an impending ice age—but the impetus to establish the state as a god on earth is old: as old as the serpent’s seduction in the Garden of Eden, “ye shall be as gods” (Genesis 3:5).

The state’s great tool for functioning as a god, of course, is science, harnessed to the service of the government. Science can do anything! This is the basis for extravagant, messianic promises like this one, from The Humanist Manifesto II:

“Using technology, we can control our environment, conquer poverty, markedly reduce disease, extend our life-span, significantly modify our behavior, alter the course of human evolution and cultural development, unlock vast new powers, and provide humankind with unparalleled opportunity for achieving an abundant and meaningful life.”5

That particular message of hope and change was written in 1973; but based as it is on Satan’s own eternal lie, it’s still very much in style. Big Science and Big Government will not only rescue us from extinction at the hands of Climate Change, but will also lead us into Paradise on Earth.

To Tremble or to Laugh?

How can we protect our own children from being given nightmares by these visions of environmental doom spewed out by politicians, academics, news personalities, and idiotic movie stars? How can we protect them from being taken in by this scam?

A solid Biblical foundation is a must. Faith in God and His Word is a shield that will protect us from all the fiery darts of the wicked. Teach children, for instance, to take Psalm 24 literally: “The earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein.”

To believe in catastrophic, extinction-causing, man-made climate change, we must believe in a pitiful, powerless God who sits in a remote corner of heaven wringing His hands, unable to stop His human creatures from destroying His creation and rendering His promises null and void. Is that any kind of God for a Christian to believe in? If God is true (and of course He is), then the prophets of human self-extermination are liars.

We have only ourselves to blame if we send our children off to public schools every day to watch An Inconvenient Truth—Al Gore’s global warming end-of-the-world movie, complete with computer-generated images of drowning polar bears: required viewing in many schools—and have their heads crammed full of Darwinism, radical environmentalism, and the need for an Amazing Colossal Government to solve all our problems. We are much better off following God’s commandment to give our children a godly education, either at home or in a solid Christian school.

God Himself laughs at the vain things imagined by a godless people (Psalm 2), whom in due course He will punish with a rod of iron. We should be laughing with Him—but not until we’ve first seen to our children’s education so that they can laugh, too.


3 R.J. Rushdoony, Thy Kingdom Come (Vallecito, CA: Ross House Books, 2001 ed.), 75.

4 Ibid., 76.


Lee Duigon
  • Lee Duigon

Lee is the author of the Bell Mountain Series of novels and a contributing editor for our Faith for All of Life magazine. Lee provides commentary on cultural trends and relevant issues to Christians, along with providing cogent book and media reviews.

Lee has his own blog at www.leeduigon.com.

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