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| Modern secular humanists boast in being non-racist and scientific. However, it was the Enlightenment--which secular humanism came from--that opened the way to racial classification into "higher" races and "lower" races. This pseudo-scientific practice was all in the name of true science. |
The Enlightenment not only made reason racist, but science as well:
"By the late eighteenth century, the Enlightenment was in full swing, and efforts were made for the first time to assure a scientific understanding of race. Biologists, building upon the pioneer studies of Linnaeus and Buffon, turned to the classification of races. Animals, as well as human beings, were arranged in systematic hierarchies. Distinctions were made between “higher” and “lower” races. European whites were placed at the summit in the hierarchy of races."[1]
Thus, “The scientific thought of the Enlightenment was a precondition for the growth of a modern racism based on physical typology.”[2] Carl Linnaeus, a Swedish naturalist, considered Europeans, Asians, American Indians, and Africans different varieties of humanity.[3] Blacks he dismissed as “crafty, indolent, negligent. … Governed by caprice,” while Europeans he praised as “acute, inventive. … Governed by laws.”[4]
Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, who produced the “most authoritative classification of the races” of the Enlightenment, considered Caucasians the first human race. All other races, he held, had, as George M. Fredrickson writes, “diverged or degenerated.”[5] “Whatever their intentions, Linnaeus, Blumenbach, and other eighteenth-century ethnologists opened the way to a secular or scientific racism by considering human beings part of the animal kingdom rather than viewing them in biblical terms as children of God endowed with spiritual capacities denied to other creatures.”[6] (Correction for Fredrickson’s statement: While his point is well taken, only Christians are children of God [Jn. 1:12
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