THE HUMAN AGENDA

Dr. Rod Gorney is a professor of psychiatry at UCLA and a practicing psychiatrist/psychoanalyst.  He is also well-known in the free thought community as an engaging personality and speaker whose excellent presentations have graced many a lectern.  Gorney has in addition proven himself to be a great friend to humanitarian causes.

The Human Agenda: How to be at Home in the Universe—Without Magic is a magnificent effort on many different levels: humanistic, scientific, educational, and psychological.  Anyone who views atheism and humanism as negative, destructive forces will change their tune after reading the book.  The trick is to get them to do so.

Dr. Gorney addresses many of the key issues of our time and, by so doing, presents an inspirational view for the future that is ours for the taking—if we as a species can muster up the courage and intellectual integrity to address these issues honestly and recognize the root causes of our problems.  Gorney describes a world of abundance and the steps we must take to ensure a full enjoyment of life’s plentiful harvest.

Gorney’s description of values is eloquently simple: That which helps us survive is a value.  To those desirous of positing an unknowable, supernatural entity as an “ultimate” value, Gorney’s first chapter, entitled “Universe and God,” is a poetic description of the nature of reality.  Here, he describes the primeval efforts of our ancient ancestors to “control” that reality by inventing supernatural explanations for events of nature, and how they attempted to appease those deities through worship and sacrifice.  Gorney tells how humanity advanced and became more “human” as they summarily rejected earlier, more primitive concepts—and how the mystical purveyors of the occult fought these advances every step of the way.  We can see modern manifestations of this attitude in today’s creationist “experts” and “historical revisionists” who will stop at nothing in order to advance the cause of their religion.

If it did nothing else, Gorney’s book would serve as an excellent scientific reference.  In addition to discussing the principles of evolution and cosmogony, Gorney relates the painstaking manner by which humankind learned from the scientific method and how it is this method which has freed us (or at least some of us) from the intellect tyranny of ancient dogmas and myths.

Gorney also does a great service to the free thought community by elucidating how these myths have served to set humans against one another by setting up patriarchal hierarchical system of control designed to discriminate against all but the “chosen” ruling elites.  He discusses how our ancestors’ apparently innate fear of darkness was utilized by many of these elites to justify human bondage.

Gorney’s The Human Agenda rests upon our recognition of the fact that ancient mythology and philosophical control systems have brought humanity to the sociological and cultural abyss we are in today.  Only a concentrated effort at “demythification” will free us from our present woeful state.