Aldous Huxley's hidden agenda: 'I had motives...'
In 'Ends and Means' (1937), Aldous Huxley confessed that his reasons for arguing against the message of the Bible were not unbiased and objective philosophical reasons. He 'had an agenda':
I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning; and consequently
assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find
satisfying reasons for this assumption. The philosopher who finds no
meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in
pure metaphysics. He is also concerned to prove that there is no valid
reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do. For myself,
as no doubt for most of my friends, the philosophy of meaninglessness
was essentially an instrument of liberation from a certain system of
morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our
sexual freedom. The supporters of this system claimed that it embodied
the meaning - the Christian meaning, they insisted - of the world. There
was one admirably simple method of confuting these people and justifying
ourselves in our erotic revolt: we would deny that the world had any
meaning whatever.
Famous writers, academics, and media figures, like Huxley, often 'have an agenda' behind their anti-Christian propaganda. We need to be aware of this, and to understand what their agenda may be, and be ready to respond to this underlying agenda as well as (- perhaps even instead of -) their surface arguments.