Why We Need Secularism Today More Than Ever?
Enough of religious bullying. Resist it while you can before its too late.
Today it has become almost impossible to open up and turn over a newspaper page without seeing some sort of crime committed against free societies and individuals, or of stifling of free speech, of religious and clerical bullying, of war and destruction in the name of religion, of the teaching of garbage to children, and much more horrible and nightmarish things.
Why Criticism of Religion Is Not Hate Speech?
I don’t know if you have noticed this before or not, but the religious faith that you adhere to has a stunning correlation with your parents’ religion and your place of birth. If you are born in India you’re probably a Hindu, if you are born in America you’re probably a Christian, If you are born in Saudi Arabia you’re probably a Sunni-Muslim, if you are born in Iran you’re probably a Shia-Muslim.
And no matter which religion you belong to, you are quite critical when it comes to other people’s faiths, and can point out the flaws in other’s religion so effortlessly, but when it comes to your own faith, you seem to fail to apply the same critical faculties.
I know this because I’ve tried several times over the past years to make theists acknowledge this issue but the idea always doesn’t seem to have any impact on their worldview. And that quite often makes me wonder what is the reason behind such behavior? And what I have come to realize is that religion is given the unwarranted privilege when it comes to public discourse.
Just like the mighty Voltaire once said:
“To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.”
You can easily criticize or ridicule someone’s political ideology and that will be considered diversity in opinion, but god forbid you do the same with someone’s religious belief, and without wasting a single breathe you will be called a bigot or a racist. Like religion is some sort of race?
Are Secularism And Atheism The Same Thing?
It’s been more than 20 years into the 21st century and there are still people on this planet and in our society who think that Secularism means banning all religions in the country and establishing an atheist regime.
Secularism is not atheism, period.
Secularism and atheism are two different ideas, the latter being a denial of the theist claims to the certainty of having access to supernatural knowledge and revealed wisdom, and the former being a political ideology which maintains that the matters of the supernatural and the divine have nothing to do with that of the State, neither does one religion has dominion over the other nor does the state condone any one religion in the public sphere.
“A separation of the church and the state”, as one of my personal heroes, Thomas Jefferson, put it.
Why Secularism Benefits Everyone?
Secularism means that you have the right to believe whatever you want unless it doesn’t undermine or infringe upon others’ right to do the same. No matter who you are or whatever your set of beliefs, secularism benefits everybody.
It protects my right to be an atheist, but it also protects my parents’ right to be Muslims, and my friend’s right to be a Hindu, and your right to be a Christian or a Buddhist or whatever you might choose to believe in.
And it protects all children’s right to pure scientific education and their right to abstain from pledging allegiance every morning at school to a God they don’t believe in.
Why Is Criticism Of Religion So Important?
Everyone has the right to believe in whatever they want as long as they keep it to themselves, and I’m pretty okay with this, but when it comes to religious belief, these are not just private delusions. These are beliefs that greatly affect the politics of the masses and children’s education, which indirectly or directly affect the lives of every individual on a significant scale.
There are people in this country who insist that creationism should be given equal time in school as evolution with the tax payer’s money. Now let us imagine giving equal time to alchemy after a chemistry class or to astrology after an astronomy class for a moment. And not to forget asking that the same people who so generously make such demands, are they prepared to give equal time to evolution or the big bang in their Sunday schools?
Do they really want equal time? No, they don’t. They want a dictatorship of pseudoscience and stupidity. A scientifically crippled education system produces adults like Anti-vaxxers, by whose grace Measles, a disease that was declared eliminated back in the year 2000, made a huge return to the US after years.
The Supreme Court of the United States refuses to say as it should that not a single American taxpayer’s dollar can or should be used for the military aid of the establishment of the Jewish religion and state on the West bank of the Jordan river.
Nor we will have people who are eager to bring on the Armageddon or the Messiah be treated as friends, and not enemies of civilization. Those who not just look forward eagerly, but who genuinely wish that death and destruction take over our species and our world.
If you want your religion to infiltrate politics and education and every public sector because you feel like it is the only right religion, then you should have better reasons than just personal intuition and should be prepared to face all sorts of criticism and ridicule as well.
Was The USA Founded Upon Judeo-Christain Values?
America’s founding fathers were strictly secular despite we keep on hearing from those on the right that the country was founded upon Judeo-Christian values. No, it wasn’t. The Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom was established and still stands to repudiate this nonsensical claim.
John Adams himself stated that;
“the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”
The four most important documents in American history; the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, the Federalist Papers, and The Constitution itself, are living proof of the county’s secular origins.
The Founding Fathers were explicit in trying to prevent establishing a religious state because they were completely aware of the dangers associated with it. But despite these facts, every single US president has been a Christian, except for Jefferson and Lincoln of course, given that they were considered Deists due to the ambiguousness of their religious convictions.
Conclusion
Now, of course, you’re not expected to justify the reasoning behind your beliefs if you’re happy to keep them to yourselves, I just wish this wasn’t the case.
I might be an atheist, but I am a secularist first, and even though I don’t want to force kids to abandon their religion, I just wish that we build an environment where they are truly free to make that decision for themselves.
I dream of a world where we could live in an educational environment that promotes skepticism, freedom of thought, and critical thinking. A world where no ideology is immune to criticism and free inquiry. Where no ‘one religion’ is given dominion over the other. Where children are taught that their beliefs are fine, but so are others’.
If this were a reality, don’t you think most of our problems like radicalization, holy wars, terrorism, stifling of free speech, religious and clerical bullying, would be a thing of the past?
I know this sounds like a utopian dream, but look wherever you want and you will see a constitutionally secular state under the influence of Christianity, divisions in society based on religious differences, scientific illiteracy among children as well as adults, and then look me in the eye and tell me that we don’t need secularism today more than ever.
I am not an American. I was born and raised in Pakistan, under the Islamic regime, where I deserve to be killed just for leaving my religion of birth and thinking differently by the law. I am someone who knows how theocracy looks like from the inside out and how it feels like living in one.
I am fully aware of the dangers and consequences that lay ahead once you stop taking the separation of religion and state seriously. So when I say we need secularism today more than ever, I really mean it.