Keep God out of public affairs

Chris OConnor · Posted: Sun Oct 17, 2004 10:57 pm Post subject: Keep God out of public affairs

Keep God out of public affairs by A. C. Grayling

Summary...

Religion will never provide a moral framework for technological change, argues the distinguished philosopher, A.C. Grayling, who says the state must sever all support for all faith-based groups and events in order to foster a rational, ethical basis for science.

Sunday August 12, 2001
The Observer

Religion has been given comfortable house room in liberal democracies, which protect the right of people to believe as they wish, and accept the wide variety of faiths brought into them by immigrants from all over the world. This is right and proper, for freedom of speech and belief are essential values, and the very idea of democratic society is premised on the idea of responsibly exercised liberty.
But as votaries of imported religions grow more assertive in seeking the opportunities and privileges enjoyed by religious organisations indigenous to those democracies, and as the tolerant democracies respond concessively, so the prospect of real difficulty arises. It is obvious that Tony Blair's Government does not see the difficulty, because it is encouraging the spread of faith-based schools, whether Christian, Islamic, Jewish or Sikh, and considering legislation to protect people from harassment or discrimination if suffered specifically on the grounds of their faith. Both developments seem innocuous, even (in the latter case) desirable; but in fact they dramatically increase the potential for social divisions, tension and conflict, and illustrate why the public domain needs to be secularised completely as a matter of urgency.

The world's major religions - especially Christianity, Islam, and Judaism - are not merely incompatible with one another, but mutually antithetical. All religions are such that if they are pushed to their logical conclusions, or if their founding literatures and early traditions are accepted literally, they will take the form of their respective fundamentalisms. Jehovah's Witnesses and the Taliban are not aberrations, but unadulterated and unconstrained expressions of their respective faiths, as practised by people who are not interested in refined temporisings or theological niceties, but who literally accept the world-view of the writings they regard as sacred, and insist on the morality and way of life prescribed by them.

This is where the threat of serious future difficulty lies, because all the major religions blaspheme one another, and each by its principles ought actively to oppose the others - although not, one pessimistically hopes, as they did in the past with crusades, jihads and pogroms. They blaspheme each other in numerous ways. All non-Christians blaspheme Christianity by their refusal to accept the divinity of Christ, because in so doing they reject the Holy Ghost - which is described as the most serious of all blasphemies.

The New Testament has Christ say: 'I am the way, the truth and the life; no one comes to the Father but by me.' This places members of other faiths beyond redemption if they know this claim but do not heed it. By an unlucky twist of theology, Protestants have to regard Catholics as blasphemers too, because the latter regard Mary as co-redemptorix with Christ, in violation of the utterance just quoted.

All non-Muslims blaspheme Islam because they insult Mohammed by not accepting him as the true Prophet, and by ignoring the teachings of the Koran. Jews seem the least philosophically troubled by what people of other faiths think about their own - but Orthodox Jews regard themselves as religiously superior to others because others fail in the proper observances, for example by not respecting kosher constraints. And in general all the religions blaspheme each other by regarding the others' teachings, metaphysics and much of their ethics as false and even pernicious, and their own religion as the only true one.

It is a woolly liberal hope that all religions can be viewed as worshipping the same deity, only in different ways; but this is a nonsense, as shown by the most cursory comparison of teachings, interpretations, moral requirements, creation myths and eschatologies, in all of which the major religions differ and frequently contradict each other. History shows how clearly the religions themselves grasped this; the motivation for Christianity's hundreds of years of crusades against Islam, pogroms against Jews, and inquisitions against heretics, was the desire to expunge heterodoxy and 'infidelity', or at least to effect forcible compliance with prevailing orthodoxy. Islam's various jihads and fatwahs had and have the same aim, and it spread half way around the world by conquest and the sword.

Where they can get away with it, fundamentalists continue the same practices. The religious Right in America would doubtless do so too, but has to use TV, money, advertising, and political lobbying instead to impress its version of the truth on America. It is only where religion is on the back foot, reduced to a minority practice, with an insecure tenure in society, that it presents itself as essentially peaceful and charitable.

This is the chief reason why allowing the major religions to jostle against one another in the public domain is dangerous. The solution is to make the public domain wholly secular, leaving religion as a matter of private conviction. Society should be blind to religion both in the sense that it lets people believe and behave as they wish provided they do no harm to others, and in the sense that it acts as if religions do not exist, with public affairs being secular in character. The US constitution provides this, though the religious lobby is always trying to breach it - while George W. Bush's policy of granting public funds for 'faith-based initiatives' actually does so. To secularise society in Britain would mean that government funding for church schools and 'faith-based' organisations and activities would cease, as would religious programming in public broadcasting. It would mean the disestablishment of the Church of England, and the repeal of laws relating to blasphemy and sacrilege, leaving protection of private belief and practice to the safeguards which already very adequately exist in law.

If society does not secularise fully the result will be serious trouble; for as science and technology take us even further away from the ancient superstitions on which religions are based (a separation tellingly emphasised by the current cloning controversy), and as secular values continue to increase their influence, the tensions can only become greater. The science-religion debate of the nineteenth century is a skirmish in comparison to what we are inviting by allowing not just religion but mutually competing religions so much presence in public space. Now is the time to place religion where it belongs - in the private sphere, leaving the public domain as neutral territory where all can meet, without prejudice, as humans and equals.

• A.C Grayling teaches at Birkbeck College, University of London.

"Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world." - Nelson Mandella

PeterDF · Freshman Joined: 07 Jul 2003 Posts: 214 Gender:

Hear Hear

PeterDF · Freshman Joined: 07 Jul 2003 Posts: 214 Gender:

I've been thinking about this article further. I agree with Grayling that each religion describes a version of the truth that is incompatible with any other, as I think I've said in one of my other posts somewhere.

Most intellectuals and theologians honour the right of those, whose faith differs from their own, to hold their own religious viewpoint. Or at least they do when they are seen debating, and the cameras are on. What they say in private may, or may not, be different. But it is interesting that, even in public, they are not always so comfortable to respect someone's right to deny god altogether. (I talked about this when I was discussing BBC bias in the roundtable.)

What is dangerous is that most people don't have the camera's on them, or the intellectual training to take the wider view. Even those who happen to become the president of the US.

At the risk of repeating myself:
Hear Hear!


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