Why religions, too, would benefit from embracing secularism

[cbayer]

http://www.secularism.org.uk/blog/2014/04/why-religions-too-would-benefit-from-embracing-secularism

Posted: Tue, 29 Apr 2014 09:16 by Terry Sanderson

In a debate at the Nottingham Secular Society on 24 April, National Secular Society president, Terry Sanderson, argued that the time has come for all religions to embrace secularism. These are his opening remarks

I think one of the most poignant headlines I've seen recently was in a Pakistani newspaper. It said simply: "Christians call for secularism".

Anyone who follows foreign news will know that in some areas of Pakistan the persecution of Christians is endemic. Churches are burned, pastors are murdered, people are forced under torture to convert to Islam. No wonder the Christians there want secularism.

They have come to understand that secularism is their best hope. It could help them gain the right to worship in the way they want to – as it would every other minority in the country. It would also help protect people who have no religious feelings – whereas at present just admitting such a thing in Pakistan – and many other areas of the Islamic world - could put your life at risk.

Secular laws would not permit particular religious doctrines to be dictated into law. A secular state has a justice system based on impartiality and not holy writ. It would not permit blasphemy laws that are so easily abused and misused. It would not contain privileges for one particular religion that put others at disadvantage.

more at link

[struggle4progress]

1. The Secular City 25 Years Later (Harvey Cox | 1990)

The Christian Century
November 7, 1990

... I argued then that secularization — if it is not permitted to calcify into an ideology (which I called "secular-ism&quot — is not everywhere and always an evil. It prevents powerful religions from acting on their theocratic pretensions. It allows people to choose among a wider range of worldviews. Today, in parallel fashion, it seems obvious that the resurgence of religion in the world is not everywhere and always a good thing ...

The thesis of The Secular City was that God is first the Lord of history and only then the Head of the Church. This means that God can be just as present in the secular as in the religious realms of life, and we unduly cramp the divine presence by confining it to some specially delineated spiritual or ecclesial sector. This idea has two implications. First, it suggests that people of faith need not flee from the allegedly godless contemporary world. God came into this world, and that is where we belong as well. But second, it also means that not all that is "spiritual" is good for the spirit. These ideas were not particularly new. Indeed, the presence of the holy within the profane is suggested by the doctrine of the incarnation—not a recent innovation. As for suspicion toward religion, both Jesus and the Hebrew prophets lashed out at much of the religion they saw around them. But some simple truths need restating time and again. And today is surely no exception ...

The Bible portrays a God who is present in the jagged reality of conflict and dislocation, calling the faithful into the crowded ways, not away from them. Nothing is further removed from this biblical God than the inward-oriented serenity cults and get-rich-now salvation schemes that inundate the airwaves and pollute the religious atmosphere. Here Bonhoeffer had it exactly right. From behind bars he wrote that we are summoned as human beings to "share the suffering of God in the world." If the divine mystery is present in a special way among the poorest and most misused of his or her children, as the biblical images and stories — from the slaves in Egypt to the official lynching of Jesus — constantly remind us, then allegedly religious people who insulate themselves from the city are putting themselves at considerable risk. By removing ourselves from the despised and the outcast we are at the same time insulating ourselves from God, and it is in the cities that these, "the least of them," are to be found ...

The first premise is that for us, as for Moses, an act of engagement for justice in the world, not a pause for theological reflection, should be the first "moment" of an appropriate response to God. First hear the Voice, then get to work freeing the captives. The "name" will come later. Theology is important, but it comes after, not before, the commitment to doing, to what some still call "discipleship." This inverts the established Western assumption that right action must derive from previously clarified ideas. Liberation theology’s insistence that thought—including theological thought—is imbedded in the grittiness of real life is one of its most salutary contributions ...

http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=206

Cox published The Secular City in 1965

[pinto]

2. That's a good read. Thanks for passing it on.

another excerpt:

In any case, the death-of-god theology had an unusually short half-life, whereas the issue I tried in my youthful enthusiasm to tackle—the significance of the ongoing battle between religion and secularization—rightly continues to stoke debate and analysis. To illustrate the dilemma from my own Christian tradition, how many Mother Teresas and Oscar Romeros does it take to balance a Jim and Tammy Bakker? And how do we measure Pope John II’s courageous vision of a "Europe without borders" against his worldwide crusade against contraception? So much good and so much mischief is done—as it always has been—in the name of God. Perhaps the suggestion I made at the end of The Secular City, which sounded radical to some readers then, is still a good one: we should learn something from the ancient Jewish tradition of not pronouncing the name of the Holy One, live through a period of reverent reticence in religious language, and wait for the spirit to make known a new vocabulary that is not so tarnished by trivialization and misuse.