How to Establish and Advance Secularism Today
As a secular, nonreligious and atheist person, I think that even we secularists still need some additional critical deliberations (especially in a compelling and concise piece employing our main arguments) to strengthen and advance secular realizations both in public policy and in individual freedoms. On the other hand, as a pro-human rights person, I think that we need some clarifications and conceptual distinctions to facilitate secular directions without causing any unnecessary conflict between nonreligious and religious persons, and without violating human rights of religious persons too. So, the primary objective of my this very short piece is to resolve some false dichotomies about this issue and also to provide a successful response to the most pressing real-world challenges related to (or stemming from) any religion.
First of all, I want to highlight that all religious texts aim to generate some “belief/value/commitment/norm formations” for their believers to use (toward promoting/demoting some actions) by commanding some behavioral rules and by describing some “preferable” approaches to many social issues through relating/attaching these to some “divine” causes. They mostly demand some rituals or religious practices too in order to support such belief-formations and actions.
So, religious texts have immutable goals (with their underlying permanent assumptions) as such “informational formations” functioning to initiate/influence/direct/determine our individual choices, social interactions, value systems, behavioral expectations, public policy, governance models, and investment-decisions. The problem is that any release that religious texts signal or command about influencing all of these is not based on sciences. They are just written pieces claiming to be divine codes for their signals and prescriptions. They have no causal evidence both for this divine-claim itself and for preferable usefulness in relation to such functions. They are not open to updates based on new evidence, changing conditions, relevant informational modifications, or scientific advancements. They are also not negotiable: They expect obedience and conformity without discussion or modification on their contents. Furthermore, they mostly permit their believers to force others to obey such religious (unreasonable/problematic) codes. Thus, they are not improvable too (due to their insensitivity to argumentation). Religious texts claim that their first versions are successful, and hence that they do not need scientific evidence, argumentation, or demonstrations. In short, they are not sensitive to information, reasoning, or evidence. Their certain, non-negotiable and closed contents effect/determine their believers’s perspectives, goals, approaches, and behaviors in various (problematic) ways. I mean that even if any religious texts didn’t signal any human rights violations, yet they would be problematic especially about social and political systems. But of course, religious texts (i.e., religions’s primary functions) mostly cause/facilitate/promote human rights violations, gender inequality, problematic social norms, and low quality governance by signalling many sorts of violence and/or discriminatory assumptions/loaded commands beside their unscientific/groundless messages. So, not only violence-prescriptions but also many other problematic signals in religious texts do have harmful/unethical effects on any individuals (including nonreligious, atheist, secularists ones) in terms of long-term well-being and human rights. As a result, religious texts and their believers cause/generate such unacceptable high costs and negative externalities too.
Then, what can we do about that? When it comes to the right to freedom of worship, belief and conscience, how to decide about these and other human rights considerations together in well-defined ways? First, the right to conscience must not be undermined/violated especially because of realizing the individual autonomy. But at the same time, we must stop and prevent such problematic things and human rights violations stemming from religious texts. For that, i.e., to be able to achieve such objectives, first I’ll present my conceptual distinctions:
Religiosity: It’s while a person has some religion-oriented beliefs as (even if personally-modified) religious ethics.
Extreme-religiosity: It’s while a person not only has religiosity but also generates “religion-oriented intolerance/violence” especially against other groups/group members (especially other religion members, atheists, nonreligious persons). Religious terrorism is a version of it. Apart from its terrorism-potential, it involves “diverse violent responses to (or at least a delusional fight against) the persons (or systems) of secularism/nonreligiosity/laicite” too.
Nonreligiosity: It’s while a person has no religious belief. Instead, it’s while having “secular ethics”.
Anti-religiosity: It’s while a person has not only nonreligiosity but also “a deliberate fight against religion-oriented social/political systems/policies/norms”. Such a person defends science-based policy-making and human rights.
Irreligiosity: It’s while a person generates violence/intolerance/unfair discrimination against religious persons.
Secularity: It’s while a person has preferences/values/choices/grounds of being separate from any religious basis for any activity/regulation/lifestyle even if she has some inactive/powerless religious beliefs too (but she may be and is mostly nonreligious). So, it’s to have “secular ethics”.
Laicite: It’s some successful, progressive and recurrent realizations of State-implementation of “anti-religiosity” especially in terms of policy, law and investment by avoiding any religion-oriented basis. As a result, it also implies State-neutrality toward any religious beliefs and practices insofar as such beliefs/practices do not cause/signal/incite human rights violations or considerable obstacles to those implementations.
According to these distinctions, and by considering quality (well-informed, science-based) policy-making fundamentals and human rights necessities, I want to conclude that, as establishing secularism in brief, first we must adopt and always enhance “laicite and secularity”, second we should live in accordance with “nonreligiosity and even anti-religiosity”, third we should deliberately try to avoid/prevent “religiosity” in informational, peaceful and legitimate ways due to its problematic effects, and finally we must combat “extreme-religiosity and irreligiosity”.
author: Barış Bayram (10 August 2017) - Twitter: @BarisBayram2045
