Why is secularism seen as such a threat?

[technodad]

Why is secularism seen as such a threat, when the very idea is based around protection of the rights of the individual?

Just to be clear before we start, secularism is about making everyone equal, no matter what their belief - simple as that really. It means that no one group (or individual) has greater rights or power in society than everyone else and that everyone has freedom of expression.

So what is it about this concept that is so difficult for some people to accept and support?

Just read the website linked from your creationist thread! Scary stats! I discovered that I'm a humanist. But I'm not calling myself that, because it implies affiliation to a certain creed.

I don't think it is a particularly large leap from being a Humanist, to being a secularist. The main distinction between humanism and secularism is that you can still be religious whilst being a secularist.

Techno, in the UK, Parliament gets to decide what is offensive enough to be an offence. NB that abusive and insulting language wrt to religious groups is not illegal, so from a legal POV insulting / childish quips are fine. From a social cohesion POV maybe less so...!

Will you put me right on this, please? Is secularism, then, an actual movement, and does it aim to remove religious influence from public life?
Thanks.

I suppose it is. Have a look at the National Secular Society website.

There are plenty of religious people who are part of the NSS because they agree with their aims.

Humanists are a group of like minded individuals who don't believe in god.

Just one final question, techno... are childish quips the best way to promote rational debate? I know Erasmus thought so, but I don't find it so in any arena, this one included. I more see the giant-bearded-fairy line as a huge pointless distraction and cause for tit-for-tat yelling. I don't find it offensive, but I find it boring.

The preacher in the street, however... agree that he was offensive.

I by the way think that despite my religion I do believe in reason, and don't feel remotely threatened by it. Funnily enough, I have the doctorate to prove it .

Sieglinde

I was merely using those two examples, rather supporting either view.....

But if I'm both rational and religious what becomes of the idea that religion is a threat to reason?

It's the other way round, Sieglinde. A really rational person can't sustain religious belief, because it is such a load of ridiculous old bollocks when you think about it properly.

Solid is completely right.

You can not be rationalist and have any superstitious beliefs, you are caught in a quasi rationalist state!

But I didn't say I was a rationalist, whatever that is - it sounds insulting. I said I was rational. And I have no superstitious beliefs whatsoever.

What I am is religious. It remains to be demonstrated that this is a load of anything; surely your mere assertion isn't especially rational? And surely I would not be rational were I to accept this evaluation?

A rationalist is a well trodden and accepted term for people who reject non-scientific and non-logical beliefs.

I don't think I like the -ist, though. It implies an ideology which overmasters possibility, and that can never sort well with any rational epistemology.

I still await your demonstration. I've read a lot of humanist texts, starting with Lucretius, and also Darwin, and also many philosophical refutations of religion, from Marx and Sartre and Russell to (pygmy) Dawkins. I'm a historian and I've also read a lot of terrifying history about the times that the heavens did not darken.

And I remain unconvinced. I still think the only entirely rational position is agnosticism, so I find the braying certainty of modern atheism even odder than religion. I find anyone who defines reason as 'what I think' much more frightening than any god.

sieglinde said: I still think the only entirely rational position is agnosticism, so I find the braying certainty of modern atheism even odder than religion. I find anyone who defines reason as 'what I think' much more frightening than any god.

I understand why modern atheism is odder than religion, an atheist is just someone who says that the likelihood of god existing is so ridiculously small, that we might as well say that god doesn't exist (because it is a mouthful to talk about statistical likelihood when asked a simple question).

Ultimately, most atheists are really agnostic (but at the extreme end of the scale), because no one can prove that god doesn't actually exist (in the same way that we can't disprove unicorns).

In terms of it being frightening, I don't know many people who loose sleep about being blown up or shot by secular extremists, or fear being hunted down for drawing a cartoon of Darwin, so I think you are being melodramatic. I bet the pope looses sleep about how he might loose his massive house and servants though, if this is what you mean about people being frightened?

TechnoDad, has anyone ever tried to work out the probability of God's existence? Maybe a statistician or an actuary or some such professional who could be relied on to assess the probability with done degree of accuracy? I'd love to know how this kind of research would be carried out, what methodology, controls etc.

Wrt 'rationalism' and 'rational' people, historically, that's meant lots of different things at different times. Solid's line about 'a truly rational person...' could have cone straight out of Plato, although he'd have meant something very different by it. There has never been one truly authoritative definition for the word 'rationalism'. So ISTM that what we're talking about here is ideological identity; who us it who gets to call her / himself rational? This makes sense to me as I've been hearing variations on it my whole life; who gets to call themselves Christian? Or feminist? Or socialist? Or Pacifist? And the list goes on.

The thing with ideological identity is that these words have fluid meanings, so any attempt to use them in such a say as to say 'If you're x then you can't be y' seems to me like an act of ideological theft, taking away something from the person who wants to be both x and y, to whom it is perfectly feasible to be both a rational person and a religious person, who suspects that these two things might actually cross-fertilise. There's much more I could say about the closed-end way of defining open-ended ideological identities so as to exclude the 'other'...but I fear I've 'waffled' too much already! ;)

Holo said: TechnoDad, has anyone ever tried to work out the probability of God's existence? Maybe a statistician or an actuary or some such professional who could be relied on to assess the probability with done degree of accuracy? I'd love to know how this kind of research would be carried out, what methodology, controls etc.

Not that I know of, it would be an interesting research subject for someone!

You know I love your waffling!

Ah, you're such a charmer! ;)

So...without wanting to ask the really stupid question....if the probability of God's non-existence has never been demonstrated mathematically, is it not somewhat irrational to assert such an improbability?

Nice try Holo - a very good post!

However, I meant that I don't know of any detailed studies that have generated an actual number to a high precision.

Clearly, since there is overwhelming evidence for their not being a god (in comparison to the pretty much zero evidence supporting the existence of god) any idiot can make the correct judgement that the likelihood is much closer to 1:0 than it is to 1:1 without writing a statistical PhD thesis!

technodad, I really recommend a book called Bloodlands, by Timothy Snyder, about events last century; I think the part you might want to focus on is the events in eastern Poland when the Soviets moved in in 1939. If that isn't scary, what is? If you are irrationally certain of a position, that in itself leads to violence. It's only a matter of time. A lesson from history.

As for the pope's big house, who gives? The last pope (JP II) lived in a couple of bare rooms, in fact.

holo, yes. My point exactly. So techno, what is the overwhelming evidence for God's absence? An absence of evidence is not ITSELF evidence. Why not call yourself an agnostic if you know you aren't sure? 99.999% sure isn't the same as 100% sure.

MUCH more rational.

Yes, I was pondering the nature of evidence earlier, which is worth thinking about. It seems fairly obvious to me that one defining feature of evidence is that it needs to be interpreted one way or another; a lump in the breast may be evidence of something, but it takes a trained medic and some high-tech equipement to assess this evidence. Same with archaeology; a child can find a pot containing some scrolls in a cave, but it takes rather a lot of scholarly work to assess of what this means. ISTM that any kind of evidence is dependent on the interpretive skill of its assessor, which normally involves a detailed knowledge of the context of the evidence, whether medical, archaeological, environmental etc. What we can't do with evidence (at least not as rational peole) is to slap it down on the table and say 'there!' as if its very existence were enough to demonstrate anything. So, with all this in mind, where does that leave the evidence for God's non-existence?

Yes, good point, Holofernes. Cosmologists now think that everything we see is a miniature version that merely reflects that vastness which really is, for example. Even quarks are only a hypothesis to explain phenomena. For centuries nobody knew any microbiology. In all these ways, the limits of empiricism lie in the eye of the beholder.

Rationality and presumably soi-disant 'rationalism' are limited by the observer, too - already physicists know that by observing, they alter.

I note the secularists are now in their bunkers , though surely this can't be due to my request for a rational argument? Maybe it's because the weather is so lovely.

I have been at work. Will try to read later.

I have read the posts now, and fundamentally, there is no point in bothering to reply with any significant detail. Holo and I have had this discussion a couple of times on different threads, and it goes nowhere.

Ultimately, just because there isn't evidence to prove something, it doesn't mean you can just make stuff up to fill the gaps.

In terms of horrible things that people have done to each other in the past for what they see as a just cause, I do not see the relevance of your point. Hitler was reportedly a vegetarian (actually he wasn't but it is a popular myth), so does that mean that all veggies are murderous dictators? Of course not. The modern secular movement bears no resemblance to the Russians from 73 years ago, in the same way that the Catholic Crusades are nothing like the little church down the road.

In any case, since the NSS has supported a christian preacher who was arrested for telling a gay couple they were going to hell, I don't understand how you can imply that they are a danger to certain religious groups.

I note the secularists are now in their bunkers , though surely this can't be due to my request for a rational argument? Again, you seem to have misunderstood secularism. You can be religious (i.e. not rational ) and secularist, since secularism is nothing to do with a particular religion (or atheism), but a movement which is attempting to ensure everyone has equal rights, irrespective of religion, skin colour, political views etc.

If you don't actually understand what something means, then please try to do some research before joining in with the adults www.secularism.org.uk/what-is-secularism.html

To be fair, Techno, I think that the various God-discusions that pop up on MN from time to time are worth engaging in. I've probbaly changed my thinking a bit because of these discussions. I certainly don't approach them with the rock-solid confidence of someone who's done all her thinking already, thank you very much, and has got all the answers ready to hand to trot out. I remember someone thinking / assuming that would be the case; it's not! I don't read books on Christian apologetics; I haven't got the time, and when I do have time, I'd rather thinkfor myself, and threads like this one help that process. So, genuinely, I do thank you and the others for your engagement in these conversations.

I would lke to talk about the nature of evidence and the role of the interpreter / observer. I think that unless we consider those questions, any appeal to the evidence for God's existence (or non-existence) is just a bit meaningless really. You could take out the words 'God's existence (or non-existence)' from that last sentence and substitute many other things. It's the logical process that I'm interested in right now.