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?

technodad, that is kinda beautiful in itself. :) You I note believe in your wife, anyway. Love is one of those necessary irrational things. My children might look like trolls to you, but to me it's not irrational to see them as angels because to me they really look like angels. I'm not inventing or pretending. It feels real to me. So my point here is simply that the whole fairytale thing that some atheists have going will always tend to miss its intended mark with persons of religion, and at best will be met wiht a shrug, at worst with renewals of solipsism on all sides.

Discussion has moved on, so I won't interrupt for long, but Garlic, Celtic myth and Old English as well as Judaeo-Christian and Graeco-Roman. All these are our patronymics, and we have both right and duty to know about them as well as about dinosaurs and beetles.

Still busy, but will get back to Dawkins soon - and NP is right, he isn't according to my colleagues a leading evolutionary biologist so much as a populariser. Those academics who are the darlings of the meeja are usually not cutting-edge researchers. (I can think of one exception, and that is David Starkey.) But Susan greenfield, or Stephen Hawking.. my colleagues groan and pull their hair. Smoke and mirrors.

TD it's touching that your wife thinks you're beautiful...

But it doesn't quite seal the deal that there is no such thing as beauty apart from the perception of objects. The class of things that we can't prove, and that don't have a physical existence is huge. To add to beauty and justice, we might give pi, wormholes, calculus, love, the existence of other people (how do I know that you exist - you may well just be a spambot)' the existence of anything outside my head (I might just be a brain in a vat dreaming all this up). Simply insisting that only things that you can prove do actually exist doesn't get you very far. In life we depend on faith all the time.

It may be that you have better grounds to believe that your wife is a human being with a consciousness of her own and not a robot than I have to believe in the existence of God. But the distinction, philosophically speaking, is not nearly as clear cut as it at first appears to be.

sieglinde - I never said she loved me

sieglinde said: So my point here is simply that the whole fairytale thing that some atheists have going will always tend to miss its intended mark with persons of religion, and at best will be met wiht a shrug, at worst with renewals of solipsism on all sides.

I agree with you. I have often said on MN (and in the real world), that having a debate between an atheist and religious person is pointless. The religious person has faith and so does not need proof. The atheist wants proof because they have no faith, and neither can see things from one another?s perspective.

Telling a religious person that they are stupid for having faith without evidence is never going to convince them to change their faith because it wouldn't be faith if it was easily swayed and the religious person will think the atheist is rude and uneducated. Similarly, telling an atheist to trust in god and explain that he/she doesn't understand the transcendence of the lord is likely to get yourself told to stop being a moron.

I am quite happy to shrug off the idea of a personal's private religion, since it is absolutely none of my business, however in exchange for this freedom, ALL religious people must recognise that their religion should be private and cannot be forced on society (no matter what our nation?s religious history is). Religious people with private belief need to join in support of all the other private religions, along with the agnostics and atheists and stop strong religious institutions from having unfair privilege and influence in society. When we have this balance, the people like Dawkins will have nothing to fight for (I believe his political objective is not to remove all religion from the world, but simply to make sure that the world is a fair place).

niminy said: It may be that you have better grounds to believe that your wife is a human being with a consciousness of her own and not a robot than I have to believe in the existence of God. But the distinction, philosophically speaking, is not nearly as clear cut as it at first appears to be.

I agree that the distinction is not clear cut. Otherwise people would not have argued over it for millennia. At the end of the day, it is all about making a judgement based upon the available facts:

Given the statement: My (non robot) wife's love for me comes from her brain's electrical activity and when that electrical activity stops, so does her love for me.

My "rational" fact only based view says that this statement is extremely likely to be true, because there is no evidence for anything else. However a religious person may say that her love (and frustration) for me, continues with her soul in heaven. However, the religious view only stems from the things (facts or non-fact belief) that have been taught to them, and their brain?s susceptibility to this sort of teaching.

In both the case of the atheist and the religious person, both are just making a judgement based upon their life values, and it is impossible to prove that one person's values are better than another?s. Basically, we should all just respect each others values.

Our life values are generally formed up until we are about 25 years old. Beyond this point, values are very difficult to change. This is why for me, as a secularist, is it so important to separate religion from school. Not in order to ban children from being religious, but so that their life values are formed around a multicultural and inclusive way of living.

As promised, some Dawkins aggression, rudeness and over-certainty:

1. 'But I think his [Richard Carvath's] article could perform a useful service in laying out, clearly and relentlessly, the full extent of the nastiness of which people of his persuasion ? we inevitably get to the love of Jesus before we are through ? are capable. As often on the Internet today, you have to wonder whether it is satire, but on balance I am persuaded that this one isn?t. This is the real McCoy. Read it and marvel at the depths to which the human mind can sink, when its moral sense is sufficiently disabled by religion.' On old.richarddawkins.net/articles/646832-does-this-set-a-record-for-smug-nastiness

1. 'Fat-cat evangelical pastors with tax-free mansions and private jets are an obscenity. Indefensible.' [Presumably this was before Dawkins' own mansion ownership was awkwardly revealed? hard to say why they are obscene.]

1. In three utterly randomly chosen pages of TGD, Christians are said to be 'dripp[ing] with intellectual and moral cowardice' 'abject' 'destructively misleading'. This is his usual tone of voice and I can find more of this kind of rhetoric.

1. Hilariously, he also says he won't take part in a debate because they are usually all rhetoric.

Obviously one woman's rudeness might be another's mere frankness, but I do find the relentlessness of his aggression in the end wearing and boring. Urbanity might serve him better, if only for the sake of variety.

I agree, Nightlurker. But there really are very few rich pastors - it's an extremely small subset of a generally not very well paid profession. (And a profession that increasingly is unpaid, in fact.) They may be distasteful, but obscene? That's an overstatement. Save the hyperbole for when it is really needed, I say.

Sieglinde, "urbanity would serve him better, at least for the sake of variety", I wish I'd written that!

interesting blog by one of my favourite secularists

Seeker Thanks for posting that link. Nice to have a reminder of Sagan's Pale Blue Dot, too.

I'm not fond of rich pastors either, but why does he single them out, rather than - say - Catholic priests on £2000 a year? That was my point. it sounds an awful lot like other kinds of bigotry, structurally - let's tar all asylum seekers by finding one on benefits, let's attack all feminists by finding one whose public statements are inegalitarian, let's attack all Jews because some are rich bankers. Never mind if the victim is representative as long as we can revel in our own righteous rage.

Niminy - thanks!

seeker... that blog is sane, and as you know I agree with much of what it says about policy, but it's also vehemently preaching to the choir. So to speak. . One has only to look at NI to see what faith schools can do to entrench sectarian divisions. That said, I also support people's right to bring up children in their faith, any or all or none.

Still gnawing this old bone here alone...

Irrationality and the refusal of proper scholarship frighten me too. Just take a look at this morning's Times, and particularly the comments, for many examples of crazed conclusions based ont he wish to prove religion wrong in fewer than 25 words. Holy Blood and Holy Grail is NOT a scholarly book; none of these people knows anything about gnosticism, but they are all painfully sure that they do know. The article is about one papyrus fragment of no knowable provenance, yet it's hailed as rocking the world.

www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/faith/article3543296.ece

The link won't work if you don't pay Mr Murdoch his shilling....

Hi Sieglinde, I haven't seen the Times article but have looked at one in the Guardian. Yep, of all the things that irks me about debates over religion and atheism is the ignorance and irrationality displayed by so many of those who rail against religion. Sometimes I think that the driving force is not disbelief in God, nor anger at the wrongs of organised religion, but suspicion and fear of something people simply do not understand. When you look at comments below the line you see a kind if hysteria that is massively out of proportion to the threat posed by its ostensible object. It reminds me sometimes of Arthur Miller's The Crucible. Except that the object if the hysteria and hatred is not witches, but Christians and Muslims.

Yes, and that is and remains my answer to the OP. Current atheism is much, much too certain, and has few bases for its certitudes.

I too often think of the witch hunts - which were in the British Isles mostly aimed at people of different Christian denominations to the accuser. Also of the many martyrs under the Tudors - yes, all of them - all killed by the other person's bewildered certitude, and even when the killer was highly educated and even brilliant.

But secularism has nothing to do with atheism (in the same way that it has nothing specifically to do with any religion).

Is this thread about atheism or secularism?

Conversations do move on, so it's not unreasonable for the thread to become a discussion about atheism if it started about secularism. But in any case the two are connected, aren't they? I've just looked up the term 'secularism' in the Oxford English Dictionary. These are the two definitions that it lists:

1. The doctrine that morality should be based solely on regard to the well-being of mankind in the present life, to the exclusion of all considerations drawn from belief in God or in a future state.
2. The view that education, or the education provided at the public cost, should be purely secular.

The second definition has been repeatedly referred to by Technodad, who started the thread. Nevertheless it is clear from the examples given in OED that the first is the prior (it appeared first, in 1851), and most important meaning, and that it gave rise to the second. So people started to think that education should be secular because they throught that morality should not be drawn from belief in God. Secularism as a doctrine was originally promulgated by atheists, and remains a position that is associated more strongly with atheists than people of faith.

As a Christian I cannot agree with the first definition. Nor, after thinking for a moment, can I agree with the second. It does not seem to me right either that education provided at the public cost should be purely secular, nor that it should be purely religious.

But lots of religious people are secular- in that they want to live in a secular society.

Niminy - what is a "purely secular education"?

Secularists would say that a secular education is one where no religion is taught as a fact, but all religions (as well as atheism) are taught as options (allowing common understanding and tolerance).

Why is it acceptable for the state to create a situation where atheist raised children to be forced to go to a Christian school, or for Christians to be forced to go to muslim schools?

seeker and technodad, I think the conversation might have moved back rather than on; I promised to explain what I find difficult about atheism in its current guise, and I did so. This therefore is my account of why I would be reluctant to make common cause with the Secular Society.

Why not respond to what I said?

On your post, technodad, the current RS syllabus for GCSE - in my view a superficial and dumbed-down disaster - pretty much meets your criteria as above. No religion taught as fact, all major religions taught, including atheism. I'd say you had a win there, providing you don't mind the dumbing-down of everyone's past and the shallowness and PC.

Sorry- I didn't read the thread properly before I posted- I realise that I have missed a lot!

One thing I noticed, seglinde- you said you have a problem with atheism because of it's certainty. Do you have a similar problem with faith?

Oh, and surely you wouldn't want religion taught as fact for GCSE?

You are very good at demanding responses aren't you! I don't particularly Want to debate your Dawkins quotes, because they aren't particularly rude and you are being over sensitive. They are political statements and should be taken as thus.

Your comment about GCSE is fine. However, what about primary schools where kids are effectively taught creationism (get 'em while they are young)!

Actually, I'm not sure you are right about GCSE RE. My dd has just started doing A level Philosophy and Ethics without having done RE- and she is having to work hard to catch up with the others!