A world of secularism and relativism

RELIGION has served humanity as successfully as science, with an equal allocation of regret felt by both camps for the pernicious failures of both. Failures involving Torquemada, the first Grand Inquisitor of 15^th century Spain; and of course sciences midwifery of the atomic bomb that killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese people; far more than the Grand Inquisitor was ever capable of torturing during the Inquisition. 

Both science and religion have many unpleasant episodes in their respective histories. However, both fields of human knowledge have always sought to bring benefits to the whole of mankind, by their thoughts and actions.

The growth of secularism effectively pushes religion to one side, and honours the materialism of science in its place. Secularists will deny that they wish to ban religion, only to put it in its place. But as far as Christianity is concerned, its banishment as a 2000 year old comfort to believers, whether rich or poor, or dying of the plague, or sent mad by syphilis, as well as other numerous illnesses science had yet to come to terms with…is indeed sad.

In the Middle Ages, a belief in another life better than the one of misery that the age they lived in entombed them in, became a source of hope for millions of people throughout the Christian world. Those modern day secularists have never known an empty belly or suffered a bacterial infection without being rescued by antibiotics. They never had to fight for enough nutrition to keep them and their families alive: but to such people who did, religion and the church were their only saviour.

Today religion still serves a need for the billions of believers on this earth. The secularists in this country are fighting for the elimination of religion as an irrational superstition. If not secularism, then the secularists themselves are like Dostoyevsky’s hated nihilists that brought about only anarchy and confusion to 19^th century Russia.

           

Secularists are the modern equivalent of the Russian nihilists. But they want the country rid, not of a tsar, but of religion no less. Their own Nikolay Chernyshevsky  is Richard Dawkins, who countenances no quarter when it comes to those who follow the “God Delusion”.

            But what do such people replace religion with? Religion offers a code of morality bounded by faith. It encompasses boundaries which if breached requires different forms of punishment; punishment which thankfully, in this modern age, no longer requires monastic loneliness or flagellation to erase the sin. Nevertheless, a code of morality that sets concrete boundaries  is far better than what has become known as moral relativism.

MORAL RELATIVISM is a meaningless concoction. There are no absolutes. The relativist ideology means a conformity to whatever, in a multicultural society, other cultures believe in and we should accept them, or, if not , remain silent if they, the moral relatives themselves, do not share such customs and practices.

            Moral relativism is an empty-headed and pusillanimous creation of liberalism. Those who believe in such a social conception are also hypocritical. If a young Indian or Pakistani girl is enslaved by an arranged marriage which goes against her wishes; where are the UK leftists – especially the feminists on these occasions – nowhere, for they are, as of a liberal demeanour, in hock to the enslavement of their sisters; all in the interest of moral relativism.

            We have had, in Rochdale and parts of Oxford, gangs of Asians running amok and abusing and raping young white girls, in some case in their pre-teens  – in another piece of cultural relativism no less; these gangs have been effectively protected by the police who are racially aware and are loath to act, even if they know who the offenders are. The police in Rochdale turned a blind eye to the activities of those Asian gangs who traded in white and very young female flesh for their own sexual gratification.

The police, like society as a whole, have been socially engineered into the acceptance of multiculturalism. Moral relativism, like political correctness is just another branch on the multicultural tree. Relativism is the liberals riposte to any kind of indictment of the behaviour of other cultures, including those that preached witchcraft in the UK. I listed some victims of this primitive multicultural inheritance in a piece I wrote on the 23^rd October 2006.

            As an atheist, I, unlike Dawkins have no wish to see the demise of religious faith. Its usefulness to society has been proven over millennia. It is arrogant for people who have no such faith to assume that they are liberating people by seeking to rationalise them away from religious influences.

            I do not think Dawkins is a relativist of  the usual kind found on the left; at least he is not afraid to attack all religion and not just Christianity. To him Islam is equally pernicious for their “corruption” of youth, enslavement of women and homophobia; whereas those who support his attack on religion and gain comfort from his polemical writings, would never dare argue their case against Islam, or any other minority faith. Their own Holy Trinity of Multiculturalism, Relativism and Political Correctness, would not allow them to go as far Richard Dawkins in the pursuance of their own atheism.

A SECULAR SOCIETY with religion pushed to one side and materialism left rampant, will be an unhappy society. Like communism, such a society will be dulled by materialism. Like Marxism, secularism will fall fowl of reality. If you do not believe in religion, but are prepared to acknowledge that there are billions of people do, and not seek to persecute them unless they fall fowl of societies civil or criminal laws, then you share my atheistic view. But if you are intent upon ridding society of all religious influence; then at least incorporate all religions and not just Christianity.

           

            Where science was unable to cure, religion comforted. Where science is still yet to find a cure for cancer, religion still gives comfort to hundreds of thousands of the dying. Science is the great hope of human existence, its methodology is based upon curiosity free from any religions grip on the human mind, it has moulded  the material world, and human life, which, on the whole, is in a far better state of contentment through technology, and medicine than at any other time in human history.

            The sciences (with the exception of the social ones of course) are humanities best hope for survival. Science is intelligence based, and human beings are intelligent. In the times before modern science when religion reigned supreme, the great minds of such an age turned to theology and classical philosophy, all of which, seem to the modern scientist a insignificant development. But it was a development that eventually led to their dominance in modern culture.

If we dismiss what the atheists believe to be fantasises, after the great purpose they served in the cultural development of Western humanity, then such people have a scientific identity that is intolerant to anything other than their own absolute certainties. Certainties that, like the faith based ones, are un-provable. Both science and religion can only, in the end, believe.

Science has as yet no theoretical explanation of what came before the Big Bang - that period when the universe came into being. Religion, on the other hand has put the Big Ban down to the intervention of God; who set the whole process in motion. The scientist cannot explain it because they have to come up with a picture of a time before the universe came into being that relies on scientific methodology .

In other words they have only their rational scientific method to describe  what came before the universe? But they would, using the same logic, ask – what came before God? For if there existed something before the Big Bang, that entailed the presence of what we now believe to be God – then who came before God, using the same rational logic?

This is the stalemate on the chessboard of human existence; and long may it remain so. So, in effect those who say the world was created by God has as much right to do so as those who scientifically believe the opposite: and this will be the formula until science works even harder to prove the contrary. Until then religion has as much right to a place in modern society as does Darwinism.