Secularism
So many words are spilt today arguing about the non-existence of an almighty that it’s easy to forget that atheism isn’t the end goal. Far from it.
Atheism is just the beginning. It’s the question of what comes after God where things become really interesting.
Because atheism is ultimately only a negative thesis: it simply states that there exists no god or gods. As such, to say I’m an atheist tells you something about what I don’t believe in, but it tells you almost nothing about what I do believe in.
I can see why the new atheist commentators Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins want to take on the Pope. Here is someone who fears what Gareth Evans called “relevance deprivation”. He fears it for himself as Pope, he fears it for the Church. To bolster the declining authority of the Church, he has set up the straw man of “aggressive secularism” and sets his adherents against it.
Religion, the Pope told Britons in his trip this month, is being “marginalised”, relegated to the “purely private sphere”. Believers holding public roles are being asked to act against their conscience, he claims. Secularism, Britains were warned, no longer values or tolerates their traditional values such as honesty, respect and fair-mindedness.
Your Holiness, this is rubbish – ideologically motivated rubbish.
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Badger says:
Well, good on you if you “prefer education over restrictions”, Jade, but that is not the prerogative of the secularists. In other areas - for example, racial vilification - some religious and some secular people support legal bans, other religious and other secular people support education as the solution. In… Read more »
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True Believer says:
I find it depressing that so many who know so little expound so much about what they do not know and think they are clever. For those who only rabbit on about the Roman Catholic Church, not all Christians are Catholics. Just as not all church-goers and those who lord… Read more »
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