Perils of Secularism

Recently i've been reading up a little on religion in our secular world aka the godless world. it's feels coincidental that i've been stumbling across such material. and it also happens to be my ISM topic, which until this afternoon, i've been ready to change entirely. the sudden rekindling of interest really took me back to my paper's proposal, which incidentally is in dire need of editing before sunday.

i just opened the book The Dawkin's Delusion today. i'm only a third through McGrath's critique on Dawkin's The God Delusion. but it's already spoken so much that led me to think about the secular delusion. i kept thinking about jo zheng when i read this book cos i first heard of The God Delusion from him.

most people in the world think of religion as something additional to humanity. something that was constructed through history and was infiltrated into cultures and everyday living in various parts of the planet. with this in mind, the secular world is then depicted as the default “natural” world - the ideological world that humanity was "born into". secularism is associated with a blank space; an impartial platform void of religion for the human race to congregate and connect with one another; where rationality is assumed and hence should be privileged in all big and minor political arenas. but it isn't that.

what people fail to see is that secularism is essentially another religion itself. it is not a neutral world and it is not free of ideological constraints. like other religions, it has its idols of worship, its cultures, practices, beliefs, etc. just as silence is also a sound, secularism is also a faith. a faith that is placed somewhere else that just happens not to be categorized as 'religion'. Believing in the secular world requires your subscribing to and internalizing certain beliefs. faith in self, faith in money, faith in capital, faith in the satisfaction of self-fulfillment, blah blah blah. these faiths were constructed too! it entails your believing in other people's words. you learnt individualism from people, you learnt consumerism from people, you learnt the value of capital and status from people. other people taught you to believe in these. and other people told these other people to believe in these. how is that different from the legacy of religious thoughts? is the fervent preaching of these secular beliefs to the next generation any less of an "abuse of freedom" than parents inculcating religious beliefs in their young?

what if secularism was something that was additional to humanity? what if religiosity (as we know it today) was the "default" world that humanity was "born into"? or what if there was no "default" world to begin with? (i do not believe in that)

anw there was something in the book that seriously jumped out at me. McGrath was addressing Dawkin's argument about the extreme improbability of the existence of God. Dawkin himself had asserted how virtually impossible it is to quantify how improbable the existence of human beings is (God is even more complex than this and hence existence of such a Being is even more improbable). Besides the problematic association of complexity to improbability, McGrath pointed out the obvious truth that despite the high improbability of it all, humans are here. we exist. the point is that "we need to appreciate that there are many things that seem improbable - but improbability does not entail, and never has entailed, non-existence. The issue, then, is not whether God is probable but whether God is actual."

this really jumped out at me because it brought me back to the essential search for truth. for what is reality and what is actual. you could spend your whole life circulating about the probability of that 99% being true, yet miss the whole truth altogether. God could be your 1%. and then you ask.. which God(s) is it? you really really can argue and debate till the cows come home and all the way to your grave. it's never ending, seriously. but the crucial point is not about debunking what isn't. nor is it about what it could or could not be. the most crucial thing is to find out what it is.

it isn't about the 99.9% that could be, but the 0.1% that is.