The reasons why govt must remain secular

George M. Spencer, Author, 'Hope After Holocaust: A Layman's History of the 20th Century', The Straits Times, Asia News Network, Singapore

There are 10 or so major religions in the world and many lesser ones. If each or most claim some sort of connection with absolute truth, then they cannot all be right.

One reaction might be to retreat into agnosticism, but if we hold on to our individual faiths, we have to accept the need for tolerance.

Any given faith may be right for the individual who holds it, but we have to concede that other individuals may have some incompatible faith. So, we all have to agree to disagree.

Fundamentalism of any kind, Christian, Islamic, Hindu or whatever, is a back-to-basics movement to an absolute and pure religion -- as perceived by fundamentalists.

Fundamentalists, often called puritans, were distinguished from the more liberal and intellectual elements in the faiths concerned -- namely, those who pragmatically adjust to a changing world or see an evolution in their beliefs.

Inherent in dogmatic fundamentalism is intolerance, either of heretics within the faith or infidels without it.

The first category, though often hated, are relatively easy targets. The second may present practical or political difficulties and usually has to be compromised with.

Religious laws against heresy and apostasy, and those that insist on conversion on marriage, as with Islam and Catholicism, are at bottom political devices to strengthen the faith against loss to the unbelievers or rival religions.

The strongest, least compromising faith, thereby gains at the expense of the more tolerant ones, which assume that a person's faith is a matter of his individual convictions, a right that should not be surrendered to a partner's religious intransigence.

Fundamentalism's intolerance has, thus, a very considerable political or Darwinian component which, of course, feeds back and reinforces the intolerance.

Reason would indicate the need for mutual tolerance in this situation, but reason is not always resorted to by religion, least of all by fundamentalism. Reason is usually rejected by fundamentalism. Aspects of science, the evolution of man from other life forms or inconvenient facts of cosmological physics may well be absolutely and irrationally denied by fundamentalists.

However, the same fundamentalists will make use of the advances of medical science or weapons technology while denying the empirical science that has brought about these advances, as well as our knowledge of the descent of man and the nature of the universe. This has been described by writer V.S. Naipaul as a form of intellectual parasitism. A less kindly view might regard it as simple ignorance or idiocy.

The rejection of reason is coupled with a reliance on revelation, present or past, which includes referral to ancient and sacred texts as a source of guidance on all things.

Since most of such sources are open to interpretation or emphasis, using them as a guide becomes highly subjective. The preoccupations or obsessions of the truth-seeker become conveniently reflected in the text.

This becomes all the more obvious and absurd when aspects of the modern world, such as contraception, space travel, in-vitro fertilization and so forth, are concerned.

The ancient divines are unlikely to have considered such areas and may be deemed, therefore, to be incompetent in, or at least silent upon, them. Yet, the fundamentalist still pronounces fearlessly on what he usually does not understand, adding ignorance to bigotry.

This combination is then used to deny social advance in, for example, the emancipation of women. It is a small step from there to think that the taking of another's life, an infidel's or a non-fundamentalist believer's, is no big deal or even a morally- cleansing action for both parties concerned.

The sacrifice of one's own life as a suicide bomber is then a logical, self-absorbed, almost selfish exchange of a few microseconds of disintegration for an eternity in heaven.

This situation might be the furthest extreme a religious extremist can travel to but, no, he can convince a few hundred others to volunteer to die with him. The suicide bomber's commander has made the ultimate subjective discovery -- God's will has become his own will or vice versa.

Religion often gets involved in both sex and power. The more extravagant ways of punishing errant women become exercises in sexual sadism. Women who become moved as the result of some intense spiritual or emotional experience may experience physical orgasm, the spiritual and the sexual having got muddled up in an identical ecstasy.

Many fundamentalists see sexual threats in everything and reducing our prime biological function to a sin.

Hindu fundamentalists in India get more upset over beauty contests, which hurt no one, than bride-burning, which certainly does. Some Victorian puritans covered up table legs because women's legs had to be covered and so, even table legs might carry sexual associations.

The religious, especially the fundamentalists, are hungry for power but should never be given it.

The Papal States, once an appreciable portion of the Italian peninsula, were notorious for corruption.

Renaissance Italy produced popes as violent, sexually indulgent and corrupt as any secular ruler although they were not fundamentalists. However, the anti-witchcraft legislation they enacted fell into the hands of puritans a century later.

Hundreds of thousands of ordinary people were killed as a grotesque consequence. Confession of witchcraft was extracted under torture. Denial of guilt was not accepted and the tortured were encouraged to denounce others before being burnt.

Entire villages in Germany were depopulated, all in the name of the Lamb of God and the vicars of Christ, Catholic or Protestant.

In Iran, among the many abuses of the revolution in its earliest, wildest period, prisons were reportedly executing girls as young as nine for religious offenses.

As they were virgins and, therefore, did not qualify for execution, their gaolers raped them before killing them. If these reports were true, a fundamentalist movement, dedicated to sexual chastity, thus enforced chastity by child-rape and murder.

If fundamentalism is so arbitrary, irrational, intrusive, potentially corrupt and violent, why are large numbers of people attracted to it?

The first explanation is that, if taught young enough, many will believe almost anything, as the Jesuits, once the shock- troops of the Catholic church, well knew. This is one reason why the religious extremist must not get into education.

Another reason is that fundamentalism can become a mass movement, fueled by a millennial passion that may well be hysterical.

The fundamentalist also appears to offer certainty and security in this world and the next, so that no one needs to doubt, much less think for himself. Its simplicity is its strength.

More positively, the fundamentalist in his insurgent period may well be very brave and honest, in stark distinction from the often corrupt secular governments he is opposing.

Although religions often claim an absolute truth which the fundamentalist believes is fixed forever, religious belief, in reality, is subject to adjustment, change or fashion.

The present wave is a fashion, dangerous and destructive, but one that will pass like any other. No one expected totalitarian communism to collapse overnight but it did.

Totalitarian religion may not disappear in the same fashion but it, too, will be affected by the human dynamic in time.

The generation that follows the fundamentalist founders sees its contemporary religious establishment as ultra-conservative, unchanging and repressive.

Since change cannot move to further conservative extremes, change has to be back towards the liberal, open and tolerant, in some sort of Hegelian pattern of movement and counter-movement, as is happening in Iran.

The fundamentalists can only hold on to power where people are totally wretched and uneducated and can be kept in complete ignorance or simply occupied by a desperate struggle for existence.

Politically speaking, religion is a curse upon mankind, the last real source of our division. Religion, however, is generally regarded as a good thing and the fundamentalist tends to assume that you cannot have too much of a good thing.

They share this attitude with health faddists who carry their desire for clean water or clean air to absurd lengths, or militant Maoists who want everyone to dress the same, and extreme feminists who pretend that men and women are identical.

Religion should be taken in small, measured doses, like alcohol, chocolate or medicines. Too much of many good things kills you.

Therefore government must remain rational and secular.

One final reason: Secular government tends to be more tolerant of religious variety than religious government, so that even the religious should prefer secular government to those of their own ilk.