IN emptying my spam file I have found several varied complaints about my criticism of secularism which seem to make several assumptions about what I mean that aren't only unwarranted, they are clearly things I've never proposed and have often stated I am totally against.
a. I would oppose any state imposition of religion on anyone, willing or not. It would not serve to do much but discredit the religion I believe is closer to the truth than other religion to get it into a fixed, legalistic government enforced form. It certainly has and did discredit those forms of it which gained such established status. It does, today, even when the establishment is in the form of dictatorial cults in which there is rigid control of membership, especially when that cult is controlled by one man or woman, those people who constitute the central power in the cult and who enforce their control and, in most cases, fleecing of the members of the cult, often with violence, in the worst cases, murder. The INC cult in the Philippines is one of the most extreme examples in which the "church" tells its members to vote as a block, they were instrumental in installing and maintaining the Duterte regime, playing a similar role to the "white evangelicals" and other right wing "christains" who installed and support Trump.
I would certainly be opposed to government imposing religion I rejected on me and I am told I should not do to others what I would not have done to me. More about that later.
b. I am increasingly disillusioned with much of organized Christianity and Judaism which is structured around patriarchal, centralized power. I've slammed Opus Dei and other such cults repeatedly, I have not as much criticized the way in which the Heredi factions of Judaism which form around the supposed authority of their Rebbi can run from the positive and kind of sweet to the downright evil in their blind obedience to their deified Rebbi. Some of the worst have a relationship to the right-wing Israeli government not unlike that of the INC mentioned above and in places of concentration of the Heredi factions, like Brooklyn. And what you can say about those two religious orientations can be said about those who are independent of any larger grouping or those who are identifiable as such.
That said, there are good people who are involved in even the most highly centralized churches, even some of those at the center of power. I think Pope Francis is a good person, I think Pope John XXIII was and Paul VI tried to be. I am far more critical of John Paul II and Benedict XVI but would note that even in their cases, according to their encyclicals and other statements, based on the Gospel of Jesus and The Law of Moses and the Christian theological tradition, their economics was entirely more egalitarian than anything any secular regime has done or proposed doing. Not all of the Bishops they appointed shared their economics, some of them are overt fascists and, JPII, especially, had a weakness for highly centralized cults more like Mafia gangs than the Apostles, such as Opus Dei, the so-called Legionairs of Christ and others. I think neither he nor his chosen successor Benedict XVI much liked democracy and their notions of equality were severely limited, certainly excluding women and LGBTQ people or others.
That said, I don't think egalitarian democracy, economic equality, human decency and human survival are compatible with or are at all derived from secularism. Though in a pluralistic, egalitarian democracy, governmental secularism is a necessary and efficient practice. I would say that the more innocuous violations of that on the local level, the odd manger scene on public property, the maintenance of some largely ignored cross or "10 Commandments" put up by Hollywood to promote that gawddawful movie, tolerating that is more politically productive than giving the fascists material to turn to worse ends. Though opening up public space to those stupid atheist "satanists" for their own PR campaigns serves those dopes right.
It is as a widespread cultural phenomenon that secularism quickly shows its defects and limits.
Secularism either starts out or devolves into self-centered gratification-based living, there being no external motivation in being anything else. That in the early generations of a secularized culture there may be some vestiges of the golden rule or some vaguer notion of fairness doesn't seem to be there as strongly in succeeding generations. I've seen that is often the case in families involved in some of the supposed "liberal" churches though I think in their official statements of practice and the vestiges of a core of beliefs, many of those may be closer to the Gospel in their presumed decline than they were at their heights.
I'm beginning to think that the future of Christianity will be far more dependent on individuals practicing Christian morals than on churches or groups. And with that there will be everything from the tendency of strong personalities, sincere and con-man, to attract cults around them to bizarre theological stuff such as could be seen in the so-called "Gnostics" of the early Christian period to attempts to clearly understand the teachings of Jesus, of his earliest witnesses, and the other things left to us in the Scriptures and to live it out. While the organized churches were not free of some of that bizarre distortion especially when wedded to medieval feudalism, much of what they weeded out was anything from dangerous to absurd. A reading of the so-called "Gnostic" writings should cure a sensible or rational person of good will from the romantic modern nonsense concerning them.
Something I have come to see is that any attempt to go back to some imaginary idyllic original "Christian Church" the central superstition of the INC and so many other, generally awful cults, is based in the folly that it is either possible or desirable to reproduce the past. It isn't even possible to really know it in a way comprehensible enough to conduct a life or the life of a community within. The universe goes from the past to the future through the present, we are to live as people of the present in ways to try to make the future better for all. The talk in the Bible about "the alpha and the omega" frankly puts it that the universe had a beginning and it will have an end, that the progress to the end is part of the creation. I think that it is not an accident that so often the worst aspects of religion are found in those people and groups that want time to go backwards, the ultra-orthodox in Judaism, the various restorationist crackpots in Christianity, fundamentalisms of all kinds. They insist on the present doing what the present not only cannot do, be the past, but they insist on something it shouldn't do because it damages and distorts the future. Jesus certainly never instructed his followers to keep things as they were.
There are some moral absolutes that don't change and always apply, doing unto others what you would have them do to you, a somewhat transactional way to appeal to people to be good to each other being one of those. They certainly knew that people were more likely to do it if you put it in those terms than if you put it in terms of self-sacrifice. On that truth, as Jesus and Hillel and many others have pointed out, the entirety of The Law depends, treating your neighbor with justice, the laws commanding giving generous sustenance to the destitute, to the widow and orphan and stranger, treating workers well and fairly, economic justice, foremost among those.
Another that the truth being good a necessary basis of being good to each other, the only secure foundation of anything that is honestly called "freedom". And because of that lies are evil, especially the lies told in false witness to damage others, though lies forced on people to prevent them doing evil are made necessary though only in the most dire and exigent of circumstances. It is no accident that religious cults are always based in lies and deception, as so often has been the maintenance of church hierarchies and, always, in secular power. I have pointed out quite a bit lately how much of our legal system, supposedly based on a rigorous investigation and determination of truth runs on mutually ignored lies.
We are not guaranteed anything at any point though that every structure of governance that human beings are capable of creating or, perhaps, any we are capable of articulating will constantly be in danger of being corrupted, perhaps through the guaranteed faults of its articulation, certainly through the desires of lawyers, judges, commentators, politicians, etc. to find loopholes and other of those guaranteed faults and turn them into policies and habits for their own generally bad ends. Our object of secular worship,the Constitution is worshiped in the secular United States far more than The Bible is, especially by the white Bible thumpers who certainly have no use for either of those enduring moral absolutes mentioned above. It is certainly an object of worship by secular, civic religion and the junk you get from pop culture - so much of that profited by recent rulings on the First Amendment and the religion of the gun on the Second.
I'm a total sucker for YouTubes of animals, rescue videos of wild animals, cats and dogs and foxes and deer and other animals. I'm a real sucker for videos of reunion videos of mother donkeys and cows with their young, mother dogs with their puppies, even birds and others with people who were good to them. I can't help but conclude that even without Scripture that animals have the ability to surpass human beings in being good, loyal, self-sacrificing even outside of their own species - Darwin as an observer of animals was 100% an upper class beneficiary of the evil Brit class system. I think human beings, certainly in many cases, are fallen animals.
And I am constantly reminded that the human record that Scripture is, falls short, especially in the treatment of animals and not infrequently of other people. It is a human record of, I am certain at times, inspiration from God, but it is recorded through human perception and articulation and so susceptible to human limits, distortion and even corruption.
I don't have the same faith that human Constitutions and laws are as worthy of belief as divinely inspired*, though they can be inspired through the better aspects of religious belief as well a the most mistakenly and corruptly legalistic. All human constitutions will be imperfect, accidentally or intentionally. I could cite many instances of both happening. I cannot think of any rational scientific or mathematical or strictly logical support for making the golden rule into controlling law, it can't be done. I can find the reason to do that in Leviticus and in the Gospel of Jesus. God wants us to. Though I can certainly find a lot of really bad stuff that has been put into law from Leviticus too, I have no doubt as to what part of that book should be left to the dead past and what must not be.
No human construction, no law, no Constitution, especially no "bill of rights" can be safely allowed to be considered a perfect or even safe construction given eternal power to conduct human affairs. Such a construct is as futile in conception as the Tower of Babel yet that is exactly how we are supposed to imagine the United States Constitution, in its most evil and obviously dishonest form, the worship of the "original intent" of the deified "founders" is the required pose of what the rather stupid and corrupt Sandra Day O'Connor called our "civic religion". In that secular attitude, one encouraged by the ACLU and the "civil liberties" industry, I see some of the greatest evils of established churches repeated in a purely secular form. And from that I have listed many resulting evils or inequality, of commodification of people and their exploitation in some of the most brutal of industries such as prostitution and by others who enslave us through addictions to liquor and drugs and destroy the basis of democracy through lies. The church of secularism is a pretty terrible one when you look at it in the same critical manner that all of religion should be treated.
That's what I'm trying to do here when I criticize secularism.
* We certainly have no call to consider the United States Constitution as such, the writers of it were explicit in their denial of that and we have the records of the evil calculations made in the Constitutional Convention.
