Secularism -- Will It Survive?
Johan Galtung
Will secularism survive? Of course it
will, for a simple reason: religions are also treasure chests of
simple human reason, leaving God and Satan on 24/7 duty with such bad
taste that they even choose George W. Bush and Usama bin Laden as
tools for fundamentalists. Thus, I pick from:
- Judaism—truth is not a declaration of
faith but a process, a dialogue with no end;
- Protestant Christianity—emphasizes
the significance of individual conscience and responsibility;
- Catholic Christianity—distinguishes
between sin and the sinners, being against the sin but forgiving the
sinner;
- Orthodox Christianity—possesses the
optimism of Sunday Christianity as opposed to the necrophilic Friday
Christianities of the other two;
- Islam, Sura 8:61—when the Other shows
an inclination toward peace, so do you; peace breeds peace and zakat,
the sharing with the poor;
- Hinduism—the view of history as
ongoing creation, preservation, and destruction;
- Buddhism/Jainism—nonviolence, ahimsa,
and engi, that it all hangs together, causation is codependent, no
beginning, no end; nobody is totally guilty or innocent; we all share
responsibility in reducing dukkha (sorrow, suffering) and increasing
sukha (fulfillment, liberation) for us all;
- Confucianism—the harmony of
harmonies, inside ourselves, in the family, at school, at work, in
society, the country, the nation, the region, and the civilization,
with all levels inspiring each other;
- Daoism—yin-yang, that there is good
in the bad and bad in the good, and bad in the good in the bad and
good in the bad in the good, and we have to navigate ethically
through all of that;
- Finally, humanism—the idea of basic
human needs, reflected in basic human rights as a general guideline
for human action in general and political/economic action in
particular. Such wisdom will survive long after God and Satan die.
Johan Galtung, a Laureate of the
International Academy of Humanism, is a professor of peace studies,
the founder of TRANSCEND: A Network for Peace and Development, and
the rector of TRANSCEND Peace University. His recent books include
Transcend and Transform and Pax Pacifica.
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