All human beings have ultimate belief systems--whether they are self-conscious about them or not. In that sense, all human beings are incurably religious. In our secularist age, secularism has defined religions to be the (mistaken) belief in an ultimate, transcendent being. But the secularist asserts, "there ain't none" and so simplistically claims that secularism is, well, secular and not religious in any way.
But secularism--which we acknowledge to be the established and societally entrenched religion of our day, is an ultimate belief system, asserting that matter is all there is, and their ain't no god. Secularists reverence their religion, and their god of empirical man, just as any disciple does. It has a "gospel" of joy: there is no transcendent being to judge me for my moral transgressions. Whoopee. Freedom. The truth (of secularism) has set me free.
But at the same time, ironically, secularists believe in an ultimate authority, delivering truth and law. Its ultimate authority is the cold hard dictat of empirical reality coupled with cool detached reason.
It represents--they say--a glorious liberation from superstition and ignorance. It bases everything upon rational laws and matter. It is at this point that secularism reveals itself as the most bloody and persecuting of all religions.
Since its ultimate reality is man's reason and empirical (scientific) discovery, anyone who does not embrace the religion and comply with it will be made to do so. Not to do so, not to comply, represents great harm, damage, and evil. Superstition leads to evil ignorance, we are told. Hence Professor Dawkins openly advocates removing children from religious (that is, other religions than secularism) parents because of the harm they do to those children, inculcating them in "falsehoods", and not the truth. It is not by accident that the bloodiest regimes of all have been secularist, atheist regimes. Secularism is not afraid to kill, maim, or torture because it recognizes no authority beyond itself by which it must be judged.
Secularism also has its mysteries which the human mind cannot fathom. But secularism finds these unfathomable things discombobulating. Everything should be open and plain before the mind of man, the ultimate reality with which we all have to deal. One of their number, philosopher Thomas Nagel honestly admits the folly, the stupidity and the superstition that attends the religion of secularism:
My guess is that this cosmic authority problem is not a rare condition and that it is responsible for much of the scientism and reductionism of our time. One of the tendencies it supports is the ludicrous overuse of evolutionary biology to explain everything about life, including everything about the human mind. [Thomas Nagel, cited by Peter Hitchens, The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2010), p. 150.]If you ever want to read a devotional tract replete with awe and wonder and praise in every paragraph one only has to pick up a secularist celebration of the glories of evolutionism. It is in such places that one sees most clearly the worshipful nature of secularism. It is also at such junctures that one sees secularism for what it is: superstitious, ignorant, and foolish.
Thus, secularism's polemic against other religions reduces down to a form of hypocritical special pleading. It is merely the assertion of its own religious beliefs over other, competing religions. It accuses opponents of being religious and therefore superstitious. Yet it remains one of the most superstitious of all religions in the history of mankind.
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