Freedom of faith

Twopence that I know of religion, it is an affinity that seems to follow the same principle as law of magnets: opposite poles attract and like poles repel. The Congress Party has used Muslims as their vote bank since the independence of India. BJP also tried to woo the Muslim votes during the last election. If you want political support from the same faith, it is fundamentalism. Secularism is when you want that support from others.

So be it, if that is so. But what does it mean? The textbook definition of secularism is that it is a system of political or social philosophy that rejects all forms of religious faith and worship. To put it in another way, secularism is the view that all public matters and civil policies should be conducted without the influence of religious beliefs. A watered-down version is that it is a government of religious tolerance.

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The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution first laid down the rules of that tolerance. Congress, it said, should make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting its free exercise. But how can government not aid religion, if that religion puts it in power? How can a republic escape the spiritual influence of the majority of its people?

As a matter of fact, that escape never happened right in the United States. "In God We Trust" is inscribed on the national currency. Oaths in the courts are taken on the Bible and presidents are commonly sworn to support the Constitution with one hand on the Holy Book. A clergyman giving a prayer opens each session of Congress in both houses. To cap it all, the incumbent president of the country believes he is the chosen one, that he is acting out God's will. His religious belief is shaping his foreign policy.

Turn to India, the largest democracy in the world, and you can find the mark of Hinduism almost in every walk of life. From greeting with folded hands to mark of sandal-paste on the forehead to chants, incense and coconut-breaking in inauguration ceremonies, all bear the distinct mark of life imbued with rituals of a particular religion. Take the example of Jayanta Saraswati Shankaracharya, the holy seer from Kunch, who has been arrested, for the murder of a temple manager. BJP has claimed that his arrest is an insult to Hindu religion for the same reason arrest of Pope would have been an insult to Christianity. Top BJP leaders threatened to go on hunger strike and topple the government.

In the words of David Hume, the chief stimuli to religion were to be found in hope and fear. The world contained many things that aroused man's natural fears and still does: volcanoes, floods, droughts, wars, tornadoes, typhoons, hurricanes, earthquakes, tidal waves, evil spirits, wild animals, landslides, hostile weathers, locusts, insects, and, above all, ferocious humans. The hope of men was to conquer fear. In the end fear conquered hope and men who embraced religion allowed it to embarrass them.

David Hume further writes in his book, Does God Exist? that the Chinese beat their idols if their prayers are not answered. The Laplanders, people of a region comprised of certain parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland and the Russian Federation, worshipped as their deity any large stone of an extraordinary shape. Egyptian mythologists accounted for animal worship by claiming that gods, pursued by the violence of earthborn men, disguised themselves under the semblance of beasts.

But over the centuries religion transformed from idolatry to the divinity of one God in many parts of the world, as man somehow consolidated his fear and hope into epiphany of an almighty being. It happened in different countries in different times, evolving his soul in the manner his body had evolved in earlier times. In Homer's Iliad, Dione said to Venus after being wounded by Diomede that many ills had the gods inflicted on men and many ills, in return, had men inflicted on the gods. The history of religion is the history of how men have struggled to reconcile with God.

Sad that men could never reconcile with men. Sad that riots, crusades and simmering hatreds continued to wreak havoc on the human race. Perhaps the concept of secularism was a mere aposiopesis, a contrived surcease in the rancour of men, who found it easier to believe in heaven than to behave on earth. One of the lingering confusions of secularism is whether it is intended to exterminate religion or promote tolerance for it. True to his own tradition, man created a new problem out of solution, and complicated things in his attempt to simplify them.

Now the issue no longer was what to believe in, but whether to believe in anything at all. Atheism denies the existence of God. Agnosticism holds that existence in doubt. Secularism simply calls for restraint that the faith of individual should not be imposed on the collective will. While most people see it as a denial of any religion, it is actually the acceptance of every religion. Secularism is the religious version of Rousseau's Social Contract. Each man must give up arrogance of religion so that every man can enjoy his religious freedom.

The question is whether man can give up his arrogance of religion and live without his religious freedom. He doesn't have to necessarily believe in a deity, because freedom is the choice of even having nothing to do, because even the void occupies its own space. In that respect secularism is reverse of fundamentalism; absence in one is excess in another.

Sir J. M. Barrie claimed that one's religion was whatever he was most interested in. Secularism is when one minds one's own religious interest and allows others to enjoy the same privilege. Fundamentalism is when one minds that interest, but in a different context. A fundamentalist is so obsessed with it that he forgets others have the right to do the same as well.

In the end, the conflict boils down to a single contention, and that contention is between freedom of faith and arrogance of it. People cannot be separated from their faith in so much as government cannot be separated from them. Religion is faith of the people, by the people and for the people, and democracy is government in the same order. While people are common in both, the clash between government and religion is a clash between here and hereafter.

Not a quiz, but it is quizzical I must say. By resorting to religion in the heartland of democracy, George Bush spurned secularism and reminded us of what we forgot. Secularism is freedom of faith and democracy is faith of freedom. Nothing makes it more obvious than this ultimate joke when a fundamentalist calls others fundamentalists and vows to take on them.

Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a banker.