One would think the 21st century would be the age of reason and tolerance. Sadly, for the faithful, the era is proving to be as traumatic as the days when it was heresy to dare suggest that the Earth was not the centre of the universe.
In France, Muslims are forbidden by law from wearing their scarves at schools and other public spaces, because this offends that country’s proud secular tradition. In Sweden, it is illegal for Jewish and Muslim parents to perform the age-old ritual of circumcising their sons, because the snip is a curtailment of the youngster’s right to choose whether he wants to have a foreskin.
In South Africa we celebrate the termination of pregnancy laws, but make life hell for medical professionals who, in the name of their faith and in terms of the same law, choose not to partake in the termination.
Then you have the likes of Tariq Ali responding to the now infamous cartoons by criticising the offending newspapers, but still finding opportunity to say, ”I am not insulted by billions of Christians, Muslims and Jews believing there is a God and praying to this non-existent deity on a regular basis.” You would expect someone of Ali’s intellectual stature not to insult by stealth.
Ali’s comments tally with the rising belief that faith, believing in God or being religious sets one up as a legitimate object of ridicule, scorn and disrespect.
These increasing numbers of secular fundamentalists ”recognise no difference or distance between the sacred and the profane. To them, everything is fair game to be used in their game,” to use the lyrics from jazzman Wynton Marsalis’s Premature Autopsy.
Ali, who is perfectly within his right not to believe in ”the non-existent deity”, implies that it is because of his magnanimity that he tolerates the irrational masses who bow before one god or another.
He is not alone among those who believe that people who choose faith are inherently irrational, thus fair game for their condescending attitude. In common with his ilk is the belief that religion, by its nature, requires one to be an unthinking zealot.
If they had not been paying as much attention to the dissidents to a cause instead of its proponents, secular fundamentalists could have discovered the works of Muslim scholar, Ibn Rushd, whose work found a way of fusing philosophy, theology and rhetoric as ways to the truth, and influenced even Christian theologians.
They would have ”heard” St Thomas Aquinas tell 12th- century Christians, ”Reason is the handmaid of faith.”
Invoking the Marxist line that religion is the opium of the people, they conveniently choose to ignore that Jesus Christ himself implored his followers to ”seek the truth and it shall set you free”.
Then again, fundamentalists under any guise have never been amenable to ideas that may upset their prejudices. Which is not to say that religious teachings are foolproof.
It is possible that the conclusion reached by the thinking people of faith are wrong, but it is important to accept that, even if they are, these deductions were not arrived at whimsically, as some born-again secularists believe.
They need not, therefore, celebrate differences of opinion between the various branches of faith as vindication of their long-held knowledge of the divisiveness of religion, but should see these as welcome consequences of free-thinking societies.
As with the early Christian missionaries and the Muslim formations hoping to replace present political governance structures with caliphates, these secular fundamentalists are seized with evangelical zeal to save ”those in the dark” from themselves.
But because theirs is a ”reason-based” crusade, as opposed to a superstitious set of rituals, they see themselves as the new messiahs.
And because they are the ”rational” ones, they have no excuse for behaving like those they find fault with. Any philosophy that holds itself as the only source of truth deserves to be rejected by all rational people. This is as true in the secular world as it is in the religious.
Secular fundamentalism must be placed where it belongs — on the flipside of religious zealotry on the intolerance coin.