Re: [nukkad] Pseudo-Secularism: A Primer -- Confused !!!

["Mahesh chandra gupta" <>]

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
If you don't execute your ideas, they die. 
-Roger von Oech, author and consultant
----------------------------------------------------------------------------


Re: [nukkad] Pseudo-Secularism: A Primer -- Confused !!!

Samira wrote about her concept of secularism. Here are other views 
on secularism. The first, a shorter one, is from me. It was posted 
on nukkad some months ago. The other, by Kittu Reddy, is longer. 
This, too, is from the web. I do not remember who he is. I had 
defined pseudo-secularism also in one of my mails on nukkad. If 
someone happens to locate it in the archives, it might be helpful 
to Samira.

MC Gupta
===========================================================

SECULARISM

[mc gupta]


1. Secularism is a western concept. There is no probably word in 
Indian languages that approximates the meaning of secularism as 
usd in English.

2. In the west, there was repressive dominance of the Church over 
political, social and academic life. [Refer: Galileo's persecution 
and prosecution for saying that earth revolves around the sun]. 
This continued till the renaissance. At that time, the concept 
gained ground that the Church and the religion should play only a 
peripheral role in the lives of individuals and the nations, with 
there being freedom of thought and action without inhibitions 
imposed by the Church. This concept was called secularism. It 
meant that the state should have nothing to do with religion.

3. Indian scene has been diferent. there has never been societal 
and governmental slavery to religion. As a matter of fact, there 
has not been a Hindu religion as such, but, rather, a Hindu 
philosophy. This deep philosophy has been of a scolarly level, 
permitting intense academic discussions of divergent thoughts, a 
uniform thread in all these diverse streams [vaisnavism, shaivism, 
shakti cult, Buddhism, Jainism etc.] being deep sense of 
spirituality. In India, even there has been no term for religion 
as understood in the west.  Dharma, often used as equivalent to 
religion, has, in fact, a sense of rules and regulations and a 
code of conduct which, using the modern legal terminology, might 
be somewhat akin to natural law. In India, there has been a long 
tradition of believing that the ultimate goal is spiritual 
salvation, the means to attain which may be different such as 
jewism, christianity, islam, hinduism etc. Thus Hindus do not see 
islam or christianity as radically different from Hinduism. India 
is the only country in the world where all major religions thrive 
and are practised freely by different people.

4. In summary, secularism might have two meanings. The first is 
non-indulgence by the state in religion. This is the western 
concept. The second is equal respect for all religions. This is 
the Indian concept.

5. The western concept is OK for westerners, where Christianity is 
built around love, tolerance, penance and the Holy Trinity. The 
church stiffled society in the west, forcing a reactionary move to 
confine the clergy to the four walls of the church, denying them 
interference in the affairs of the individuals and the state. so, 
it had to be restrained. Such situation never came to pass in 
India.

6. The Indian concept of sarva-dharma-samabhava [equal respect for 
all religions]does not need any constitutional dictates because it 
is already well and deeply ingrained in Indian culture.

7. Summary--- India differs fundamentally from the west in the 
sense that spirituality is a basic part of Indian culture, the 
means to attain which is through hinduism, islam, buddhism, 
jainism, christianity  etc. A government of the people, by the 
people, for the people, has to be alive to the deep aspirations 
and culture of the people. So, in India, the western concept of 
secularism can not be applied in practice. The indian counterpart 
of equal respect for all religions has been part of Indian 
tradition, much before the west ot their common law concepts came 
into being.

MC Gupta

-------------------------------------------------




SECULARISM, RELIGION AND SPIRITUALITY BY KITTU REDDY


A new word has recently been cast into the shifty language of 
politics,- a
language of self-illusion and deliberate delusion of others, which 
almost
immediately turns all true and vivid phrases into a jargon, so 
that men may
fight in a cloud of words without any clear sense of the thing 
they are
battling for,-it is the word secularism.

The Late Prime Minister Indira Gandhi introduced this word into 
the Indian
Constitution in the mid-seventies during the Emergency. Since then 
the word
secularism has become the battle cry of political parties, 
intellectuals and
opinion makers in India; it has been used as a tool and a stick to 
decry
anyone with a different viewpoint and has created more confusion 
than
understanding and harmony. So the terms now being bandied about by 
the media are  secularists, pseudo-secularists, and 
non-secularists. As a consequence, there is a great confusion in 
the minds of the  average Indian as to what secularism really 
means. It will therefore be both useful and interesting to try to 
trace the origin, history, and meaning of the word secularism. 
This exercise might help in clearing  the misunderstandings and 
pave the way for a more harmonious polity.
-----
The word secularism is not essentially of Indian origin, rather it 
is a product of modern Western history and civilization and has 
now become a
part of the  vocabulary of all governments in the world.

The Western mind

Let us therefore take a look at modern Western history and the 
mindset of
its people in order to understand its psychological roots. The 
first point
to note is that it was during the reign of Constantine in 324 AD 
that
Christianity became the State religion of the Roman Empire. Before 
that
there was no State religion any where in the world. It must also 
be noted
that the first religious wars in history were fought between the 
Christians
and the Muslims during the Crusades in the tenth and eleventh 
centuries.
Let us analyze the characteristic trends of the Western mind. 
There are two
things especially that distinguish the normal European mind. Its 
two
significant characters are firstly the cult of the inquiring, 
defining,
effective, practical reason and secondly the cult of life. All the 
great
developments and the high tides of European civilization, Greek 
culture, the
Roman empire before Constantine, the Renascence, and the modern 
age with its two colossal idols, Industrialism and physical 
Science, have come to the
West on the strong ascending urge of this double force. Whenever 
the tide of
these powers has ebbed, the European mind has entered into much 
confusion, darkness, and weakness. This  was the period of the 
middle Ages, known also as the Dark Ages; it began from the time 
of Constantine when he made Christianity the State religion right 
up to the period of the Renaissance
and the Reformation in the 15th century. During that period the 
Church was
the  dominant power in Europe. The Roman Empire was in a state of 
decay,
disorder, and lawlessness and it was the Christian  religion that 
brought
some kind of light. Appealing to the poor, the oppressed and the 
ignorant,
it captured the soul and the ethical being, but cared little or 
not at all
for the thinking mind; it was content that the mind should remain 
in
darkness if the heart could be brought to feel religious truth. 
Later, in the
fifth century, when the barbarians captured the Western world, it 
was in the
same way content to Christianize them, but made it no part of its 
function
to intellectualize them. Distrustful even of the free play of 
intelligence,
Christian ecclesiasticism and monasticism became 
anti-intellectual; it was
only when the Arabs came in contact with Europe that the 
beginnings of
scientific and philosophical knowledge were reintroduced into a
semi-barbarous Christendom; and it needed the spirit of the 
Renaissance and
a long struggle between religion and science to complete the 
return of a
free intellectual culture in the re-emerging mind of Europe. Thus 
although
the Christian religion humanized Europe in certain ethical 
directions, it
failed to spiritualize Europe; and this happened because it ran 
counter to
the two master instincts of the European mind - the cult of reason 
and the
cult of life. The Christian religion denied the supremacy of the 
reason and
suppressed the urge for a satisfied fullness of life. As a 
natural
consequence there was a  revolt and the movements of the 
Renaissance and
Reformation overthrew Christianity. Since then religion was put 
aside in a corner of the soul and was forbidden to interfere in 
the activities of the human being and this was done on the ground 
that the intermiscence of religion in science, thought, politics, 
society, life in general had been and must be a force for 
retardation, superstition, oppressive ignorance. That was the   
beginning of the modern age of Europe and it was an age of great 
progress in all the fields of human activity. It was a time of 
great activity, of high aspiration, of deep sowing, of rich 
fruit-bearing; it was also a time when humanity got rid of much 
that was cruel, evil, ignorant, dark, odious, not by the power of 
religion, but by the power of the awakened intelligence and of 
human idealism and sympathy; and it was from this time onward that 
the predominance of religion has been violently attacked and 
rejected by that
portion of humanity which was then the standard-bearer of thought 
and
progress, Europe after the Renascence, modern Europe.
The tendency to secularism is a necessary and inevitable 
consequence of the
cult of life and reason when it is divorced from their inmost 
inlook. The
early Christian religion in its origin and essence, like all 
oriental
religious thought claimed to make religion commensurate with life; 
it aimed
at spiritualising the whole being and its action. But the later 
version of
Christianity as it was practiced was a secular institution which 
did not
look beyond a certain supraphysical sanction and convenient aid to 
the
government of this life. And even then the tendency was to 
philosophise and
reason away the relics of the original religious spirit in order 
to get into
what they called, the clear sunlight of the logical and practical 
reason.
But modern Europe after the Renaisssance and the Reformation went 
farther
and to the very end of this way. In order to shake off the 
obsession of the
Christian idea, modern Europe separated religion from life, from 
philosophy,
 from art and science, from politics, from the greater part of 
social action
and social existence.  And it secularised and rationalised all 
human
activity so that it might stand in itself on its own basis; it had 
no need
of any aid from religious sanction or mystic insistence. In this 
evolution
religion was left aside, an impoverished system of belief and 
ceremony to
which one might or might not subscribe with very little difference 
to the
march of the human mind and life. Its penetrating and colouring 
power had
been reduced to a faint minimum; a superficial pigmentation of 
dogma,
sentiment and emotion was all that survived this drastic 
process.

The Indian mind

But in India there has been neither this predominance of reason 
and the
life-cult nor any incompatibility of these two powers with the 
religious
spirit. Reason and life were not opposed to religion and 
spirituality. The
great ages of India, the strong culminations of her civilization 
and
culture, -in India the high Vedic beginning, the grand spiritual 
stir of the
Upanishads, the wide flood of Buddhism, Vedanta, Sankhya, the 
Puranic and Tantric religions, the flowering of Vaishnavism and 
Shaivism in the southern kingdoms-have come in on a surge of 
spiritual light and a massive or intense climbing of the religious 
or the religio-philosophic mind to its own heights, its noblest 
realities, its largest riches of vision and experience.
And this happened because in India philosophy and religion, - 
philosophy
made dynamic by religion and religion enlightened by philosophy- 
have always co-existed in harmony. It was in such periods that 
intellect, thought,
poetry, the arts, and the material life flowered into splendour. 
The ebbing
of spirituality brought in always, on the contrary, the weakness 
of these
other powers, periods of fossilization or at least depression of 
the power
of life, tracts of decline, even beginnings of decay. Even in its 
period of
decline, the religious spirit saved it. And this was proved 
vividly in the
14th century and later in the 19th century when it seemed that 
Indian
civilization was going down under the onslaught of the Muslim and 
British
rule respectively. We can therefore say that all great awakenings 
in India,
all her periods of mightiest and most varied vigour, have drawn 
their
vitality from the fountainheads of some deep religious awakening. 
Wherever
the religious awakening has been complete and grand, the national 
energy it
has created has been gigantic and puissant This is a clue to which 
we have to hold if we would understand the great lines of 
divergence between the East and the West. We thus see that the 
Indian temperament is radically different from the Western 
temperament. What is good for the West is not necessarily good for 
India. Neither is there any question of superiority or 
inferiority. They are only two orbs of the same world culture.

The question now arises as to what is the place of secularism in 
India. If
by secularism is meant the separation of religion from life and 
all its
activities, then it goes contrary to the natural Indian 
temperament. Such
secularism cannot have any place in India; for the religious power 
and
instinct is too strong and powerful here; more as already seen, it 
has been
the central motive force behind all Indian development. It will be 
therefore
impossible to separate religion from life and all its activities. 
If on the
other hand secularism means that all religions have an equal place 
that is
nothing new; it did not need the political class or the 
intelligentsia to
reveal this truth. For this concept has been the very essence of 
all Indian
religious thought right from the Vedic times till today. Indian 
religion has
always given equal importance and place to every approach to God 
and that is the reason why all the religions in the world find 
place in India. No other
country in the world has all the religions being practiced with as 
much
vigour and freedom as in India. We may conclude therefore that the 
word secularism is quite irrelevant and out of place in the Indian 
context.

Religion and Spirituality

Religion then has been one of the dominant motivating forces of 
Indian
culture. But the governing force of Indian culture was not 
religion but
spirituality. A spiritual aspiration was the governing force of 
Indian
culture, its core of thought, its ruling passion. It not only 
made
spirituality the highest aim of life, but it also tried, as far as 
that
could be done in the past conditions of the human race, to turn 
the whole of
life towards spirituality. But since religion is in the human mind 
the first
native, if imperfect form of the spiritual impulse, this 
predominance of the
spiritual idea necessitated a casting of thought and action into 
the
religious mould and a persistent filling of every circumstance of 
life with
the religious sense; it demanded and created an all-pervading
religio-philosophic culture. It is true that the highest 
spirituality moves
in a free and wide air far above that lower stage of seeking which 
is
governed by religious form and dogma. But man does not arrive 
immediately at that highest inner elevation and, if it were 
demanded from him at once, he would never arrive there. Therefore 
Indian culture created a strong religious base with the intention 
of leading man gradually from religion to spirituality. But, at 
the same time, it was aware of the serious limitations in the 
practice of religion. Let us then see the limitations of religion 
and what we have to guard against.

The first and most serious limitation of religion is when it 
becomes creedal
and insists on the existence of one God only, one sacred book, and 
one
approach. This leads to narrowness and to fanaticism.
Another serious defect is that religion often lays exclusive 
stress on
intellectual dogmas, forms, and ceremonies, on some fixed and 
rigid moral
code, on some religio-political or religio-social system. Not that 
these
things are altogether negligible or that they must be unworthy 
or
unnecessary or that a spiritual religion need disdain the aid of 
forms,
ceremonies, creeds or systems. On the contrary, man needs them 
because the
lower members have to be exalted and raised before they can be 
fully
spiritualized, before they can directly feel the spirit and obey 
its law. An
intellectual formula is often needed by the thinking and reasoning 
mind, a
form or ceremony by the aesthetic temperament or other parts of 
the
infrarational being, a set moral code by man's vital nature in 
their turn
towards the inner life. But these things are aids and supports, 
not the
essence; precisely because they belong to the rational and 
infrarational
parts, they can be nothing more and, if too blindly insisted on, 
may even
hamper the suprarational light. Such as they are they have to be 
offered to
man and used by him, but not to be imposed on him as his sole law 
by a
forced and inflexible domination. In the use of them toleration 
and free
permission of variation is the first rule which should be 
observed. The
spiritual essence of religion is alone the one thing supremely 
needful, the
thing to which we have always to hold and subordinate to it every 
other
element or motive.
We also see that religion has often stood violently in the way of 
philosophy
and science, burned a Giordano Bruno, imprisoned a Galileo, and so 
generally
misconducted themselves in this matter that philosophy and science 
had in
self-defence to turn upon Religion and rend her to pieces in order 
to get a
free field for their legitimate development; and this because men 
in the
passion and darkness of their vital nature had chosen to think 
that religion
was bound up with certain fixed intellectual conceptions about God 
and the
world which could not stand scrutiny, and therefore scrutiny had 
to be put
down by fire and sword; scientific and philosophical truth had to 
be denied
in order that religious error might survive.
Another shortcoming of religion is that a narrow religious spirit 
often
oppresses and impoverishes the joy and beauty of life, either from 
an
intolerant asceticism or, as the Puritans attempted it, because 
they could
not see that religious austerity is not the whole of religion, 
though it may
be an important side of it, is not the sole ethico-religious 
approach to
God, since love, charity, gentleness, tolerance, kindliness are 
also and
even more divine, and they forgot or never knew that God is love 
and beauty
as well as purity.
In the field of politics too religion has often thrown itself on 
the side of
power and resisted the coming of larger political ideals, because 
it was
itself, in the form of a Church, supported by power and because it 
confused
religion with the Church, or because it stood for a false 
theocracy,
forgetting that true theocracy is the kingdom of God in man and 
not the
kingdom of a Pope, a priesthood or a sacerdotal class.
Similarly religion has often supported a rigid and outworn social 
system,
because it thought its own life bound up with social forms with 
which it
happened to have been associated during a long portion of its own 
history
and erroneously concluded that even a necessary change there would 
be a
violation of religion and a danger to its existence. As if so 
mighty and
inward a power as the religious spirit in man could be destroyed 
by anything
so small as the change of a social form or so outward as a 
social
readjustment! This error in its many shapes has been the great 
weakness of
religion as practiced in the past and the opportunity and 
justification for
the revolt of the intelligence, the aesthetic sense, the social 
and
political idealism, even the ethical spirit of the human being 
against what
should have been its own highest tendency and law.
These are the limitations of religion and we must become aware of 
it.

The solution

Where then is the solution? The solution lies in not in getting 
rid of
religion but in the words of Dr Abdul Kalam in graduating from 
religion to
spirituality. This is beautifully illustrated in the following 
passage from
Sri Aurobindo: "India can best develop herself and serve humanity 
by being
herself and following the law of her own nature. This does not 
mean, as some narrowly and blindly suppose, the rejection of 
everything new that comes to us in the stream of Time or happens 
to have been first developed or
powerfully expressed by the West. Such an attitude would be 
intellectually
absurd, physically impossible, and above all unspiritual; true 
spirituality
rejects no new light, no added means, or materials of our human
self-development. It means simply to keep our centre, our 
essential way of
being, our inborn nature and assimilate to it all we receive, and 
evolve out
of it all we do and create. Religion has been a central 
preoccupation of the
Indian mind; some have told us that too much religion ruined 
India,
precisely because we made the whole of life religion or religion 
the whole
of life, we have failed in life and gone under. I will not answer, 
adopting
the language used by the poet in a slightly different connection, 
that our
fall does not matter and that the dust in which India lies is 
sacred. The
fall, the failure does matter, and to lie in the dust is no sound 
position
for man or nation. But the reason assigned is not the true one. If 
the
majority of Indians had indeed made the whole of their lives 
religion in the
true sense of the word, we should not be where we are now; it was 
because
their public life became most irreligious, egoistic, 
self-seeking,
materialistic that they fell. It is possible, that on one side we 
deviated
too much into an excessive religiosity, that is to say, an 
excessive
externalism of ceremony, rule, routine, mechanical worship, on the 
other
into a too world-shunning asceticism which drew away the best 
minds who were thus lost to society instead of standing like the 
ancient Rishis as its
spiritual support and its illuminating life-givers. But the root 
of the
matter was the dwindling of the spiritual impulse in its 
generality and
broadness, the decline of intellectual activity and freedom, the 
waning of
great ideals, the loss of the gust of life.
Perhaps there was too much religion in one sense; the word is 
English,
smacks too much of things external such as creeds, rites, an 
external piety;
there is no one Indian equivalent. But if we give rather to 
religion the
sense of the following of the spiritual impulse in its fullness 
and define
spirituality as the attempt to know and live in the highest self, 
the
divine, the all-embracing unity and to raise life in all its parts 
to the
divinest possible values, then it is evident that there was not 
too much of
religion, but rather too little of it-and in what there was, a too 
one-sided
and therefore an insufficiently ample tendency. The right remedy 
is, not to
belittle still farther the age long ideal of India, but to return 
to its old
amplitude and give it a still wider scope, to make in very truth 
all the
life of the nation a religion in this high spiritual sense. This 
is the
direction in which the philosophy, poetry, art of the West is, 
still more or
less obscurely, but with an increasing light, beginning to turn, 
and even
some faint glints of the truth are beginning now to fall across 
political
and sociological ideals. India has the key to the knowledge and 
conscious
application of the ideal; what was dark to her before in its 
application,
she can now, with a new light, illumine; what was wrong and wry in 
her old
methods she can now rectify; the fences which she created to 
protect the
outer growth of the spiritual ideal and which afterwards became 
barriers to
its expansion and farther application, she can now break down and 
give her
spirit a freer field and an ampler flight: she can, if she will, 
give a new
and decisive turn to the problems over which all mankind is 
labouring and
stumbling, for the clue to their solutions is there in her 
ancient
knowledge. Whether she will rise or not to the height of her 
opportunity in
the renaissance, which is coming upon her, is the question of her 
destiny".


------------------------------------------------------------------------------
To join/leave, use the form at: http://www.mumbai-central.com/nukkad/#options
This list is archived at: http://www.mumbai-central.com/nukkad/archive.html