Last Wednesday, the editorial board of the Alligator wrote a column titled “Religious self-reflection is necessary,” in which it took the instance of a British Muslim school educating their girls that to be beaten by one’s spouse is permissible as a reminder that we all must reflect on the nature of religion. Mr. Editorial, as I will call this unnamed author, said we must recognize that “The Bible, the Torah, the Quran … are the words of the gods you believe in, but they were written by man, and man’s way of thinking has come a long way since those initial writings.” He consequently reminded us the books and the religions they have created are inherently flawed, and we must not simply “cherry-pick the pieces that you like and ignore the pieces that you don’t like.” Thus, the example from the British Muslim school is a classic case of a primitive religion that needs reform and needs to come to a more rational understanding of the social context in which their religion started.
I think Mr. Editorial raises valid points about religion, especially the difficulty of reconciling specific passages in the Bible and the Quran with the concept of an all-loving god. But as a Christian, I cannot accept his argument that religion is an inherently flawed, man-made construct with values and teachings that are relevant only to the times they were born out of. I think Mr. Editorial operates under some huge and contentious assumptions — assumptions I wish to flesh out in the next couple weeks.
The first and largest assumption Mr. Editorial makes, and with which he judges the religions of the world, is the secular assumption that either there is no god or at least we cannot know which god truly exists. This is the intellectual motivation behind his claim that the major religious books of the world are man-made, devoid of any divine influence. The Bible, the Quran or the Torah can only be man-made if they are not true, and the only path to falsity in religious terms is if the god being worshipped does not exist.
Now the issue I want to raise is that Mr. Editorial steps into the religious arena proudly donning his secular emblems of human reason and moral progress without proving first why his emblem is the correct one. In other words, in Mr. Editorial’s criticisms of religion, he smuggles his own deep assumptions about reality and life without offering any sound reasons as to why his worldview is the correct one. And yet, he feels it his moral duty to take the plank out of the religious eye by calling them to more self-reflection without first reflecting on the validity of his own secularism.
The irony is that the secular assumptions — this life is all there is, human reason and moral progress are all we need to thrive and God either does not exist or is far away — seem to run counter to the deepest intuitions of human experience, and Mr. Editorial, in fact, admits this. He cites rather flippantly that we have created 3,000+ gods throughout history as a proof against there being any one true god to believe in. But I take this as a confirmation, or at least a significant reminder, that humans have always and will always interpret this world as not being all there is, and that God or gods is the ultimate source of reality. Why would an overwhelming majority of human beings throughout time and in most cultures form these perceptions if they were not true? Would we have hunger if food did not exist, or sexual desire if sex did not exist? Sadly, Mr. Editorial and secularism in general understand these perceptions to be illusory.
The question, then, is not whether religions ought to become more secular, but if secularism ought to convert, and to which religion. See part two next week.
Scott Stinson is a UF English and philosophy sophomore. His column appears on Wednesdays.
