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abbyinsm's avatar

Part of the problem is that the culture/press/education system has adopted a two thousand year old idea of the divine that is out of date. As long as "being religious" means that you believe in a superhuman individual who has direct power over you in the same way a parent has direct power over a child, the default among people with a sense of their own agency will be to reject that label. When the definitions of "holy", "higher power", "worship", and "divinity" are expanded to include the powers inherent in love, nature, community, etc., those who are spiritual but not religious will be able to call themselves believers.

I've read a number of books by Christians including Al Gore, Jimmy Carter, and Francis Collins who are articulate in their understanding of the compatibility of science and religion, but my biggest influence is Martin Luther King Jr. who saw clearly the power of "beloved community". Selfishness is evil, but every single article about any legislation focuses almost exclusively on how this will benefit or hurt individuals or groups of individuals, not on how it will improve things for the whole. For example, the infrastructure proposal currently being introduced is described in terms of who gets what, instead of how a better infrastructure is good for our whole country and perhaps the world. This kind of individualized thinking rots our souls.

When I was a Catholic child we sang a song that goes "God is love, and he who abides in love, abides in God." I'm now a church-going Unitarian Universalist active in Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice. Depriving people of marriage, voting, family planning, and fair wages is against my religion, as is environmental destruction, corporate greed, and homelessness. All of these things are an affront to LOVE, which is a power greater than each of us individually. The press, the education system, and our whole culture needs to change its foundational commitment to fostering competition, individualism, and selfishness. It's a time of abundance and inclusion. God is love and Love is god.

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David Rector's avatar

"Secular" means: denoting attitudes, activities, or other things that have no religious or spiritual basis. So to say that religious people can be secular is fine - they can certainly do things that are not religious. But it is weird to say that secular people can be religious since the word "secular" applied to a person means they have no religious or spiritual basis! I am secular and I cannot, therefore, be religious... ever. But really, there are no secular people, there are just secular actions.

Secularization is absolutely the absence of religion. When people talk about secular society, they are not talking about the people having no religion, they are talking about the society and the government having no religion. There is no place for religion in government, at least not in the USA where it is forbidden by our constitution.

It seems like non-religious liberals are being blamed for the troubles with society that they are specifically trying to fix. It almost sounds like victim plaming. As a non-religious liberal who wants to remove religion from government activities/laws, I cannot figure out exactly how I am making things worse - without non-religious liberals, more laws would be based on mythology and backward (anti-science, anti-women, anti-gay, anti-choice) 2000 year old ideas. More people would be forced to follow the religious teachings that they believe to be false or baseless when you remove the non-religious liberals from the fight to make our society more secular. Sure, you as a person that believes there is a god has no problem blaming the non-religious for you perceived problems - it's typical for religious people to blame the non-religious for every problem in the world - but it's not convincing as an argument.

To be honest, I am a non-religious liberal and I have a bias. I suspect that you also have a bias. It sounds like it.

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