Religious Versus Secular World Views: The Real Crux of the Matter

These days the media and the pundits and the preachers like to say that the cause for conflict between scientific and religious worlds is that one holds with evolution by natural selection and the other with Divine Creation and Intervention. From a strictly spiritual point of view, I am glad we have both worlds. Science can improve the quality of life and the quality of intellectual experience. Religion can improve the quality of human compassion and sensibly correct where we put our life's priorities in this hyper-materialistic global culture. There are also non-religious institutions and ideologies which enable people to keep their minds above the soul-destroying torrent of consumerist culture. But if a practitioner of anthropology from another planet were to look at our situation, I believe that extraterrestrial anthropologist would point to deeper levels of discordance than what our society consciously admits to. Religious institutions have never wholly been pleased with scientific and technological progress, and it's not so much to do with what the truth is in the Copernican sense. It's what the truth might lead people to do, namely, change the rules of the game. Ardent religionists do not believe this is the real and ultimate world, and therefore they are skeptical of anyone who should wish to add artificial comfort to our lives, or even to obviate the hardship of existence through well-reasoned social reforms. This world, in their eyes, is designed for suffering, and suffering is the primary mechanism for spiritual progress and the confirmation of the will toward the salvation of the soul. I do not deny that suffering builds character, refines one's ability to empathize with the plight of others, and deepens human connections. Those effects of spiritual grace form the real silver lining of a traumatic or difficult experience. So to that degree, I have no arguments with the religious perspective. However, I have a beef with people who claim that one cannot be spiritual and embrace reforms and improvements in the daily existence of this world, however transient it might be compared to the eternal joys of heaven. Religious fundamentalists often seem to align themselves with political forces and agendas that oppose or wish to dismantle secular mechanisms for social justice and broader socioeconomic enfranchisement. This tendency has baffled me as much as the opposition of most fundamentalists toward conservation and protection of the environment. How can they disrespect God's own Creation?! Yet these political stances are all of a piece if one looks at the basic (and unacknowledged) schism between religious and secular worlds: if salvation only comes through suffering, religiously-minded people do not want man-made secular and scientific institutions alleviating the condition of suffering through technological convenience, medical improvements and political protection of the impoverished and socially vulnerable. They want only God and His Churches to be the source of any intervention in the condition of this world, preferably on an individual basis, and then only under certain righteous constraints. Please do not think that I only consider the agonizing blindness of religious institutions when I contemplate the persistent problems of this world. I despise the egocentric and malicious arrogance exhibited by people who spout their contempt for those who believe in a Supreme Being, creating only more (unnecessary) discord and alienation between two worlds which need to seek harmonization for the human race to survive. Of course I DO believe in aggressively defending the right of people to choose to believe or disbelieve in the supernatural, especially against those radical factions who would make it a Constitutional Amendment that every citizen must believe in God and belong to a certain religion. However, just in terms of defending a nonreligious way of life, why not write or speak from strictly affirmative positions about how atheism or agnosticism can dynamically support a responsible and fulfilling mental, emotional and moral existence? The fact that some people choose to be believers in the Divine is no skin off the teeth of those who wish to lead empirically-based lives! Also, I have a gripe with a society which is fast making a secular religion of capitalism as some sort of flawless and monolithic self-justifying center of life. In this new cult of what was once just a practical tool of economic success, we witness some of the "high priests" of capitalism shallowly flaunt and spill their wealth with such inanity and self-engrossed pride on television as to be spiritually disgusting in their vacuous spectacle. Yet I could still easily laugh that off if such behavior were not symptomatic of far worse things. It seems the rich want us to worship them and the iconography of their wealth. They want a one-way (non-reciprocal) street. What really dismays me is how the rich now hoard such gross amounts of their untaxed wealth and thereby allow broader society to rapidly wither and collapse from the civilized heights it once knew. Why can't the wealthy discover a healthier pride? Why can't the rich adopt the true leadership role of economically nurturing society and investing their unused capital in industrial progress that involves the whole nation? Yet the "do-nothing" rich and the "better-do-nothing" religious folk have made an unholy pact with each other (despite the fact that their respective motives are entirely different), and have created a choke-hold on the lives and dreams of those who want to make THIS world a better place. If the religiously-minded wish to adhere to their strict take on God's Will, I can respect that they have their own moral reasons for this stance, but what I do wish they would realize is at least this: the rich who wish to allow our country to go to rot are not rich because God gave them their wealth. Don't confuse prosperity in this world with God's Favor. God loves us all, and most especially the poor and those who seek to help them.