John Gray, 'Seven Types of Atheism', 2018:
"...The belief that we live in a secular age is an illusion. If it means only that the power of the Christian churches has declined in many western countries, it is a description of fact. But secular thought is mostly composed of repressed religion. The idea of a secular realm originated in Jesus teaching his disciples to render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s. It is Jewish and Christian monotheism – not the European Enlightenment – that is the chief source of the practice of toleration. But monotheism also inspired many of the anti-liberal movements of modern times. A mix of Christian notions of redemption with a Gnostic belief in the salvific power of knowledge has propelled the project of salvation through politics. With the revival of religion in recent times, we may seem to be living in a post-secular era. But since secular thinking was not much more than repressed religion, there never was a secular era..."
John Gray, 'The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths', 2013:
"...Humanists today, who claim to take a wholly secular view of things, scoff at mysticism and religion. But the unique status of humans is hard to defend, and even to understand, when it is cut off from any idea of transcendence. In a strictly naturalistic view – one in which the world is taken on its own terms, without reference to a creator or any spiritual realm – there is no hierarchy of value with humans at the top. There are simply multifarious animals, each with their own needs. Human uniqueness is a myth inherited from religion, which humanists have recycled into science..."
Historian Tom Holland had a lot to say about secularism in his book 'Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind', 2019.
"...Naturally,
for it to function as its exponents wished it to function, this could never be
admitted. The West, over the duration of its global hegemony, had become
skilled in the art of repackaging Christian concepts for non-Christian
audiences. A doctrine such as that of human rights was far likelier to be
signed up to if its origins among the canon lawyers of medieval Europe could be
kept concealed. The insistence of United Nations agencies on ‘the antiquity and
broad acceptance of the conception of the rights of man’8 was a necessary precondition for their claim to a
global, rather than a merely Western, jurisdiction.
Secularism, in an identical
manner, depended on the care with which it covered its tracks. If it were to be
embraced by Jews, or Muslims, or Hindus as a neutral holder of the ring between
them and people of other faiths, then it could not afford to be seen as what it
was: a concept that had little meaning outside of a Christian context.
In
Europe, the secular had for so long been secularised that it was easy to forget
its ultimate origins. To sign up to its premises was unavoidably to become just
that bit more Christian.
Merkel, welcoming Muslims to Germany, was inviting
them to take their place in a continent that was not remotely neutral in its
understanding of religion: a continent in which the division of church and
state was absolutely assumed to apply to Islam..."
"...The
great claim of what, in 1846, an English newspaper editor first termed
‘secularism’ was to neutrality. Yet this was a conceit. Secularism was not a
neutral concept. The very word came trailing incense clouds of meaning that
were irrevocably and venerably Christian. That there existed twin dimensions,
the secular and the religious, was an assumption that reached back centuries
beyond the Reformation: to Gregory VII, and to Columbanus, and to Augustine.
The concept of secularism – for all that it was promoted by the editor who
invented the word as an antidote to religion – testified not to Christianity’s
decline, but to its seemingly infinite capacity for evolution. Manifest in
English, this was manifest in other languages too…"
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