Secularism, Separatism, and Intolerance
God is invisible. And yet, with refined manners, humanity
has judged Him as the principal fundamentalist force of civilization. No other
idea has divided men more grievously, nor inflicted wounds deeper on the body
of history. So declare the self-proclaimed enlightened sages of our times. The
masses, meanwhile, are no more than pawns — Haridas Pals, carried along by
tides of belief and disbelief alike. From disbelief in God arose the new
secularism: a conjurer’s box, a talisman, that is said to have delivered the
world from His tyranny. A world without it, we are told, would have collapsed
entirely into sectarian strife, unfit for liberal habitation. And what, then,
of those lecture-laden works of “progressive literature” which promised: “We
shall make this earth a dwelling for newborn ideals”?
I have a friend — an analyst, a philosopher, a steadfast atheist. He once told me that sometimes in the middle of the night he would wake, trembling, and weave together a litany of ultimate questions: Was this world but an accident? Could it truly be that God had once sculpted Adam and Eve? How could there be any design, any symbolic purpose in the making of creation? Could it be that each life — mine, my wife’s, my child’s — is bound invisibly to some diffused cosmic wave? What meaning lies within this great Life? Is it noble at all? Do men come merely to eat, to couple, to suffer, to celebrate — or does existence carry a more exalted aim? Could the bare act of survival itself be the noble end?
The chain of such questions is so vast, the answers so scattered across the tomes of prophets and philosophers, that to wander this labyrinth is to risk madness — or, by the strange alchemy of suffering, to emerge as sage.
In the present intellectual climate, such meditations ought not to trouble atheists. For we are told to spin eternally between two poles: religiosity on one side, secularism on the other. And yet, whether true or false, we remain enchanted by ideals themselves. If we confess our weakness for ideals, then a devout socialist may well find himself astonished — is he, in truth, not close kin to the zealot of an Islamic Republic rather than its sworn adversary? Conversely, a hard-line nationalist is left baffled — what has cow slaughter to do with the majesty of the State?
Thus are we confronted with a multitude of theological questions, though never theological answers. And should atheists fool themselves that divine questions cannot stir their emotions, they risk ending as madmen, bohemians, or even believers in a monolithic religion — but for reasons entirely opposite to the faithful. The devout dismiss such questions as illegitimate, for their scriptures have already answered them. The atheists too dismiss them — for their philosophies cannot. Yet in truth these questions remain lodged in the subconscious, like unhealed wounds. Occasionally they rise to the surface and bleed. And even the most romantic believer, the bohemian theist, cannot forever conceal the scar.
With age, one watches parents, kin, and comrades vanish into death. The columns of newspapers deepen the monotony of days. No messenger from afar shall bring tidings of fortune now. Youth’s projects, once ablaze with meaning, stand revealed as transient folly — mere scaffolds before the terror of death’s waiting-room. Then, at stray moments, one feels the primal idols, the old gods, boring fresh holes into the soul. What irony, what torment! In the dark of night the series of ultimate questions reappears, like specters — and this time, they do not merely whisper; they thunder, shaking the mind. The thought of an afterlife stirs. But since there is no God, what shall this old man do? Trudge toward despair’s abyss? Or cast aside his broken convictions and begin chanting the name of God?
This chaos, this inner wreckage, might never have been if only — if only we had slain God without slaying desire. But instead, by preserving the ego and murdering God, we have led civilization into corruption. Our separatism, our intolerance — these are but the penance for our deicide.
I glimpse these anxieties in Bibhutibhushan’s Pather Panchali, in that final moment when Apu turns toward his son Kajal. That turning contained a plea for life’s moral explanation. For an instant, Apu felt that a godless world’s despairing interpretation was worthless to the individual. What is the value of life in this vast world-court? If ants perish unjustly, who cares? If men die in sin or virtue, what difference to the universe? Rebellions, riots, revolutions, pandemics, communism, religion, irreligion — all these -isms and counter-isms, these noble and ignoble philosophies, are but empty dust. Science too, at such a scale, avails nothing. What remains paramount is the individual self. Hunger, grief, incompleteness — these must be borne. To preserve this self, to enjoy it with fullness, to awaken it if possible — therein lies the success of birth. To chew, to taste, to savour life to its core — that is the essence. All other divisions are man-made, breeding grounds of suffering.
And thus arises an ineffable devotion, not to doctrines, but to life itself — life as the divine gift to be clasped with hope and faith. Here Bibhutibhushan stands magnificent. He showed personal catastrophe against the canvas of social ruin, yet never blurred the two. He did not hurl social rage into the barrel of a revolutionary’s gun. He did not let private despair fester into faithless nihilism. His poverty leads not to mass slogans, but to the dawn of selfhood. Contrast this with Manik Bandyopadhyay’s leaflet-writing character, who sought liberation not through knowledge but through the gun — only to fall to police bullets, while his leaders cashed his death into political power, steering the nation back to the same old path.
So too with secularism: a progressive’s attempt at neutrality, but one that smuggles in the apparatus of fundamentalist consumerism — promising equality, delivering division.
And yet life is brief. Why, when held under a magnifying glass, does it appear so vast? This paradox gnaws at our individuality. These are the questions that mock us daily. We do not want answers, lest our fragility be exposed. We want our selfhood hidden. And yet, some truths cannot be hidden: the dead do not rise. God is dead — He shall not return. And so, within this secular society, we must endure — with separatism and intolerance as our companions.
Since the nineteenth century, God’s disappearance has often been treated as a refined cultural loss. A century ago Max Weber declared that the modern godless age was defined by alienation. With the collapse of divine unity, man became fragmented. Into this void marched Marxism and Fascism — binding men not with hymns, but with terror. Political systems, darker than churches, preyed upon the yearning for oneness. Alienation persists still, and since God will not return, mankind remains hostage to the hypocrisies of ideologies. For without ideals, intelligent life cannot endure. The Islamic State of today stands as burning testimony. And the strange irony: progressives applaud such religious orders, for secularism itself behaves like a religion without God. Marx’s bloody revolution becomes indistinguishable from ISIS’s apocalyptic jihad.
Without God or faith, modern man is thrust into the scientific world of rationality and the supernatural — a world that betrays him. For no doctrine yet has mastered the primal instincts without brute force. Religion alone once achieved it, through voluntary submission to discipline, through sacrifice aimed at communion with the divine. Other ideologies speak not of sacrifice. From this imbalance between desire and ideal springs intolerance. In a consumerist society, where rivalry dictates all, where no scientific creed can justify unselfish renunciation, to expect tolerance is folly.
Secularism, then, is not neutrality but substitution — the replacement of God with an elaborate fiction inscribed in constitutions, a pious lie. For man can never be neutral; he is born, he dies, while the cosmos stretches before and beyond him. Secularism becomes a burden for great men to carry, a device for rulers to divide the people under the guise of uniting them. Modern godless man, stripped of old-world joy, unmoored from morality, is devoured by his own desires, leaving the dispossessed to drift lawlessly. Post-Renaissance man found himself in a desolate world, with no spiritual companion to guide his soul toward fulfillment.
Say the Church was corrupt, taming men with false promises of heaven — and yet, are today’s rulers not more mendacious? Promising liberty, they exploit men as fodder for politics and profit. Under the illusion of democracy, they have hurled civilization into the market of commodities. They have broken belief and built unbelief, where unbelievers speak only in advertisements and applause, their joys sold for corporate profit. An Apple iPhone becomes a sacrament of happiness — because propaganda, more sophisticated than Goebbels or Lenin or the Vatican, has declared it so. This propaganda infiltrates the very notion of “freedom of expression,” planting one-sided certainties in our brains.
It is easy to hail secularism as a positive creed. Easy to say: governments must help the poor; the rich must donate; industries must be nationalized for laborers’ safety. Such platitudes require no expertise. But how? Ask this, and silence follows. Even experts, when pressed, prove themselves heirs to Lenin, Hitler, Indira Gandhi. For the promise of secularism has yet to yield discovery; its fruit has been separatism and intolerance, spread ceaselessly among men.
I believe that even those who live as atheists, agnostics, or rationalists without invoking any supernatural agency cannot truly be secular. A neutral life inevitably severs citizens from the organic continuity of religion. Historically too, neutrality falters: for centuries men embraced faith without bargaining. Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism — all stressed sacrifice, humility, humanity. True, they strayed, fell short, but for five millennia religion taught men the art of civilization. Since the eighteenth century, however, in just two centuries, tens of thousands of ideologies — each breaking God, each trying to replace Him — have been cast into the dustbin. Chiefly because they lacked sacrifice.
The world we inhabit now is a negative world, and it demands certainties. It once seemed necessary to build our world on secular foundations for human welfare. But we find that secular states are hotbeds of terror and intolerance. And so, men seek refuge once more in the idea of a religious state — not the fanatic’s state, but that world which religion had always promised: the fullness of humanity, the elevation of life. Secularism has failed to deliver it. Religion, with all its flaws, remains the greatest human project, though it demands acceptance of imperfection.
Have we, in our visions of tomorrow, learned at last to imagine a holy temple without the fraud of priests?
I have a friend — an analyst, a philosopher, a steadfast atheist. He once told me that sometimes in the middle of the night he would wake, trembling, and weave together a litany of ultimate questions: Was this world but an accident? Could it truly be that God had once sculpted Adam and Eve? How could there be any design, any symbolic purpose in the making of creation? Could it be that each life — mine, my wife’s, my child’s — is bound invisibly to some diffused cosmic wave? What meaning lies within this great Life? Is it noble at all? Do men come merely to eat, to couple, to suffer, to celebrate — or does existence carry a more exalted aim? Could the bare act of survival itself be the noble end?
The chain of such questions is so vast, the answers so scattered across the tomes of prophets and philosophers, that to wander this labyrinth is to risk madness — or, by the strange alchemy of suffering, to emerge as sage.
In the present intellectual climate, such meditations ought not to trouble atheists. For we are told to spin eternally between two poles: religiosity on one side, secularism on the other. And yet, whether true or false, we remain enchanted by ideals themselves. If we confess our weakness for ideals, then a devout socialist may well find himself astonished — is he, in truth, not close kin to the zealot of an Islamic Republic rather than its sworn adversary? Conversely, a hard-line nationalist is left baffled — what has cow slaughter to do with the majesty of the State?
Thus are we confronted with a multitude of theological questions, though never theological answers. And should atheists fool themselves that divine questions cannot stir their emotions, they risk ending as madmen, bohemians, or even believers in a monolithic religion — but for reasons entirely opposite to the faithful. The devout dismiss such questions as illegitimate, for their scriptures have already answered them. The atheists too dismiss them — for their philosophies cannot. Yet in truth these questions remain lodged in the subconscious, like unhealed wounds. Occasionally they rise to the surface and bleed. And even the most romantic believer, the bohemian theist, cannot forever conceal the scar.
With age, one watches parents, kin, and comrades vanish into death. The columns of newspapers deepen the monotony of days. No messenger from afar shall bring tidings of fortune now. Youth’s projects, once ablaze with meaning, stand revealed as transient folly — mere scaffolds before the terror of death’s waiting-room. Then, at stray moments, one feels the primal idols, the old gods, boring fresh holes into the soul. What irony, what torment! In the dark of night the series of ultimate questions reappears, like specters — and this time, they do not merely whisper; they thunder, shaking the mind. The thought of an afterlife stirs. But since there is no God, what shall this old man do? Trudge toward despair’s abyss? Or cast aside his broken convictions and begin chanting the name of God?
This chaos, this inner wreckage, might never have been if only — if only we had slain God without slaying desire. But instead, by preserving the ego and murdering God, we have led civilization into corruption. Our separatism, our intolerance — these are but the penance for our deicide.
I glimpse these anxieties in Bibhutibhushan’s Pather Panchali, in that final moment when Apu turns toward his son Kajal. That turning contained a plea for life’s moral explanation. For an instant, Apu felt that a godless world’s despairing interpretation was worthless to the individual. What is the value of life in this vast world-court? If ants perish unjustly, who cares? If men die in sin or virtue, what difference to the universe? Rebellions, riots, revolutions, pandemics, communism, religion, irreligion — all these -isms and counter-isms, these noble and ignoble philosophies, are but empty dust. Science too, at such a scale, avails nothing. What remains paramount is the individual self. Hunger, grief, incompleteness — these must be borne. To preserve this self, to enjoy it with fullness, to awaken it if possible — therein lies the success of birth. To chew, to taste, to savour life to its core — that is the essence. All other divisions are man-made, breeding grounds of suffering.
And thus arises an ineffable devotion, not to doctrines, but to life itself — life as the divine gift to be clasped with hope and faith. Here Bibhutibhushan stands magnificent. He showed personal catastrophe against the canvas of social ruin, yet never blurred the two. He did not hurl social rage into the barrel of a revolutionary’s gun. He did not let private despair fester into faithless nihilism. His poverty leads not to mass slogans, but to the dawn of selfhood. Contrast this with Manik Bandyopadhyay’s leaflet-writing character, who sought liberation not through knowledge but through the gun — only to fall to police bullets, while his leaders cashed his death into political power, steering the nation back to the same old path.
So too with secularism: a progressive’s attempt at neutrality, but one that smuggles in the apparatus of fundamentalist consumerism — promising equality, delivering division.
And yet life is brief. Why, when held under a magnifying glass, does it appear so vast? This paradox gnaws at our individuality. These are the questions that mock us daily. We do not want answers, lest our fragility be exposed. We want our selfhood hidden. And yet, some truths cannot be hidden: the dead do not rise. God is dead — He shall not return. And so, within this secular society, we must endure — with separatism and intolerance as our companions.
Since the nineteenth century, God’s disappearance has often been treated as a refined cultural loss. A century ago Max Weber declared that the modern godless age was defined by alienation. With the collapse of divine unity, man became fragmented. Into this void marched Marxism and Fascism — binding men not with hymns, but with terror. Political systems, darker than churches, preyed upon the yearning for oneness. Alienation persists still, and since God will not return, mankind remains hostage to the hypocrisies of ideologies. For without ideals, intelligent life cannot endure. The Islamic State of today stands as burning testimony. And the strange irony: progressives applaud such religious orders, for secularism itself behaves like a religion without God. Marx’s bloody revolution becomes indistinguishable from ISIS’s apocalyptic jihad.
Without God or faith, modern man is thrust into the scientific world of rationality and the supernatural — a world that betrays him. For no doctrine yet has mastered the primal instincts without brute force. Religion alone once achieved it, through voluntary submission to discipline, through sacrifice aimed at communion with the divine. Other ideologies speak not of sacrifice. From this imbalance between desire and ideal springs intolerance. In a consumerist society, where rivalry dictates all, where no scientific creed can justify unselfish renunciation, to expect tolerance is folly.
Secularism, then, is not neutrality but substitution — the replacement of God with an elaborate fiction inscribed in constitutions, a pious lie. For man can never be neutral; he is born, he dies, while the cosmos stretches before and beyond him. Secularism becomes a burden for great men to carry, a device for rulers to divide the people under the guise of uniting them. Modern godless man, stripped of old-world joy, unmoored from morality, is devoured by his own desires, leaving the dispossessed to drift lawlessly. Post-Renaissance man found himself in a desolate world, with no spiritual companion to guide his soul toward fulfillment.
Say the Church was corrupt, taming men with false promises of heaven — and yet, are today’s rulers not more mendacious? Promising liberty, they exploit men as fodder for politics and profit. Under the illusion of democracy, they have hurled civilization into the market of commodities. They have broken belief and built unbelief, where unbelievers speak only in advertisements and applause, their joys sold for corporate profit. An Apple iPhone becomes a sacrament of happiness — because propaganda, more sophisticated than Goebbels or Lenin or the Vatican, has declared it so. This propaganda infiltrates the very notion of “freedom of expression,” planting one-sided certainties in our brains.
It is easy to hail secularism as a positive creed. Easy to say: governments must help the poor; the rich must donate; industries must be nationalized for laborers’ safety. Such platitudes require no expertise. But how? Ask this, and silence follows. Even experts, when pressed, prove themselves heirs to Lenin, Hitler, Indira Gandhi. For the promise of secularism has yet to yield discovery; its fruit has been separatism and intolerance, spread ceaselessly among men.
I believe that even those who live as atheists, agnostics, or rationalists without invoking any supernatural agency cannot truly be secular. A neutral life inevitably severs citizens from the organic continuity of religion. Historically too, neutrality falters: for centuries men embraced faith without bargaining. Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism — all stressed sacrifice, humility, humanity. True, they strayed, fell short, but for five millennia religion taught men the art of civilization. Since the eighteenth century, however, in just two centuries, tens of thousands of ideologies — each breaking God, each trying to replace Him — have been cast into the dustbin. Chiefly because they lacked sacrifice.
The world we inhabit now is a negative world, and it demands certainties. It once seemed necessary to build our world on secular foundations for human welfare. But we find that secular states are hotbeds of terror and intolerance. And so, men seek refuge once more in the idea of a religious state — not the fanatic’s state, but that world which religion had always promised: the fullness of humanity, the elevation of life. Secularism has failed to deliver it. Religion, with all its flaws, remains the greatest human project, though it demands acceptance of imperfection.
Have we, in our visions of tomorrow, learned at last to imagine a holy temple without the fraud of priests?
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