A response from sekhar ramakrishan on nizar's paper.
--- On Sun, 9/8/09, Sekhar Ramakrishnan
r...@columbia.edu wrote:
Life after Secularism
By life I mean what life forms are predicated on. A
life
form is a complex of practices, values, reasons, and
beliefs
etc. that picks out a group as a people, or more or
less
characterizes a group as a people.
I am unclear here as to whether you are speakng of life in
general, or only of
human life. As you know, biologists have a fairly broad
definition of life by
now. In particular, the cold virus or the HIV is a life
form. I am not sure how
what you write applies to those life forms or to parasites
that cause
tapeworm, malaria or schistosomiasis. You may want to
clarify this. I will
assume for now that you are speaking of human life.
All
life forms while mutually exclusive can coexist with
out antagonisms. Another implication of
under-determination is the openness of life forms.
This
openness probably originates from the vagueness of
the
expressions of life, because it may not be made clear
whether a particular expression applies on any given
occasion.
Your co-existence idea is ok, but it is just an assertion,
and should be
recognized as such. As for the openness, you lost me; I
simply don't
understand it.
It is not ironical to find the ways in which death of
the
other is accommodated varied greatly from people to
people while death remains stoically one.
Well, death is the end of the life form. There is nothing
more to it. What you
call accommodation is just the way many people
invoke superstition in the
form of religious belief to deny the finality of death.
Thus, there is only
one
truth (finality of death) but many false ideas or
accommodations
(reincarnation, ascent to heaven, waiting for Judgment Day,
etc). Are you
saying something else?
The openness of a life form may also come from the
internal vagueness of its expressions, because with
in
the same life form it can not be made clear whether
any
given single expression captures the feature of life
it
is supposed to be an expression of, or captures that
feature fully.
Can you give an example of this? I am lost otherwise.
with in the same life form, expression extends
vertically
and horizontally, without the need of consolidation.
Again, an example will help.
Hearkening to the silence, feeling the void ness and
seeing the unseen in the expressions are sometimes
ways
in which life forms intimate themselves about their
limits. Putting a
closure to this movement of life is
what I call in this context determining.
If I understand you correctly, you consider the many
unknowns in the world
around and within us as open and the role of
religions in offering
explanations for them (how human life originated, what
happens after death,
how do we catch malaria or elephantiasis) as
determining. Am I right? If so,
there is a serious problem, since science offers factual
explanations while
religion offers superstition, as I explain below.
Secularism
Secularism is part of a package deal. When you accept
secularism other terms in the deal, as a matter of
course,
comes binding on you.
Going by the Western concept of secularism, which is
separation of church
and state, there are atheist secularists like Nehru and
Mao, and religious
secularists like Jimmy Carter and Tony Blair (and perhaps
Obama). If you
extend it
to the Indian concept of secularism where all religions
are
supported in the public space (haj subsidies, temple
maintenance, poojas to
launch ships), it is even less clear what the other
terms in the deal are.
What are the other terms in the deal?
there is what may be called the rationality
principle,
reconstructed from what is perceived to be the
scientific
rationality
The second theme that informs the content of
secularism
as a world view is the principle of utility.
Market centered production and consumption in the
modern
era epitomizes this principle.
I find both of these terms problematic.
Religion-based societies are not
irrational; nor do they abandon the principle of utility. I
am afraid you are
letting some philosophical idealism carry you away. I think
my point will be
clearer if you consider a modern theocracy such as Iran.
Also,
a concept such as utility is too vague because
it is quite difficult to
define it when considering social policies. To give a
simple example, there is
a big debate in the US right now over the value of
providing health care to
everyone, regardless of ability to pay. There are arguments
made about how
such a social policy will make economic sense or, from the
other side, about
the contrary. Meanwhile, you have the reality that France,
possibly the most
secular and nonreligious society around, has the best
health care system for
the entire population (and even
