The future of Canada: the election--Part V: Section C.

As in earlier editions, Section C, concentrates on the philosophical and spiritual side of the battle between the Culture of Life and the Culture of Death, the struggle For the interests of the Family and true marriage against the Forces of disintegration and nihilism.

Richard Bastien once more analyses the nature of secularism, with its denial of truth and the natural law.

An interview about Europe celebrating its 50th anniversary points to the same difficulty: the wrong kind of secularism is impoverishing the whole idea of nations working together in a supranational community.--Editor

1. WHAT'S WRONG WITH SECULARISM?

The core of common culture is religion, understood as a belief system grounded in some ultimate principle of the good. Culture derives from cult.

Secularism

What we call the "culture war" is, in fact, a war about the moral foundations of society. Two religions oppose one another: Christianity and secularism.

People generally do not think of secularism as a religion because it opposes any public expression of religious views. Yet secularism is a worldview that embodies all the features of a religion. It has its own gods (the State and the Self), speaks its own theological language (political correctness), teaches its own morality (moral relativism), and censors those violating its precepts.

What's wrong with secularism? Three things.

First, it claims that there is no room for the public expression of Judeo-Christian views or for any notion of an ultimate good. This claim is based on the unproven assumption that there is no true knowledge other than empirical. All statements not subject to the scientific method, such as ethical and philosophical statements of truth, are deemed mere opinions.

Thus, there can be no generally accepted standard of good living because no such standard can be grounded in empirical reason. Consequently, there can be no rational definition of the common good. The very possibility of an objective truth about the good of man in society is denied.

Second, because it assumes that human conduct can be explained solely by material causes, secularism is forced to deny free will and, therefore, cannot accommodate the concepts of ordered liberty and personal responsibility.

This explains why, in pursuing its objectives, it rejects anything smacking of moral education and relies instead on public control. However, emphasis on public control leads inevitably to Big Government and there is no greater delusion than the idea that we can reduce the role of the State without recourse to self-control, i.e. to moral and spiritual renewal. In short, we must choose between self-control and public control, between "more conscience or more cops".

Third, having denied any common rational concept of the good, secularism is by necessity driven to the view that the good can only be a matter of personal choice. Personal choice means moral relativism.

Because secularism denies any objective moral law, it can only be guided by majority rule. But majority rule devoid of any rational concept of the good is inherently arbitrary and unstable. It must therefore resort to violence to insure compliance, as demonstrated by the fate of Christians and Jews in the former Soviet Union, and today's China, and the other Marxist tyrannies; Nazi Germany, and Blacks in the time of slavery. Today millions of unborn babies are killed in the womb in spite of a birth rate at below replacement levels. Moral relativism tends to produce violence as well as a kind of social insanity.

In Canada, the UK and Western Europe, secularism is growing more intolerant day by day. It is expanding its assaults against traditional Christianity and Judaism (but, strangely enough, not against Islam). It argues that their adherents seek to "impose" their religious views on the whole of society. But this is a distortion of reality.

What Christians and Jews seek is conformity of State legislation to the natural law, which is grounded in reason, not faith. Most societies agree on the basics of what is right and wrong. But the only area where secularists disagree most vehemently is sexual morality which, because of their materialistic anthropology, they cannot differentiate from sexual license.

Secularists and sex

Secularists say that, as long as it involves consenting adults, sexual conduct is a strictly personal matter. This is a deceptive view. Sexual mores bear heavily on the long term health of marriage and family. No society can be indifferent to these institutions because they are essentially about the rearing of children and the transmission of culture, understood as a way of life. If marriage and family cease to be viable, the future of society is endangered, as shown by our birth rate which, for almost 30 years, has been well below the population replacement level. While opposing the public expression of Judeo-Christian views, secularists demand that the tone of public life be made to conform to their own standards. Everyone must be taught to behave as practical atheists. Even believers are required to speak and act, outside their churches and synagogues, as though God does not exist. Anything else is deemed a persecution of non-believers.

Thus, the great divide in modern politics is not between the left and the right, but rather between those who believe in an objective and universal moral law and those who do not. Those who believe in such a law, "written on the heart of man," usually acknowledge God as its author. But, as far as public morality goes, belief in God need not be relevant, because true morality is also knowable through reason.

Richard Bastien is the Director of the Catholic Civil Rights League for the National Capital Area and a regular contributor to Egards.

ENCOURAGE RELIGION IN SOCIETY

2. EUROPEAN ASSOCIATION WORRIES OVER FUTURE OF UNION

Rome--The 50th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome comes at a critical time for the European Union. Giorgio Salina, president of the Association of the Europe Foundation, told Zenit that "the winds blowing in Europe, beyond the official statements, are certainly not the best for the future of the Union."

Salina said that a congress organized by the bishops of Europe on the future of the Union is "a great opportunity for Christians to launch a lofty, strong and clear message to European women and men of good will for the resumption of the community process with renewed vigour."

The congress took place in Rome, March 13-25, to mark the anniversary of the treaty which laid the groundwork for the current European Union. A preliminary condition for continued progress, Salina said, "is a return to the spirit, ideals and hopes of the founding fathers."

Konrad Adenauer (Germany), Alcide De Gasperi (Italy) and Robert Schuman (France) were the three statesmen who had "a great desire for peace and fraternity to be made concrete in an economic, social and political collaboration." All three were Catholics "with a great and clear awareness of the common good for which nationalist egoisms must be sacrificed. They were also statesmen gifted with great political realism and wide vision."

Europe without a soul?

According to Salina, two other preliminary conditions to return to that spirit and those ideals are secularism and subsidiarity. Salina interprets "secularism" in its original meaning as pertaining to "the world."

Secularism must be one that "moves from positions of rejection of religion to positions of neutrality, so that public institutions enjoy the democratic collaboration of the Churches and of confessional communities, of cultural and philosophical associations, of all the cultural positions, and therefore also of Christianity, which in a great measure has contributed to make Europe what it is today."

"Without this tradition and history," Salina said, "we have a Europe without a soul which does not recognize itself. There is no future without an awareness of what one is."

In regard to subsidiarity, Salina explained that "it must not be only 'vertical' among community institutions, individual states and local powers, but also 'horizontal' between political power at different levels and society in its different articulations."

One "result of a correctly understood secularism, and of subsidiarity concretely carried out" is the recognition of religious liberty. This will have positive repercussions for democracy: "Respect for the religious liberty of individuals and their associations is, in fact, an index and a guarantee of respect for fundamental human rights. This implies freedom of thought, of expression, of association, of education, and of many more."

"Religious liberty guarantees the correct application of all the cultural positions of a fundamental democratic principle: 'I will refute what you say, but I will fight so that you can say it.'"

In the end, he said, "religious liberty favours the constructive contribution of religious people to the full realization of a modern democracy of all, in the service of all, recovering ethical principles and the sense of responsibility."

Back to the beginnings

Salina said these conditions "can favour the recovery of Europe, with the courageous ideal drive of the beginning, of an international role in favour of peace which especially the countries of the South call for and expect."

"All this is not an easy path," said Salina, "it is certainly strewn with difficulties, but precisely because of this it is necessary to recover the reasons that have made it a 'necessity,' that have verified the lack of alternatives to the path undertaken 50 years ago."

He said that "it is necessary to restore conditions of collaboration to find the common way, even if it is in the frank and hard confrontation between different cultures."

Salina added: "If these conditions had not been established in the beginning, no one would have even started on the path, because there were difficulties and unknowns also then and perhaps greater ones" than today (Zenit, Feb. 27, 2006).

ARTICLES BY TONY GOSGNACH AND FR. ALPHONSE DE VALK, C.S.B.