WHEN PEACE IS NO PEACE - 25
Peace, Spirituality and Religion

We have observed that right reason demands that the right to freedom of religion and conscience is indispensable for peace in a multi-religious society. However peace will not arise from a mere declaration of principles but in actually working out the principles in practice. So freedom of religion will surely imply that one will be free and unhindered to propagate his religious beliefs and be able to share it with whoever he likes, and whoever would like; and even the freedom to change ones religion if he so wills. To deny such freedom to any one is a deep violence against his religious sense and conscience. It means condemning one to a life of in authenticity, a life of hypocrisy and a false life. He becomes literally a prisoner of conscience.

It must immediately be observed that the right to freedom of religion, does not mean that all religions are equally true or a recipe for religious indifferentism. Such would be absurd since we know that religions hold beliefs that can contradict each other. In such cases both cannot be equally true. Thus if one after his own free decision and reflection in view of the truth, decides to change his allegiance to any religious faith, that is a part of his religious right. Unfortunately some religions forbid or pass death sentence on their members who decide to quit. We observe this in some Muslim countries where other religions are denied the right to freely and openly speak or propagate their faith. “Islam is the state religion of Saudi Arabia; the government has not allowed the construction of any non Muslim place of worship. No religion other than Islam is allowed to schedule public services and even the possession of bibles, rosaries and crucifix is forbidden… while it is home to 800,000 Catholics, virtually all of them foreign workers. Saudi Arabia is the only country on the Arabia peninsula without a Catholic church.”

What makes this attitude highly hypocritical, dishonest, myopic, selfish, absurd, and shamefully inconsistent, is that while other religions are denied the right to exercise their religious freedom, yet the same religions and countries continue to sponsor the propagation of their faith in other countries. Commentators have queried the situation whereby Moslems enjoy privileges in non Moslem states, in traditional Christian Europe including Rome where they have one of the largest Mosques in Europe and yet some Moslem countries could not reciprocate such gestures. It is such inconsistencies and failure to see the depth of such moral madness and narrow- mindedness that caused much religious conflicts and misunderstanding, revenge and retaliation. And as an author would say, “the question of conflict and inconsistency… lies in the fact that traditions and people who enjoin propagation forbid the conversion of their members. Apart from this apparent inconsistency to deny people the right to change their religion is not just a violation of the universally accepted right of an individual but even more importantly it is to turn that religion into a prison whose followers become inmates condemned to life sentences. And of course no one wants to be in a prison, no matter how wonderful that prison might appear to be. But even more important any meaningful and genuine pluralism must include not exclude freedom of speech, choice and association. A denial of any of these is a denial of the fabric of pluralism….”

2. Religion friendly but inclusive state
Peace in a multi-religious and religiously pluralistic society equally demands that state power and state constitutions should not aim at promoting, propagating, and protecting one religion or a group, to the disadvantage of others. This means that state constitutions and laws must be such that protect the fundamental rights of every citizen and respect peoples freedom of conscience and religion and the citizens right to dignity of the human person and personal liberty. In the language of modern politics we talk of a secular state. Such a state makes religion a matter of personal decision and not the dictates of the state or public authority; it creates a level playing field which offers all religions the opportunity to develop and flourish, and people to pursue their religious activities within the bounds of the law. Without such a state, a peaceful religiously pluralistic society cannot be built. True pluralism is based on freedom of conscience, and most people would not like any religion to be imposed on them. Perhaps the only religion or group, that does not deserve such right or even the right of existence in a state is one which is against freedom of religion itself, on whose activities do violence to religious tolerance and people's fundamental rights. It could be true that due to some historical and cultural reasons, a particular religion could have taken such a root that it pervades and permeates every aspect of the people's social and political constitution, yet as long as a people have moved from homogeneous to heterogeneous societies, human rights demand that there must be religious space created for others where they can peacefully pursue their religious activities.

However, we must guard against a false secularism, which is as dangerous and intolerant as the societies which do not respect the freedom of religion. Today, in some places especially in the Western world secularity is turning to secularism. For while secularity may be religion-friendly and tolerant, secularism is hostile to religions and tends towards an atheistic and materialistic society. A healthy secular state, is “based on sharing some natural and historical- cultural values, rights/ duties that constitute the “citizenry” in which every one, believers in one faith or another, as well as non believers, can live together in a harmonious way with solidarity, and contribute to the greatest realization of each and every citizen in accordance with his/her dignity as a human person”.

On the contrary, secularism is anti-religion. In it religious thinking, religious institutions, and religious practice lose their significance within the social system. Even deliberate efforts are made to wipe God out of the socio-cultural structures. Though, secularism is not an explicit denial of God's presence like yesteryear's atheism, but a lived mentality where God is absent entirely or in part from life and the human conscience. It is precisely this culture that makes the Western materialistic modernism impermeable to the realities of faith. However, secularism cannot promote real peaceful society, for the religious question is the “first social question and respect for religious freedom is a constitutive right of the person which no civil authority has the right to deny. Those who are in charge of public welfare have the duty to respect its affirmation and favour its peaceful and orderly exercise always and every where”.

Thus Pope Paul VI in his Apostolic Exhortation “Evangelii nuntiandi” stressed “when secularization is transformed into secularism, a grave cultural crisis results, from this of which one of the signs is the loss of respect for the person and the spread of a kind of anthropological nihilism that reduces man to his instincts and tendencies”. (No.55)

In fact it has been affirmed that one of the ideological causes of the resurgence and growth of religious fundamentalism and intolerance among many in the Islamic Arabic world is due to the growth of the Western European-American materialism and secularism, whereby Western culture has come to be identified as anti- religion, a culture in which nothing appears to be sacred.

In this respect, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XV1) once observed, “In my opinion the rise of fundamentalism is caused at least in part by an implacable form of secularism. Such fundamentalism involves a rejection of this world which refuses God and respect for what is sacred, which feels it is totally autonomous, which does not acknowledge laws inherent in the human person and which rebuilds man according to its own systems of thought. The loss of meaning of what is sacred and of respect for others causes a self- defense reaction in the Arab and Islamic world in which profound contempt is expressed for the loss of meaning of the supernatural that is perceived as degeneration. So, absolutized secularism is not the answer to the terrible challenge of fundamentalism. Only a sound religious sense in profound union with reason can moderate these forms of radicalism and make it possible to find equilibrium in the dialogue of cultures”. From what we have seen so far, we can say peace among religious can neither come from a narrow-minded and intolerant religiosity nor from an anti-religions or God-hating secularism.