This is just one of the many subversive efforts that guardians of our regime take against its people. And they all do this in order to save “secularism.” And secularism is a good thing, right?

Secularism For The Masses

Well, you need to be careful here, because secularism is a very tricky term. On the one hand, it refers to a political system that is not defined by any religious belief. But on the other hand, it refers to people. A secular person would be someone who does not fashion his mind and life according to religion. He can be an atheist, an agnostic, a deist or even some nominal member of the world’s religious traditions. But he would not care about the rules and principles of religion.

The distinction between these two meanings of secularism is crucial. Despite the official Turkish rhetoric, one does not need to be a secular person in order to appreciate a secular political order. Many Christians in America are content with the separation of church and state, which protects not just the state but also religion. Devout Muslims can accept the same approach as well, as Sudanese-born legal scholar Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im explains brilliantly in his recent book, “Islam and the Secular State” (Harvard University Press, 2008).

In other words, “secularism” can be just fine for believers as far as it refers to the state. But asking these believers to accept secularism as a principle for their lives is something different. It is like saying, “you should either not believe in God, or not take Him too seriously.” No believer worthy of its salt would conform to that.

And yet that is precisely what the ultra-secularist establishment in Turkey proposes to its citizens. Although our constitution defines secularism only as a feature of the state (Article 24), the Constitutional Court, with a sleight of hand, has broadened it to a quality of society. “The secularism principle,” argues Turkey’s top judicial body in its famous 1989 decision, “requires that the society should be kept away from thoughts and judgments that are not based on science and reason.”

According Ergun Özbudun, a prominent and liberal professor of law, this bizarre notion of secularism aims at making citizens followers of “positivism.” That was a form of atheistic scientism promoted by French thinker Auguste Comte in late 19th century, and which was cheerfully embraced by some Young Turks and their Kemalist successors.

Forces of ‘Darkness’

This hostility toward religion stems from a presumption that Turkish secularists — and many others around the globe — take for granted. They are convinced that religious belief makes people irrational. If people believe in God, the angels, or the afterlife, their reasoning goes, they will become not just dim but also dangerous. Richard Dawkins, the world’s most prominent evangelist of atheism, made the bluntest form of this argument when he said that we wouldn’t have 9/11 and other suicide bombings if “Abrahamic faiths” and their notion of martyrdom didn’t exist.

Similarly, the all-popular John Lennon had advised us to imagine a world in which “there is no religion” and, consequently, everything comes up roses.

What renders all these let’s-get-rid-of-God-and-create-heaven-on-earth arguments invalid is that all the dreadful outcomes of religion can be caused by secular philosophies as well. Take suicide bombing. The Kamikaze pilots killed themselves for the sake of not God, but the Empire of Japan, a secular entity. More recently the Tamil Tigers have done the same thing for the sovereign homeland they want to achieve. Actually the passion for ethnically defined homelands, along with the zeal for “classless societies,” has just created the world’s greatest horrors throughout the 20th century. Nationalism and communism turned out to be more dogmatic, and lethal, than any traditional faith could ever be.

But what about science? Secularists often argue that religious belief impedes scientific progress. This argument not just overlooks the fact that many of the world’s greatest scientists were, and still are, theistic believers. It also turns a blind eye to the atheists who crippled science because of their own dogmatism. Trofim Lysenko ruined Soviet agriculture because his Stalinist ideology led him to deny Mendelian genetics — which was, remarkably enough, the work of Gregor Mendel, a Christian monk.

Believe In Anything

The truth is that theistic faith doesn’t necessarily make people irrational, because it is not incompatible with reason. Moreover, human reason is not as all-encompassing as the radical rationalists believe. That’s why people almost always end up in having some sort of belief in some form of absolute. If not God, then this can be the nation, the tribe, the ideology, the Supreme Leader, the sciences, or even the blockbuster celebrity. “If man ceases to believe in God,” as G. K. Chesterton said, “he can believe in anything.” And if he doesn’t believe in anything at all, then he soon becomes a nihilist — which is really not the best thing to be.

In short, there is nothing inherently problematic about religion, and both religious and secular people can be rational or mindless, reasonable or crazy. And sometimes those who rant about “religious dogmatism” may turn out to be as bigoted as the wildest religious fanatic.

If you don’t still believe me, please look at Turkish society and try to figure out who is reasonable and who is not. Just note which circles are the most xenophobic, illiberal and paranoid, and then check their commitment to secularism. You will see that minds that have been freed from religion can be filled with all the nonsense in the world.