Watch Fariborz Pooya’s new weekly TV programme called Secular Society. In this week’s programme, he interviews Hamid Taqvaee on the role of state in a secular society and the question of neutrality of state towards religion and Maryam Namazie on the comments made by Bishop of Rochester, Nazir Ali, on the question of ‘no go areas’ in Britain.
I like Mehmet Çagatay’s comments. I never thought that way before.
Name me one area that Islamic extremists have turned into a no-go area for people of a different faith or race?I wrote a comment about this episode on my blog – and frankly I think the Bishop is talking nonsense.
Hello,I agree with your views in general but I would like to make a contribution with overstepping the mark. You implied that you are not completely content with conventional secularism (separation of church and state) by positing it as the minimum solution. Then you put forward direct intervention of state as the “real secularism”: “state cannot be natural to religion… it needs to be regulated… it needs to be controlled… it needs to be taxed”. I think the major paradox of secularism is that it demands from the religious society to give up their illusions about the world in the political field. This is a very feasible solution as long as the society is free of contradictions… i.e. only if there was no other religion, gays, women, laborers, etc, etc. Even it was a “real secularism”, regulation of religious field by state, the subjectivity of statesmen overrides the quality of secularism to be promoted as real. So, even the “real secularism” is a derivative of minimum solution. In the sense of state neutrality to religion the real solution is, I am very serious, Atheism. I know it sounds strange (and there is a misunderstanding that Marx criticized both religion and Atheism at the same degree) but only Atheism could ensure the neutrality of “state”. So let me set up a dialectical formula (!): secularism is the abstract negation of Christianity in political field, Atheism is the concrete negation of both religion and secularism, socialism is the complete establishment of social objectivity as there is no need for Atheism to solve the contradictions.Best Regards,