“Well, a religion is a set of faiths. You have a faith on secularity… Hence, you belong to a religious group.”
If this is the case, then your accusations of liberal bias and anti-Christian discrimination are really just an act of religious discrimination in and of itself, Bernaridho. And this exposes more than you’d like for it to expose, because if every belief system is a religion, then all these arguments you want to have are just about which religions actually get a voice. Do I need to remind you what the dominant religion in the West has been and still is? It’s never been secularism and certainly isn’t that today, either. To deny that would just be to spin the facts towards willful ignorance.
However, I don’t agree with your characterization of secularism. Not only do I think religions are more complex than “a set of faiths,” but I don’t think all religions place the emphasis on faith that you do. This is rather a presumption carried over from a culture where the faith-based tenets of Christianity have held powerful sway for centuries. I would strongly encourage you to look to the work of religious scholars who have done work on defining religion, as well as religious philosophers who have written on faith. Things are more complicated than you’re suggesting here.
“Your claim ‘Personally, I feel that religious groups who place the tenets and doctrines of their faith first will always tend to indoctrinate rather than educate.’ also fires back to you. You indoctrinate readers through your writings. Everyone indoctrinates.”
Bernaridho, there has been a problem recognized by intellectual thinkers for some time now about defining something in a way that applies it to everything. If every belief system is a religion, or if every act of merely trying to educate or teach someone is indoctrination, then what isn’t religion and what isn’t indoctrination? If something is true of everything, it’s easy to argue that it’s also true of nothing.
But aside from this, it’s quite a pessimistic view of things to have if you think about beyond the convenience it seems to lend to an argument on first glance. Indoctrination is about teaching someone to uncritically accept a set of beliefs. If you think that’s what I’m doing in my writing, then okay — let’s see where. That’s not the same as teaching anything, though, or writing anything at all. The point behind indoctrination is that, unlike educating someone and teaching them how to think, indoctrination is teaching someone what to think to the exclusion of evidence or arguments that would challenge those ideas.
So imagine what you’re implying if everyone indoctrinates. Then there is no difference between learning to think, learning the truth, and learning a set of facts and being taught or trained to believe and depend on something without reflecting on it, thinking about it, or questioning it. There’s no possibility of really learning something, and everything we come to understand — despite our best intentions and the intentions of those around us — isn’t really understood as much as it’s molded into us like making impressions in wax. In a real sense, collapsing the difference between these two things is exactly what authoritarian and fascistic belief systems want us to do. Then everything is relative and nothing matters except power.
Do you believe this is a particularly Christian viewpoint to hold? I don’t, and beyond that I don’t even think it’s a particularly coherent viewpoint, either.
