May 28, 2025

A page from the luxury illuminated manuscript Wenceslas Bible,...

Wednesday:
My views on secularism – May 28, 2025

In the course of what has been labeled the "enlightenment" the term secular is often considered imperative to that tradition. Secularism being primarily the concept of the separation of state and religion, the church in the west. While this sentiment has good and reasonable intentions, it fails to understand the importance of faith in the long and yet more traditional perspective of history. Religion is more often than not, something that has been shaped more by the culture of any given region, than the other way around. Religious beliefs and traditions have often informed man of profound truths and insights, and in so doing also improved the general condition of life.

    In modern times, religion is often painted as something that is oppressive and something that has been imposed on a population, but considering the historical perspective this could not possibly be further from the truth. While religions in the world may vary in detail, they all hold many more elements in common than not; religions converge around the source, the force that set in motion everything in existence. By claiming that people have been oppressed by and are being oppressed by religion, you are blaming the long standing traditions and truths of a people and a region, without seeing the oppression for what it is – idolatry. Religion and other ways of knowing the source or getting closer to the source is not oppression, but when people interpret the source or the tools to find the source in such a way where man puts himself at the center, when he commits idolatry, oppression makes itself in no time apparent. It is surely the case that idolatry leads to oppression, but this is in no part due to religion or the source, this is due to the totalitarian tendencie at the intersection of ideas and the saturation of being in a world that has departed further and further away from the source, a world that has been almost completely enveloped in the darkness of the Kali Yuga.

Fiqh
Islamic jurisprudence(فقه)

    You may blame religion and man's attempt to get closer to the transcendental, but you would be mistaken to take this for something oppression, and you will also fail to see the oppression in your own actions and your own assumptions. Rules and laws exist for a reason: to put order into the world and to make the source apparent in every fibre of the human condition, and to make the source palatable to the human condition. The mistake that man does is not in implementing the rules of the sacred, but to make his own version of the truth and thus corrupting the source and the truth. In the modern world, idolatry is the source of most of the decay – man has deemed himself immortal and nonpareil in the face of nature and thus he has turned his back to the real source. Man is no longer humbled by nature, and this is the way of the sin. At the end of the Kali Yuga, this will become more apparent, and we're reaching that point–singularity–by every decaying moment. What has been passed off as great achievements are in fact no such thing, but let this become apparent, don't just take my words for it – feel it with every decaying step.

Reginald Drax – May 28, 2025.