PEOPLED by more than 100 million 111 ethnic, linguistic and cultural groups speaking 70 major languages and dialects, our country today proudly remains a coherent nation, sharing a common racial identity, moral concepts and historical experiences.
This is so because, despite variations in cultural and religious practices, we are a people distinctly endowed with a clear understanding on the limit to secularism and free expression. Otherwise, we would have experienced the violent aftermath in France following Charlie Hebdo’s wrong interpretation of secularism.
Geographically, the Philippines, with a total land area of 115,800 square miles, is divided into 17 regions comprising 80 provinces, 138 cities and 1,474 towns scattered in 7,150 islands from the Northern tip of Luzon, the central plains, the mountainous areas of the Visayas and up to the Southwestern tip of Tawi-Tawi Province in Mindanao.
A New York Times editorial said: “Irreverent magazines like Charlie Hebdo have been a fixture in Western societies for many years, and France has strong tradition of such journalism.”
Briefly and clearly, the secular principle means separation of church and state and it’s inviolably (not to be broken) stated in Section 6, Article 11, of the 1987 Constitution.
Anthony C. Grayling, the distinguished philosophy professor at Birkbeck College, University of London, and author of the bestselling book Ideas that Matter (Phoenix, 2010), said: ‘Secular’ does not imply ‘anti-religious’, it implies ‘non-religious’. So there have been and are many religious people who are also secularists, because they take the view that religion and government should be kept apart. It has been argued that secularism in the Western tradition was an invention of the Christian Church, which wished to keep itself free of interference from the temporal powers whenever and wherever it found itself unable to govern the temporal powers.
“A secular dispensation is one in which matters of governments, public policy and administration, and publicly funded provision of services, are kept distinct from any religious organizations or movements and their particular wishes for the form that society should take and how it should be run.”
“In the natural way,” he said, “the word ‘secular’ has come to acquire additional connotations and extensions of meaning. So for a main example, a secular outlook is one that bases itself on reason and evidence, at the same time opposing acceptance of views on the basis of faith, tradition, authority of superstition.”
He pointed out further: “Secular values and principles are most illuminatingly associated with those of the Enlightenment, celebrating individual autonomy and enjoining the responsibility to think for oneself and to base one’s life and outlook on rational and empirical grounds. Commitment to science, humanist ethics and democratic institutions lies at the core of this outlook, and by its nature therefore secularism is pluralistic.”
Grayling explained that the US is a constitutionally secular state; the First Amendment to the Constitution provides that there is to be no public interference in matters of religion and vice versa. “Turkey under the reformist project of Mustapha Kemar Atatürk became a secular state after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. France is a secular state; the most populous part of the United Kingdom, England is not a secular state, because it has an established Church which is deeply implicated in the constitutional fabric of the state, has a major unelected presence in the legislature, runs over a quarter of secondary schools and three-quarters of primary schools, and presides over most of the ritual functions of the state such as coronations of monarchs, royal weddings, and ceremonies of state including daily prayer in Parliament.
According to him, “the word ‘secularism’ itself was coined in 1846 by the atheist and Owenite socialist writer George Holyoake, who five years earlier had spent six months in prison for blasphemy. He was the last person to be convicted for this ‘crime’ in England. In a magazine founded for the purpose of promoting the idea of secularism, the Reasoner, Holyoake argued not merely for the separation of Church and state but for the development of a secular society, in which the influence of religion would be relegated to the private sphere and all the public matters would be cooperatively decided on rational principles.
“In the view of some, the future safety and sanity of the world depend on secularism at least in the Church-state separation sense, and ideally in the more inclusive social sense too. The work of such organizations as the Secular “Coalition for America and Americans United in the United States, and the National Secular Society in the United Kingdom, is vital in articulating the argument for secularism and opposing the continuous effort by religious organizations to increase their influence in the public domain.
“A notable achievement in secularist endeavor was its defeat of the Roman Catholics Church’s efforts to have reference to Europe’s Christian part inserted in the preamble to draft versions of a European Constitution. Europe is the most secular region of the world, being the home of the Enlightenment and all that this implies; for both sides of the debate about secularism that is a fact of singular importance, and illustrates the importance that secularism has for those who reflect on it.”
To reach the writer, e-mail cecilio.arillo@gmail.com