The danger of religion?

Interesting article on the FT today by Professor John Gray. He is right in pointing out that secularisation has been shown not to be the inevitable process resulting from industrialisation and scientific progress as postulated by Weber and Durkheim, among others, and, I might add, taken as ‘gospel truth’ by most of the academia until recently. He concludes by stating that “the issue is not how to exorcise religion from society. It is how rival faiths can learn to live together in peace”. I disagree.
The challenge posed by the current de-secularisation process, does not lie in the potential clash of rival religious faiths, rather it lies in the coming together of conservative religious groups in ‘unholy alliances’. This was the case in the UN population conference in 1999 where the Vatican, Sudan, Pakistan and Egypt coalesced to stop the implementation of family planning policies to counteract overpopulation and the spread of HIV. More recently, in the UK various religious groups came together to oppose gay adoption. Such high-profile campaigns in the public arena are often the result of internal divisions or rivalry between the conservative and progressive elements of a faith, as I mentioned in a previous post. However, what is of concern is the attempt by conservative faith groups to establish their interpretation of a particular faith and identity by distorting the government’s equality strands’ agenda. Whilst conservative religious groups might not aim to impose their own set of beliefs in a pluralist environment, by appealing to religion as an ‘equality strand’, they risk essentialising and reducing the religion to which they belong to their own particular understanding of it. It follows that, if the government had allowed discrimination against homosexuals by certain service providers on the grounds of their specific interpretation of a religious tradition, such interpretation would have had a legal recognition possibly over and above any other interpretation of the same religious tradition. This is why it was religious groups, opposed to the creationist fundamentalists, who fought against the teaching of creationism in Arkansas in 1981. The danger is not religion per se but the imposition of certain dogmas or interpretations on the members of a religion.
The great inheritance of the Enlightenment was not secularisation, but individual autonomy. What religious and secularist fundamentalists want to take away from us is the ability to interpret our identity and belief system, to find meaning and exercise our free will.

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