Faith and Secularism

Secularism claims the need to erase every religious aspect from the public life, thus even excluding believers from democracy. This negative idea of secularism is supported by a minority of the population that is openly antireligious and highly militant; if you carefully follow them, you can’t help noticing that modern atheism structures itself like a church .

It’s now different from the theoretical and reflexive atheism of Nietzsche, Stirner, Feuerbach, partly of Marx or from Dostoevskij’s Ivan Karamazov. We’re facing a kind of atheism that, on certain levels, has lost some traits of maturity and regressed to a child state precisely when it became militant, praxeological, active. From a negative atheism, that is to say, based on the refusal of God and of the very idea of God, we arrived to a positive atheism, especially after the fall of the Berlin wall, that is to say, a struggle against all that refers to God. National-popular atheism has then imploded into its most naïve variant: antitheism.

It’s a real faith, more and more organized like a church with its ministries, rites, actions of proselytism, dogma (for ex. the infallibility of science). The contemporary antitheism is perfectly represented by new atheism’s movements and by people like Richard Dawkins; its absurdity lies in the fact that this antitheism’s stance against religion becomes a faith itself.

However, we believe that, due to his nature, it is hard for a human being to be truly atheistic. In fact, either you allow some space to God or He will inevitably be replaced by an idol, a fetish: scientism, activism, anticlericalism… In other words, something in which a human being can put all his faith, and his hope, as a man. Thus, we shouldn’t call him atheist, but “diversely religious” and we can easily understand why by reading the very words of one of the main philosophers of the XIX century, Fëdor Dostoevskij: «To live without God is a nuissance an agony. A man cannot live without kneeling down before something. If man refuses God, then he will kneel down before an idol. We are all idolaters, not atheists» (F. Dostoevskij, The Adolescent. Our translation )

One of the most widespread idols which took God’s place in the heart of many men of our secularized society is, in fact, science, considered as the only source of answers for every human question. Science philosopher Vittorio Mathieu explained: “At the heart of current atheism there’s the very meaning of the coming of a new God on earth. The coming of a God who isn’t there yet or, better, who isn’t unequivocally there yet; however we are waiting for this God and we have to prepare his coming. This God can be called in many ways, but today he has one name in particular: science”.