SECULAR BELIEFS - It's Certainty Or Bust.

On social media, on any day, probably at this very minute whilst you're struggling to read this on a train, people will be being attacked, often quite crudely and cruelly, by someone online who they don't know, for something they have posted or allegedly publicly said or done. 

It may say 'Comment' at the bottom, but boy do some folk go way way beyond that. Whether its left field or right field, it's still a field that someone stands in the middle of and bellows like a prize bull. It's hard to say how widespread intolerance of other people's opinions or behaviour has become. The voices, though assertive and loud, may actually be few in number. 

Harsh vitriol I tend to interpret as coming from a contemporary strain of puritanical, knee jerk authoritarian impulses. Its almost the default social media mode. These people sound murderous in there intensity. Though the individual writer might not think this is how they are being. They probably believe they're just saying it how it is. Being brutely honest. 

Though the volume or the honesty with which an opinion is expressed, does not necessarily make it true or right. They sound as if they are extremely certain about it, and about what needs to happen. That this person is wrong, they are the secular equivalent of the anti-christ and should die a horrible prolonged death. At the very least should have their entire career petulantly snatched away from them.

This demonstrates the modern penchant for a type of rough justice. A desire, in some at least, for moral and ethical lines to be harder, firmer, clearer, more black and white. They sense a moral vacuum and want it filled, leaving no wiggle room. With the degeneration of religious or political authority, it can be difficult to know how to respond to the apparent vague messiness of relativism and liberal permissive ethics. Instinctively folk reach for the clarity and security of holding firm to values and beliefs, drawing sharper lines and high defendable boundaries. 

However illusory those lines and that certainty may actually be, there is still no room for one scintilla of doubt. For if you doubt yourself, why this is so important to you, what your motivation is, why on earth does it matter, are you even exemplary in this area? Then the evangelical purity of your quest is fundamemtally undermined. 

The consequences of not pausing to doubt, are extremely unforgiving of human failings in others, conjuring the most prejudicial judgement about people they don't know personally.  Because this immovable strength of belief, so they feel, is what is required to put the world to rights. Beliefs have to be cast, not in iron, but stainless steel. Nothing must be allowed to rust, let alone be subject to doubt.

This messianic need for inflexible conviction has also infected our political sphere. Where everything from Brexit to the major fuck up that was the Truss government, are presented with an undeserved degree of certainty about what needed to happen. One that brooks no debate or disagreement, it demands ideology on steroids. There will be pain, but it will now be our pain, and hence will be good for us.

Beliefs then are, paradoxically, in our secular era, well, are not to be lightly or provisionally held. They have to be swung around with great zeal. Anything else is weakness. Execute with complete conviction, wholeheartedly and perfectly, nothing else is acceptable. If life and the world cannot be made perfect. If religions, or democracy for that matter, haven't made the world a totally better place after millennia, well. maybe they never will.  Why bother with them?  Lets go totally freelance on belief shall we? 

G K Chesterton famously quipped - 'when a man chooses not to believe in God, he doesn't then believe in nothing, he'll believe anything.' And in these days of internet conspiracy theories and the rise of the 21st century secular puritan, that quip has come to seem, sadly, quite prophetic. People express belief in a wide variety of untruths, wishful thinking and rot. It's the zeitgeist, the more righteously unhinged it is the better. Its the unvarnished truth no one will let you say. You need to be totally defiant in the midst of your wrongheadedness.

Whilst we all can walk away from actively practicing Christianity as a faith. This doesn't mean we stop passively practicing it's values and beliefs. Whether I want them to be there or not, so many of my underlying values and beliefs are infused with veins of Christianity Lite; of fairness; equality; mutual respect; supporting the unfortunate and weak in society; tolerance; charity; turning the other cheek etc. And these are not necessarily a bad thing, not even for a non aligned Buddhist to tag along with. Unless you are Ayn Rand of course. 

In these turbulent uneasy times, we seem frequently caught between the extremes of nihilistic fundamentalism and eternalistic fundamentalism. And though it is true that the world today is in a bit of an all out ethical mess. Retreating to the lofty mountains of pristine ideals, or dismissively sweeping aside ideals as impractical daydreams, helps no one. In Buddhist practice you always start from where you are, not from where you imagine you might want to be. Though it is good to have some inkling of what the latter provisionally may be. Because it helps to have faith in a horizon to head for.

To have faith, is a very different thing to the possession of dogmatic belief.. The nearest Buddhist word to faith is sraddha, which can be translated as 'what you place your heart upon'. That is not the same as 'what you put your mind to' which is more the mode for beliefs. Religious beliefs are like specific instructions, faith an impulse that's heading toward the general direction of 'the good'. 

Whatever is missing from our secular society, and whether we need a renewed social agreement on 'common values and ethics' or not. No system of secular values or ethics will have the power to move us unless we have faith that we are being led by them towards 'the good'. The collapse of confidence and trust in our institutions, is in essence a collapse of faith in those institutions themselves as being vehicles capable of bringing what is good into existence. Still more fundamentally, it has become the collapse of faith, in faith itself.

It doesn't necessarily have to be a religious faith, just a simple optimistic faith in humanities future, willing to 'put your heart upon' making that future a better place for everyone. Just so long as we collectively all decide to do something about it - together.