Saturday, September 8, 2007

Secularism is absolutely essential for a State

Few months back, I wrote an article on why I think concept of present secular state is flawed:

http://www.vinnomot.com/BiplabPal/Flawed%20secular%20state.htm

I will start from where I ended in this article:

Therefore, I am of the strong opinian that in order to set up a true secular state, one can not ignore the demand-supply aspect of religion in the emotional journey and realization of human being and the support system it forms around its followers. If science can not be a part of that realization and support system, it does not serve any significant purpose just by proving God does not exist or religion is vile. There will not be mass taker of rationalism except a few intellegent beings-not enough to form a political force. And unless we are a part of a strong political force, concept of secularism will be out from the self-organization of human society.

My point is simply this--our society, culture, laws --everything has been formed around God and religion. Or at least in the name of it. Now if I throw God out from the equation, how could we form a society and political system based on scientific social laws? Is that possible?

For example what would be law governing the divorce?

Actually it is much simpler than said for a scientific society. Social research on divorce proved that divorce has devastating effects on the kids:

"A startling thought is occurring to the folks who study the impact of divorce on children: A good divorce may be much worse than a bad marriage."

"American society may have erased the stigma that once accompanied divorce, but it can no longer ignore its massive effects. As social scientists track successive generations of American children whose parents have ended their marriages, the data are leading even some of the once-staunchest supporters of divorce to conclude that divorce is hurting American society and devastating the lives of children. Its effects are obvious in family life, educational attainment, job stability, income potential, physical and emotional health, drug use, and crime."

"But some long-term research suggests that children of broken marriages face a higher risk of divorce, difficulty forming relationships and serious psychological problems."
"Given the potential reverberating effects of divorce through a child's life, some divorce experts say that broken marriages have become a serious public policy question. "

"For parents, the question can be excruciating. ``Most adults want the freedom to end an unhappy marriage,'' said Andrew Cherlin, a professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins University. ``But they don't want to harm the lives of their children. The question of long-term effects tells us whether the difficulty of divorce will last into the next generation.''
"Three-hundred-and-thirty undergraduates at a large southeastern university completed a confidential anonymous 26 item questionnaire designed to assess the effect of parental divorce/remarriage on the relationship with their respective parents and on their own romantic relationships. The data revealed several significant relationships-respondents whose parents were divorced and remarried reported being less happy and less close to both their mother and father than respondents whose parents were still married. In addition, offspring whose parents were divorced were more likely to avoid short-term relationships. Implications and limitations of the data are suggested."
"The present study updates the P. R. Amato and B. Keith (1991) meta-analysis of children and divorce with a new analysis of 67 studies published in the 1990s. Compared with children with continuously married parents, children with divorced parents continued to score significantly lower on measures of academic achievement, conduct, psychological adjustment, self-concept, and social relations. After controlling for study characteristics, "
So when a scientific society will formulate laws on divorce-they don't need to seek for obscured religious texts of Koran or Manu--instead, they need to look after the results from social science as stated above--to protect women and kids-to minimize the impact of divorce on state productivity. State productivity must be measured in terms of education and well being of the kids.

This is what I call a secular state--a state which relies on scientific research to guide its society and does not depend on any idealism like Hinduism, communism, Islam etc. These are anti-thesis of human civilization.







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