Commentary: Saving God through a secular faith: A new testament

Religion is a spring of goodness. But at times in modern history, it has also represented the mother of all hatred.

The tendency of Abrahamic faiths - Judaism, Christianity and Islam - to respectively condemn the heresy of others to sanctify their own righteousness is testament to this fact.

Indonesia's devout and learned founding fathers realized the inherent divisiveness of organized religion. The late Mohammad Roem once described Indonesia's large Muslim population as a source of both pride and concern.

That was why former vice president Mohammad Hatta, then Muhammadiyah chairman Ki Bagus Hadikusumo and others in 1945 quickly rewrote the original draft of the Pancasila national ideology, which initially required Muslims to implement sharia, instead they simply substituted "belief in one God."

The architects of the republic understood that history was satiated with the blind ambition of the pious and clergy. How scripture was used as a common blunt tool to impair modernism and critical thinking and, that a book compiled by a roman emperor and slapped within a divine catalog became carte blanche to torture, burn and confiscate.

The world's most advanced civilizations today arose out of this struggle against religious dogma.

The history of the Inquisition serves as a forewarning of the present day omission of applying critical inquiry to text-based faith in the deleterious m*lange of religion and politics.

The Inquisition began in the late 12th century as a response to counter the church's waning influence on local communities. But worldly motives accelerated its descent after it was decreed that the property of heretics would be confiscated by the church. Old Testament chapters such as Deuteronomy were the accusers' bible to indict the blasphemous.

Galileo, the founder of modern experimental science, was convicted for defending Copernicus' theory of the planets. The Holy See's Index Librorum Prohibitorum (List of Prohibited Books) was a list of censored volumes comprised of authors representing the pinnacle of modern science, literature and philosophy -- including John Locke, Voltaire, J.J. Rousseau, Rene Descartes, Johannes Kepler, Thomas Paine, Charles Darwin and D.H. Lawrence. The index was updated as recently as 1948, until it was abolished in 1966.

"The history of Christianity is principally a story of mankind's misery and ignorance rather than of its unrequited love of God," wrote Sam Harris, the author of The End of Faith.

"While Christianity has few living inquisitors today, Islam has many."

Harris is an atheist, but his final remark rings no less true.

Muslims, not least in Indonesia, are straggling in the war between religious doctrine versus critical inquiry.

Paul Berman in the New York Times Magazine asked: "What have we needed for these terrorists to prosper? ... Immense failure of political courage and imagination within the Muslim world."

Islam's silent majority has allowed fundamentalists to exploit religious doctrine and make sacraments of illiberalism and violence, which are included in various Islamic texts: A moral omission that continues to leave Islam a fertile breeding ground for extremism.

Indonesia needs to seriously revisit what the late Nurcholish Madjid said was "the mental readiness to always test and retest religious truths in the face of material, moral and historical facts".

A reprisal of "secularization", not the kind that celebrates atheism, but one that according to Nurcholish, desacralizes everything other than that what truly possesses divine attributes. A liberating strategy to distinguish the truly transcendental from the temporal.

Noted Algerian-French Islamic thinker Mohammed Arkoun once called for a rethink of Islam by "encouraging and initiating audacious, free, productive thinking on Islam today".

But Indonesia's present Muslim scholars still fail to launch a sustained systematic analysis of Islam's applicability to modern problems.

Notice how politically reticent scholars and state officials were to react to sharia clauses applied in provinces that are excessive, sexist and barbaric.

Few had the courage that Nurcholish did decades earlier to say that "sharia as we know it today is an evolutionary historical *rather than religious* process after the death of the prophet".

It took centuries to overcome the Vatican's religious dogma.

The struggle within Islam is much more challenging. Unlike the Roman Catholic structure that has a unifying edifice, Islam's dogmatics work on the fringes of a religion that has no history of an organizing center.

Hence more than just overturning a monolithic structure as was the case in the Inquisition, the current endeavor is truly a heart's and mind's struggle of reason over history, culture and dogma.

Whether Indonesia's ulemas are truly sympathetic toward such a rethink is questionable. Like the bishops of the Inquisition, ultimately they are the ones whose monopoly on the power of "God's will" shall be lost if devout men and women liberate themselves from the deterministic conditions of a non-secular faith.

The politics of religion, like all politics, is about power.

What is so dangerous about liberal thought and ijtihad (independent interpretation) is not that it denies Allah or the existence of a divine being, but that it will negate people who claim to exclusively represent God's rule on earth.