Another good piece from Malaysiakini. Very insightful.

Highlights:

Secularism has itself become a messianic religion, convinced of its own infallibility, hostile towards dissent, and determined to place strict limits on how all other systems of faith and belief in society are practiced.

The high priests of secularism are the educated middle classes, who use their dominance of politics, media, education and law to proselytise their secular values… They identify with and promote the causes of the like-minded in other countries, convinced that the only answer to religious confrontation is a more complete domination of secular values.

And

The only possible response to those who oppose secularism is a form of faith-based, literalist religious observance. This is because secularism and religion confront each other as antipathetic ideologies, each insisting on its own absolutist standards.

(The religious movements) object to the relentless and articulate hostility to their basic beliefs conveyed through the mainstream media. They watch with alarm as their children are educated in an atmosphere that ridicules, attacks or ignores their parents’ core values.

But even as they react in opposition to secularism, the patterns of their religiosity, observance and activism are deeply imbued with secularist conceptions, yielding a much more dynamic and unpredictable type of religious movement.

And

In secular Europe, where less and less is held sacred from either exploitation or ridicule, minority cultures are expected to conform immediately to the same boundaries of the sacred and the profane… Secularism, in other words, has been stretched to advance a nasty, exclusionist form of right-wing politics.

Finally,

It is in the media that religion is portrayed as the fulcrum of conservatism versus change, or reaction versus progression. In so many of the contemporary controversies over religion, it is the media which chooses who will speak for each side, rather than the religious communities themselves.

The media often cannot resist the urge to portray conflict in stark, simplified terms – as “progressives” versus “fundamentalists”. The media has always had dual, and partially contradictory, roles: as a representer of public opinion and a shaper of public opinion.

In the years ahead, the media will play a central role in how this current age of religious confrontation evolves, and hopefully, resolves. It must be attentive to how it represents, and as a consequence shapes, public opinion…  Experience shows that the presentation of confrontations between stark positions and moral absolutes only serves to sharpen conflict and heighten defensive reactions.

What these secularist media should maybe also consider is Peace Journalism.

I’m kind of becoming a brand ambassor for Malaysiakini…