A Religio-Philosophical Reflection on Secularism

I had the privilege of living in different periods of my life in an autocratic and secular modern monarchic system, in a theocratic Islamic system, and in the U.S. secular democratic capitalism. Indeed, capitalism, with some major differences, is common between the mentioned political systems. In today’s reflection, I don’t mean to engage in political philosophy, though it carries an utmost interest in our lives. What I wish to do is a religio-philosophical reflection on the dilemmas of secularism.

These are my hypotheses: 1) secularism is not an indifferent separation of religion from state, it is an active ideology based on “the sovereign individual”; 2) secularism as an ideology actively separates and cuts off the relation between the ethical and the divine (cosmos, universe); 3) secularism is an excessive reaction or pendulum swing to the excessive self-righteousness and sectarian-dogmatic interpretation of faith, which in turn it swings all the way to a self-destructive nihilism.

Secularism as the Theology of the Sovereign Individual

“Secularism is not one simple thing; it has distinct theological, philosophical and political lives. Its theological and philosophical versions are formed from simple, if explosive, ideas. In its political guise, ideas are less important than institutions, and it is on the shoals of institution-building that American secularism wrecked.” So wrote Sam Haselby, in American Secular, in Aeon magazine. (https://aeon.co/essays/why-did-the-secular-ambitions-of-the-early-united-states-fail)

He is clear that secularism is not a simple and innocuous demand for separation of religion from state, it is a full force ideological and even theological stance against religions. But he complains that America couldn’t institutionally eradicate all the pretensions of religiosity from the public sphere. Let’s review Haselby’s article as a point of conversation about secularism. But before that it is good to have a summary of three secular systems: French, America, and India.

In his article, State, Religious Diversity, and the Crisis of Secularism, Rajeev Bhargava gives us some basic description of three versions of secularism: French one-sided exclusion of religion by state, America’s mutual exclusion of religion and state, and India’s distanced principle of exclusion and inclusion. I will briefly quote his description of these three versions of secularism.

“Take first the idealized French conception. In this conception, the state must be separated from religion but the state retains the power to interfere in religion. However, religion is divested of any power to intervene in matters of state. In short, separation means one-sided exclusion.”

“The idealized American self-understanding secularism interprets separation to mean mutual exclusion. Neither the state nor religion is meant to interfere in the domain of the other. This mutual exclusion is believed necessary to resolve conflicts between different Christian denominations, to grant some measure of equality between them, but most crucially to provide individuals with the freedom to set up and maintain their own religious associations. Mutual exclusion is believed necessary for religious liberty and for the more general liberties of individuals. This strict or ‘perfect separation’, as James Madison termed it, must take place at each of the three distinct levels of (a) ends, (b) institutions and personnel, and (c) law and public policy. Levels (a) and (b) make the state non-theocratic and disestablish religion. Level (c) ensures that the state has neither a positive relationship with religion - for example there should be no policy of granting aid even non-preferentially to religious institutions - nor a negative relationship with it; it is not within the scope of state activity to interfere in religious matters even when some of the values (such as equality) professed by the state are violated within the religious domain. The Congress simply has no power to legislate on any matter pertaining to religion.”

Finally: “The idea of principled distance unpacks the metaphor of separation differently. It accepts a disconnection between state and religion at the level of ends and institutions but does not make a fetish of it at the third level of policy and law (this distinguishes it from all other models of secularism, moral and amoral, that disconnect state and religion at this third level). How else can it be in a society where religion frames some of its deepest interests? Recall that political secularism is an ethic whose concerns relating to religion are similar to theories that oppose unjust restrictions on freedom, morally indefensible inequalities, and intercommunal domination and exploitation. Yet a secularism based on principled distance is not committed to the mainstream Enlightenment idea of religion. It accepts that humans have an interest in relating to something beyond themselves including God and that this manifests itself as individual belief and feeling as well as social practice in the public domain. It also accepts that religion is a cumulative tradition, as well as a source of people’s identities. But it insists that even if it turned out that one religion was true and others false, this would not give the “true” doctrine or religion the right to force it down the throats of others who did not believe it. Nor does it give a ground for discrimination in the equal distribution of liberties and other valuable resources.”

Contrary to Bhargava, Haselby argues that America had to take the route of French one sided secularism. Similar to so many secular and atheists, Haselby constantly remembers all the negative points of religious sectarianism and is unable to see the destructive falling state of the secular ethics, which is empty from a sense of belonging and connection to the universe and the divine and suicidal in the grip of nihilism. In the following, I will show that secularism is a theology and ideology of its own as Haselby admits it. And in the next section, I will argue that how excessive emphasis of secularism on the sovereign subject and enmity with religion is nihilistic and destructive to the soul of individual. In this context, compared to the distanced secularism of India, the critique of Bhargava of American and French secularism makes more sense. However, I will not elaborate on Bhargava’s article. All I try to do in this reflection, is to separate the wheat from the chaff and let us see the point of destructive excess of secularism.

Haselby states that America was the first power which established secularism. “Prior to 18th-century Anglo-America – specifically revolutionary-era Virginia – no other modern society had sought to separate law, politics, social life and civic institutions from the divine.” Accordingly, the theological root of secularism is Protestantism which systematized the idea of religion as a matter separable from the rest of life, a ‘private’ matter, in the well-known secularist formulation. Protestantism made religious institutions obsolete and “[a]s the Catholic Church immediately recognized, Luther’s ideas did not just defy established religious teachings. They made religious institutions profane, rendering the experience of the sacred a private matter. They elevated private judgment as equal to or above that of the high and learned, and threw religion and religious experience beyond the reach of the state and society. It marked the creation of the modern sovereign individual.”

How much this modern sovereign individual and Protestant ethics have facilitated capitalism is beyond the scope of this reflection and is elaborated by Max Weber. Also I take for granted that there are some relations between this sovereign individual and the autonomous subject of the Western Enlightenment, even though Luther, according to Haselby, wanted to protect religion from politics, not politics from religion. The idea of political equality of individuals is a later phenomenon. In the next part, I will come back to the ethical effect of these excessive pendulum swings. For now, I just want to report Haselby’s article and analyze it.

He wrote: “For Luther, however, the implications of the sovereign individual were narrowly and entirely theological, rather than social or political. Princes would always be princes; peasants were to perpetually remain peasants. Luther’s sovereign individual simply had no social or political implications. By contrast, American religious freedom, as it took shape in Virginia during the Age of Revolution, contained little differences that made big differences. The Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom granted broad, principled protections for freedom of thought. It granted them to everyone, including those without theological qualification or learning.”[1]

Haselby rightfully emphasizes that belief leads to action, but his concern is that it is not enough to contain religious belief through constitutional freedom of religion and secularism but also framers had to curtail religious actions, and indeed this is his critique of American secularism that it didn’t go far enough to exclude religious practices from public and institutional domains. It is ironic that he forgets to reflect about the pendulum swing of secularism and what ethical-practical effects secular ideology has had on individuals. I will come to this point in the next part.

I started with the claim that secularism is not a simple political action but a full fledged ideology and philosophy. Haselby makes the same claim:

“The simplest way to grasp the underlying philosophical idea of the secular is to understand that its original antonym is not religious, but divine. That is, secular refers to all things that are not the prerogative of the divine, of God, but are in the world and ‘in time’. God is not in time, or worldly, because God and the City of God are eternal. It is the worldly, the City of Man, that changes.” For Jefferson “secular” meant to find natural reasons for astronomical, geological phenomena, the physics of cosmos and the earth. Jefferson talks about “secular acceleration and retardation of the Moon’s motion,” and generally “secular” meant in time and without God’s intervention (and by implication presence): “For Jefferson, Laplace’s discovery amounted to the heavens themselves attesting that God did not even intervene in the cosmos. This caused Jefferson much excitement both because of the great authority of science for Enlightenment thinkers, and for its political implications. Jefferson brought this core philosophical idea of the secular from the cosmos down to Earth in his Notes on the State of Virginia (1785). Describing the origin of the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Shenandoah Valley, he gave a geological explanation meant as a direct challenge to the Christian account of creation.”

We can see that the myopic bigotry of religious fanatics gave rise to the myopic generalizations of secularism and naturalism. As some religious institutions hold that we can’t have some causal explanation of the movement of planets and formation of the earth, the myopic reasoning goes, so there is no presence of God in the world. As Foucault says, “we know what we do, frequently we know why we do ‘what we do’, but what we don’t know is ‘what we do’ does.” In a rebel against religious extravaganza, secularism created another extravaganza. It is the exclusion of the divine out of scenery by all means possible.

Haselby’s contends: “No one described this necessity better than Jean-Paul Rabaut, the architect of the French state education system. ‘The secret was well known to the priests,’ he said in 1791. ‘They took hold of man at birth, grasped him again in childhood, adolescence and adulthood, when he married and had children, in his moments of grief and remorse, in the sanctum of his conscience, in sickness and in death.’ Public schools ought to ‘do in the name of truth and freedom’ what the church so ‘often did in the name of error and slavery’.”

Haselby complains that America couldn’t do fully the same as French in substituting a new conscience, a secular conscience for the individual through public education, positively to create the conscience of ‘the sovereign individual’. He can’t see that how good and bad turn into each other in our lives by excess. How the divine faith, which educated and inspired us for centuries, turned into its opposite by excess of religious bigotry, authoritative intervention, and coercion, and how secularist schism turned into its opposite by excess in de-deification of nature (as Nietzsche wished and predicted) and reducing living beings to machines, human beings to AI and robots, a meaningful life to hedonism and at best humanism, and the sovereign individual into consumerist and nihilist. 

[New York Times reports:

“Drug overdoses are driving up the death rate of young white adults in the United States to levels not seen since the end of the Aids epidemic more than two decades ago — a turn of fortune that stands in sharp contrast to falling death rates for young blacks, a New York Times analysis of death certificates has found.” Drug Overdoses Propel Rise in Mortality Rates of Young White Jan. 16, 2016

And another report on April 22, 2016: “Suicide in the United States has surged to the highest levels in nearly 30 years, a federal data analysis has found, with increases in every age group except older adults. The rise was particularly steep for women. It was also substantial among middle-aged Americans, sending a signal of deep anguish from a group whose suicide rates had been stable or falling since the 1950s.”]

Surely there were some improvements in the fight against discrimination: antislavery, civil rights, women suffrage, and labor movements.  However, the dream that “a secular society would be a more enlightened, peaceful and just society,” in the course of two centuries turned into a nightmare: two world wars, cold wars, mass industrialization and consumerism, colonization and modern slavery, moral decadence, animal factories and destruction of environment, extinction of 20% of species, and the prospect of human made global warming, droughts and floods which are likely to bring about mass extinction. “We know what we do, frequently we know why we do what we do, but what we don’t know is ‘what we do’ does.”

Spiritual Starvation: Nihilism and the Separation of the Ethical from the Universe and the Divine

Haselby ignores the ethical effect of secularism and adamantly holds that we should persist and proceed more and more in our scientism and reducing individuals into “sovereign individuals” who are: carriers of selfish genes, lost in moral relativism, identify themselves with machines and electrical circuits, and see themselves as the subclass of dead, whose dream is getting lost in the principle of sensual-aesthetic pleasure, hedonism, and at best humanism, fame, honor, wealth, and nihilism, because our sciences and secular philosophy can’t give them anything better.

Basically it is a common current that life doesn’t have any meaning, but what ‘the sovereign individual’ gives it. The dominant philosophy in France and America leaves the individual to themselves and the principle of pleasure to find some motivation to proceed in life, but if you ask most of them they declare that the cosmos or reality is indifferent to them and life has no universal meaning but survival of genes. Ethics is basically secularized and disconnected from spirituality. In utilitarian terms, it is maximizing pleasure for the most. If you ask them why “the most”, why not only myself? The answer is whether it is not practical, or as Mill responded, statistics show we have a feeling and empathy for fellow human beings. Basically we are back to Plato’s Trasymachus definition of justice, who asks: why to be just, if injustice pays more? As the universe has no ethics and we are a subclass of dead, referring to the fact that some show feelings for their fellow human beings is not convincing enough for the youth not to fall into moral relativism, hedonism, drug abuse or suicide, and/or a desire for domination and abusing others.

My point is that it is clear now that none of our well wished secular theories: from capitalism to socialism and anarchism has an ethical-spiritual connection with the universe and the divine. Ethics for them is mostly about how to manage our lives here on the earth, it has nothing to do with the disposition of soul, our connection to our source, the universe, God or any meaningful spirituality. Going back to the time of Socrates, we have substituted pleasure, health, fame, wealth, and honor for cultivation of our souls. These are the ethical voids and values that secularism created for ‘the sovereign individual’. One can see clearly the pendulum swing, from excessive dissolution of the individual into collectivism and the spiritual to excessive confusion of the individual in the meaningless and absurd notion of ‘the sovereign individual’.

I don’t think we should go back to religious fanaticism and excessive self-righteousness. We have to learn from the past and stop this violent oscillation back and forth. I agree with Karen Armstrong in her The Great Transformation, that the solution is going back to the Axial Age sages and learn from them. We have to reconnect our ethics to spirituality. After all these ups and downs we should clearly see that to be moral is an internal affair; it is about the disposition of the soul of the individual as being-in-the-world. This non-consequentialist view of ethics is alien to our pragmatic and secular ears, because we already abandon the idea that there is anything eternal in us. We abandon the hope that there is a connection between our being-in-the-world here and the universe and God. We are now machines and robots who paradoxically have complete knowledge and grasp upon reality by our secular sciences and for sure know life has no meaning and it is a subclass of dead.

In going back to Axial Age sages and re-connecting the ethical to the spiritual, we also have to learn from the past not to excessively declare divine knowledge about all natural and metaphysical processes. This way of thinking will release the oppressive illusion that any religious institution per se can inform us about natural processes. As well, scientific method has to be critically scrutinized by philosophers and rational-ethical-spiritual insights to take a more revealing and less destructive pathos. After critiques of Heidegger, it is obvious now, for those who can reflect, that the reductive method of science and reducing reality only to the measurable is an excess and hence a dangerous aberration, and as Heidegger predicted, it will turn us into a controlled machine from without and within.

Secularism as Excessive Reaction to Fanaticism

“James Madison, the primary author of the US Constitution, was an even more rigorous and consistent, if less poetic, secularist. On grounds of what he called ‘pure religious freedom’, Madison opposed military and congressional chaplains, believing that they amounted to government sponsorship of religion. Every step short of this ‘pure religious freedom’, he wrote, would ‘leave crevices at least thro’ which bigotry may introduce persecution; a monster… feeding & thriving on its own venom’.”

“‘The mutual hatred of these sects has been much inflamed,’ Madison wrote to Thomas Jefferson in 1785, and ‘I am far from being sorry for it.’ Virginia’s disestablishment, or separation of church and state, came to be the model for national separation. But it was made possible only by a combination of parliamentary legerdemain and elite manipulation of sectarian hatred.” (American Secular, Sam Haselby)

Obviously, secularism is a pendulum excessive reaction to religious sectarianism and bigotry, as Protestantism rebelled against selling salvation in Catholic centralized institution, as Sufi movement was a rebel against materialism and hypocrisy in institutionalized Islam in 8th and 9th century. Both Protestantism and Sufism call for simplicity, piety, and individual connection with God. But how both of them might have pushed their critique, as always to another extreme, is the story for another note.

The question is what happens to religions when they turn into materialistic and authoritative institutions? And what is the way out of it? I don’t want to engage in historical and political analysis of the deviation of different religious institutions, but to do some religio-philosophical reflection on religious faith.

My general hypothesis is that our reaction to excess: from institutionalized and materialistic Catholic Church to Protestantism and from Institutionalized and materialistic Islamic Caliphate to Sufism, and from Religions altogether to Secularism is throwing the baby out with the bathwater, a kind of knee jerk reaction which creates another excessive pendulum swing and another throwing the baby out with the bathwater. But let’s first reflect some on what real faith looks like or feels like and how, possibly, it gets distorted.

§ One of the first phenomenological (how it appears) unfolding of faith in the divine is overwhelming exuberance and transcendence. Those who have any tincture of this experience, know about its mind bending state which indeed supersedes rational thinking in that one can’t rationalize or bring a rational proof for the intense certainty that one experiences. It is a spiritual rapture and rupture. I know for most secular individuals and atheists this experience is delusional, irrational, and superstitious, as I used to think before experiencing it myself. However, as Pew Research Center polls shows “atheists, agnostics and other people who do not affiliate with any religion – though increasing in countries such as the United States and France – will make up a declining share of the world’s total population.”[2] The unaffiliated secular or atheists who deny the experience of faith as real and authentic are only 16.4% of population of the world, 51% of the population of the world experience it or take it to be an authentic connection to the source.

Nonetheless, the raw rapture of faith without proper reflective initiations and ethical growth, for strange reasons, can potentially turn into its opposite. It is like a nuclear fission within soul which can be productive or destructive, if it is not harnessed and trained properly. The experience of faith creates a sense of oneness which defies definition. It is usually the result of a long deep longing and prayers. It is a psychosomatic transformation which moves from a need, a desire, a calling inside (immanent) and to outside (transcendence), to the transcendental, to the divine, God, Nameless, Merciful, Ineffable Awareness. And it roams for life in spiral and spheres inside-outside, which constitutes one’s codes of behavior and ethical projection. 

What is important about this experience is that one is relieved from duality. When we were child, we used to act to please our parents, siblings, then friends and classmates, then spouse, colleagues, and co-workers. We mutually pleased each other, but if we had Plato’s “Ring of Gyges” to be invisible, probably or certainly we would act differently, because no one could see us. But the experience of faith, if it doesn’t get placid and pale due to lack of practice or focus, is this intense feeling that God can see us. This is another stage in which one experiences the constant presence of God from without.

But this ethical behavior is still immature and deficient. It doesn’t come fully from a source within. Or in Buddhism and Confucianism [even though I think their phenomenology of life is flawed without the Merciful Awareness], the sense of attunement to the divine (Tien or Nirvana) is not because of God is constantly seeing us but because of fear of disharmony and a state of falling, a sense of loss of self and a breach from the divine. In Religions of the Book, however, the intense awareness of God, through practice and prayers, gradually become a constant: an internal predisposition in which God is constantly present. In this stage, one can connect to God from within and so one becomes who one is. One becomes one’s ethical comport, not only because of fear of God, but because in oneness with God (as present, not identity), one overcomes all duality. One doesn’t need punishment and reward, fear and encourage, I and You, the duality will be over. One is one’s judge, and then judgement is also over. It is sheer psychosomatic oneness with the universe, the Merciful, aware and alive, ethical, dense, intense, and without any shadow of doubt, while one is constantly open to act uniquely, contextually, and authentically, sui generis, not always based on a kind of situation, or a generic formula.

The resoluteness here is not to get closed off or see oneself as infallible or dogmatic, though it is the very place that danger, the seduction, the schismatic, and the falling lurks. Faith is to be resolute and open to observing oneself, to see one’s mistakes without and beyond the veil of vanity, in constant resort to God, and making amends without time lapse. And if experience of faith turns out to close oneself off to the world, rather than opening up, to see evil all around oneself rather than loving people, then it is very likely that we have a touch of Mara and Iblis on this seeming faith.

Heidegger hyphenates the term “ent-schlossenheit” (resoluteness) in German to show two sides of the same coin of resoluteness: to be close and open. Etymologically entschlosseneheit drives from the word schliessen (to close, shut, fasten) and the prefix ent indicates opposition or separation. So entschlossenheit means to open, unlock, or to be unclosed and opened up. It is interesting that within the phenomenology of Heidegger, “resoluteness” (entscholossenheit) is related to dis-closedness (erschlossenheit), and this dis-closedness is related to Truth, alethia.

In this interconnectedness of an authentic comportment in the world to “resoluteness” and “truth” and “opening up”, one can see that “resoluteness of faith” doesn’t require to be closed off or dogmatic. In resoluteness of faith one is acting in truth and openness. And to be open resolutely is not a one-time act of will but requires constant vigilance and self-observation. This is the same about resolute faith in God and overcoming duality from within and without.

In another reflection note, I quoted Aldous Huxley about “duality” when I was talking about overcoming “duplicity”. I will quote it here again:

“That this insight into the nature of things and the origin of good and evil is not confined exclusively to the saint, but is recognized obscurely by every human being, is proved by the very structure of our language. For language, as Richard Trench pointed out long ago, is often wiser, not merely than the vulgar, but even than the wisest of those who speak it. Sometimes it locks up truths which were once well known, but have been forgotten. In other cases, it holds the germs of truths which, though they were never plainly discerned, the genius of its framers caught a glimpse of in a happy moment of divination.' For example, how significant it is that in the Indo- European languages, as Darmsteter has pointed out, the root meaning ' two ' should connote badness. The Greek prefix dys- (as in dyspepsia) and the Latin dis- (as in dishonorable) are both derived from 'duo.' The cognate bis- gives a pejorative sense to such modern French words as bevue ('blunder/ literally 'two-sights’). Traces of that 'second which leads you astray' can be found in 'dubious,' 'doubt' and Zweifel for to doubt is to be double-minded. Bunyan has his Mr. Facingboth- ways, and modern American slang its ' two-timers.' Obscurely and unconsciously wise, our language confirms the findings of the mystics and proclaims the essential badness of division a word, incidentally, in which our old enemy 'two* makes another decisive appearance.” (Perennial Philosophy by Aldous Huxley)

It is interesting that this overcoming of “duality” is not to become “dogmatic” but to be true to oneself, to drop the veil of conceit and mask of pretentiousness. In most original cases of emergence of faith, such as Axial Age sages (Socrates, Upanishad mystics, Lao Tzu, Confucius, Buddha, Jeremiah, Amos, Ezekiel, and then in Jesus and Muhammad), we won’t see that sectarian zeal and excessive self-righteousness. Why? To my estimation, it is so because of two reasons: first, they are predisposed to be affected directly and originally by the divine, and in the divine there is no sense of hostility, insecurity, bigotry, schism, and narrow-mindedness. Second, these sages have overcome the duality within and without. Ethically and spiritually, they have arrived at the level of righteousness in which they can defy the evil with good, to love the enemy, to be patient and forgive wrongdoers. For example the Quran contends:

“Good and evil cannot be equal. Repel evil with what is better and your enemy will become as close as an old and valued friend, but only those who are steadfast in patience, only those who are blessed with great righteousness, will attain to such goodness.” (41: 34). Or: “Far better and more lasting is what God will give to those who believe and trust in their Lord; who shun great sins and gross indecencies; who forgive when they are angry; respond to their Lord; keep up the prayer; conduct their affairs by mutual consultation; give to others out of what We have provided for them; and defend themselves when they are oppressed. Let harm be requited by an equal harm, though anyone who forgives and puts things right will have his reward from God Himself—He does not like those who do wrong. There is no cause to act against anyone who defends himself after being wronged, but there is cause to act against those who oppress people and transgress in the land against all justice—they will have an agonizing torment—though if a person is patient and forgives, this is one of the greatest things.” (The Quran, 42: 36-43)

Any way of life, including secularism, is based on some variation of faith, and when any faith turns into hostility and excessive self-righteousness, it becomes [self-]destructive. And this is what we see about all different fractions, discordance, and conflict within and between religions. This sense of faith which withers into bigotry is the root cause for a demand for “secularism,” as a hostile ideology (not only as the separation of religion and state). Secularism became an ideology and ideal which created a schism between ethics and spirituality, and a divide between economy of an unbridled capitalism[3] and ethical-spiritual practices. As the result, following a spiritual death, the unpredictable effect of secularism is nihilism, consumerism, and destruction of the earth and consequently ourselves.

05/28/16

------------------------------------------------------------------------[1] In his fervor to defend American secularism, Haselby won’t mention Chomsky’s critique that indeed sheer political equality was not also Madison’s vision. Chomsky says: “If you go back to the record of the Constitutional Convention, which took place in 1787, almost immediately after the end of the war, you see that they are already moving in another direction. James Madison — who was the main framer, and one of the founding fathers who was most libertarian — makes it very clear that the new constitutional system must be designed so as to insure that the government will, in his words “protect the minority of the opulent against the majority” and bar the way to anything like agrarian reform. The determination was made that America could not allow functioning democracy, since people would use their political power to attack the wealth of the minority of the opulent. Therefore, Madison argues, the country should be placed in the hands of the wealthier set of men, as he put it.” (Radical Democracy https://chomsky.info/19970303/)

[2] http://www.pewforum.org/2015/04/02/religious-projections-2010-2050/

[3] Marx questions the bourgeois conception of "the sovereign individual" and replaces it with “the social individual” within relations of production. However, Marx is still an offshoot of Western Enlightenment and his secularism (abolition of religion) is based on self-sufficiency of rational human beings unto themselves. He says: “Religion is only the illusory Sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself." (the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right)

So, I hold that Marxism’s secularism is also a variation of nihilism for these reasons: 1) Human beings need a sense of connection or integration in the universe or the divine. 2) Marx’s materialism still implies that life is a subclass of dead. 3) Marx holds the Enlightenment ideal of self-sufficiency of rational human being unto itself. 4) Similar to liberal secularism, not only Marxism separates the ethical from the spiritual, but also it doesn't have any coherent ethical theory. Remember Marxism holds that ethics as well as spirituality is a superstructure based on material condition of life. So, he suggests by changing material conditions of life through political action we can change the whole social moral-spiritual apparatus. I argue that this lack of ethics-connected-to-our-spiritual-needs gives rise to nihilism.