Do secular states breed religious violence?
By Paul Jones http://www.dailymirror.lk/2004/01/09/opinion/2.asp In the backdrop of the recent religious tension between Buddhists and Christians in Sri Lanka the controversial speech by Professor S.N. Balagangadhara of the University of Ghent, Belgium was unsurprisingly, met with a lukewarm response from the assembled audience at the International Centre for Ethnic Studies (ICES) in Colombo on Tuesday evening. In a speech titled “How secular are secular states of South Asia”, Prof. Balagangadhara hypothesized that secular states, in which people are free to be religious in any way and not coerced into religion, are in essence ruled through a disguised version of Christian ethics, and that secularism according to this definition is not a solution to religious violence and may even encourage it. At present the professor is trying to develop a description of western culture against the background of Indian c
