Does religion give a sweet peace?

We have discomforts in the religious sphere. Some of these discomforts worry religious people as a state of meaninglessness, chaos or secularization, while the fact that religious debates are running away with themselves worries the sections distant from religion in another way. In fact it is a typical image of a modern society, and it is always ordinary for religious freedoms to produce such images.

On a ground where religious pluralism increases in a healthy environment, debates among religions do not drive people away from religion; on the contrary, thanks to these debates a serious rise can be observed in the quality with which all religions express themselves. Of course, how valid the truth content of a religion is, is up to each person's own decision. The experience religious people have when they encounter, with all their perceptions of truth, the perception of truth of other religions may be different, but when these encounters become the routine of daily life, it is inevitable that they bring with them a certain habituation and disregard.

In a situation where believing in a particular religion or voicing that religion's claims costs nothing, where everyone sees all beliefs as possible down to the last margin, how authentically beliefs can be lived becomes open to question.

In a ground where the whole society is Christian, that is, in an environment far from the hardships lived by Jesus and the Apostles, does not the concern Søren Kierkegaard felt at Christianity's having turned into an effortless bourgeois religion turn back into an unsettling challenge to society?

Religion, of course, is not an approval of the life we live; it cannot be felt forever as a trouble-free glue of our human relations and social order, which have come down this way and keep going this way. It sets in motion the sediments that form in our routinized human relations, and from that moment it loses the conservative function that has stuck to it.

In fact this disturbing, unsettling function of religion has always existed, but it is always forgotten, and people wish to forget it. Because religious people want to think of religion as an address of peace in the name of eulogies to religion, and because politicians think of their expectations from religion together with its function of facilitating power and administration, they wish to forget this dimension.

There is also a type of discomfort that Necdet Subaşı calls "religion fatigue." Is it due to being too occupied with religion, to loading religion with different meanings and expectations, to the wearisome disputes lived by the people who walk together in the name of religion, to quarrels that erode and drain of meaning the sense of truth? It is clear that this is an expression that will provoke thoughts, disturb the peace of routine perceptions, and itself tax the mind.

Between religion and either social or mental peace there is of course no necessary relationship. There is a relationship, but this relationship is not independent of what is understood by peace.

Is it possible that turning religion, wrapped and swaddled in promises of peace in society, into a commodity bought and sold does not weary people? That religion turns into a market commodity is of course incompatible with the nature of religion, but that a debate among religious claims takes place as such a struggle for grabbing territory is also in the nature of the matter.

The worst is a particular religious group or view taking the power of the state on its side and eliminating other religious groups without any need to enter into any debate with them. A religious discourse that meets exaggerated, reductionist, simplifying rhetoric and informer officiousness in pursuit of rewards has no respectability left.

This, as a monopolistic venture in religion by a greed that perceives religion as a market, does not serve even its own understanding of religion in the long run. But in most cases those who make this monopolistic attempt in any case have no very long-term strategic vision even in favor of their own understanding of religion. Their resorting to this path is in itself a lack of confidence in their own religious understanding, their arguments, their evidence, their sincerity.

Since the sincere would in fact suffer no loss in the cause of religion, there is no need for them to fall into such haste either. Religion is God's religion. What falls to the person who sincerely believes in religion is to convey religion plainly, without falling into any haste. Whether people respond to this conveying and this call is entirely up to them. In religion there is neither compulsion nor deception.

In various places in the Qur'an God says repeatedly to His Messenger: (in meaning) "You will destroy yourself because they do not believe; nothing falls to you but the conveying, guidance is from God."

In the final analysis, the secularization of the world or its turning away from religion is entirely people's own choice, and there is nothing that would require the believer to destroy himself because of this choice.

Of course a Muslim will tell people everything he knows to be true, but in doing so there is never any need for him to resort to ways that are not at all compatible with the dignity of a Muslim. People's believing or not believing should not bring a Muslim any material return. That is why the most important attribute of all the prophets whose stories are told in the Qur'an, because of what they relate and the truth to which they call people, is that "they never demand a fee, a reward, an interest."

In fact this should be the most important test question against all movements that claim to call to the truth: Do they obtain any interest through the religious movement they invite to, thanks to this movement? Is this religious movement turning into a door of economic gain?

The participation of the people they invite in the movement: what power, what fee, what interest does it provide, and to whom?

What could be the reason that people who are not pursuing an interest, who have no worry about grabbing a market, behave so greedily in a religious debate, and resort to rhetoric of hatred and loathing, with a haste and zealousness not at all compatible with the dignity, the claims, the truth of religion?