Il presente contributo si propone di analizzare quelle che sono da identificarsi, da un punto di vista teologico e filosofico, come le cause di quella situazione di indifferenza, se non di vera e propria ostilità, che le legislazioni statuali, anche in materia giuslavoristica, riservano alla manifestazione delle opinioni religiose dei cittadini, e dei lavoratori in particolare, nell’esercizio delle mansioni loro affidate dai contratti di lavoro.

Viviamo in un contesto sociale e culturale di una vera e propria irreligione naturale, che ha superato la stessa visione ateistica o agnostica della vita, della società e della storia, e che se, da un lato, non rifiuta apertamente, sicuramente, dall’altro, banalizza e marginalizza il credo religioso, in nome di un empirismo antropocentrico inserito in un orizzonte fideistico tutto incentrato sul predominio della tecnica, assurta a ruolo di vera e propria divinità.

Eppure religione e società sono e saranno sempre intrinsecamente legate.

Le istanze religiose rappresentano una provocazione ai Legislatori affinché si sforzino di integrare, in una visione pluralista e veramente democratica, tutte le sensibilità e le opinioni/convinzioni di tutti i componenti di una nazione, nel comune impegno della promozione di un vero progresso sociale.

Per uscire da questo contrasto tra un rispetto formale ma non sostanziale del credo religioso dei cittadini/lavoratori, ecco che il contributo propone di riprendere un discorso serio sulla laicità, e su ciò che questo implichi veramente. Questo rappresenterebbe la “soluzione” per giungere ad un effettivo riconoscimento delle istanze religiose che l’essere umano porta con sé a prescindere, anche in un ambito lavorativo.

SOMMARIO:

1. Today's social context: an overview that takes into account philosophy - 2. Religion and society - 3. Secularity: a chimera? - NOTE

1. Today's social context: an overview that takes into account philosophy

In this part of my reasoning I will make use of the reflections of a great Italian thinker of the 20th century, Augusto Del Noce, who, in my humble opinion, offered an admirable synthesis of the philosophical horizon that created the foundations of the social situation that we find ourselves to live in this “post-everything” 21st century, a social situation that is causing so many problems to the idea of Man we are promoting in the Western, First World countries [1], but also on the concept of life that we are handing over to the new generations. What characterizes our society today is “the diffusion of something entirely different from atheism, that is, the “natural irreligion” (the loss, the fading out of everything sacred, or whatever name we may give to it) [2]. Since the concept of Truth and, consequently, that of so-called “non-negotiable” principles have disappeared from the collective heart and soul of society and even the concept of natural law [3] has also been strongly questioned, a new (very attractive) way of thinking has become popular. This way of thinking is basically empiricism, which assumes that only what can be verified (mostly by science) can be true. By viewing the world through this (deforming) lens, followers of this way of thinking can structure knowledge, morals and politics without ever referring to transcendence. Starting therefore from a Gnostic point of view, empiricism basically postulates total irreconcilability with religion and even if empiricists have to admit that there are (supersensible) problems that cannot be dealt with by ordinary tools of knowledge, they very quickly add that these issues simply don’t matter [4], “those who want to act in the world and to improve it in any technical, aesthetic, practical-social sense but do not want to look for a transcendence that may lead them to evade [5]”. “(...) There is [in short] no reason to reflect on the problem of God because even affirming His existence is logically meaningless [6]”. I believe that these statements, even if written more than fifty years ago, are definitely relevant and topical today and provide us with a key to reading the choices made by Lawmakers or judicial bodies, with serious repercussions on the social fabric. This, at the very least, is the humble opinion of those who still try to with their eyes turned [continua ..]

2. Religion and society

The social framework seems clear and obvious: the marginalisation of faith, or the persistent ideological attempt to eradicate it from the collective consciousness both inexorably advance in this overwhelming era of globalisation, and not only of the world of labour and economy. However, much of politics does not take into due consideration what History has established as an indisputable principle: religion and society are and will always be intrinsically linked [19]. Every attempt to separate them, carried out by the great totalitarian regimes has failed even if, the natural irreligion, if we want to use Del Noce’s words, has permeated wide layers of the social fabric, shaping the consciences, especially those of the new generations, with the result of making “plausible” the illusion of the irrelevance and futility of any question about God. Man always carries within himself questions about the meaning of life and therefore, no matter how bewildered, deluded and misguided man may be, he will never be able to suffocate that “religious” yearning which, like nostalgia, will always resound in the depths of his soul. “Martin Buber in Tales of the Hasidim [20] discusses Rabbi Mendel of Kozk, who “astonished some learned men who were his guests with this question: “Where does God live?” Those men laughed at him: “What are you saying? The whole world is full of His glory!” But then the Rabbi answered his own question: “God lives where he is allowed to enter”. And he is not allowed to enter where one assumes that “the facts of the world are everything” where the illusion that man is capable of self-salvation, of saving himself from the throes of the absurd is nourished”. We must also not forget, in fact, that “religions – at least the great religions – are wide-breadth, long-term phenomena that constitute one of the primary forces that contribute to forge the basic structures of the social and cultural order, one of those matrices of sense that design the face of a civilization and imprint an indelible mark on the juridical-normative dimension [21]”. Consequently, all the most attentive scholar cannot fail to see the secondary role of religious belief in the development of a social structure, nor can they deny that religion is also a drive for the world of labour and for the economy in general [22]. In a [continua ..]

3. Secularity: a chimera?

I believe my reasoning highlighted how the ideological burden that weighs on the spiritual and transcendent dimension of man, and on everything that refers to them, is the main obstacle to overcome. Let me sum it up: we live in a social cultural context which either openly refuses or at the very least trivialises and marginalises religious beliefs, in the name of an anthropocentric empiricism in a fideistic horizon centred on the predominance of technology, which has become a true divinity. The origins of all this lie in the far past but, especially in these last centuries (XIX and XX), “a process is in progress, though most failed to notice it, involving loss of inner concentration and elevated feelings, generalised dispersion and perhaps irremediable eclipse of the spiritual values. [30]”. “However, the radical, organic reason for this decline in culture is the fact that it has lost its strength by evaporating in secularisation. For many centuries the enlightened minds of humanity have been increasingly attracted by the conception of the “anthropocentrism, more dignifiedly called humanitarianism, that humanitarianism which in the twentieth century has led to abstract, sometimes totalitarian ideologies. In any case, the fact remains that a self-sufficient anthropocentrism is not able to provide answers to many essential questions that life presents us with, and its incapacity increase as one tries to go deeper n answering these questions. The spiritual component is eliminated from the whole set of representations and motivations of thought and human action. This has caused the distortion of the whole hierarchy of values, and the understanding of the essence of man and its ends has disappeared, while at the same time man has increasingly moved away from the rhythm, from the breath of Nature, of the Universe [31]”. A second, summarising step will lead us to emphasize the intrinsic relationship between religion and society as an indispensable factor of growth and development. I dare say that religion and society simul stabunt vel simul cadent, since they are so deeply and intrinsically connected. Starting from this premise, let us now go back to the title of the paragraph: “Secularity: a chimera?”. I wanted to stir a provocation because everywhere you turn you will hear about secularity, but it is its concrete and daily application in people’s lives that leaves great [continua ..]

NOTE