خلاصه ماشینی:
' Secularism does not necessarily deny God's existence; it simply marginalizes Him, claiming to concentrate exclusively on this world (humanity and nature).
It is the weakness of someone who has achieved human strength, for instead of submitting (in a reflexive, natural, rational way} to the iron and monistic laws of natural necessity, such an individual freely rises to the generous laws of human complexity.
The hero of Brecht's play, on the other hand, is a transnational imperialist merchant who has achieved a high degree of rational self-discipline, who has adapted himself completely to the laws of the market, and who entertains no dreams of nobility and transcendence.
The difference between the Frankeleyn's tale and that of Brecht's Merchant parallels the difference between the first stages of the secularizing sequence, where only the economic sector was secularized and the individual's dreams were still private and free, and the final stages of secularization, where all human activities manifest natural law and submit to natural necessity.
One must go, that is, by the rational economic rule rooted in the uniform natural laws immanent in matter, not by the irrational exception that results from human freedom and choice.
Even if the Coolie were in reality acting in a human way and, after transcending his class antagonism, gave the water flask to the Merchant, the latter, operating in terms of the natural discourse of imperialists and espousing its ethics of self-interest, power, and conquest, acted in "selfdefence," for from a natural rational point of view "he couldn't assume it was a flask.