Secularization enables the growth of Islam.

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Yet where does it take place? Predominantly in nations considered to be Islamic in nature, and as the line between religion and state is often non-existent in such places, Islamic states. To many people IN those countries it is a part of their religion and daily lives. Try convincing the women who get mutilated in this way that it isn't a Muslim thing. Its not going to undo the damage done by people who believe it is.

Lots of people love to dig quotes out of the Koran then wave them around shouting "Look, it doesn't support THIS unpleasant act at all, it says the opposite." Yet quite clearly many followers of that religion THINK THAT IT DOES. It isn't the westerners that need convincing. Its the people who are part of the religion that takes the damn book seriously. Maybe if some of the Imams started reading the bloody thing properly there wouldn't be quite so much of an issue.

Many people who perform murder aren't Muslim either, but having it advocated as a method to spread Islam to the Infidels (Christians, Jews, Pagans, Atheists, et al.) is a different matter.

no it is starting to look like you throwing out random and extreme arguments to support an anti-muslim stance. i could do the same thing towards christianity, but this is silly.

I think rather that you cannot consider that such is true because it sounds too extreme. In most of the Western nations, people are often more of a "live and let live" nature, rather than the type which goes around killing people for minor offenses like drawing a stick figure and labeling it "Mohamed" or placing a book atop the Quran, or other such things which just sound too bizarre to be true based upon experience in nations where the laws do not revolve around Islam.

So it goes.

that's a gross generalizations unfounded in fact - christian terrorists exist, and have killed many people of different faiths (or even christians of variously different beliefs) in that name of their faith.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_terrorism

islam is not worse than christianity if you want to compare atrocities. i believe that the idea that islam is more violent comes from the fact that the 9/11 terrorist attacks happened in on u.s. soil. that makes it seem more personal in my opinion.

The awareness of their violence became known on 9/11, but it has been there for much longer than that and remains there still.

sure, absolutely. and christian violence has been around a long time also... and remains there still.

This thread is based on the assumption that 'Islam' is a monolithic entity. It might annoy even a few Muslims, if I say this - but it isn't. No religion works that way. A very close friend of mine has studied Islamic history. From what she tells me, Islam is an amalgamation of Abrahamic monotheism, Neo-Platonism and Persian spirituality (where the Sufi element comes from). It was a reform movement to unite and modernise Arabia and beyond. There is evidence that parts of the Qu'ran were added by later Caliphs. I think people are more willing to admit that religions like Christianity are the result of a complicated history - but even some people who profess Islam, and its detractors, seem to think it arrived perfectly formed, in the current form it's practiced by groups like Wahhabists. The fact that there are so many different schools of Islam should prove that the 'Islamic world' is not united.

Given this, what form of Islam is going to fill the vacuum left by secularism? I assume the OP meant the radical kind. I think all movements to purify a belief system end in division and dissolution. Protestantism was an attempt to purify Christianity, to take it back to some mythical purity based on scripture. The Reformation led to many different reformed churches and eventually to increased secularism itself for the Western world.

I think the 'resurgence' of purtianical Islam is more a result of Islam itself fracturing than Western secularism. Secularism is a global paradigm shift, and some Islamic societies were heading that way even before Christian ones were. If we look at the history of the Islam in the Middle Ages, those societies seemed more on the way to 'liberal democracy' than European ones did. If we look at Islamic countries before the 1970s (Israel has a role to play in this) they were secularising. Some countries, like Turkey, still are.

Why do Westerners think secular society is their baby? The Western countries are seeing a reactionary Christian revival, Indian Hindus are seeing it. I don't know, maybe some of the Buddhist societies in Asia are seeing the same thing.

There's no guarantee that secularism will outlast and dominate over reactionary religion. If there was a galactic bookmakers, though, and I had a lifespan of a few hundred years, I would bet on secularism. Just a hunch

Last edited by puddingmouse on 11 Sep 2010, 1:39 pm, edited 1 time in total.

While there is no guarantee it is still the better bet.

Religion has been loosing ground steadily in the industrialized nations.

ruveyn

The germ of secularism is present in organised religion itself. We realise that if we give this world a creator, and then give the creator human qualities (intentionally or not), we make a flawed god for ourselves - the bad effects of organised religion bring this into focus. Islam tried to make a less anthropomorphic creator than Christianity or Judaism, but I believe its project won't succeed because it still supposes a perfect creator creating an imperfect world.

Most complex religious ideas are set to self-destruct in this way, but no idea ever dies completely. They'll all be reconstructed and reconfigured into something different totally different, I think.

this had never occurred to me at all. i appreciate the explanation.

I really oversimplified it. I think some 'grand ideas' are made by sticking others together. They get pulled apart by human scrutiny and bits of those ideas get put together again to make new ones. It'll happen to liberalism and secularism eventually. Religions and ideologies are like attempts to make multi-purpose tools, that serve a purpose when they're made, but then get taken apart as humans need to make new tools to survive.

In Abrahamic religions you are compelled to question and 'wrestle with God like Jacob'; you're also compelled to bring about Paradise on earth through Moschiach/the second coming/jihad. Dynamism and the need to progress are parts of those religions that got pulled into secular 'progressive' ideology. The idea of humanitarian and scientific progress, in countries with Abrahamic pasts, that we owe partly to religion.

I mean, there are parts of these religions that say 'accept God's word as final', 'submit' and generally encourage fatalism. Large-scale religions are motley and contradictory like that - but there's something of value to extract.

Okay, I need to stop talking so much about this subject, it must be so boring!

er, no. not even a little bit boring. utterly fascinating - you stopped me in my mental tracks! i apologize that i can't contribute even one single insightful comment - i just have no knowledge or understanding of this. i can think critically but i lack the knowledge base. i would love to hear more!

what field does this type of thinking arise from? is it religious studies, or philosophy, or sociology, or history, or something else?

I don't know. It's one of my internal monologues on a grandiose topic. I really want to write a sci fi novel one day. I think about how societies develop so I can project them into the future somewhat realistically.

The idea that religions and societies are tools and that they evolve is fairly common amongst sociobiologists (yeah, I know much of that stuff is rubbish) and sociologists.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutiona ... _religions
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_societies

well, if you write it i'll buy it and read it, that's for sure!