03.31.07
Modernity and (a)theism
From Tothesource.
Nothing whatever in ‘Western civilization’ (modernity, evidently, is what is meant) entails obligatory atheism. First there is no such thing, really, as Western Civilization. It is better to think of the ‘modern transformation’ and a global community forming around that. There, indeed, secularism has come to the fore. But what does that mean?
It is not a ism, but a condition of philosophical dialectic, a point well made by Hegel, who, like many Sufis, was a bit of a pantheist.
That new global culture is not some invention of atheist Darwinists, but springs from the sources of the early modern, which were not atheist promo but an attack on theocratic domination. That began with the Protestant Reformation whose logic rapidly unfolded the Enlightenment, one corner of which spawned modern atheist, another corner of which spawned the Romantic reaction, another corner of which spawned evangelicals, another corner of which spawned the Kantian revolutin, another corner of which….
Don’t let these Darwin loudmouths define modernity in their pet atheist vein: Darwin was not a part of the Enlightenment, please note. And note also that positivism is another post-Enlightenment oversimplification.
A better approach to this would be to adopt a more sophisticated philosophical strategy that espouses not the dogmatic atheism of the current atheist fad, but the critique of religious/scientific metaphysics such as we see in the Kantian perspective.
Today, the West is repugnant to many traditional Muslims because it looks like a civilization that has abandoned God and is trying to seduce the Muslims to do the same thing. I also noted in the article that Muslims who are exposed to the religiosity of the West, like that found in America, like and even admire it. For example, when “The Little House on the Prairie” was aired in Turkey in the early 80’s, all conservative Muslim families that I know were its greatest fans. Nowadays similar families are worried that their children will be corrupted by America’s pop culture.