Darwin diehards just don’t get it, and Coyne’s completely distorted rendition of Fodor/PP’s successful attack on Darwinism is a pathetic case in point. But these gross distortions are effective with the peanut gallery of Darwinism and the Dawkins cult.
The situation has a curious desperation to it. The persistence of the pseudo-science of Darwinism has almost destroyed the reputation of science, in the age of Big Science, and left an immense number of people, unreported in the news, disgusted and nettled at the degeneration of science into ideology.
You would think scientists would welcome the work of people like Fodor trying to lead science beyond its completely frozen state.
But as we can see the science culture is in a state of termininal Darwin paralysis. People won’t put up with it much longer. Sufistic sources have been waiting since the nineteenth century for the opportunity to rewrite modernity after the obvious incapacity of science idiocy to do so. They have failed so far, but more generally the attack on modernity is replacing the disgust with Darwinism, and the dumbed donw cadre that has been created to serve it.
This review originally appeared in The TLS, whose website is www.the-tls.co.uk, and is reposted with permission.
I have a problem here, and this can be seen from the first sentence: ‘the ongoing suit of Secularism vs God’.
this is a completely false antithesis, one that has come into being due to the propaganda of the cult of scientism and the new atheists, et al.
But it is wrong to oppose the two. Secularism began with the Protestant Reformation, and can be as religious as anything else considered to be modern. Read the rest of this entry »
On the Axial Age
A careful study of the Axial Age in light of the eonic effect (in this passage from the third edition, about to go offline as the fourth edition appears) can show the way that the myths of revelation were right and wrong in ways that many non-religious secularists also get wrong. We can see better now what they got right, and where they went wrong, and also see that Archaic Greece was a more stupendous revelation, if we must use those terms, than the Hebraic. And that the issue is not ‘god’, but the mystery beyond evolution itself.
In any case, religion and secularism were born simultaneously, so we can dispense with the differences.
After commenting on Hedges’ article on Christianity and Nietzsche, I would offer the caution: don’t underestimate Christianity. Dawkins is a programmed robot set to wreckerball for powerful forces beyond his ken. Xtianity may be undergoing collapse, but that’s none of your doing, don’t flatter yourself. It has long been prophesied that this collapse would occur spontaneously, and yet at each point the religion has persisted. Read the rest of this entry »
Liberalism can be defended
by Ophelia Benson – butterfliesandwheels.com
http://richarddawkins.net/articles/5215
from dawkins site
Taner Edis thinks Gary Bouma is right about secularism and that Russell Blackford is wrong. I think Taner is mostly wrong that Russell is wrong that Gary Bouma is wrong. Still with me?
Note that, as often in the liberal tradition, the main pragmatic argument Blackford uses to promote a secular regime is that it helps keep the peace between rival sects…Such arguments tend to overlook how such reasoning is difficult to generalize beyond the context of Western European Christianity in the modern era.
Possibly. But then…this may sound crude, but the reality is, Western Europe is a pretty good place to live, and it and its descendants are better places to live than most of the rest of the world. Yes, that does sound crude, but it doesn’t sound exactly fictitious, does it. There aren’t great waves of migrants going from France or Canada or New Zealand to live in Pakistan or China or Nigeria, and that’s not just some random accident. Yes Western Europe and its descendants are prosperous as well as liberal, but then it is generally thought that there is a pretty strong connection between the liberalism and the prosperity. So even if it’s true that secularism currently seems easier to defend in (let’s call it) the liberal world than outside it, that doesn’t really indicate that the illiberal world (to put it crudely) has a good case for theocracy.
But today’s multicultural urban environments are different. We have to deal with not one fragmenting religious tradition, but people thrown together from very different faiths, including various kinds of Muslims, Buddhists, African Christianities, indigenous traditions, etc. etc.
Well not exactly ‘thrown together’ – as indicated above, it’s more a matter of people going to such places on purpose, for reasons, because they want to. It’s a matter of mass migration, of large-scale immigration, of people who are drawn to these places because, for whatever reason, they prefer them to their places of origin. For at least some of those people, secularism and liberalism in general are among the reasons, are among the attractions that draw people from all these very different faiths into today’s multicultural urban environments. It is not necessarily the case that people who move from one place to another want their destination place to transform itself into a simulacrum of the place they left behind. People don’t generally leave home in order to find the same thing elsewhere, so the fact that the new place has many unfamiliar aspects is not automatically a reason to change those aspects. For all anybody knows those are the very aspects that draw people in the first place.
[I]t is hard to say that individualist tendencies are clearly dominant over desires to retain some measure of community identity and cohesion. Governmental bodies, unless driven by an explicit secularism in the French style, can effectively deal with representatives of religious communities as intermediaries. Keeping the peace often means ensuring that South Asian Shiites and Korean evangelicals and so forth do not feel disrespected and disadvantaged.
The best way to rebalance one’s thinking on secularism is to study the eonic effect, where the ‘modern transition’ is seen in its balanced complexity: The modern transition
The nature of secularism comes through in this context.
The great irony of secularism is that its place in world history and the evolution of civiization makes it fully the equivalent, not just of the Greek classical transition, but of Old Testament Axial period, which has been totally misunderstood and mythologized.
Thus the almost magical nature of the rise of secularism should leave Xtianity idiots gasping, clutching their now obsolete Bibles in vain.
James said,
February 27, 2010 at 2:37 pm ·
Why is commentary from the mass media on every conceivable topic so worthless? I find it strange that none of the usual suspects can find the right reference point to frame this debate. The issue isn’t some abstractions called “science,” “secularism,” “atheism,” etc. vs. “religion,” “spirituality,” etc.; it is about competing systems of thought that create different paradigms of human action. When it comes down to it, Marxists, Darwinists, Christians, Muslims, etc. are all playing the same game.
The term ‘secular’ has itself shifted meaning, and now we see religionists attacking modernity because they think that secularism means atheism, this view often seconded by the ‘scientism gang’ of New Atheists, Darwinists, etc…
So it is important to see that while the center of gravity of secularism seems to lie beyond religion the fact remains that modernity is perfectly compatible with religion. It began with the Protestant Reformation.
Atheism was a secondary strain in the Enlightenment and became a kind of cult in the nineteenth century. The New Atheists have created a completely stupid pseud-secularism based on scientism, Darwinism, and atheism, which is a complete misunderstanding.
The term ‘secular’ is very similar to the idea of a new age, if not ‘New Age’, and only points to a society beyond the theocracy of medieval Catholicism. The Reformation fought a war of liberation on that score, and when that war was over secular culture came into existence, as by and large still a Christian culture. Even Spinoza was only amibiguously atheist.
This is not a plea for theism or religion, but a warning that the watered down secularism of the Dawkins/scientism cult will backfire and produce a religious reaction.
Published: Thursday, December 21, 2006
LONDON — Geopolitically, the resurgence of religion is dangerous and spreading. From Islamic fundamentalism, American evangelism to Hindu nationalism, each creed demands total conformity and absolute submission to their own particular variant of God’s revelation.
Common to virtually all versions of contemporary religious fanaticism is a claim to know divine intention directly, absolutely and unquestionably. As a result, many people demand a fresh liberal resistance to religious totalitarianism.
But it is important to realize that this reduction of a transcendent religion to confirmation of one’s own personal beliefs represents an ersatz copy of liberal humanism. Long before religious fundamentalism, secular humanists reduced all objective codes to subjective assertion by making man the measure of all things and erasing God from nature.
This was a profoundly secular move: It simply denied natural knowledge of God and thereby eliminated theology from the sciences. Religion, stripped of rationality, became associated with a blind unmediated faith — precisely the mark of fanaticism. Thus religious fundamentalism constitutes an absence of religion that only true religion can correct.
Although the cultured despisers of religion are once again making strident appeal to secular values and unmediated reason, they do not realize that the religious absolutism they denounce is but a variant of their own fundamentalism returned in a different guise.
Richard Dawkins’s barely literate polemic “The God Delusion” declares that religion is irrational without ever explaining the foundations of reason itself. Sam Harris’s diatribe “The End of Faith” has to falsify history by claiming that Hitler and Stalin were religious in order to make its case for the malign influence of faith. The attacks on religion are becoming ever more shrill and desperate — a clear sign of atheist anxiety about the status of their own first principles and explanatory frameworks.
Ferris’ attempt to smear over the classic issues of the philosophy of history with the crude sociology of scientism deserves a look at the legacy of the Enlightenment here. Scientists can’t claim the Enlightenment then trash its classics.
The question of a science of history is discussed at length in World History And The Eonic Effect and this is connected with what I call ‘Kant’s Challenge’, that is, the paragraph of his famous essay cited in this passage: Kant’s Challenge
I am not an interpreter of Kant here, as such, but simply take his beautiful implied change to resolve the issue of freedom and causality across history. The pattern of the eonic effect provides a spectacular answer to that implied challenge.
Note that the eonic effect automatically picks up the question of the rise of liberalism (and science) and shows its deep relationship to the historical/evolutionary process of man’s descent, and creation of world civilization.
Let me note my suspcion here, for the umpteenth time by various authros, that Ferris is well aware of World History And The Eonic Effect and wants to produce an answer (without citing the book in question) that negates the apparoach indicated. One thing is sure these people are afraid of the challenge to produce a ‘science of history’. They can’t do it in conventional terms, and Ferris produces a whole book of moolah to distract attention from that fact.
Science the cause of liberalism? That’s a joke. As here, we see the effort to asphyxiate the public with the propaganda of scientism, and to eliminate history, as in any totalitarian system.
Make sure you don’t get drugged and put to sleep forever.
Fundamentalism began as reaction to modernism
Much has been written this year in observance of the birth of Charles Darwin in 1809 and the publication of his monumental work, On the Origin of Species, in 1859. Another important date – one which has gone largely unnoticed, yet which is also important in its perverse way to the ideas of our modern world – is 1909, the year in which a couple of oil tycoons met and hired theologian A.C. Dixon to produce a series of books called The Fundamentals.
Conceived as a reaction to Darwin and the other voices of modernism, The Fundamentals were a collection of 90 essays by prominent American and British clerics, compiled into 12 volumes and published between 1910 and 1915. They became the intellectual basis of modern fundamentalism.
from dawkins site
The Chief Rabbi, Lord Sacks of Aldgate, warned today that Europe was dying because the growth of secularism had made people too selfish to have children.
Its loss of a tolerant religious culture made it vulnerable to the advance of fundamentalism, he argued.
Comparing its decline to that of ancient Greece in the third century of the pre-Christian era, he said the answer lay in the rediscovery of the continent’s Judeo-Christian religious roots.
Tolerant religion was “the only strong enough defence with some of the religiosity that is coming our way with the force of a hurricane”, the Chief Rabbi said.
“Let me be blunt. Either we win or the fundamentalists win and that is the challenge. If the fundamentalists win, I wouldn’t hang around too long.” “Let me be blunt. Either we win or the fundamentalists win and that is the challenge. If the fundamentalists win, I wouldn’t hang around too long.”
The question of religion and secularism has been hopelessly confused. The reality, beyond religious form, is that secularism can be the foundation for a true religioin for the first time.
Toward A Secular Postdarwinism
As noted already today the polarization of the debate over evolution between ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ camps is completely false: there can only be a secular postdarwinism that leads beyond the reductionist scientism of the Darwinists to a robust secular public philosophy and science.
In the 21st century, the Islamic burka, the full-face-and-body veil, adopted by more women every day, has become the most potent human symbol on earth. But what exactly does it symbolize? Many say it stands for piety. No, that’s wrong, says Marnia Lazreg, an Algerian-born professor of sociology at the City University of New York. Piety has little to do with it; the Koran doesn’t even mention the veil. In truth, the veil stands for political ideology and male power.
Reflections on the Revolution in Europe:
Immigration, Islam, and the West
By Christopher Caldwell
Doubleday, 422 pages, $30
Although I find Caldwell’s analogy with revolution (the French) and the Burkean reaction to that to be problematic, his book is nonetheless of great interest, and joins a long list of books dealing with this, most of them ensared in a conservative mindset (in turn excoriated from the left) that confuses the issue. The citation of Burke makes me pessimistic, were I to read the book (or when!), that this conservative strain might be absent here.
Whatever the case, it is time for the liberal/left to find a stance to deal with this issue without the kneejerk submission to unlimited immigration that has characterized this spectrum for too long. Read the rest of this entry »
I persist in expressing caution with respect to the term ‘secular’ and ‘secularism’. The term ‘secular’ comes from ‘saeculum’ (age period) and refers to the sense of a ‘new age’ that made the men of the early modern, sixteenth to seventeenth century, think that they had left the world of antiquity.
There is no inherent association of ‘secularism’ with atheism. Secularism is not really a philosophy, but a series of ‘dialectical’ spectra clustered around ‘modernist’ themes.
The (conservative) attacks against secularism almost always fail because of these semantic miscalculations, and also because the ‘pick and choose’ tactics of the critics: they denounce atheism, but never the quite secular capitalist economy. etc,…
As noted, the problem with attacking secularism as ‘anti-religion’ is that the ‘secular era’ was initiated by Protestantism, a religious renewal.
To accuse secularists of wishing to move past religion is a slur against the principal momentum. Some secularists have indeed espoused such views. But the general trend of the secular is open for inspection: it has proven far more tolerant of religion than Christianity (or Islam) ever was, and has seen an immense flowering and proliferation of New Age religious explorations. What is the charge that the secular age is against religion? Hinduism was almost defunct (apart from its cultural substratum in India) and was revived first by the British Raj, then by its ignition and globalization in the twentieth century. Secularization is the greatest thing that ever happened to Hinduism!
There is a lot to say here, and the sense that the secular is moving past religion springs from the fact that is, or may be, moving past the religions of the Axial Age, on the way to a new religious consciousness???
It is not clear who has harmed the term ‘secularism’ more, the Darwin faithful, the New Atheists, or the ID-ists.
The result is a shift in the meaning of the term ‘secular’ which is destructive to all discussion.
So, let’s be clear: the secular is a temporal boundary emerging in sixteenth, then seventeenth century, in the emergence of a new modernity. Secularism is not therefore a belief system, as such, nor is it equatable with Darwinism, or atheism, or even the Enlightenment. Secularism includes Protestantism, and/or its critics/successors, etc…
The abuse of the term secular by those nervously fanatic about Darwinism as secularism have given ammunition to right-wing anti-modernists who wish to make the attack on the secular a restoration of religious traditionalism.
It is all futile. The secular is quite secure, short of a renewal of the thirty years war and the reactionary or fascist destruction of modern libreral pluralism….
One of the confusions of the debate over evolution is the tendency over time for the parties to that debate to polarize over secularism and religion, itself a false division.
The challenge to evolution is in reality to the pseudo-science created from Darwinism, which is not a religious but a scientific issue. Darwinism has created bad science, with ideological abuse of scientific priniciples. The correction lies in a scientific critique of Darwinian reductionism, not in a right-wing ideology promoting religion.
Beyond that it would help if the challenge to Darwinism sprang from a liberal critique of Darwinian ideology and economics where instead we have a monopoly of conservatives: a veiled conservatie ideology of classical liberalism, and a critique of that that never mentions its economic/ideological aspects but instead invokes religious agendas.
To be sure, religious views provide a reality check, however crude, against the reductionist assumptions of science, which have shown themselves incapable of correction in the dumbing down of scientific cadres.
Christians tend to complicate all discussions by injecting their mythological belief systems into the discussion, thus bending out of shape such terms as ‘design’, or ‘faith’, or ‘miracles’, even issues of ‘ethics’. Battling Christians tends to drive scientists ever deeper into the reductionist trap.
The saddest thing about this is that scientists now claim the enlightenment when they have in fact destroyed it by making a religion of scientism.
Let us remember that the issue of scientism found one great resolution in the work of figures such as Kant who exposed the concealed metaphysics of religion and scientism both, and mediated the Newtonian world view in a fashion that should be easy for scientists to adopt and use. And yet this small gesture is too much for current science. The reductionist absolute found in Darwinian selectionism and its kin is the hybristic ambition of scientists now.
A genuine postdarwinian liberalism already exists and would embrace the culture of modernity and the idea of freedom (against possibly in a Kantian perspective) in relation to the culture of science and the idea of causality. The mediation of these two could create the basis for a genuine secualarism beyond the degenerate scientism of technocratic Big Science and the distintegrating and reactionary religious traditionalism of Christian conservatives.
The issue of Buddhism is a confusing one. But one thing to consider is that it came into existence in the wake of the Axial Age, and then straddled an entire age until the modern, at which point its impetus began to fail. We see the desperation in the attempts to cast its ‘seeds’ in the West, as the whole structure collapses. The Axial Transitions
The ‘new age’ is going to do something different, but it is a good question at this point what that might be. The impulse to imitate the past is compulsive. But the deviation of modernity into a culture of scientism is almost worse.
This short essay might help, if you forget the term ‘sufi’, and ‘fouth way’ and try to understand the invariant of all religion, man’s self-consciousness.
If religions can’t help here, and so far they haven’t, then they will pass away.
The controversy over evolution has persisted since the publication of Darwin’s Origin to the point of becoming almost a liability for secular society itself. The relentless abuse of the evolution question in the pursuit of agendas, religious or scientific, is the principal culprit. But the ultimate source of the endless debate lies in the claims for natural selection made by Darwin, and the metaphysical character of his original theory. The claims for natural selection exceed the limits of correct observation and the result is the reductionist character of Darwinian attempts to explain the whole scope of biological phenomena in terms of scenarios of adaptation. We are left with the distorted world view characteristic of the era of positivistic scientism in which Darwin lived. The original critics of Darwin were not all motivated by religious beliefs and many of the first objections to the selectionist theory came from scientists themselves who saw at once that Darwin had overextended his claims for natural selection. T. H. Huxley himself, the principal champion of Darwin, said as much and thought the emphasis on natural selection would prove a problem. The later emergence of fundamentalist creationism has further confused the whole question. Lately, this has become the renewed challenge of the Intelligent Design movement, a more sophisticated version of the views of Paley. These claims for design simply compound the metaphysical burden of the debate and the result is the deadlock that we see in our own time as the question of evolution seems irresolvable.
Critiques of scientism are often confusing to those who equate scientism with modernity or secularism: a look at the eonic effect, and its discrete-continuous model show the way that the period after the characteristic transitional interval, here The Great Divide can explain the sudden loss of quality in the outcome after the transition.
A Sufi myth: Fourth Ways,…and The Great Freedom Sutra
I need to rewrite this essay without the allusion to ‘fourth ways’ and sufism, but the point is clear that there future dimension to ‘religion’ is beyond religion, and that secular society has all the potential for a religious culture, except better.
The historical position of the great religions such as Xtianity and Islam is actually inferior to that of the rise of modernity, if you study the eonic effect and consider its implications.
You know the powers that be are trying to propagandize anti-religion when figures such as Robert Wright get so much free air time. Beware of such people. They make fundamentalists look brilliant.
Beware of Wright’s formulation. He says he spent a decade researching religion.
Is this fellow kidding?
Wright is either without talent on the issue of religion, or else his Darwinian assumptions have made him artificially brain dead on religious questions.
Wright gets hunter-gatherers completely wrong, we suspect (but we weren’t there, so who can say).
The Eyptian Book of the Dead is an enigma beyond the powers of those raised in Darwinian scientism. It might help to apprentice yourself to the Tibetan Book of the Dead first, to get your bearings on Books of the Dead.
The question of sin and redemption is so obvious, so completely transparent, that only the genius of Christian stupidity could have muddled the issue.
Here’s the shortest take I can manage on ‘redemptive religion’: man (contra the idiotic beliefs of scientists mired in scientism) has a will, and the exercise of this will is perilous and can result in dangerously bad choices. How dangerous? Is there some sort of karma (to transpose a Buddhist term on ‘Christian’ redemption logic). The point is that the burdern of free choice can become problematical. Perhaps the possibility of redemption is real. Is it?
Or is the promise of figures such as ‘Jesus’ purely formal?
We don’t actually know, but the warning has been sounded repeatedly by many in the ancient discourse of redemption. It depends also on the question of reincarnation which has been factored out of the redemptive logic of Xtianity.
There is a lot to say here!!! And I make no claim to be able to elucidate redemptive religion. But a little cribbing from Buddhism can suggest what was originally intended, in its own context (maybe).
The amnesia and mythologization of the basic idea has turned Xtianity into an exercise in futility.
My point here is that while the key to traditional discourses has usually been lost, the attempts of complete idiots like Robert Wright or Karen Armstrong to clarify any of this is dangerous medicine.
Xtianity is a mystery. We see the calamity of decline in the Roman Empire in the wake of the Axial Age. From the theatre of Greek tragedy to the theatre of the Colliseum. Somehow in a gesture of ‘redemption’ Xtianity assisted in the rebirthing of civilization into a new form. Secularists would do well to be less arrogant about this, and be wary of the long term calamity likely to happen to populations indoctrinated in Darwinism
James said,
July 23, 2009 at 12:04 pm ·
“But lying won’t help, not at all, and this charade of Darwinists has almost damaged secular credibility beyond repair.”
Almost? Face it, the chance is gone and it is too late for these “secularists” to turn back on their Darwinian foundation now. To admit failure after so much has been vested in this worldview would result in a TKO(Marx and Freud were killed off a while ago and Darwin is the only one left). It doesn’t matter that the religious right can smell blood and is zeroing in the for the kill (Altenburg 16 signals that Big Science is losing control over its community)…they will be forced to defend this worldview to the bitter end.
Panel Discussion – Dawkins, Tyson, Druyan, Stenger, Grothe
Center For Inquiry
from Dawkins site
This panel discussion took place at a Center for Inquiry – New York City conference titled “Secular Society and its Enemies.” The panel discusses a wide variety of topics, including, science, science education, the nature of science, the correct political methodology and much more.
Richard Dawkins, Neil Degrasse Tyson, Ann Druyan and Victor Stenger. Moderated by D.J. Grothe.
James said,
July 20, 2009 at 5:53 pm ·
” Islam has exactly the potential that emerged with Protestantism from Catholicism to be a secular religious matrix in the context of modernization. In fact, it might be too fair to hope for such an outcome in what seems a religious culture stuck in the past.”
Actually, I hope the Islamic world doesn’t have to go through what Europe had to go through to overthrow its theocracy. Who wants to see a Thirty Years War carried out with modern weapons?
I share your hope, but it is important to see that history never quite repeats itself, and the unique moment of the early modern whence appeared Protestantism won’t occur again (as a study of the eonic effect will make obvious), so what will happen with Islam is unknown. From what we have seen so far it will be much much worse than the Thirty Years War, centuries of conflict, the destruction of Europe, the Israel, Oil, imperial, and other issues.
The confusion has already taken up most of the twentieth century. So I don’t know what to suggest.
Speaking from my own experience, however, a threshold has been crossed as the confusion over Sufism has been exposed, and is not likely to reoccur. In the name of multiculturalism, an immense and false mystique about Islam has arisen, and is about to collapse as Sufism is seen as a Big Con on the level of a super-scientology of ancient gnosticism. Once these advertisements for the superiority of Islam as a culture are played out, the secularization of Islam (for many more reasons that this example) might well occur very rapidly.
It might help if the postmodern fad could get dumped into the trash bin, and if marxists on the so-called left could get their head out of their….
It can also help to consider what secularism means. Iraq lost its secular triumph and wasted a generation on Shaddam Hussein’s fixation on Stalin’s brand of what was the ‘secular’(!!!!).
You can declare what you wish, and the results can be surprising.
But, actually, Iraq was there a generation ago, and is now being destroyed in a mini ‘thirty years war’ mixed with imperialism, and the oil great game.
History, and histories, of Islam
The problem with many of these critics of Islam, such as Spencer, mentioned in one of the comments, is that they drift into a right-wing perspective and then become proponents of ‘Western Civilization’ (whatever that is) and defenders of Christian traditionalism and religion against Islam, the status of secularism remaining confused.
The issue in criticizing Islam is not the Western tradition or some debate between Christianity and Islam.
The issue is the emergence of a new secular modernity, potentially global, in a ‘European context or matrix’, proceeding swiftly toward a transcultural context or matrix’. The emergence of modern freedoms is the great moment of this modern transition.
Muslims give themselves away as lacking in historical comprehension in their rejection of this aspect of modernity.
For Europeans bemused by a spurious latecomer consisting of postmodern multiculturalism and the rest of it to throw away their emergent heritage for an Islamic restoration of reactionary premodern culture is almost beyond belief, incomprehensible.
It is the emergence of modern secular culture in a Western source area, not Western Civilization, that is important. The reflexive focus on the West confuses the whole critique of the retrograde Islam, now most tragically threatening to overtake Europe.
Conservatives making a fetish out of the ‘West’ and Christianity are part of the problem and are inhibiting secular liberals from taking up the critique of Islam. Here the radical left with its idiotic alliance with Islamic culture has missed the point and is threatening to precipitate still another cultural tragedy, sharia in Holland. That is simply beyond belief. And no part of the legacy of Karl Marx, for crying out loud.
I recommend a careful look and study of the eonic effect to see the way in which emergent civilization transcends its source areas, and the dilemma that Muslims must face, with respect to the relatively weak basis for a world culture in Islam.
I don’t wish to be unfair to Islam, whose study I find of great interest, and in fact it is not unfair. Islam has exactly the potential that emerged with Protestantism from Catholicism to be a secular religious matrix in the context of modernization. In fact, it might be too fair to hope for such an outcome in what seems a religious culture stuck in the past. The same was said of Catholicism (now a variant of Protestantism).
Westerners, so-called, need to grasp the reality of their situation, which cannot be Christian culture vs Islamic culture. It can only be globalizing secular culture, born in the ‘west’, but rapidly globalizing on the way to a new oikoumene of secular entities.
For Europe to succumb to a retrograde phase of Islamic restoration is a recipe for total catastrophe, and it is irresponsible for any secularist to contemplate such an outcome. The radical left now abetting such an eventuality is in the midst of still another screw up, in the long list of many since the nineteenth century.
The eonic effect is a good guide to the larger dynamics of religions in world history.
Islam and Christianity/Judaism, for all their claims to spiritual foundations are in fact medieval distortions in all cases. The true moment in the Axial Age of the Greek, Israelite, Indic, Sinic (et al) intervals of transformation are lost to us now, and none of the world religions that find their sources in that era have any real connection to those periods, least wise any claim of ‘revelation’.
We should note that Axial Age Greece gave birth to secularism, and much else, and the modern transformation echoes much of that.
Thus the rise of modern secularism has a far better claim for a spiritual foundation than the medieval distortions of Christianity and Islam. Strange to say, but the facts of history in the large show the reality.
We tend to think of ‘Western Civilization’ in terms of Judaic, and Greek, sources, but that isn’t European! So why the exclusive focus on Europe. It is confusing the issue.
Look at the facts of the case with Islam: it is a most remarkable cultural matrix, but its basis is not adequate for a future global culture. This reality has to be faced, as the sentimental distortions of culture and history are set aside for a more realistic appraisal of Islamic history in light of the facts.
Christians and Moslems are full of themselves as they flaunt some special relationship to the sacred or to god. Such claims are without merit and are blinding millions to their real needs.
One of the problems is that secularism is misunderstood by its proponents, as scientism, darwinism, atheism, and a host of lesser episodes of modernity rise to claim the whole. The real significance of the secular has yet to manifest itself, and remains a project of the future.