Secular Country Quotes

How dismal it is to see present day Americans yearning for the very orthodoxy that their country was founded to escape.

Aren't you, like me, hoping that some person, thing, or event will come along to give you that final feeling of inner well-being you desire? Don't you often hope: 'May this book, idea, course, trip, job, country or relationship fulfill my deepest desire.' But as long as you are waiting for that mysterious moment you will go on running helter-skelter, always anxious and restless, always lustful and angry, never fully satisfied. You know that this is the compulsiveness that keeps us going and busy, but at the same time makes us wonder whether we are getting anywhere in the long run. This is the way to spiritual exhaustion and burn-out. This is the way to spiritual death.

I was once reproved by a minister who was driving a poor beast to some meeting-house horse-sheds among the hills of New Hampshire, because I was bending my steps to a mountain-top on the Sabbath, instead of a church, when I would have gone farther than he to hear a true word spoken on that or any day. He declared that I was 'breaking the Lord's fourth commandment,' and proceeded to enumerate, in a sepulchral tone, the disasters which had befallen him whenever he had done any ordinary work on the Sabbath. He really thought that a god was on the watch to trip up those men who followed any secular work on this day, and did not see that it was the evil conscience of the workers that did it. The country is full of this superstition, so that when one enters a village, the church, not only really but from association, is the ugliest looking building in it, because it is the one in which human nature stoops the lowest and is most disgraced. Certainly, such temples as these shall erelong cease to deform the landscape. There are few things more disheartening and disgusting than when you are walking the streets of a strange village on the Sabbath, to hear a preacher shouting like a boatswain in a gale of wind, and thus harshly profaning the quiet atmosphere of the day.

If I have one message to give to the secular American people, it’s that the world is not divided into countries. The world is not divided between East and West. You are American, I am Iranian, we don’t know each other, but we talk together and we understand each other perfectly. The difference between you and your government is much bigger than the difference between you and me. And the difference between me and my government is much bigger than the difference between me and you. And our governments are very much the same.

But gay marriage is coming to America first and foremost because marriage here is a secular concern, not a religious one. The objection to gay marriage is almost invariably biblical, but nobody's legal vows in this country are defined by interpretation of biblical verse - or at least, not since the Supreme Court stood up for Richard and Mildred Loving. A church wedding ceremony is a nice thing, but it is neither required for legal marriage in America nor does it constitute legal marriage in America. What constitutes legal marriage in this country is that critical piece of paper that you and your betrothed must sign and then register with the state. The morality of your marriage may indeed rest between you and God, but it's that civic and secular paperwork which makes your vows official here on earth. Ultimately, then, it is the business of America's courts, not America's churches, to decide the rules of matrimonial law, and it is in those courts that the same-sex marriage debate will finally be settled.

Hindutava's nationalism ignores the rationalist traditions of India, a country in which some of the earliest steps in algebra, geometry, and astronomy were taken, where the decimal system emerged, where early philosophy — secular as well as religious — achieved exceptional sophistication, where people invented games like chess, pioneered sex education, and began the first systematic study of political economy. The Hindu militant chooses instead to present India — explicitly or implicitly — as a country of unquestioning idolaters, delirious fanatics, belligerent devotees, and religious murderers

Believing this country to be a political and not a religious organisation ... the editor of the NATIONAL CITIZEN will use all her influence of voice and pen against 'Sabbath Laws', the uses of the 'Bible in School', and pre-eminently against an amendment which shall introduce 'God in the Constitution.

America was always a religious country, and it remains the most religious of industrialized Western democracies. America derived its strength from religion, not secularism.

Israel is the only truly democratic, secular country in the Middle East, right in the middle of all of them.

secular countries such as Denmark and the Czech Republic aren’t more violent than devout countries such as Iran and Pakistan.

...organized religion is no longer good news for most people, but bad news indeed. It set us up for the massive atheism, agnosticism, hedonism, and secularism we now see in almost all formerly Christian countries.

In thirty years Iraq too has gone from being among the most modern and secular of Arab countries -with women working, artists thriving, journalists writing- into a squalid playpen for a megalomaniac.

But in the 17th century Russian Orthodoxy was gravely weakened by an internal schism. In the 18th, the country was shaken by Peter's forcibly imposed transformations, which favored the economy, the state, and the military at the expense of the religious spirit and national life. And along with this lopsided Petrine enlightenment, Russia felt the first whiff of secularism; its subtle poisons permeated the educated classes in the course of the 19th century and opened the path to Marxism. By the time of the Revolution, faith had virtually disappeared in Russian educated circles; and amongst the uneducated, its health was threatened.

Mainly, though, the Democratic Party has become the party of reaction. In reaction to a war that is ill conceived, we appear suspicious of all military action. In reaction to those who proclaim the market can cure all ills, we resist efforts to use market principles to tackle pressing problems. In reaction to religious overreach, we equate tolerance with secularism, and forfeit the moral language that would help infuse our policies with a larger meaning. We lose elections and hope for the courts to foil Republican plans. We lost the courts and wait for a White House scandal. And increasingly we feel the need to match the Republican right in stridency and hardball tactics. The accepted wisdom that drives many advocacy groups and Democratic activists these days goes like this: The Republican Party has been able to consistently win elections not by expanding its base but by vilifying Democrats, driving wedges into the electorate, energizing its right wing, and disciplining those who stray from the party line. If the Democrats ever want to get back into power, then they will have to take up the same approach. ...Ultimately, though, I believe any attempt by Democrats to pursue a more sharply partisan and ideological strategy misapprehends the moment we're in. I am convinced that whenever we exaggerate or demonize, oversimplify or overstate our case, we lose. Whenever we dumb down the political debate, we lose. For it's precisely the pursuit of ideological purity, the rigid orthodoxy and the sheer predictability of our current political debate, that keeps us from finding new ways to meet the challenges we face as a country. It's what keeps us locked in "either/or" thinking: the notion that we can have only big government or no government; the assumption that we must either tolerate forty-six million without health insurance or embrace "socialized medicine". It is such doctrinaire thinking and stark partisanship that have turned Americans off of politics.

It is now established by verifiable evidence that religion stultifies the brain and is the great obstacle in the path of intellectual progress. The more religious a person is, the more he is steeped in ignorance and superstition, the less is his sense of moral responsibility. The more intelligent a person, the less religious he is. There is an old saying that 'where there are three scientists, there are two atheists.' The countries whose governments are dominated by religion and religious institutions are the most backward. By the same token, the countries whose people are the most enlightened, and whose governments are based upon the principle of secularism—the separation of church and state—are the most progressive. And let me tell you: When man is intellectually free, the progress he will make is beyond calculation.

At present, the successful office-seeker is a good deal like the center of the earth; he weighs nothing himself, but draws everything else to him. There are so many societies, so many churches, so many isms, that it is almost impossible for an independent man to succeed in a political career. Candidates are forced to pretend that they are catholics with protestant proclivities, or christians with liberal tendencies, or temperance men who now and then take a glass of wine, or, that although not members of any church their wives are, and that they subscribe liberally to all. The result of all this is that we reward hypocrisy and elect men entirely destitute of real principle; and this will never change until the people become grand enough to allow each other to do their own thinking. Our government should be entirely and purely secular. The religious views of a candidate should be kept entirely out of sight. He should not be compelled to give his opinion as to the inspiration of the bible, the propriety of infant baptism, or the immaculate conception. All these things are private and personal. The people ought to be wise enough to select as their officers men who know something of political affairs, who comprehend the present greatness, and clearly perceive the future grandeur of our country. If we were in a storm at sea, with deck wave-washed and masts strained and bent with storm, and it was necessary to reef the top sail, we certainly would not ask the brave sailor who volunteered to go aloft, what his opinion was on the five points of Calvinism. Our government has nothing to do with religion. It is neither christian nor pagan; it is secular. But as long as the people persist in voting for or against men on account of their religious views, just so long will hypocrisy hold place and power. Just so long will the candidates crawl in the dust—hide their opinions, flatter those with whom they differ, pretend to agree with those whom they despise; and just so long will honest men be trampled under foot.

If anyone attempted to rule the world by the gospel and to abolish all temporal law and sword on the plea that all are baptized and Christian, and that, according to the gospel, there shall be among them no law or sword - or need for either - pray tell me, friend, what would he be doing? He would be loosing the ropes and chains of the savage wild beasts and letting them bite and mangle everyone, meanwhile insisting that they were harmless, tame, and gentle creatures; but I would have the proof in my wounds. Just so would the wicked under the name of Christian abuse evangelical freedom, carry on their rascality, and insist that they were Christians subject neither to law nor sword, as some are already raving and ranting. To such a one we must say: Certainly it is true that Christians, so far as they themselves are concerned, are subject neither to law nor sword, and have need of neither. But take heed and first fill the world with real Christians before you attempt to rule it in a Christian and evangelical manner. This you will never accomplish; for the world and the masses are and always will be unchristian, even if they are all baptized and Christian in name. Christians are few and far between (as the saying is). Therefore, it is out of the question that there should be a common Christian government over the whole world, or indeed over a single country or any considerable body of people, for the wicked always outnumber the good. Hence, a man who would venture to govern an entire country or the world with the gospel would be like a shepherd who should put together in one fold wolves, lions, eagles, and sheep, and let them mingle freely with one another, saying, “Help yourselves, and be good and peaceful toward one another. The fold is open, there is plenty of food. You need have no fear of dogs and clubs.” The sheep would doubtless keep the peace and allow themselves to be fed and governed peacefully, but they would not live long, nor would one beast survive another. For this reason one must carefully distinguish between these two governments. Both must be permitted to remain; the one to produce righteousness, the other to bring about external peace and prevent evil deeds. Neither one is sufficient in the world without the other. No one can become righteous in the sight of God by means of the temporal government, without Christ's spiritual government. Christ's government does not extend over all men; rather, Christians are always a minority in the midst of non-Christians. Now where temporal government or law alone prevails, there sheer hypocrisy is inevitable, even though the commandments be God's very own. For without the Holy Spirit in the heart no one becomes truly righteous, no matter how fine the works he does. On the other hand, where the spiritual government alone prevails over land and people, there wickedness is given free rein and the door is open for all manner of rascality, for the world as a whole cannot receive or comprehend it.

Service to “the country” is considered a virtue – although the net beneficiaries of that service are always those who rule citizens by force. In

By their actions, the Founding Fathers made clear that their primary concern was religious freedom, not the advancement of a state religion. Individuals, not the government, would define religious faith and practice in the United States. Thus the Founders ensured that in no official sense would America be a Christian Republic. Ten years after the Constitutional Convention ended its work, the country assured the world that the United States was a secular state, and that its negotiations would adhere to the rule of law, not the dictates of the Christian faith. The assurances were contained in the Treaty of Tripoli of 1797 and were intended to allay the fears of the Muslim state by insisting that religion would not govern how the treaty was interpreted and enforced. John Adams and the Senate made clear that the pact was between two sovereign states, not between two religious powers.

[Dan] Brown states that five million women were killed by the Church as witches. In fact, modern research has shown that the witch hunts began in the sixteenth century in Europe and that between 30,000 and 50,000 men and women were burned to death for the crime of witchcraft. However, 90 per cent of those trials took place before secular tribunals in countries such as Germany and France where by the 1500s the Church had lost most of its influence in judicial matters. Indeed, it was precisely in countries like Spain and Italy where the Catholic Church still had influence that there were almost no witchcraft trials.

This body of thought represents an almost total inversion of Westphalian world order. In the purist version of Islamism, the state cannot be the point of departure for an international system because states are secular, hence illegitimate; at best they may achieve a kind of provisional status en route to a religious entity on a larger scale. Noninterference in other countries’ domestic affairs cannot serve as a governing principle, because national loyalties represent deviations from the true faith and because jihadists have a duty to transform dar al-harb, the world of unbelievers. Purity, not stability, is the guiding principle of this conception of world order.

I would take my beloved Najma to my country so that she would taste secularism and true freedom. How wrong I was! How wrong we all were! Unfortunately, you truly miss what you have had all along and taken for granted (in this case the spirit of secularism and true freedom) only once you actually lose it.

when we compare these types of nations, we see that the religiosity/secularity correlation holds true the world over: the poorer, more chaotic, more troubled countries tend to be among the most religious, while the wealthier, more stable, more well-functioning countries tend to be among the most secular.

It is pluralism, not secularism, that defines democracy. A democratic state can be established upon any normative moral framework as long as pluralism remains the source of its legitimacy. England continues to maintain a national church whose religious head is also the country’s sovereign and whose bishops serve in the upper house of Parliament. India was, until recently, governed by partisans of an élitist theology of Hindu Awakening (Hindutva) bent on applying an implausible but enormously successful vision of “true Hinduism” to the state. And yet, like the United States, these countries are considered democracies, not because they are secular but because they are, at least in theory, dedicated to pluralism.

Many of Pakistan’s problems—from falling behind in secular education to the rise of Islamist extremism—can be traced to the country’s founding on the basis of religious nationalism.

Blasphemy laws in Islamic countries force people there to stay quiet. If we also choose to be quite because of self-imposed blasphemy laws, who will be left to speak? It is our responsibility and our duty and our privilege to speak our minds. People have died so that you and I can have the right to free speech. what a dishonour to their memory if we squander this gift they have given us.

Lyell and Poulett Scrope, in this country, resumed the work of the Italians and of Hutton; and the former, aided by a marvellous power of clear exposition, placed upon an irrefragable basis the truth that natural causes are competent to account for all events, which can be proved to have occurred, in the course of the secular changes which have taken place during the deposition of the stratified rocks. The publication of 'The Principles of Geology,' in 1830, constituted an epoch in geological science. But it also constituted an epoch in the modern history of the doctrines of evolution, by raising in the mind of every intelligent reader this question: If natural causation is competent to account for the not-living part of our globe, why should it not account for the living part?

Studies that assess education at Time 1 and wealth at Time 2, holding all else constant, suggest that investing in education really does make countries richer. At least it does if the education is secular and rationalistic.

The paradox has often been noted that the United States, founded in secularism, is now the most religiose country in Christendom, while England, with an established church headed by its constitutional monarch, is among the least.

For Eric, Columbine was a performance. Homicidal art. He actually referred to his audience in his journal: “the majority of the audience wont even understand my motives,” he complained. He scripted Columbine as made-for-TV murder, and his chief concern was that we would be too stupid to see the point. Fear was Eric’s ultimate weapon. He wanted to maximize the terror. He didn’t want kids to fear isolated events like a sporting event or a dance; he wanted them to fear their daily lives. It worked. Parents across the country were afraid to send their kids to school. Eric didn’t have the political agenda of a terrorist, but he had adopted terrorist tactics. Sociology professor Mark Juergensmeyer identified the central characteristic of terrorism as “performance violence.” Terrorists design events “to be spectacular in their viciousness and awesome in their destructive power. Such instances of exaggerated violence are constructed events: they are mind-numbing, mesmerizing theater.” The audience—for Timothy McVeigh, Eric Harris, or the Palestine Liberation Organization—was always miles away, watching on TV. Terrorists rarely settle for just shooting; that limits the damage to individuals. They prefer to blow up things—buildings, usually, and the smart ones choose carefully. “During that brief dramatic moment when a terrorist act levels a building or damages some entity that a society regards as central to its existence, the perpetrators of the act assert that they—and not the secular government—have ultimate control over that entity and its centrality,” Juergensmeyer wrote. He pointed out that during the same day as the first attack on the World Trade Center, in 1993, a deadlier attack was leveled against a coffee shop in Cairo. The attacks were presumably coordinated by the same group. The body count was worse in Egypt, yet the explosion was barely reported outside that country. “A coffeehouse is not the World Trade Center,” he explained. Most terrorists target symbols of the system they abhor—generally, iconic government buildings. Eric followed the same logic. He understood that the cornerstone of his plan was the explosives. When all his bombs fizzled, everything about his attack was misread. He didn’t just fail to top Timothy McVeigh’s record—he wasn’t even recognized for trying. He was never categorized with his peer group. We lumped him in with the pathetic loners who shot people.

Holy scriptures may have been relevant in the Middle Ages, but how can they guide us in an era of artificial intelligence, bioengineering, global warming, and cyberwarfare? Yet secular people are a minority. Billions of humans still profess greater faith in the Quran and the Bible than in the theory of evolution; religious movements shape the politics of countries as diverse as India, Turkey, and the United States; and religious animosities fuel conflicts from Nigeria to the Philippines.

racism may wear a new dress, buy a new pair of boots, but neither it nor its succubus twin fascism is new or can make anything new. It can only reproduce the environment that supports its own health: fear, denial, and an atmosphere in which its victims have lost the will to fight. The forces interested in fascist solutions to national problems are not to be found in one political party or another, or in one or another wing of any single political party. Democrats have no unsullied history of egalitarianism. Nor are liberals free of domination agendas. Republicans have housed abolitionists and white supremacists. Conservative, moderate, liberal; right, left, hard left, far right; religious, secular, socialist—we must not be blindsided by these Pepsi-Cola, Coca-Cola labels because the genius of fascism is that any political structure can host the virus and virtually any developed country can become a suitable home. Fascism talks ideology, but it is really just marketing—marketing for power.

Jinnah had chosen a Hindu, Jogendar Nath Mandal, as the country’s first law minister to affirm that secular lawyers and not theologians would run Pakistan’s legal system. But many of his followers could not comprehend this nuanced conception of a state.

We in the West still seemed to believe the old story of how a man transformed an Islamic empire into a secular republic: Atatürk came along, changed some rules, the people followed. Old Turkish textbooks didn’t portray the suppression of Islam as anything other than a liberation. But I began to question for the first time what it was like to suddenly lose your language, your mode of dress, your idea of the world. My assumption had been that any social revolution that resulted in a country becoming more “modern,” in the American sense, must have been a good thing. In Turkey, not only had this revolution been damaging, but it hadn’t worked. It was strange, I was as critical of the United States as I thought one could be. But at that point, I still had no idea that with even those political views came an unassailable, perhaps unconscious faith in my country’s inherent goodness, as well as in my country’s Western way of living, and perhaps in my own inherent, God-given, Christian-American goodness as well.

It is interesting to note that both the “secular humanism” so prevalent in Western democracies, and the Marxist atheism, found in communist countries include the fundamental belief that mankind is capable of solving his own problems without God’s help or direction.

It must be ‘UNDER GOD’ to include the great Jewish Community, and the people of the Moslem faith and the myriad of denominations of Christians in the land,” he said. “What then of the honest atheist? Philosophically speaking, an atheistic American is a contradiction in terms.” The Presbyterian praised atheists for being “fine in character” and “good neighbors” but suggested they were “spiritual parasites.” “I mean no term of abuse in this,” the minister added. “A parasite is an organism that lives upon the life force of another organism without contributing to the life of the other. These excellent ethical seculars are living upon the accumulated Spiritual Capital of a Judaio-Christian civilization, and at the same time, deny the God who revealed the divine principles upon which the ethics of this Country grow.

But in the end we found it impossible to ignore the impassioned pleas of the Lost City of White Male Privilege, a controversial municipality whose very existence is often denied by many (mostly privileged white males). Others state categorically that the walls of the locale have been irreparably breached by hip-hop and Roberto Bolaño’s prose. That the popularity of the spicy tuna roll and a black American president were to white male domination what the smallpox blankets were to Native American existence. Those inclined to believe in free will and the free market argue that the Lost City of White Male Privilege was responsible for its own demise, that the constant stream of contradictory religious and secular edicts from on high confused the highly impressionable white male. Reduced him to a state of such severe social and psychic anxiety that he stopped fucking. Stopped voting. Stopped reading. And, most important, stopped thinking that he was the end-all, be-all, or at least knew enough to pretend not to be so in public. But in any case, it became impossible to walk the streets of the Lost City of White Male Privilege, feeding your ego by reciting mythological truisms like “We built this country!” when all around you brown men were constantly hammering and nailing, cooking world-class French meals, and repairing your cars. You couldn’t shout “America, love it or leave it!” when deep down inside you longed to live in Toronto.

The current political dispensation in the country takes pride in its affiliations with religion and culture. But unfortunately, they have become a corporate government more than a moral government. Religion to them does not mean the supremacy of moral, family and social values prescribed by religion, but hatred based on religious identity. If they can revisit their strategy, and take a bold stand against social vices, almost all the religious communities of the country, which means more than 95 pc of the people, will be standing behind them. But unfortunately, they stand for the rest 5 per cent.

Instead of seeing the French Revolution as a failure, therefore, we should perhaps see it as the explosive start of a lengthy process. Such massive social and political change overturning millennia of autocracy cannot be achieved overnight. Revolutions take a long time. But unlike several other European countries, where aristocratic regimes were so deeply entrenched that they managed to hang on, albeit in limited form, France eventually achieved its secular republic. We should bear this long-drawn-out and painful process in mind before dismissing as failures revolutions that have taken place in our own time in Iran, Egypt, and Tunisia, for example.

Whatever laws we make mixing religion with government for the sake of appeasing our (currently) predominantly Christian constituency will only pave the way for the next religious majority, who will take advantage of whatever permissions we've already established and which we thought were harmless enough at the time. Christians very often have no concept of the value of a secular government, until or unless they understand that they won't always hold the majority. Once they realize that their religion is in a general state of decline even in this country and that the fastest growing religion globally is Islam, then the math isn't very hard to work out.

If I had hoped to skirt the sense of being a stranger in the world by coming to Ghana, then disappointment awaited me. And I had suspected as much before I arrived. Being a stranger concerns not only matters of familiarity, belonging, and exclusion but as well involves a particular relation to the past. If the past is another country, then I am its citizen. I am the relic of an experience most preferred not to remember, as if the sheer will to forget could settle or decide the matter of history. .I am a reminder that twelve million crossed the Atlantic Ocean and the past is not yet over. I am the progeny of the captives. I am the vestige of the dead. And history is how the secular world attends to the dead.

Now we see Christendom likewise sinking. But the true point is this: that Christ's kingdom remains. Indeed, it can be seen more clearly and appreciated more sharply by contrast with the darkness and depravity of the contemporary scene. (...) A wonderful sign (...) is the amazing renewal of the Christian faith in its purest possible form in, of all places, the countries that have been most drastically subjected to the oppression and brainwashing and general influence of the first overtly atheistic and materialistic regime to exist on earth. (...) Soviet citizens had no access to the Gospels, few religious services available, no literature of the mystics, no devotional works, no religious music, and an education brutally atheistic and secular.

Secular-minded royalist Afghans from the country’s thin, exiled tribal leadership and commercial classes said they had long warned both the Americans and the Saudis, as one put it, “For God’s sake, you’re financing your own assassins.” But the Americans had been convinced by Pakistani intelligence, they complained, that only the most radical Islamists could fight with determination.

Chaos was the fuel of Israel. It was a country built on shifting tectonic plates. Things were constantly colliding. Everything led to the edge, the next moment of rupture, but life became most vivid at moments of danger. It was why people drove so fast and so close. It was why they didn’t wait in lines at the airport. It was why the cafés throbbed in the mornings. It was why the markets were so loud and raw. People were chaotic in unison. Molecular in their turmoil. But it worked. Even the polar opposites were attracted to one another. Occasionally they would bash together and it made the ground pulse. There was left and there was right, and there was Orthodox and secular, and there was Arab and Jew, and there was gay and straight, there was high-tech and hippie, and there was rich and fiercely poor. Israel was a condensed everywhere. A tiny country bursting at the seams, but they were in this together. Every dream and neurosis under the sun. The psychoses. The passivities. The pretensions. The pride. The electricity of it all. And the fear too. Everyone wore a loud armor. Always in search of a debate over who and what and where they were.

Blasphemy laws in Islamic countries force people there to stay quiet. If we also choose to be quiet because of self-imposed blasphemy laws, who will be left to speak? It is our responsibility and our duty and our privilege to speak our minds. People have died so that you and I can have the right to free speech. what a dishonour to their memory if we squander this gift they have given us.

If TV sitcoms idealized the American suburbs of the 1960s, the works of the artistic elite disparaged them ceaselessly, then and now. The songs of Pete Seeger, novels like Revolutionary Road, the stories of John Cheever, movies like Pleasantville and American Beauty, television series like Mad Men: in all of them, that long-ago land of lawns and houses is depicted as a country of stultifying conformity and cultural emptiness, sexual hypocrisy, alcoholism, and spiritual despair. Privilege murders the senses there, the creatives tell us. Gender roles strangle freedom. Family life turns the heart of adventure to ashes. There’s bigotry and gossip and dangerous liaisons behind every closed door. Oh, the soul, the human soul! In the suburbs of fiction, she is forever dying. But

Once upon a time there were as many ways to be holy as there were people, and the space between secular and monastic, between laity and clergy, was filled with all sorts of strange books and crannies. You could have visions, dream dreams, you could be monastic from the four walls of your own house or you could wander the country barefoot and begging. But we’ve lost much of that over the centuries.

Liberal agnosticism about the good life has some compelling historical reasons behind it. It is a mind-set that was consciously cultivated as an antidote to the religious wars of centuries ago, when people slaughtered one another over ultimate differences. After World War II, revulsion with totalitarian regimes of the right and left made us redouble our liberal commitment to neutrality. But this stance is maladaptive in the context of twenty-first-century capitalism because, if you live in the West and aren’t caught up in battles between Sunnis and Shiites, for example, and if we also put aside the risk of extraordinary lethal events like terrorist attacks in Western countries, then the everyday threats to your well-being no longer come from an ideological rival or a theological threat to the liberal secular order. They are native to that order.

When she mysteriously disappeared along with her son and granddaughter in August 1995, some assumed they had fled the country with the organisation's money amidst speculations of tax fraud. The gruesome truth of their disappearance would come to light several years later as it was discovered Madalyn, her son Jon Garth and granddaugher Robin had been kidnapped, extorted, murdered and dismembered by a former American Atheist employee.

It must be noted that the general philosophical position that we call "liberalism" is compatible with a wide range of positions on political, economic, and social questions, including both what Americans call "liberal" (and Europeans call "social;-democratic") and moderate forms of what people in all countries call "conservative". This Philosophical liberalism is opposed to authoritarian movements of all types, be they left-wing or right-wing, secular or theocratic.

When, during and after the Reformation, the universities lost their status as so many autonomous parts of the universal church, they lost their independence correspondingly. In Protestant Europe, they came under the jurisdiction of the national churches and of the rapacious national monarchies; in Catholic Europe --although to a lesser extent--they came under the jurisdiction of the reinvigorated and consolidated Papacy, and of the sovereigns who, as in Spain and France, made royal influence over the church establishment within their realms a condition of their support for the Roman cause. The dissolution of medieval universalism meant that learning, like nearly everything else, was forced to submit to new or more rigid denominations. With the complete or partial secularization of society which followed upon the French Revolutionary era, in nearly every country except Britain, the universities were stripped of what remained of their old rights and became little better than state corporations.

The danger of nationalism is not that it encourages us to cultivate loyalty to and affection for our country—which is inescapable—but that it endows the state with almost limitless jurisdiction to reshape culture, imagines the nation as a quasi-religious body, and exacerbates sectarian and ethnic cleavages at home. Christians who uncritically buy into nationalism are giving support to an incoherent secular idea with a troubled historical record and making themselves credulous supporters of a dangerous and thoughtless theology.

You would expect the loss of a stable existence on earth to drive a search for fixity on a higher sphere. If this is the case, a rise in the appeal of fundamentalism will testify to the experience of impermanence. That takes me deep into the realm of subjectivity, but there are empirical hints and signs. In Egypt, we saw, the old regime was initially replaced by the Muslim Brotherhood, which won the country’s only fair elections to date. The hard reality in the Middle East is that Islamist groups have prospered wherever secular Arab authoritarians have wobbled. In the US, the more demanding faiths — evangelists, Mormons, Hasidics — have grown at the expense of older institutions which too much resemble the earth-bound hierarchies of the Center. The spread of Christianity in China is among today’s best-kept secrets. For the governing classes and articulate elites of the world, this turn to religion is both appalling and incomprehensible — but this is a denial of human nature. If the City of Man becomes a passing shadow, people will turn to the City of God.

When you open it up like that, you’re effectively saying there is no right answer. And in the absence of a right answer, pluralism is the only option. And pluralism will lead to secularism, and to democracy, and to human rights. We must all focus on those values without worrying about whether atheism is the most intellectually pure approach. I genuinely believe that if we focus on the pluralistic nature of interpretation and on democracy, human rights, and secularism—on these values—we’ll get to a time of peace and stability in Muslim-majority countries that then allows for conversations like this. Questioning whether God really exists would become a choice, open to all.

individuals exist to serve the purposes of the secular state and an imperial president. The implied warning to Christians is: Obey or find work elsewhere. But a deeper agenda may be that Obama is using a backhanded maneuver to try and put religious institutions out of business, and quiet Christians. For this is the method used in communist countries to limit religion; by putting extremely difficult restrictions on them. In a draft of a Communist Confession of Faith, (the original name for the Manifesto of the Communist Party) it says “communism is that stage of historical development which makes all existing religions superfluous and supersedes them.” 73And the Manifesto says, “There

Carlo had learned much from his pilgrimage-retreat, and the most important of his insights was the realization that it is essential to make Jesus the focus of the church's life and not the institution, which unfortunately had been the emphasis for the last several centuries. The church is merely the vehicle for bringing Jesus to the world. Carlo realized that the countries of Europe have turned secular mostly because the people are tired of hearing about church. They hunger for spirituality and intimacy with God, and all we give them is church. Carlo was determined to make Jesus real again for the people, knowing from his own experience that when he preached Jesus to the people, it changed their lives.

Institutionalized Buddhism throughout Asia not only has a doctrinal commitment to rebirth but also has an economic and political one. In contrast to most Tibetan lamas, for whom the belief in the doctrine of rebirth is essential to the continuing authority of their institutions in exile, other Asian Buddhists in the West have felt freer to adapt their teachings to suit the needs of a secular and skeptical audience whose interest in the dharma is as a way of finding meaning here and now rather than after death. One will search in vain for any discussion of rebirth in the numerous writings of Thich Nhat Hanh, for example. Although he comes from a country (Vietnam) in which the belief is deeply rooted, he now seems to be moving toward a view that equates karma with some form of genetic inheritance and transmissioṇ

To be ridiculously sweeping: baby boomers and their offspring have shifted emphasis from the communal to the individual, from the future to the present, from virtue to personal satisfaction. Increasingly secular, we pledge allegiance to lowercase gods of our private devising. We are concerned with leading less a good life than the good life. In contrast to our predecessors, we seldom ask ourselves whether we serve a greater social purpose; we are more likely to ask ourselves if we are happy. We shun self-sacrifice and duty as the soft spots of suckers. We give little thought to the perpetuation of lineage, culture or nation; we take our heritage for granted. We are ahistorical. We measure the value of our lives within the brackets of our own births and deaths, and we’re not especially bothered by what happens once we’re dead. As we age—oh, so reluctantly!—we are apt to look back on our pasts and question not did I serve family, God and country, but did I ever get to Cuba, or run a marathon? Did I take up landscape painting? Was I fat? We will assess the success of our lives in accordance not with whether they were righteous, but with whether they were interesting and fun. If that package sounds like one big moral step backward, the Be Here Now mentality that has converted from sixties catchphrase to entrenched gestalt has its upsides. There has to be some value in living for today, since at any given time today is all you’ve got. We justly cherish characters capable of living “in the moment.”…We admire go-getters determined to pack their lives with as much various experience as time and money provide, who never stop learning, engaging, and savoring what every day offers—in contrast to the dour killjoys who are bitter and begrudging in the ceaseless fulfillment of obligation. For the role of humble server, helpmate, and facilitator no longer to constitute the sole model of womanhood surely represents progress for which I am personally grateful. Furthermore, prosperity may naturally lead any well-off citizenry to the final frontier: the self, whose borders are as narrow or infinite as we make them. Yet the biggest social casualty of Be Here Now is children, who have converted from requirement to option, like heated seats for your car. In deciding what in times past never used to be a choice, we don’t consider the importance of raising another generation of our own people, however we might choose to define them. The question is whether kids will make us happy.

Says our Vyasa, “In the Kali Yuga there is one Karma left. Sacrifices and tremendous Tapasyâs are of no avail now. Of Karma one remains, and that is the Karma of giving.” And of these gifts, the gift of spirituality and spiritual knowledge is the highest; the next gift is the gift of secular knowledge; the next is the gift of life; and the fourth is the gift of food. Look at this wonderfully charitable race; look at the amount of gifts that are made in this poor, poor country; look at the hospitality where a man can travel from the north to the south, having the best in the land, being treated always by everyone as if he were a friend, and where no beggar starves so long as there is a piece of bread anywhere! In this land of charity, let us take up the energy of the first charity, the diffusion of spiritual knowledge. And that diffusion should not be confined within the bounds of India; it must go out all over the world.

Many irreligious societies like Canada, Denmark, and New Zealand are among the nicest places to live in the history of our kind (with high levels of every measurable good thing in life), while many of the world’s most religious societies are hellholes.87 American exceptionalism is instructive: the United States is more religious than its Western peers but underperforms them in happiness and well-being, with higher rates of homicide, incarceration, abortion, sexually transmitted disease, child mortality, obesity, educational mediocrity, and premature death.88 The same holds true among the fifty states: the more religious the state, the more dysfunctional its citizens’ lives.89 Cause and effect probably run in many directions. But it’s plausible that in democratic countries, secularism leads to humanism, turning people away from prayer, doctrine, and ecclesiastical authority and toward practical policies that make them and their fellows better off.

Most geographers regard the small area of Turkey which is west of the Bosporus as being in Europe, and the rest of the country, south and south-east of the Bosporus, as being in the Middle East (in its widest sense). That is one reason why Turkey has never been accepted into the EU. Other factors are its record on human rights, especially when it comes to the Kurds, and its economy. Its population is 79 million and European countries fear that, given the disparity in living standards, EU membership would result in a mass influx of labour. What may also be a factor, albeit unspoken within the EU, is that Turkey is a majority Muslim country (98 per cent). The EU is neither a secular nor a Christian organisation, but there has been a difficult debate about ‘values’. For each argument for Turkey’s EU membership there is an argument against, and in the past decade the prospects for Turkey joining have diminished. This has led the country to reflect on what other choices there may be.

Gus Speth tells us in the environmental journal Solutions: Economic growth may be the world’s secular religion, but for much of the world it is a god that is failing—underperforming for most of the world’s people and, for those in affluent societies, now creating more problems than it is solving. The never-ending drive to grow the overall U.S. economy undermines communities and the environment. It fuels a ruthless international search for energy and other resources; it fails at generating the needed jobs; and it rests on a manufactured consumerism that is not meeting the deepest human needs. Americans are substituting growth and consumption for dealing with the real issues—for doing things that would truly make the country better off. Psychologists have pointed out, for example, that while economic output per person in the United States has risen sharply in recent decades, there has been no increase in life satisfaction, and levels of distrust and depression have increased substantially.

The birth and growth of modern antisemitism has been accompanied by and interconnected with Jewish assimilation, the secularization and withering away of the old religious and spiritual values of Judaism. What actually happened was that great parts of the Jewish people were at the same time threatened by physical extinction from without and dissolution from within. In this situation, Jews concerned with the survival of their people would, in a curious and desperate misinterpretation, hit on the consoling idea that antisemitism, after all, might be an excellent means for keeping the people together so that the assumption of external antisemitism would even imply an external guarantee of Jewish existence. This superstition, a secularized travesty of the idea of eternity inherent in a faith in chosenness and a Messianic hope, has been strengthened through the fact that for many centuries the Jews experienced the Christian brand of hostility which was indeed a powerful agent of preservation, spiritually as well as politically. The Jews mistook modern anti-Christian antisemitism for the old religious Jew-hatred—and this all the more innocently because their assimilation had by-passed Christianity in its religious and cultural aspect. Confronted with an obvious symptom of the decline of Christianity, they could therefore imagine in all ignorance that this was some revival of the so-called "Dark Ages." Ignorance or misunderstanding of their own past were partly responsible for their fatal underestimation of the actual and unprecedented dangers which lay ahead. But one should also bear in mind that lack of political ability and judgment have been caused by the very nature of Jewish history, the history of a people without a government, without a country, and without a language. Jewish history offers the extraordinary spectacle of a people, unique in this respect, which began its history with a well-defined concept of history and an almost conscious resolution to achieve a well-circumscribed plan on earth and then, without giving up this concept, avoided all political action for two thousand years. The result was that the political history of the Jewish people became even more dependent upon unforeseen, accidental factors than the history of other nations, so that the Jews stumbled from one role to the other and accepted responsibility for none.

To be ridiculously sweeping: baby boomers and their offspring have shifted emphasis from the communal to the individual, from the future to the present, from virtue to personal satisfaction. Increasingly secular, we pledge allegiance to lowercase gods of our private devising. We are concerned with leading less a good life than the good life. In contrast to our predecessors, we seldom ask ourselves whether we serve a greater social purpose; we are more likely to ask ourselves if we are happy. We shun self-sacrifice and duty as the soft spots of suckers. We give little thought to the perpetuation of lineage, culture, or nation; we take our heritage for granted. We are ahistorical. We measure the value of our lives within the brackets of our own births and deaths, and we’re not especially bothered with what happens once we’re dead. As we age—oh, so reluctantly!—we are apt to look back on our pasts and question not did I serve family, God, and country, but did I ever get to Cuba, or run a marathon? Did I take up landscape painting? Was I fat? We will assess the success of our lives in accordance not with whether they were righteous, but with whether they were interesting and fun.

this earth, as a parent, as a lover, as a migrant, as a bird. And if we are to suspend our secular beliefs, even for half a paragraph, we can imagine the migrated souls of all the human ancestors presently at table, looking over their bloodline progeny gathered together over the familiarity of cabbage and fried rice and the unfamiliarity of a meat disk between two circular pieces of bread, happy as parents in a playground when all of the children assembled play together quietly and at peace, and no one’s young feelings are hurt, and everyone will go home still innocent. Of course, by the logic of fiction, we are at a high point now. This respite, this happy family, these four new lovers, this child slowly losing her shyness, all of this must be slated for destruction, no? Because if we were to simply leave them feasting and ecstatic, even as the less fortunate of the world fell deeper into despair, even as hundreds of thousands perished for lack of luck, lack of sympathy, lack of rupees, would we be just in our distribution of happiness? And so we sigh, cross ourselves, mumble the Kaddish, perform our pujas and wudu, all in preparation for the inevitable, which, in this case, comes with the crunch of gravel down the driveway.

In the evening he saddled his horse and rode out west from the house. The wind was much abated and it was very cold and the sun sat blood red and elliptic under the reefs of bloodred cloud before him. He rode where he would always choose to ride, out where the western fork of the old Comanche road coming down out of the Kiowa country to the north passed through the westernmost section of the ranch and you could see the faint trace of it bearing south over the low prairie that lay between the north and middle forks of the Concho River. At the hour he'd always choose when the shadows were long and the ancient road was shaped before him in the rose and canted light like a dream of the past where the painted ponies and the riders of that lost nation came down out of the north with their faces chalked and their long hair plaited and each armed for war which was their life and the women and children and women with children at their breasts all of them pledged in blood and redeemable in blood only. When the wind was in the north you could hear them, the horses and the breath of the horses and the horses' hooves that were shod in rawhide and the rattle of lances and the constant drag of the travois poles in the sand like the passing of some enormous serpent and the young boys naked on wild horses jaunty as circus riders and hazing wild horses before them and the dogs trotting with their tongues aloll and footslaves following half naked and sorely burdened an above all the low chant of their traveling song which the riders sang as they rode, nation and ghost of nation passing in a soft chorale across that mineral waste to darkness bearing lost to all history and all remembrance like a grail the sum of their secular and transitory and violent lives.

At first glance the Bible appeared to be a collection of unrelated books of history, poetry, rituals, philosophy, biography, and prophecy held together only by a binder’s stitch and glue. But I only had to read Genesis 11 and 12 to realize that seemingly unrelated and different books of the Bible had a clear plot, a thread that tied together all the books, as well as the Old and the New Testaments. Sin had brought a curse upon all the nations of the earth. God called Abraham to follow him because he wanted to bless all the nations of the earth through Abraham’s descendants.6 It didn’t take long to realize that God’s desire to bless human beings begins in the very first chapter of Genesis and culminates in the last chapter of the last book with a grand vision of healing for all nations.7 The implication was obvious: The Bible was claiming that I should read it because it was written to bless my nation and me. The revelation that God wanted to bless my nation of India amazed me. I realized it was a prediction I could test. It would confirm or deny the Bible’s reliability. If the Bible is God’s word, then had he kept this word? Had he blessed “all the nations of the earth”? Had my country been blessed by the children of Abraham? If so, that would be a good reason for me, an Indian, to check out this book. My investigation of whether God had truly blessed India through the Bible yielded incredible discoveries: the university where I was studying, the municipality and democracy I lived in, the High Court behind my house and the legal system it represented, the modern Hindi that I spoke as my mother tongue, the secular newspaper for which I had begun to write, the army cantonment west of the road I lived on, the botanical garden to the east, the public library near our garden, the railway lines that intersected in my city, the medical system I depended on, the Agricultural Institute across town—all of these came to my city because some people took the Bible seriously.

[...]Many of those friends were self-declared socialists - Wester socialists, that is. They spoke about Rosa Luxemburg, Leon Trotsky, Salvador Allende or Ernesto 'Che' Guevara as secular saints. It occurred to me that they were like my father in this aspect: the only revolutionaries they considered worthy of admiration had been murdered.[...]ut they did not think that my stories from the eighties were in any way significant to their political beliefs. Sometimes, my appropriating the label of socialist to describe both my experiences and their commitments was considered a dangerous provocation. [...] 'What you had was not really socialism.' they would say, barely concealing their irritation. My stories about socialism in Albania and references to all the other socialist countries against which our socialism had measured itself were, at best, tolerated as the embarrassing remarks of a foreigner still learning to integrate. The Soviet Union, China, the German Democratic Republic, Yugoslavia, Vietnam, Cuba; there was nothing socialist about them either. They were seen as the deserving losers of a historical battle that the real, authentic bearers of that title had yet to join. My friends' socialism was clear, bright and in the future. Mine was messy, bloody and of the past. And yet, the future that they sought, and that which socialist states had once embodied, found inspiration in the same books, the same critiques of society, the same historical characters. But to my surprise, they treated this as an unfortunate coincidence. Everything that went wrong on my side of the world could be explained by the cruelty of our leaders, or the uniquely backward nature of our institutions. They believed there was little for them to learn. There was no risk of repeating the same mistakes, no reason to ponder what had been achieved, and why it had been destroyed. Their socialism was characterized by the triumph of freedom and justice; mine by their failure. Their socialism would be brought about by the right people, with the right motives, under the right circumstances, with the right combination of theory and practice. There was only one thing to do about mine: forget it. [...]But if there was one lesson to take away from he history of my family, and of my country, it was that people never make history under circumstances they choose. It is easy to say, 'What you had was not the real thing', applying that to socialism or liberalism, to any complex hybrid of ideas and reality. It releases us from the burden of responsability. We are no longer complicit in moral tragedies create din the name of great ideas, and we don't have to reflect, apologize and learn.

It serves the American socialists as a leading argument in their endeavor to depict American capitalism as a curse of mankind. Reluctantly forced to admit that capitalism pours a horn of plenty upon people and that the Marxian prediction of the masses' progressive impoverishment has been spectacularly disproved by the facts, they try to salvage their detraction of capitalism by describing contemporary civilization as merely materialistic and sham. Bitter attacks upon modem civilization are launched by writers who think that they are pleading the cause of religion. They reprimand our age for its secularism. They bemoan the passing of a way of life in which, they would have us believe, people were not preoccupied with the pursuit of earthly ambitions but were first of ali concerned about the strict observance of their religious duties. They ascribe ali evils to the spread of skepticism and agnosticism and passionately advocate a return to the orthodoxy of ages gone by. It is hard to find a doctrine which distorts history more radically than this antisecularism. There have always been devout men, pure in heart and dedicated to a pious life. But the religiousness of these sincere believers had nothing in common with the established system of devotion. It is a myth that the political and social institutions of the ages preceding modem individualistic philosophy and modem capitalism were imbued with a genuine Christian spirit. The teachings of the Gospels did not determine the official attitude of the governments toward religion. It was, on the contrary, thisworldly concems of the secular rulers—absolute kings and aristocratic oligarchies, but occasionally also revolting peasants and urban mobs—that transformed religion into an instrument of profane political ambitions. Nothing could be less compatible with true religion than the ruthless persecution of dissenters and the horrors of religious crusades and wars. No historian ever denied that very little of the spirit of Christ was to be found in the churches of the sixteenth century which were criticized by the theologians of the Reformation and in those of the eighteenth century which the philosophers of the Enlightenment attacked. The ideology of individualism and utilitarianism which inaugurated modern capitalism brought freedom also to the religious longings of man. It shattered the pretension of those in power to impose their own creed upon their subjects. Religion is no longer the observance of articles enforced by constables and executioners. It is what a man, guided by his conscience, spontaneously espouses as his own faith. Modern Western civilization is thisworldly. But it was precisely its secularism, its religious indifference, that gave rein to the renascence of genuine religious feeling. Those who worship today in a free country are not driven by the secular arm but by their conscience. In complying with the precepts of their persuasion, they are not intent upon avoiding punishment on the part of the earthly authorities but upon salvation and peace of mind.

Although none of the Buddhist sects in the countries where Buddhism is a settled tradition conceive the self naturalistically—most are dualist and thus consider mental states to be nonphysical—and although hardly any sects deny rebirth, Buddhism is being adopted and changed by people who are naturalists, agnostics, and atheists. The great appeal of Buddhism to secular naturalists of the “spiritual but not religious” type comes from the original Buddhism lending itself so easily to being demythologized or naturalized and it remaining nonetheless ethically extremely serious. The world, recall, is ethicized.

Falwell and Harris agreed on almost nothing when it came to religion or politics. But on this point, at least, they were in accord. The country we’re living in now—as opposed to the America of sixty or a hundred or three hundred years ago—is secular, and only getting more so.

Compared to a decade ago, it’s true, almost twice as many Americans say they don’t believe in God. But consider the actual numbers: the total of agnostics and atheists has gone from extremely tiny (4 percent in 2007) to very tiny (7 percent in 2014). Those are percentages one otherwise finds in less-developed countries. If that is evidence for U.S. secularization, we are now just about as secular as, oh, Turkey.

But let’s be clear: the madness of everyday life was its own issue. It didn’t have any relationship to whether or not Christianity was bullshit. Obviously, Christianity was total bullshit. It was the most insane bullshit! But it was impossible to make an argument against superstition and magical nonsense, and have it stick, when that argument was delivered from a society where every citizen was a magician. And yes, reader, that includes you. You too are a magician. Your life is dominated by one of the oldest and most perverse forms of magic, one with less interior cohesion than the Christian faith, and you invest its empty symbolism with a level of belief that far outpaces that of any Christian. Here are some strips of paper and bits of metal! Watch as I transform these strips of paper and bits of metal into: (a) sex (b) food (c) clothing (d) shelter (e) transportation that allows me to acquire strips of paper and bits of money (f) intoxicants that distract me from my endless pursuit of strips of paper and bits of metal (g) leisure items that distract me from my endless pursuit of strips of paper and bits of metal (h) pointless vacations to exotic locales where I will replicate the brutish behavior that I display in my point of origin as a brief respite from my endless pursuit of strips of paper and bits of metal (i) unfair social advantages that allow my rotten children to undertake their own moronic pursuits of strips of paper and bits of metal. Humiliate yourself for strips of paper. Murder for the strips of paper. Humiliate others for the strips of paper. Worship the people who’ve accumulated such vast quantities of strips of paper that their strips of paper no longer have any physical existence and are now represented by binary notation. Treat the vast accumulators like gods. Free blowies for the moldering corpse of Steve Jobs! Fawning profile pieces for Jay-Z! The Presidency for billionaire socialite and real-estate developer Donald J. Trump! Kill! Kill! Kill! Work! Work! Work! Die! Die! Die! Go on. Pretend this is not the most magical thing that has ever happened. Historical arguments against Christianity tended to be delivered in tones of pearl-clutching horror, usually by subpar British intellectuals pimping their accent in America, a country where sounding like an Oxbridge twat conferred an unearned credibility. Yes, the Crusades were horrible. Yes, the Inquisition was awful. Yes, they shouldn’t have burned witches in Salem. Yes, there is an unfathomable amount of sexually abused walking wounded. Yes, every Christian country has oriented itself around the rich and done nothing but abuse the fuck out of its poor. But it’s not like the secular conversion of the industrialized world has alleviated any of the horror. Read the news. Murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape...Despair. All secularism has done, really, is remove a yoke from the rich. They’d always been horrible, but at least when they still paid lip service to Christian virtues, they could be shamed into philanthropy. Now they use market forces to slide the whole thing into feudalism. New York University built a campus [in Abu Dhabi] with slave labor! In the Twenty-First Century AD! And has suffered no rebuke! Applications are at an all-time high! The historical arguments against Christianity are as facile as reviews on Goodreads.com, and come down to this: Why do you organize around bad people who tell you that a Skyman wants you to be good? To which the rejoinder is: yes, the clergy sucks, but who cares how normal people are delivered into goodness?

Until the qualities of justice, equality and integration spring out of the hearts of the citizens of a nation, no matter how much we pretend to maintain the illusion of secularism and assimilation through legislative means, internally the country will remain conflicted till eternity.

[T]he current system in place evaluates us less as citizens and more as customers or consumers. This is applicable even in foreign policies in the sense that the US foreign policy supports or attacks other countries not based on their values and methods of governance but based on whether these nations allow or block America’s corporate interests on their territories. This perhaps explains why the US supports some of the most undemocratic regimes (customers) and destroys and bombs other secular and diverse nations that do not allow mega malls, McDonald’s, Pepsi, Coca Cola, Amazon, you name it, to plunder their lands and populations.

The third group consists of Americans. In America, Jews live in unprecedented equality and security, and America is Israel’s defender. The reason is not just that America is so tolerant a society. America does not merely tolerate Jews and Judaism, it honors them. It does so in large part because the United States is the only country that has long defined itself as Judeo-Christian. There are Christian countries, secular countries, and Muslim countries, but America is the only Judeo-Christian country.

People can question the existence of cancel culture or they can rebrand it as a culture of accountability, but I don’t think anyone can question the stifling and deadening effect of the fear of cancellation – or even just getting it wrong – on art, writing, public discourse and even comedy. It has made the world of ideas so relentlessly uninteresting. […] But it’s understandable that certain people behave in this way. We are, as a species, meaning-seeking creatures. That is what defines us. What do you mean by ‘meaning-seeking’? I just think the traditional institutions in which people once sought meaning and validation have been eroded, certainly in this country. It is natural for people to look for meaning elsewhere, to look for unity and a sense of belonging. Ironically, I think the rise of woke culture is akin to a fundamentalist religious impulse. Come to think of it, it may reflect an unconscious desire to return to a non-secular society. […] Well, it’s as if autocratic ideas of virtue and sin have come into play, and, as a result, prohibitions and punishments have been put in place, enforced by a kind of moral callousness that, in my view, is akin to the very worst aspects of religion – the fundamentalist, joyless, sanctimonious aspects that have nothing to do with mercy. Cancellation is a particularly ugly part of its weaponry and can end up as a kind of sadism dressed up as virtue.

In many traditional societies, the political head is also a spiritual leader, and in others the secular leader is limited by ancient religious teachings. We Americans pride ourselves on separating church and state, rightly worried that citizens may lose freedoms if politicians mix their religious beliefs with their political agendas. But as a result we have created a wholly secular state that can't truly govern a people, because its activities ignore the needs of the soul and play out as if a human community were a mere aggregate of inanimate bodies. How could we run a country according to the most recent reckoning of pollsters unless we considered citizens as mere numbers?...If we could distinguish between a basic religious attitude and a system of beliefs, we might bring to our civic lives a spirit of reverence, an acknowledgement of mystery, and an appreciation for ritual, all in an atmosphere of tolerance.

It with some sorrow and regret that the work was undertaken as the writer was no believer of the two nation theory, and strongly opposed the partition of the country into two dominions of India and Pakistan. But after over twenty years in India as an Indian citizen, it must with sorrow be declared that its much proclaimed secularism is hollow and much as the American Negro, though American, cannot rid himself of his colour the Indian Muslim, though Indian is nevertheless by and large unable to survive the inferiority of being a Muslim. It is said he keeps aloof from the “mainstream”. After reading the book the reader will be able to decide for himself whether the Indian Muslim does not join the mainstream or is successfully kept away from it. The Tirana-i-Hind of Sir Mohamed Iqbal with which this book opens may also be read as a postrscript.

Islam means working for peace and welfare, Islamism is the ruin of synchronization. Sanatana Dharma is advaita sanskriti, that is, a culture of nonsectarianism, Hindutva means mindless saffronization.

This high-souled gentry and this noble and far-descended peasantry, 'their country's pride,' were set at naught and ultimately obliterated for a set of greedy, secular adventurers, by the then representatives of the Ancient Earls of Sutherland.

A long time lag intervened between the point when high fertility rates were no longer needed to replace the population and the point when these changes occurred. People hesitate to give up familiar norms governing gender roles and sexual behavior. But when a society reaches a sufficiently high level of economic and physical security that younger birth cohorts grow up taking survival for granted, it opens the way for an intergenerational shift from pro-fertility norms to individual-choice norms that encourages secularization. Although basic values normally change at the pace of intergenerational population replacement, the shift from pro-fertility norms to individual-choice norms has reached a tipping point at which conformist pressures reverse polarity and are accelerating changes theyonce resisted. Different aspects of cultural change are moving at different rates. In recent years, high-income countries have been experiencing massive immigration by previously unfamiliar groups. They have also been experiencing rising inequality and declining job security, for reasons linked with the winner-takes-all economies of advanced knowledge societies. The causes of rising inequality are abstract and poorly understood, but

And if we are to suspend our secular beliefs, even for half a paragraph, we can imagine the migrated souls of all the human ancestors presently at table, looking over their bloodline progeny gathered together over the familiarity of cabbage and fried rice and the unfamiliarity of a meat disk between two circular pieces of bread, happy as parents in a playground when all of the children assembled play together quietly and at peace, and no one’s young feelings are hurt, and everyone will go home still innocent.

There are several reasons secularization is accelerating. One generally overlooked cause springs from the fact that, for many centuries, a coherent set of pro-fertility norms* evolved in most countries that assigns women the role of producing as many children as possible and discourages divorce, abortion, homosexuality, contraception, and any other form of sexual behavior not linked with reproduction.

Khalsa means freedom from hate, Khalistan means nationalizing hate. Christ stands for love and compassion, Chistian nationalism is Christ's death. Sanatana Dharma is advaita sanskriti, that is, a culture of nonsectarianism, Hindutva means mindless saffronization. Islam means working for peace and welfare, Islamism is the ruin of synchronization.

Pew Research Centre, a self-described “fact tank” based in Washington.* This found that only 69% of adult Latin Americans are now Catholics, down from 92% in 1970. Protestants now account for 19%, up from 4%. Over the same period the share of those with no religious affiliation has grown from 1% to 8%—though most of these people still believe in God. Pew’s study finds sharp variations from country to country. In four Central American countries—El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua—barely half of the population is still Catholic. Though 61% of Brazilian respondents say they are Catholic, 26% are now Protestant. In many other countries there are still firm Catholic majorities. Whatever their denomination, most Latin Americans remain deeply religious. Only Uruguay stands out as a bastion of secularism—a tradition dating back more than a century. Two things distinguish Latin American Protestantism. First, it is mainly a result of conversion (see chart). Second, two-thirds of Latin American Protestants define themselves as Pentecostal. Much more often than Catholics, they report having direct experience of the Holy Spirit, such as through exorcism or speaking in tongues. Indeed, the words “evangelical” and “Protestant” are used interchangeably in the region. Pew finds that Latin American Protestants are conservative on social and sexual issues, such as gay marriage and abortion. As Catholics become more liberal on such questions, that points to looming American-style “culture wars”.

There are prerequisites for democratic discourse to be successful: people must be willing to discuss the issues, provide reasons for their views, and be open to persuasion; and, in addition, the participants in the discussion must be able to analyze, evaluate, and debate the reasons that others offer for their views. In other words, there must be a commitment to reason together in terms everyone can understand. That is not possible if religious doctrines are offered as a justification for public policy positions—not in a country that is religiously pluralistic and includes a significant number of nonbelievers.

I asked Professor Manning to describe in her own words some of the more significant things that she has learned from all of her conversations with secular parents over the years. Is there anything that secular parents have in common? “A key pattern that I uncovered in my research—and this applies to parents from all over the country, and it held, overall, in all of my interviews—is that secular parents value the idea of having choices. This emphasis on having choices just really stands out. Secular parents want their children to have a choice about what to believe in and what to practice. And this makes them quite different from religious parents. You know, your typical Catholic parent will send their kids to CCD—catechism class—and Jewish parents will send their kids to Hebrew school, and what they want is to pass on their own worldview. But secular parents do not necessarily want their kids to turn out secular. Rather, what they talk about, what they emphasize is, ‘I want my son or daughter to be able to freely choose his or her own worldview.’ So many secular parents will even try to expose them to religion because they think it would help them make their own choices.

He abolished the Sultanate. Then, the Caliphate, the Islamic equivalent to the Pope. He gave women the right to divorce and introduced civil marriage. Laws were passed introducing western dress and western hats. Madrassas, Islamic religious schools, were closed and major universities were made secular. Women were not allowed to wear veils in public buildings, and were given the right to vote. He changed the script of the Turkish language, from Arabic to a modified Latin script still used throughout the country today. Under his tutelage, Turkey shifted from the center of the Islamic world to a nation oriented firmly to Europe and the west for direction. All

It is, however, admitted that the intelligence organisations of these ‘free countries’ do give wide coverage to the activities of their citizen in almost all sphere of activities. Their systems keep track of the citizen from the Cradle to the Grave. No other country, except, perhaps the former Soviet Union, has documented their citizen in such exhaustive and comprehensive manner. India has not been able to keep track of its own citizen. The faulty system allows unhindered entry of alien nationals from the neighbouring countries. Periodically some Indian politicians wake up and raise slogans for comprehensive documentation of the citizens of the country. Vote-bank beggars in the right, left and centre of the political spectrum oppose them, because they depend a lot on illegal migrant voters from the neighbouring countries. They also shed crocodile tears in the name of ‘secularism’- an apartheid mechanism devised by the Indian democracy. Once in a while the intelligence and police agencies are whipped up to trace out the illegal settlers. They even violate the rights of the natural citizens.

Throughout the decades after Independence, the political culture of the country reflected these ‘secular’ assumptions and attitudes. Though the Indian population was 80 per cent Hindu and the country had been partitioned as a result of a demand for a separate Muslim homeland, three of India’s eleven presidents were Muslims; so were innumerable governors, cabinet ministers, chief ministers of states, ambassadors, generals, and Supreme Court justices. During the war with Pakistan in 1971, when the Pakistani leadership was foolish enough to proclaim a jihad against the Hindu unbelievers, the Indian Air Force in the northern sector was commanded by a Muslim (Air Marshal, later Air Chief Marshal, I. H. Latif); the army commander was a Parsi (General, later Field Marshal, S. H. F. J. Manekshaw), the general officer commanding the forces that marched into Bangladesh was a Sikh (General J. S. Aurora), and the general flown in to negotiate the surrender of the Pakistani forces in East Bengal was Jewish (Major-General J. F. R. Jacob). They led the armed forces of an overwhelmingly Hindu country. That is India.

Before continuing further, it is important to gain an understanding of how democracy is perceived by the ordinary people of the Middle East. Democracy, as a secular entity, is unlikely t be favorably received by the vast majority of Middle Easterners who are devout followers of the Islamic faith. Traditionally, there is tension among the Muslim countries with respect to the establishment of a democratic form of government. On the one hand, there are those who believe that democratic rule can co-exist with the religious nature of the Middle Easter societies; however, on the other hand there are those who believe that the tribal structure of the Middle Eastern countries may not be suitable for democratic rule as too many factions will emerge. The result will be a "fractured" society that cannot effectively unite and there is also the risk that this could impact the cohesion produced by the Muslim faith. Although concerns exist, for the most part, the spirit of democracy, or self rule, is viewed as a positive endeavor so long as it builds up the country and sustains the religious base versus devaluing religion and creating instability. Creating this balance will be the challenge as most Western democracies have attempted to maintain a separation of church and state. What this suggests is that as democracy grows in the Middle East, it is not necessarily going to evolve upon a Western template—it will have its own shape or form coupled with stronger religious ties.

If we are to make the ordinary man aware of the spiritual uity out of which asll the separate activities of our civilization have arisen, it is necessary in the first place to look at Western civilization as a whole and to treat it wit the same objective appreciation and respect which the humanists of the past devoted to the civilization of antiquity. This does not seem much to ask; yet there have always been a number of reasons which stood in the way of its fulfillment. In the first place, there has been the influence of modern nationalism, which has led every European people to insist on what distinguished it from the rest, instead of what united it with them. It is not necessary to seek for examples in the extremism of German racial nationalists and their crazy theories, proving that everything good in the world comes from men with Germanic blood. Leaving all these extravagances out of account, we still have the basic fact that modern education in general teaches men the history of their country and the literature of their own tongue, as though these were complete wholes and not part of a greater unity. In the second place, there has been the separation between religion and culture, which arose partly from the bitterness of the internal divisions of Christendom and partly from a fear lest the transcendent divine values of Christianity should be endangered by any identification or association of them with the relative human values of culture. Both these factors have been at work, long before our civilization was actually secularized. They had their origins in the Reformation period, and it was Martin Luther in particular who stated the theological dualism of faith and works in such a drastic form as to leave no room for any positive conception of a Christian culture, such as had hitherto been taken for granted. And in the third place, the vast expansion of Western civilization in modern times has led to a loss of any standard of comparison or any recognition of its limits in time and space. Western civilization has ceased to be one civilization amongst others: it became civilization in the absolute sense. It is the disappearance or decline of this naive absolutism and the reappearance of a sense of the relative and limited character of Western civilization as a particular historic culture, which are the characteristic features of the present epoch.

Consider what it might look like if we were without this divine grace in the Western world. We would probably become like many third world countries held hostage in poverty and hunger. Perhaps it would take time for our economic structures to collapse, but it would become obvious to everyone that we had been divinely blessed and that this blessing was no longer available. This is why it is so important for us—especially individuals in the secular arena—to humble ourselves.

I know that many people including our President insist that it be called the Christmas Season. I’ll be the first in line to say that it works for me however that’s not what it is. We hint at its coming on Halloween when the little tykes take over wandering the neighborhood begging for candy and coins. In this day and age the idea of children wandering the streets threatening people with “Trick or Treat!” just isn’t a good idea. In most cases parents go with them encouraging their offspring’s to politely ask “Anything for Halloween.” An added layer of security occurs when the children are herded into one room to party with friends. It’s all good, safe fun and usually there is enough candy for all of their teeth to rot before they have a chance to grow new ones. Forgotten is the concept that it is a three day observance of those that have passed before us and are considered saints or martyrs. Next we celebrate Thanksgiving, a national holiday (holly day) formally observed in Canada, Liberia, Germany Japan, some countries in the Caribbean and the United States. Most of these countries observe days other than the fourth Thursday of November and think of it as a secular way of celebrating the harvest and abundance of food. Without a hiccup we slide into Black Friday raiding stores for the loot being sold at discounted prices. The same holds true for Cyber Monday when we burn up the internet looking for bargains that will arrive at our doorsteps, brought by the jolly delivery men and women, of FedEx, UPS and USPS. Of course the big days are Chanukah when the Maccabean Revolt against the Seleucid Empire, regained control of Jerusalem. It is a time to gather the family and talk of history and tell stories. Christmas Eve is a time when my family goes to church, mostly to sing carols and distribute gifts, although this usually continued on Christmas day. This is when the term “Merry Christmas” is justified and correct although it is thought that the actual birthday of Christ is in October. The English squeezed another day out of the season, called Boxing Day, which is when the servants got some scraps from the dinner the day before and received a small gift or a dash of money. I do agree that “Xmas” is inappropriate but that’s just me and I don’t go crazy over it. After all, Christmas is for everyone. On the evening of the last day of the year we celebrate New Year’s Evening followed by New Year’s Day which many people sleep through after New Year’s Eve. The last and final day of the Holiday Season is January 6th which Is Epiphany or Three Kings Day. In Tarpon Springs, the Greek Orthodox Priest starts the celebration with the sanctification of the waters followed by the immersion of the cross. It becomes a scramble when local teenage boys dive for the cross thrown into the Spring Bayou as a remembrance of the baptism of Jesus Christ in the Jordan River. This tradition is now over a century old and was first celebrated by the Episcopal Church by early settlers in 1903.

Commentators, journalists, and, on exceptionally clear days, their audiences are beginning to wonder why it is that with fatal environmental problems bearing down upon us, with global warming threatening agriculture and our minimal ability to feed ourselves, the rich and powerful aren’t more actively attempting to remedy the situation. Worse, why do they so often seem to want to do just the opposite of what is required? This question is easy to answer if we understand the psychology of the capitalist. Easy and disturbing. The logic of capitalism acknowledges that there will be destructive consequences for its activities. Economists even have a name for it: negative externality. This is also known as “externalizing cost” when it comes time for somebody other than the perpetrator to pay for the damage. It is a secular form of what the generals call “collateral damage,” which means that the wrong person got blown up. Or, as one might say, “We didn’t mean to pollute the river with coal ash. We were only pursuing private prosperity and personal happiness. In the meantime, we’re glad to have someone else pay to fix it.” But what do you do when it’s not a river - when it’s a whole world that has been trashed? Are taxpayers going to have to pay for a new planet? So the oligarchs and their minions, the so-called 1 percent, aren’t missing anything. They’re not stupid. If they choose to do nothing about looming global catastrophe, it is because they don’t want to do anything. And they do not want to do anything because the threat of destruction is, frankly, not persuasive to them. Those who benefit from capitalism understand that it has always depended on suffering, and they have confidence that if someone is to suffer it won’t be them. “Let the songbirds suffer in my place,” they say. “Or those fucking - what do they call ‘em - manatees. There’s only about ten of them left anyway. And, we admit, the miscellaneous poor will suffer, here and in those faraway countries, but why shouldn’t they suffer? Look at them! They’re rather good at it. Besides, the humans could use a little downsizing.” Pereat mundus, dum ego salvus sim!

In 2000, the National Gallery in London put on a millennial exhibition entitled “Seeing Salvation.” That was a case in point—especially remembering that European countries tend to be far more “secularized” than the United States. It consisted mostly of artists’ depictions of Jesus’s crucifixion. Many critics sneered. All those old paintings about someone being tortured to death! Why did we need to look at rooms full of such stuff? Fortunately, the general public ignored the critics and turned up in droves to see works of art, which, like the crucifixion itself, seem to carry a power beyond theory and beyond suspicion. The Gallery’s director, Neil McGregor, moved from that role to become director of the British Museum, a job he did with great distinction and effect for the next decade. The final piece he acquired in the latter capacity, before moving to a similar position in Berlin, was a simple but haunting cross made from fragments of a small boat. The boat, which been carrying refugees from Eritrea and Somalia, was wrecked off the coast of the Italian island of Lampedusa, south of Sicily, on October 3, 2013. Of the 500 people on board, 349 drowned. A local craftsman, Francesco Tuccio, was deeply distressed that nothing more could have been done to save people, and he made several crosses out of fragments of the wrecked vessel. One was carried by Pope Francis at the memorial service for the survivors. The British Museum contacted Mr. Tuccio, and he made a cross especially for the museum, thanking the authorities there for drawing attention to the suffering that this small wooden object would symbolize. Why the cross rather than anything else?

The university was a Christian invention, but over the centuries and especially in the decades of the twentieth century in our own country, it was progressively secularized. The focus in today's academia is not knowledge or character-building or truth, it is "diversity" or "tolerance", but a very select kind, as most universities are resolutely opposed to true diversity of thought, given their speech codes and bans, and are interested in tolerance only insofar as it benefits favored groups. Preaching tolerance, while at the same time dismissing truth, has led the millennial generation to embrace a moral and intellectual nihilism. If there is no objective truth and only subjective opinion, inevitably one's opinion becomes the summum bonum or highest good and the idea that truth exists and finding it might involve study is lost.

Until that moment, Canada had been a secular and progressive nation that believed in transfer payments to better distribute the country’s wealth, the Westminster model of governance, a national medicare program, a peacekeeping role for the armed forces, an arm’s-length public service, the separation of church and state, and solid support for the United Nations. Stephen Harper believed in none of these things.

Tunisia settled into its modern, secular identity in the 1990s under Bourguiba’s successor, Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali. Appalled by Bourguiba’s decision to execute a group of Islamist rebels, he had ousted the by then senile leader in 1987 in a nonviolent coup. Ben Ali thus kept Tunisia free of bloodshed (the rebels were not in the end executed), something the country had managed to do since independence from France was achieved through negotiations, and therefore bloodlessly as well. He

Give them an inch, and they take the whole playing field and then change the rules of the game to make sure it is only they who ever get to win. Above all, you cannot beat the Islamists at the long game. When it comes to sheer endurance they will always have the edge. The very definition of moderation is knowing when to stop. What all the Islamists have in common is that they never let up for a second. To quibble with Islam, or, more precisely, with what the Islamists define as Islam, has become the equivalent of advocating that the age of consent be abolished in a full session of the U.S. Senate. Once the Islamists take charge, all arguments must be carefully couched in Islamic terms. Such support as secular movements once enjoyed go up—at least publicly—in smoke. In August 2011, Malaysian activist Norhayati Kaprawi, the director of a documentary about the new stricter women’s dress codes in her country, said some women she interviewed had refused to show their faces in her film. They did so not on religious grounds, but because they feared reprisals. Malaysia is a country living in fear of the radical Islamists, she said. “If you don’t follow the mainstream you will be lynched,” she said, adding that people who hold more progressive or alternative views “don’t dare to speak up in public.”36

As the government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion, — as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen — and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.

The liberal constitutional experiment that the Egyptian political scene had witnessed in the 1930s and 1940s remained the province of Cairo's and Alexandria's elite and upper middle class. The liberal cultural fashions of the same period were detached from the crushing living standards of the peasants in the Delta and Al-Saeed, as well as the poor in the country's urban areas. It was no surprise then that the vast majority of people on the Egyptian street cheered Nasser's repudiation of the ‘bygone era'(which conveniently lumped together the monarchy, the aristocrats, the landed gentry and the different political parties – from the liberal and secular to the conservative and religious). Nasser's political and socio-economic plans emerged as the country's sole and compelling project with a substantial, expansive mandate.

There is much irony in the fact that Anglo-American Middle East policy, from Operation Ajax, the deposing of democratically elected, socialist, secularist Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq in Iran in 1953, to Operation Iraqi Freedom, the overthrow of secular nationalist dictator Saddam Hussein in 2003, has served in fact, if not intention, to ensure the continuing hold of Islam over nearly all the countries of the region.

Statistics Canada, the national statistical agency of that country, has pointed out that churchgoing Christians in Canada are generally much more likely than the majority of non-Christian Canadians to donate significantly to charities and to volunteer. According to their recent study, 62 percent of Canadians who regularly attend Christian services volunteered their time to various causes compared with only 43 percent of other Canadians. Surprisingly to some at least, these Christians did not limit their giving to churches. Almost 60 percent of their volunteer time went to secular causes from health care to youth sports to various social and environmental organizations. Doug Todd, religion writer for the Vancouver Sun newspaper, summarizes the situation as revealed by Statistics Canada and his broader research this way: Christians are on the front lines, locally and around the globe, helping those who can not fend for themselves. They are supporting Canadian aboriginals, providing micro-loans in the Dominican Republic, handing out soup in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, providing clean water in Ghana, ministering to people with AIDS and supporting environmental projects in Asia. . . . They’ve also led social justice movements: To free slaves, oppose wars, fight for civil rights or protect wilderness.[161]

In countries where the government provides extensive social welfare—health benefits, unemployment benefits, disability benefits, and retirement benefits—people tend to be less religious. Where

A skeptical secularism fails to provide a foundation for human rights and undermines the foundation that historically has existed. Secular republics need inspiration about the nature of the person and of liberty that they cannot find within themselves, and they depend on religious and moral traditions to provide it. Most ordinary citizens in a country like America understand that intuitively.

I'm very worried about the future of separation of church and state: will it survive in a meaningful way? I'll tell you, there are a very large number of people throughout this country whose values, statements, and conduct appear to place them in some alternate universe governed by some constitution they apparently found while cleaning out their sock drawer. It is not the American “living” Constitution that reflects, increasingly, the search for individual freedom and justice: in other words, what the Constitution's purpose is.

P9 'It is no exaggeration to say that democracy has become a religion - a modern, secular religion. You could call it the largest faith on earth. All but eleven countries - Myanmar, Swaziland, the Vatican and some Arab nations - claim to be democracies, even if only in name. This belief in the God of democracy is closely linked to the worship of the national democratic state that arose in the course of the 19th century. God and the Church were replaced with the State as society’s Holy Father. Democratic elections are the ritual by which we pray to the State for employment, shelter , health, security, education.

Some observers, notably Farah Azari, have remarked upon the way that orthodox, traditional Shi‘ism has worked in the past to repress women and female sexuality in Iran, linking that to male anxiety in periods of social and economic change. There are still books to be written on the other distortions this has caused historically.26 The success of women’s education, and the greatly expanded importance of women in the workplace and in the economy, is a huge social and cultural change in Iran—one that in time, and combined with other factors, is likely to have profound consequences for Iranian society as a whole. Surveys have indicated that this is already emerging in more liberal attitudes toward education, the family, and work.27 There are parallel changes in attitude away from religion toward more secular, liberal, and nationalistic positions.28 Some clerics among the ulema are challenging the religious judgments on the status of women that were pushed through into law at the time of the revolution. These developments are not peripheral but are absolutely central to the future of the country.

Cultural Awareness Capabilities for Social MDM As we have worked with customers around the world, we have encountered numerous situations that have taught us to broaden our understanding, handling, and use of information about people—once again reminding us of the diversity and richness of human nature. Following are some of the things we have learned: • Birth dates can be surprisingly tricky. In some cultures, people have a religious birth date that is different from the birth date tracked by the government. This could be due to differences between religious calendars and secular calendars, or it could be that the religious birth date is selected for other reasons. Depending on how you ask people for their birth date, you may get either their actual or religious birth date. In other situations, the government may assign a birth date. For example, in some rural areas of India, children are assigned a legal birth date based on their first day in elementary school. So you need to exercise caution in using birth date as an attribute in matching individuals, and you also have to consider how information is gathered. • Names can also be challenging. In some cultures, people have official and religious names. So again, it is important to understand how and why an individual might give one or the other and perhaps provide the capability to support both. • In some countries, there are multiple government identification systems for taxation, social services, military service, and other purposes. In some of these schemes, an individual may, for instance, have multiple tax ID numbers: one that represents the individual and another that might represent individuals in their role as head of household or head of clan. • Different languages and cultures represent family relationships in different ways. In some languages, specific terms and honorifics reflect relationships that don’t have equivalents in other languages. Therefore, as you look at understanding relationships and householding, you have to accommodate these nuances. • Address information is country-specific and, in some cases, also region-specific within a country. Not all countries have postal codes. Many countries allow an address to be descriptive, such as “3rd house behind the church.” We have found this in parts Europe as well as other parts of the world.

Thanksgiving has become the first day of what in now thought of as the “Holy or Holiday Season.” The “holidays” as they are generally known, are an annually recurring period of time from late November to early January. These days are also recognized by many other countries as well, with the “Christmas Tree” and all the trimmings, generally being considered secular. This period of time incorporates the shopping days, which comprises a peak season for the retail market. Regardless of religious affiliation, children and adults alike enjoy the many window displays and Christmas tree lighting ceremonies. To a great extent it really doesn’t matter that there are still some people believing that the commercialism of these holidays is blasphemy and that they should be reserved strictly for worship. There are virtually, no valid reasons why we can’t all enjoy these days in our own way. Children of all faiths and ages should be able to understand the true meaning and still be able to enjoy the music, surprises and magic of the season… This year we are again faced with a severely, politically divided country; with a great number of people fearing for their future. It might be too much to hope for, that politicians will be able to put aside their differences. Unfortunately many of them still believe that their hypocritical concept of Christianity is greater than that of their opposition. Regardless, they should however understand that we are all equal in the eyes of God as well as the law, and that America was built by a diverse people. Let us not slip back into a newer form of “Small Minded Bigotry,” but rather forge ahead in a unified way making our country stronger. The time has come to energize our nation by rebuilding our bridges and highways. Rebuilding our airports, investing in high-speed trains, and making education affordable is the way to a more productive future. If we head down this ambitious path of development, we will create jobs and put more people to work. It will help the middle class to regain their footing and it will strengthen our slowly growing economy. When our citizens earn more, the economy will lift us all out of the recession that so many.

Ray Honeyford was an upright, conscientious teacher, who believed it to be his duty to prepare children for responsible life in society, and who was confronted with the question of how to do this, when the children are the offspring of Muslim peasants from Pakistan, and the society is that of England. Honeyford’s article honestly conveyed the problem, together with his proposed solution, which was to integrate the children into the surrounding secular culture, while protecting them from the punishments administered in their pre-school classes in the local madrasah, meanwhile opposing their parents’ plans to take them away whenever it suited them to Pakistan. He saw no sense in the doctrine of multiculturalism, and believed that the future of our country depends upon our ability to integrate its recently arrived minorities, through a shared curriculum in the schools and a secular rule of law that could protect women and girls from the kind of abuse to which he was a distressed witness. Everything Ray Honeyford said is now the official doctrine of our major political parties: too late, of course, to achieve the results that he hoped for, but nevertheless not too late to point out that those who persecuted him and who surrounded his school with their inane chants of ‘Ray-cist’ have never suffered, as he suffered, for their part in the conflict. Notwithstanding his frequently exasperated tone, Ray Honeyford was a profoundly gentle man, who was prepared to pay the price of truthfulness at a time of lies. But he was sacked from his job, and the teaching profession lost one of its most humane and public-spirited representatives. This was one example of a prolonged Stalinist purge by the educational establishment, designed to remove all signs of patriotism from our schools and to erase the memory of England from the cultural record. Henceforth the Salisbury Review was branded as a ‘racist’ publication, and my own academic career thrown into doubt.

Coe has always claimed he’s not a nationalist, and it’s true—unlike immigrant Abram, who cared most for America, Coe, Oregon-born, cares most for the American Christ, His power spread throughout the world even as the homeland is denied Him in the secular folly of church/state separation. One day, Coe believes—not yet—America (and Old Europe, too, the Germans and French and Italians who drifted from Christ once their prosperity was assured) will wake up and find itself surrounded by a hundred tiny God-led governments: Fiji, a “model for the nations” under a theocratic regime after 2001, a Family organizer boasted to me; and Uganda, made over as an experiment in faith-based initiatives by the Family’s favorite African brother, the dictator Yoweri Museveni; and Mongolia, where Coe traveled in the late 1980s to plant the seeds for that country’s post-communist laissez-faire regime.

The American Civil War was the first modern war, a revolution in military affairs, and more. It tapped the primal urges of humanity, including deep- rooted expressions of religiously based justifications for violence leveled at Blacks before, during, and after. Many Americans accepted racism and white supremacy backed by pseudoscience and buttressed by the Bible, which allowed people, even opponents of slavery, to believe that whites were racially superior to Blacks. Protestant Christianity had a major influence on developing American nationalism, and “secular and religious motifs were woven into the belief that America had a unique role in bringing the Kingdom of God to this world.”6 This was pervasive throughout the country. Northerners tended to apply it to the nation, but for Southerners it became an article of faith in themselves. The South was the New Israel, with the North, corrupted by foreigners, industrialists, and abolitionists— apostates who had abandoned the faith.

Among Jews, as well, a clear schism has emerged between secular, Reform, and Conservative Jews on the one hand and Orthodox Jews on the other. Of all groups about whom enough evidence exists to make such a claim, Jews are the most likely to be fluid. As such, they are among the most resolute Democratic voters in the country. But that is only true among secular, Reform, and Conservative Jews. Orthodox

Among Jews, as well, a clear schism has emerged between secular, Reform, and Conservative Jews on the one hand and Orthodox Jews on the other. Of all groups about whom enough evidence exists to make such a claim, Jews are the most likely to be fluid. As such, they are among the most resolute Democratic voters in the country. But that is only true among secular, Reform, and Conservative Jews. Orthodox Jews have, as a group, become increasingly politically conservative over the past two decades. Although the group is numerically too small to measure its attitudes using survey research, it is hard not to think its members, with their focus on texts and traditions, wouldn’t be highly fixed in their worldview.

With Bob Dylan, Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver, and convicted Watergate lawyer Charles Colson proudly declaring to be 'born again,' Newsweek and Time called 1976 'the Year of the Evangelical.' The most famous 'born-again' Christian in the United States that year, however, was president-elect James Earl Carter. That same year, Francis Schaefer wrote How Should We Then Live, explicitly arguing that proliferating pornography, accelerating abortion rates, prohibition of prayer in public school, and other examples of 'secular humanism' were the work of Satan. It was the mission of evangelical Christians to save the country from Satan by taking back their government. Schaefer was central in bringing evangelical Christians to politics, but he was a reclusive intellectual theologian living on a mountaintop in Switzerland. His clarion call would not have been distributed so extensively without an infusion of money from Nelson Bunker Hunt. The rotund international oilman bankrolled a documentary adaptation of How Should We The n Live. A phenomenal success, the film convinced thousands of evangelical Christian that a culture war was afoot, and they had an obligation to take the fight to Satan by abandoning any past reluctance to engage in politics.

If ever there was a period in the history of our country when there was occasion for weeping over it, that period is the one in which we ourselves are living. Is this England of ours a Christian land in any real and true sense? Is there not some reason for fearing that we are living in the afterglow of Christianity? Outside the Catholic Church are not the ties of Christianity being almost everywhere loosened? Is not its dogmatic teaching being almost universally ridiculed, while its moral obligations are just tossed to the winds as though worthless as the dust in our streets? Are not congresses declaring constantly that the education of our children must be free and secular, that the Words of Christ must be banished from the schools, and that not a penny of the rates and taxes should be spent on "cramming dogmas down the throats of children"? Do we not recognize around us a spirit of discontent with all that is, with Society as at present constituted, and with religion as identified with politics, or with the State? I will not refer to the desecrations of the marriage bond, nor to the destruction of home life, nor to the prevention of child-bearing, nor the other social and domestic horrors, which all go to prove incontestably that the Christianity of Christ is ceasing to be the leaven which alone can spiritualise now, as it spiritualised in the past. (chapter 6)

Part of this struggle involves an unrelenting critique of liberal multicultural “tolerance” (in the West as much as the rest), which despite all pretenses, prioritizes dominant white European culture (or in such countries as India, dominant Hindu culture), while patronizingly “tolerating” others (see Iqtidar and Sarkar 2018). Here, Muslim culture is fixed and stereotyped, most often reduced to a religious category, thereby ignoring the dynamic, diverse, and indeed secular mix that makes up the “Muslim world” (both outside and inside the “West”). What is most often missing is a properly politicized view of Muslim culture (or indeed culture writ large), in which political-economic antagonisms play a key role: thus, violence against women is not the result of some pathological religious practice, but most often imbricated with unequal state property/inheritance laws (and their lack of enforcement) and/or male domination in the advancing cash economy (Visweswaran 1994, 510; Salhi 2013). A universal politics worthy of its name cannot, as a result, engage in a purely “cultural politics” that avoids the key question of the politicization of the economy; this would merely play into the hands of postpolitical global capitalism, which, as underlined already, seeks to keep culture and economy apart. Linking the two spheres is precisely what enables universality: seeing the antagonisms of culture/identity (struggles of representation, violence against women, queer rights, racialization) as intimately linked to the antagonisms of global capitalism (socioeconomic and spatial inequality, environmental catastrophe) is what opens the door to shared struggle. It helps establish bonds of solidarity between those who struggle for justice in the West and those who participate in the same struggle in the “Muslim world” (and elsewhere). Perhaps those of us Westerners engaging in universalizing struggles can learn from the political vitality and truculence of the “Muslim world”: at a time when engagement, energy, and commitment to change the system are often so fickle in the West, the Islamic resurgence, despite often being misdirected, can teach us something about a refusal to be so easily co-opted and seduced by Western hegemony. The challenge, though, is to channel such “rage” to the right target, that is, to make it anti-systemic rather than anti-symptomatic.

Some liberals falsely assert that Christian aid groups help only those who are Christians (this is not true of the major organizations? and don't appreciate the scale of giving by people of faith. World Vision has 40,000 staff in roughly 100 countries-more than CARE, Save the Children, and the United States Agency for International Development combined. Some secular liberals are pushing to end the longtime practice of channeling aid through religious aid groups, even though that would cripple aid efforts. In the past five years, half of food aid in Haiti went through religiously affiliated organizations, such as World Vision, that have deep networks on the ground. ...Religious Americans actually donate more of their income to charity and volunteer more of their time than any other group. If secular liberals can give up some of their scorn, and if religious conservatives can retire some of their sanctimony, combined they might succeed in making greater progress against common enemies of humanity.

Some liberals falsely assert that Christian aid groups help only those who are Christians (this is not true of the major organizations) and don't appreciate the scale of giving by people of faith. World Vision has 40,000 staff in roughly 100 countries-more than CARE, Save the Children, and the United States Agency for International Development combined. Some secular liberals are pushing to end the longtime practice of channeling aid through religious aid groups, even though that would cripple aid efforts. In the past five years, half of food aid in Haiti went through religiously affiliated organizations, such as World Vision, that have deep networks on the ground. ...Religious Americans actually donate more of their income to charity and volunteer more of their time than any other group. If secular liberals can give up some of their scorn, and if religious conservatives can retire some of their sanctimony, combined they might succeed in making greater progress against common enemies of humanity.

Page 80-81: The two patron saints of American cultural pluralism rejected both Anglo-conformity and the melting-pot ideal. In his 1915 essay in the Nation, “Democracy vs. The Melting Pot,” Horace Kallen was concerned (as the essay’s title suggests) with rebutting the melting-pot conception, as well as the nativism displayed in Edward A. Ross’s polemic the Old World and the New (1915), the immediate occasion of Kallen’s essay. Randolph Bourne, in his July 1916 essay “Trans-National America,” concentrated on contesting the claims of Anglo-conformists for the superiority of Anglo-American culture.* Rejecting assimilation, in its Anglo-conformist and melting-pot forms, both of which, in their different ways, envision the United States as a conventional nation-state with a single predominant culture, cultural pluralists counterposed the ideal of the United States as a nonnational confederation of minorities, a country without a majority nation. * Kallen and Bourne arguable were influenced by their ethnic backgrounds, Kallen was a Harvard-educated German Jew who had immigrated to the United States with his family at the age of five, a Zionist and a proponent of secular (but not religious) Jewishness, Kallen was concerned about the effect on a distinct Jewish-American identity of the melting-pot ideal that Zangwill (an English Jew) promoted.

Although armed actions have been the most dramatic, revolutionary militancy has never been limited to guns and bombs. Hundreds of political prisoners have come from pacifist circles, both secular and religious. While these activists are generally imprisoned on shorter sentences than those described above, their political actions are no less vital, their commitments no less revolutionary. Just as those who engaged in armed struggle never comprised the majority of the movements from which they came, most nonviolent activists who serve prison time for acts of civil disobedience are not revolutionaries. Yet many of them are, and their work provides a vital point through which to build strategic unity among those who differ on questions of tactics. It was, in fact, revolutionary nonviolent activists who maintained dialogue and critical support for armed revolutionaries in the 1970s when other sectors of the Left, who were often theoretically supportive of armed struggle in Third World countries, were decidedly hostile to its domestic iterations.

BA Nubian Princess Zahra for a young man, Liberia was exciting, but it was also an outright dangerous place to be. It wasn’t only the dangerous situations that could present themselves, such as suddenly being confronted by gangs or petty criminals on the streets or along the roads between villages. There were also natural dangers that could run the gamut from snake bites to being attacked by wild animals. I constantly heard stories, told to me by my crew members, of friends, family and neighbors being seriously hurt or killed in the bush. When I was born in 1934 my life expectancy was 59.3 years. When I came to Liberia the average life expectancy in Liberia was 33.1 years. Now in the United States it is 78.5 years and in Liberia it is 62.9 years. Things have improved in both countries, but at my “advanced age” I consider myself very fortunate. Regardless of the severity of the obvious dangers in Liberia, the greatest danger is still what could come from not understanding the tribal rules based on long held traditions, which were both secular and religious in nature. Fooling around with the local women might be a nice way to spend an afternoon or evening but the ramifications could be costly, dangerous or even deadly! It wouldn’t even matter if the flirtation had been started by the girl, or let’s say woman, because Liberia’s women don’t remain girls very long. But, the memories of their families are long-lasting!

What is “woke” culture? It is a collection of political, social, and economic beliefs that insist on a post-Christian secular culture that embraces abortion, the LGBTQ+ agenda, various forms of socialism, government control, sometimes specifically calling for world government. It also includes something like a new version of class warfare based on racial identity, dividing the world into the “oppressors” and the “oppressed” and fomenting suspicion and hostility among citizens of a country.

At that level, organized religion is no longer good news for most people, but bad news indeed. It set us up for the massive amounts of atheism, agnosticism, hedonism, and secularism we now see in almost all formerly Christian countries (and in those who just keep up the external trappings of Christianity).

In Belgium, secularism manifested itself in anticlericalism allied to the Freemasons. This led to the establishment of a secular university in Lubumbashi to counter the launch of the Catholic University, Lovanium, in Kinshasa. The first university courses were taught during the Second World War; this event is cut from the history of the country because it was the initiative of Catholic missionaries. For the same reasons, Jef Van Bilsen and the Manifesto of African Conscience of 30 June 1956 are cited as precursors of independence, without any mention of the Catholic bishops who had previously taken some distance from the Colony by calling for the political emancipation of Blacks and by condemning racism in all its forms. Such political rebellion by missionaries were common in Africa and it is still perpetuated within episcopal conferences.

President Obama’s actions cannot be understood except as an expression of “Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior.” Liberals constitute a “secular-socialist machine” that is “as great a threat to America as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union.” There is “a gay and secular fascism in this country that wants to impose its will on the rest of us” and “is prepared to use violence.” … In San Antonio, Gingrich declared, “I am convinced that, if we do not decisively win the struggle over the nature of America,” his grandchildren will live “in a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists and with no understanding of what it once meant to be an American.” 40

Masterclass for Humans (The Sonnet) Only the Native Americans are real Americans, Everybody else is an immigrant. Before you tell someone to go back to their country, Start by heading back to Britain yourself. Only Indigenous people are real Canadians, Kiwis, and Aussies, everybody else is an immigrant. Before you yell slurs at an immigrant of today, Start by heading back to Europe yourself. Turkey was transformed by one man, Upon the foundation of thoughts most rational. Before you bring back the days of fanaticism, Start by taking down the statues of Mustafa Kemal. India never had any organized religion, Brahmin barbarians peddled a myth to have control. Before you cremate a secular beacon into safron ashes, Wipe out all memories of Kabir, Ambedkar and Tagore. From discrimination to assimilation, That's how we walk the course of progress. Till every trace of intolerance is history, Keep on struggling against mindlessness.

One of Gunter’s fears was that the Bible was a ‘policy’, a deliberately manipulative hoax. This venerable theme, revived by Machiavelli, now seemed more compelling than ever. During the Reformation age, Christendom had been splintered into national churches closely controlled by secular governments – none more so than the Church of England. Apparently God’s eternal truth changed when you crossed a border, or on the whims of kings and queens. Bishop Earle’s ‘sceptic’ was ‘troubled at this naturalness of Religion to Countries, that Protestantism should be born so in England, and Popery abroad’. What if we only believe what we believe out of chauvinism and habit? A popular advice-book warned young Englishmen travelling to the Continent against sampling foreign churches, fearing not so much that they would convert as that they would conclude that all churches had good points and bad points, ‘and so, displeased on all sides, you dash upon the rock of Atheism’ – a fate to which those who had ‘seen many countries’ were proverbially prone. Even if you did not give ‘perfect credit’ to another religion, merely to ‘admit of a suspicion that things may be’ as others say was to set the woodworm to work.

If America’s slide into secularism continues, then what awaits us tomorrow is already evident today in Europe. Western Europe has become so secularized that it’s hard for the gospel even to get a fair hearing. As a result, missionaries must labor for years to win even a handful of converts. Having lived for thirteen years in Europe in four different countries, I can testify personally to how hard it is for people to respond to the message of Christ.

Nowhere among Catholic countries in the world is the Church deeply involved in the shaping of policy than in the Philippines. It is anachronistic that the Church plays such a dominant role in a secular society where we supposedly draw a line between Church and State.

millennialist thought was a cluster of religious and secular ideas forged into a kind of national creed. In its more hopeful mode, it held that Christ would have a Second Coming in the “new Israel” of America, or at least that the country possessed a mission as a “redeemer nation” destined to perform a special role in history. Millennialism was an outlook on history, a disposition about

Soccer is best experienced as sport cloaked in spectacle and secular religion, and for the first time, Americans on a large scale felt - if only fleetingly, in a sanitized, hooligan-free, sample-sized container - the rosary clutch, the chest ache, that makes this game the athletic heartbeat of nearly every other country of the world.

America’s founding philosophy and the principles described above are under attack in our country. The idea of a Creator, for example, is replaced with secularism and atheism. Equality before the law is replaced with forced equality of outcomes. Instead of celebrating our national achievements and progress, many demonize conservatives, whites, men, heterosexuals, Jews, Christians, and the rich, seeking to hold them accountable for evils and injustices of the past. The inherent value of the individual is attacked and replaced with value that is based upon group identity. Reason and the pursuit of objective truth are mocked, and postmodern subjectivity, ugliness, and criticism take their place. The liberties of many are trampled because of the insistence of a loud, angry, and sometimes violent minority. Self-defense is criminalized while destruction of others’ personal property is permitted in the name of freedom, justice, and equality. Government overreach is now the rule rather than the exception.

Dalai Lama Even given positive results of experiments, it is exceedingly difficult for the Western-acculturated mind to accept that supernormal abilities really do exist. The Dalai Lama is often asked about this issue, and he wrote about it in his autobiography: Many westerners want to know whether the books on Tibet by people like Lobsang Rampa and some others, in which they speak about occult practices, are true. They also ask me whether Shambala (a legendary country referred to by certain scriptures and supposed to lie hidden among the northern wastes of Tibet) really exists.… In reply to the first two questions, I usually say that most of these books are works of imagination and that Shambala exists, yes, but not in a conventional sense. At the same time, it would be wrong to deny that some Tantric practices do genuinely give rise to mysterious phenomena.6 This statement is cautiously worded, and appropriate for a spiritual leader who was also a political leader for many years. The upshot of his answer is that yes, advanced meditative practices do give rise to some strange effects, and for the most part these practices have been ignored by science. The Dalai Lama has been personally interested in promoting science-spirit dialogues, but at the beginning these talks were not easy to arrange, even for him. Within meditative traditions advanced methods are considered a secret doctrine, and as we’ve seen repeated in the Yoga Sutras, demonstrating one’s abilities for secular reasons is strongly taboo. Nevertheless, the Dalai Lama believed it was important to get science to investigate these phenomena: I hope one day to organise some sort of scientific enquiry into the phenomenon of oracles, which remain an important part of the Tibetan way of life. Before I speak about them in detail, however, I must stress that the purpose of oracles is not, as might be supposed, simply to foretell the future. This is only part of what they do. In addition, they can be called upon as protectors and in some cases they are used as healers.… Through mental training, we have developed techniques to do things which science cannot yet adequately explain. This, then, is the basis of the supposed “magic and mystery” of Tibetan Buddhism.6

In a country where the Army stays in the shadows, has no political ambitions, is strictly secular, and does not want the limelight, the irony is that our toughest warriors are sometimes the softest target for this media spectacle.

Ignored are the secular regimes and processes that have historically been evident in many Muslim-majority countries such as Egypt, Turkey, Morocco, and Tunisia, as well as the secularism evident in second- and third-generation migrants from these countries.

Then there was Obama being Obama the day after the election: "We have to remember that we're actually all on one team." A man's character is his fate, as Heraclitus said, and what a sick, twisted fate indeed that Barack Obarna-cerebral, disciplined, cool, ever seeking to reconcile and accommodate (as an African-American pastor in Charleston drily commented, once his presidency is over, Obama will no longer have "to be the least threatening black man in America't has had to contend these past eight years with a political opposition that regards him as very much not on the team. Not even American: "His grandmother in Kenya said, 'Oh, no, he was born in Kenya and I was there and I witnessed the birth.' She's on tape. I think that tape's going to be produced fairly soon.."5 Or not a "real" American, but a "man who is a closet secular-type Muslim, but he's still a Muslim. He's no Christian. We're seeing a man who's a Socialist Communist in the White House, pretending to be an American. That terrorist fist-bump, remember? Oh, and he was the founder of ISIS, an aspiring tyrant aiming for a Nazi-or Soviet-style dictatorship, and looks like a skinny ghetto crackhead.Z "All this damage he's done to America is deliberate," said Marco Rubio during a Republican debate,a which had to be one of the dumbest things anyone said during the whole campaign. If Obama wanted to destroy the U.S., all he needed to do was sit on his hands in 2009 and let the hot mess of the Bush economy melt the country down to slag. But the issue is bigger than any particular president. After his "all on one team" remark, Obama continued: The point, though, is that we all go forward with a _presumption of goodfrith in our fellow citizens, because that, of good faith is essential to a vibrant and finctioning democracy.

Then there was Obama being Obama the day after the election: "We have to remember that we're actually all on one team." A man's character is his fate, as Heraclitus said, and what a sick, twisted fate indeed that Barack Obarna-cerebral, disciplined, cool, ever seeking to reconcile and accommodate (as an African-American pastor in Charleston drily commented, once his presidency is over, Obama will no longer have "to be the least threatening black man in America” has had to contend these past eight years with a political opposition that regards him as very much not on the team. Not even American: "His grandmother in Kenya said, 'Oh, no, he was born in Kenya and I was there and I witnessed the birth.' She's on tape. I think that tape's going to be produced fairly soon...» or not a "real" American, but a "man who is a closet secular-type Muslim, but he's still a Muslim. He's no Christian. We're seeing a man who's a Socialist Communist in the White House, pretending to be an American. That terrorist fist-bump, remember? Oh, and he was the founder of ISIS, an aspiring tyrant aiming for a Nazi-or Soviet-style dictatorship, and looks like a skinny ghetto crackhead. "All this damage he's done to America is deliberate," said Marco Rubio during a Republican debate, which had to be one of the dumbest things anyone said during the whole campaign. If Obama wanted to destroy the U.S., all he needed to do was sit on his hands in 2009 and let the hot mess of the Bush economy melt the country down to slag. But the issue is bigger than any particular president. After his "all on one team" remark, Obama continued: The point, though, is that we all go forward with a presumption of good faith in our fellow citizens, because that, of good faith is essential to a vibrant and functioning democracy.

Index: The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index9 Monitors: Civil liberties, pluralism, political culture and participation, electoral process Method: Global ranking India 2014 ranking: 27 India 2020 ranking: 53 Result: India fell 26 places. Reasons cited: Classifying India as a ‘flawed democracy’, the report says ‘democratic norms have been under pressure since 2015. India’s score fell from a peak of 7.92 in 2014 to 6.61 in 2020’. This was the ‘result of democratic backsliding under the leadership of Narendra Modi’ and the ‘increasing influence of religion under Modi, whose policies have fomented anti-Muslim feeling and religious strife, has damaged the political fabric of the country’. Modi had ‘introduced a religious element to the conceptualisation of Indian citizenship, a step that many critics see as undermining the secular basis of the Indian state’. In 2019, India was ranked 51st in the Democracy Index, when the report said, ‘The primary cause of the democratic regression was an erosion of civil liberties in the country.’ It fell two places again in 2020. ‘By contrast,’ The Economist Intelligence Unit noted, ‘the scores for some of India’s regional neighbours, such as Bangladesh, Bhutan and Pakistan, improved marginally.

An anti-evolution stance belittles science, logic, human reason, the scientific method and could be a factor in youth not believing in or respecting science, skepticism, reason and rationality. Many countries have already passed the United States in science and technology and eventually will in GDP.

A first world country is born of first world citizens. A citizen becomes first world by defying all divisions.

Throughout most of history, religious institutions were able to impose pro-fertility norms. But the causal relationship is reciprocal and the dominant direction can be reversed: if pro-fertility norms come to be seen as outmoded and repressive, their rejection also brings rejection of religion. In societies where support for pro-fertility norms is giving way to individual-choice norms, we find declining religiosity. In societies where religion remains strong, little or no change in pro-fertility norms is taking place. But religiosity has been growing in some societies, particularly in formerly communist societies, and there it has been accompanied by growing emphasis on pro-fertility norms and declining acceptance of individual-choice norms. The declining need for pro-fertility norms opened the way for gradual secularization, with the young being most open to change. Consequently, in high-income countries the younger birth cohorts are much less religious than their older compatriots; among those born between 1894 and 1903, 42 percent said that God was

Most of what Jesus said and did took place in a secular workplace in a farmer’s field, in a fishing boat, at a wedding feast, in a cemetery, at a public well asking a woman he didn’t know for a drink of water, on a country hillside that he turned into a huge picnic, in a court room, having supper in homes with acquaintances or friends. In our Gospels, Jesus occasionally shows up in synagogue or temple, but for the most part he spends his time in the workplace. Twenty-seven times in John’s Gospel Jesus is identified as a worker: “My Father is still working, and I also am working” (Jn. 5:17). Work doesn’t take us away from God; it continues the work of God. God comes into view on the first page of our scriptures as a worker. Once we identify God in his workplace working, it isn’t long before we find ourselves in our workplaces working in the name of God.

Protestant Christianity had a major influence on developing American nationalism, and “secular and religious motifs were woven into the belief that America had a unique role in bringing the Kingdom of God to this world.”6 This was pervasive throughout the country. Northerners tended to apply it to the nation, but for Southerners it became an article of faith in themselves. The South was the New Israel, with the North, corrupted by foreigners, industrialists, and abolitionists— apostates who had abandoned the faith.

India’s first prime minister, the Harrow- and Cambridge-educated Jawaharlal Nehru, once told the American ambassador, “I am the last Englishman to rule India.” The country Nehru and his fellow post-independence leaders created was built on values they drew from deep associations with Britain and the West. Their India was a secular, pluralistic, democratic, and socialist state. I was the first to celebrate when India jettisoned much of its socialist heritage, which had caused untold dysfunction and corruption. But socialism is not the only imported Western idea that countries are now second-guessing.

la revanche de Dieu, Gilles Kepel termed it, has pervaded every continent, every civilization, and virtually every country. In the mid-1970s, as Kepel observes, the trend to secularization and toward the accommodation of religion with secularism “went into reverse.

In the decades following the adoption of the Constitution, the States disestablished their churches and despite fears from conservatives, church membership flourished. Alexis de Tocqueville credits this increase in religiosity to the successful implementation of the 'complete separation of church and state' and to this day, the United States remains one of the most religious countries in the world.[12]

Presidents also voiced their opinions on the matter; President Ulysses S. Grant insisted that the matter of religion should be left 'to the family altar, the church, and the private school supported entirely by private contributions. Keep the church and State forever separate.'[16] Forty years later President Theodore Roosevelt concurred, 'I hold that in this country there must be complete severance of Church and State ... and therefore that the public schools shall be nonsectarian and no public moneys appropriated for sectarian schools.'[17]

The republican ideal, harking back to the ‘good’ elements of the Revolution, assumes that France is a nation of progress on the side of the secular angels. But the various narratives of the last two centuries have shown that the country invariably opts for right over left with occasional eruptions to prove that its revolutionary legacy is not dead. Thus, 1830 was followed by the bourgeois monarchy when those unhappy with the system were told that the answer to their complaints of exclusion was to enrich themselves as conservatism was entrenched under Guizot’s golden mean. Within four months of the revolution that created the Second Republic, troops were liquidating the worker barricades of the June Days and, in 1851, Louis-Napoleon staged his coup. Two decades later, the Commune was suppressed with equal bloodshed. The Third Republic was slow to introduce social reforms, shied away from an income tax for decades and denied the vote to half the population. While introducing historic and lasting changes, the Popular Front collapsed after two years and Paul Reynaud set to work to chip away at its legacy.

I am much more troubled by the claims we get in our office about what can only be described as a “Christian nationalism,” an effort by some in military circles to denigrate the service of those who are not Christian, or who are not even religious. There is a real difference in my view between God and country—Christianity has not cornered the market on faith. When we lapse into a sense that what we do is a holy enterprise and that our military policy represents God's will as well as that of the Pentagon,

Furthermore, the National Day of Prayer has always been soaked in the kind of offensive “God and country” rhetoric that many of us find nauseating.

Let's keep this simple: We separate religion and government in this country. That means the state has no business setting aside special days for prayer or other religious observances. Thomas Jefferson knew that. He refused to issue prayer proclamations during his presidency. James Madison issued a few under pressure from Congress but later in his life wrote an essay saying he wished he hadn't. Andrew Jackson followed Jefferson's lead and refused to issue such proclamations entirely.

India has not been able to keep track of its own citizen. The faulty system allows unhindered entry of alien nationals from the neighbouring countries. Periodically some Indian politicians wake up and raise slogans for comprehensive documentation of the citizens of the country. Vote-bank beggars in the right, left and centre of the political spectrum oppose them, because they depend a lot on illegal migrant voters from the neighbouring countries. They also shed crocodile tears in the name of ‘secularism’—an apartheid mechanism devised by the Indian democracy. Once in a while the intelligence and police agencies are whipped up to trace out the illegal settlers. They even violate the rights of the natural citizens.

rulers claim that they are applying the Law of Islam and assert at the same time that they are governing us by democracy God knows they are liars in both. Islamic law is ignored in our unhappy country and we are governed according to French secular law, which permits drunkenness, fornication, and perversion so long as it is by mutual consent. The state itself in fact benefits from gambling and the sale of alcohol, then spews out its ill-gotten gains in the form of salaries for the Muslims, who as a result are cursed with the curse of what is forbidden and God expunges His blessings from their life. The supposedly democratic state is based on the rigging of elections and the detention and torture of innocent people so that the ruling clique can remain on their thrones

daughters, our rulers claim that they are applying the Law of Islam and assert at the same time that they are governing us by democracy God knows they are liars in both. Islamic law is ignored in our unhappy country and we are governed according to French secular law, which permits drunkenness, fornication, and perversion so long as it is by mutual consent. The state itself in fact benefits from gambling and the sale of alcohol, then spews out its ill-gotten gains in the form of salaries for the Muslims, who as a result are cursed with the curse of what is forbidden and God expunges His blessings from their life. The supposedly democratic state is based on the rigging of elections and the detention and torture of innocent people so that the ruling clique can remain on their

In Protestant countries, the Reformation removed the anointing (and the excommunicating) of secular rulers from the jurisdiction of Rome. The doctrine of the divine right of kings was invented to enable kings to be anointed by bishops they had themselves appointed, rather than by appointees of the Pope. The interests of national kings and their peoples were certainly closer than those of popes or emperors. But however much the interest of kings and their peoples might seem close at a time of national peril—as at the time of the Spanish Armada—at other times they might be in the harshest conflict, with ensuing revolutions and civil wars. The national Church of England, established by Henry VIII's break with Rome, had as its most fundamental doctrine that of passive obedience to the king, under all circumstances and at any cost. But such a doctrine could not survive the contingency of the King himself becoming Catholic. In the Glorious Revolution of 1689, the Church of England itself was converted from the divine right of kings to popular sovereignty, exercised in and through the Parliament.

And the Buddha was not interested in them. But if we look at Buddhism historically, we’ll see that it has continuously tended to lose this agnostic dimension through becoming institutionalized as a religion, with all of the usual dogmatic belief systems that religions tend to have. So, ironically, if you were to go to many Asian countries today, you would find that the monks and priests who control the institutional bodies of Buddhism would have quite clear views on whether the world is eternal or not, what happens to the Buddha after death, the status of the mind in relation to the body, and so oṇ This

These cities are also important centers of commerce, artisanal crafts, education, and culture—nodes in a network of communication and travel that connects the cities of northern France, England, and the Low Countries to the Italian peninsula. Their influence puts them in a position to shape the religious life of their communities in crucial ways. Over the previous couple of centuries, many of these cities have wrested control of church institutions away from bishops, precisely because many urban leaders were conscientious Christians who cared about the Church.22 If the bishops wouldn’t oversee reforms, secular authorities would.

In this way, Gregory sowed broadside seeds that, when they bloomed, brought about the end of Christendom and the Reformation. The Bishop of Trier saw the danger. He charged Gregory with  destroying the unity of the church. The Bishop of Verdun said the pope was mistaken in his unheard-of arrogance. Belief belongs to one’s church, the heart belongs to one’s country. The pope, he said, must not filch the heart’s allegiance. This was precisely what Gregory did. He wanted all; he left emperors and princes nothing. The papacy, as he fashioned it, by undermining patriotism, undermined the authority of secular rulers; they felt threatened by the Altar. At the Reformation, in England and elsewhere, rulers felt obliged to exclude Catholicism from their lands in order to feel secure.

The Indian Constitution embodies the positive concept of secularism ie, all religions in our country (irrespective of their strength) have the same status and support from the state10.

These experts sought to promote the idea, which culminated after 9/11 in the War on Terror, that the West was up against enemies of such unfathomable evil that engaging with their causes or motivations was pointless, and that virtually anything the national security state did to combat them, including a dramatic rise in civilian deaths, was justified. To the millions of people whom it impacted - Arabs, Iranians, Afghans, Pakistanis, and Africans of secular background or various faiths - the terrorism paradigm created a painful double existence. Those who believed that, in many instances, violence committed in their countries of origin stemmed from legitimate grievances - that the violence was not legitimate, but the underlying pathologies and grievances were - felt themselves unable to acknowledge this in public life.

Pakistani officers consider the most regressive clerics patriotic because, after all, they would never make common cause with Pakistan’s external enemies—the Indians and whoever else Pakistani intelligence might know or imagine as conspiring against the country at any given moment. Liberal and secular thinkers, on the other hand, are permanently suspect. If they speak up for any ethnic group, they must want Pakistan’s disintegration; if they ask for a secular state, they could be asking for eliminating Pakistan’s identity and a virtual reincorporation into India; and if they question the army’s political role or its budget, they must be in league with ‘the enemy’.

As just one example, Great Britain had supported the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt as far back as 1928, as it identified it as “an anti-nationalist and anti-liberal vehicle” to be used against the prodemocracy forces in that country. It continued to back the Brotherhood against the government of Gamal Abdel Nasser, a secularist who had the audacity “to abolish the monarchy and establish a republic.”3 And indeed, just around the same time it was trying to overthrow Mossadegh in Iran, Britain was trying to assassinate Nasser, who represented the distinct danger of spreading secular democracy throughout the Arab world.4 As for Iran, when its revolution came in 1979, it was led by the Islamic leaders of that country more than the Left, which the United States had made sure was suppressed and crushed throughout the reign of the Shah, and even later as we will see. In other words, it was the United States’ own policies that made a revolution, and specifically an Islamic revolution, both possible and probable.

Religious Children Are Less Altruistic A recent study of 1,170 children from six countries—United States, Canada, China, Jordan, South Africa, and Turkey—found that children raised in religious homes were not as good at sharing and more likely to be punitive when compared to children raised in more secular homes. The author of the study said in an interview, “In our study, kids from atheist and nonreligious families were, in fact, more generous. . . . Together, these results reveal the similarity across countries in how religion negatively influences children’s altruism. They challenge the view that religiosity facilitates pro-social behavior, and call into question whether religion is vital for moral development—suggesting the secularization of moral discourse does not reduce human kindness. In fact, it does just the opposite.”5 When one understands the law of worship, such a finding is no surprise; it is the predictable and unavoidable outcome when the predominant worldview of God is that of an authoritarian dictator who operates on imposed law. This is a function of design law—the law of worship—by beholding we become changed. We really are transformed into the image of the god we worship. It is just as the prophet Jeremiah said, “They followed worthless idols and became worthless themselves” (Jer. 2:5). Or as Paul said, “Because those people refuse to keep in mind the true knowledge about God, he has given them over to corrupted minds” (Rom. 1:28 GNT). Believing the wrong view of God can result in much more tragic outcomes than mere failure to share. In fact, there isn’t anything much more dangerous than someone on a mission for God who doesn’t actually know him!

Pakistan’s pan-Islamic aspirations, however, were neither shared nor supported by the Muslim governments of the time. Nationalism in other parts of the Muslim world was based on ethnicity, language, or territory. Most Arab governments, as well as secular states such as Turkey, were wary of a religious revival.

In addition, whereas a narrow (urban, secular, progressive) anti-Trump coalition would reinforce the current axes of partisan division, a broader coalition would crosscut these axes and maybe even help dampen them. A political movement that brings together—even if temporarily—Bernie Sanders supporters and businesspeople, evangelicals and secular feminists, and small-town Republicans and urban Black Lives Matter supporters, will open channels of communication across the vast chasm that has emerged between our country’s two main partisan camps.

The Islamic Republic of Pakistan partition, from the Republic of India, and as entire Secular India, independence from the British Empire enter its 70th anniversary. Unfortunately, both countries fail, within its real conception of freedom as India in its secular system and Pakistan as in its democratic prospect in the perception of Islamic values that cause the partition from India. Consequently, Pakistan bore the lesson of the partition of its East Pakistan, becoming Bangladesh. Beyond all other issues, the both Pakistan and India would have become the great, richest, and powerful nations in the world map if both sides had adopted the vision, dialogue of mutual interests, and toleration for the peace and harmony. In an open fact, enmity, with the diplomatic idiocy damaged, not only the old traditional and literary relationships but also the economic destruction on both sides. Both countries produce and facilitate, and sponsor the extremists and terrorists for self-destruction on self-costs and lives. How long both countries stay on that strategy, which gains nothing, except suffering from that, both sides people? Ehsan Sehgal

A nation is not a piece of land, so it must not be seen as such - a nation is a people - a people with various unique ingredients in their way of living - these ingredients do not make them superior or inferior to any other people in the world, rather they simply make them who they are - they simply define their uniqueness - and these unique ingredients from all the peoples of all the countries in the world beautifully construct the radiant, colorful and vivacious fabric of humanity, where all the colors are of equal potential for growth and progress.

A leader is to take away prejudices from the psychological edifice of a country - a leader is to uplift a people, while warming their minds with the gentle flames of love, acceptance and reasoning.

One of the most intriguing questions of our time is why in the developing countries their newly established liberal political institutions - set up with great hopes and idealism - survived in a handful of them and not in others. Even in countries where they did survive, the nature of infraction against them was brutal and the effectiveness of their resilience against it uncertain. One of the least explored areas in this respect is whether the developing countries and their elite are capable of learning from their past experiences - despite their political passivity, gullibility and cynicism - how to develop patterns of political conduct which will be widely viewed as proper and fruitful. To put it another way, whether they would be able to learn to strike a balance between what is normatively desirable and what is politically possible in operating public institutions and in dealing with political adversaries. What then are the problems in their learning and assimilating such normative-pragmatic dos and don'ts? The area where such problems can be fruitfully examined is the area of political society where different kinds of normative-pragmatic mix and imbalance affect the operation, effectiveness and survival of public institutions. Attempts at overly normative commitments (of personal morality, religion or secular ideology) and an overly pragmatic approach uncommitted to political values (of selfish, corrupt and cynical use of political power) often weaken the operations of liberal political institutions. Hence the need for a normative-pragmatic balance.

to remember this in a country that has long been mesmerized by the romantic figure of ‘the renouncer’, even before the Buddha came along.6 My mother, however, was spot on in recognizing ‘my third stage melancholy’. During my second stage, I had felt as though I was waking up each morning, going to work, and feeding my family—only to repeat it the following day, as my children would after me and their children after them. What was the point of it all? Now in my third stage, I wanted to find a better way to live. Meanwhile, my friends and acquaintances were incredulous. ‘So, what is this I hear about wanting to go away to read old books?’ one asked me at a dinner party. ‘Don’t tell me you are going to turn religious on us!’ exclaimed another. My wife began to explain my idea of an ‘academic holiday’ to some of the guests, who reciprocated with suitable looks of sympathy. ‘Tell us, what books are you planning to read?’ asked a retired civil servant. A self-proclaimed ‘leftist and secularist’, who had once been a favourite of former prime minister Indira Gandhi, he had the gruff, domineering accent of an English aristocrat, not surprising in a former civil servant of the old school. I admitted reluctantly that I had been thinking of reading the Mahabharata, the Manusmriti, the Kathopanishad perhaps, and ... ‘Good Lord, man!’ he exclaimed. ‘You haven’t turned saffron, have you?’ The remark upset me. Saffron is, of course, the colour of Hindu right-wing nationalism, and I wondered what sort of secularism is it that regards the reading of Sanskrit texts as a political act. I was disturbed that I had to fear the intolerance of my ‘secular’ friends as much as the bigotry of the Hindu Right, which had become a force in Indian politics over the past two decades with the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party.

What good came of all this exploration? It was a question philosophes found irresistable. Progress was their almost irresistable answer. But Diderot, the secular pontiff of the Enlightenment, the editor of the Encyclopédie, did not agree. In 1773 he wrote a denunciation of explorers as agents of a new kind of barbarism. Base motives drove them: 'tyranny, crime, ambition, misery, curiousity, I know not what restlessness of spirit, the desire to know and the desire to see, boredom, the dislike of familiar pleasures' - all the baggage of the restless temperament. Lust for discovery was a new form of fanaticism on the part of men seeking 'islands to ravage, people to despoil, subjugate and massacre.' The explorers discovered people morally superior to themselves, because more natural or more civilized, while they, on their side, grew in savagery, far from the polite restraints that reined them in at home. 'All the long-range expeditions,' Diderot insisted, 'have reared a new generation of nomadic savages ... men who visit so many countries that they end by belonging to none ... amphibians who live on the surface of the waters,' deracinated, and, in the strictest sense of the word, demoralized. Certainly, the excesses explorers committed - of arrogance, of egotism, of exploitation - showed the folly of supposing that travel necessarily broadens the mind or improves the character. But Diderot exaggerated. Even as he wrote, the cases of disinterested exploration - for scientific or altruistic purposes - were multiplying. If the eighteenth century rediscovered the beauties of nature and the wonders of the picturesque, it was in part because explorers alerted domestic publics to the grandeurs of the world they discovered. If the conservation of species and landscape became, for the first time in Western history, an objective of imperial policy, it was because of what the historian Richard Grove has called 'green imperialism' - the awakened sense of stewardship inspired by the discovery of new Edens in remote oceans. If philosophers enlarged their view of human nature, and grappled earnestly and, on the whole, inclusively with questions about the admissability of formerly excluded humans - blacks, 'Hottentots,' Australian Aboriginals, and all other people estranged by their appearance or culture - to full membership of the moral community, it was because exploration made these brethren increasingly familiar. If critics of Western institutions were fortified in their strictures and encouraged in their advocacy of popular sovreignty, 'enlightened despotism,' 'free thinking,' civil liberties, and human 'rights,' it was, in part, because exploration acquainted them with challenging models from around the world of how society could be organized and life lived.

are not identical. A society could have a secular state even if there were very few secular people in the country. Another distinction is very common. Individuals could profess to not be secular people, to have religious faith. Yet, at the practical level, the existence of God may have no noticeable impact on their life decisions and conduct. This is because in a secular age even religious people tend to choose lovers and spouses, careers and friendships, and financial options with no higher goal than their own present-time personal happiness. Sacrificing personal peace and affluence for transcendent causes becomes

Before publication of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, we were largely a family-oriented, normal-minded, churchgoing, God-centered nation. We were not perfect. Racism, sexism, and bigotry are ever-present human failings. Yet our country was increasingly given to respectful tolerance and equal rights for women and for all races and religions, secular and even atheist.

Diplomacy, professional: Like war, diplomacy is too important a subject to be left to blundering amateurism. It marks the phase of policy prior to war; it makes and breaks military alliances; it ends war. There is much lore to it; it is a subtle calling. Diplomacy is too portentous to be entrusted to the politicians but it is too political to be left to the generals. Those who may be fatally affected by diplomacy's failure have every reason to demand that only its most skilled, professional practitioners represent their interests. Diplomacy, public: Advocacy openly directed at foreign publics in support of negotiations or broad policy positions and couched in terms intended to enlist their backing from a particular position or outcome. Distinguish Propaganda Diplomacy, purpose of: The purpose of diplomacy is not to outwit the opposing nation but to engage it in a web of common interests, thereby serving the interests of one's own nation. Diplomacy, rape: Diplomacy is political rape convincingly disguised as seduction. Diplomacy, with women: "Diplomacy lies in remembering to celebrate a woman's birthday while forgetting to note her age." — Proverb Diplomacy, revolutionary regimes and: "Diplomacy is one of the things which change least in the world, for it meets the great secular need of mankind, the need of peoples to make arrangements with each other, so that they can go about their several ways in peace ... It is therefore not surprising that revolutionary Governments, however drastically they break up the old régime of their country, either carry on the inherited diplomatic system or else return to it sooner or later." — R. B. Mowat, 1936

Nevertheless, it is crucial that British-born Muslims must robustly question their own faith and return to it's original uncontaminated sublimity. Living as they do in a free and democratic country, it should be their intrinsic religious duty as well as undoubted secular necessity to familarise themselves thoroughly with their sacred scripture by not deferring to any imposed theological misinterpretations or reactionary misconceptions circulated by an imperious Islamic Clergy. Only then will British Muslims be able to disseminate an accurate Islam that is not chiefly based on ritualism and formalism, but is grounded on truth and reason, tolerance and logic- as demanded by the faiths primary text ( Qur'an - 109:6)

No secular country or state can impose laws on its citizens prohibiting polygamy or bigamy, unless one religion enjoys more privileges than others.

If one were to split the United States into two countries—one blue, one red—the blue part would look much like Northern Europe’s havens of secularism and social democracy, while the red would have more in common with conservative religious societies like Poland or Turkey.

A.K. Warder, Professor of Sanskrit and Indian Studies, University of Toronto, who has no interest in whitewashing either side of the conflict, writes: ‘The Turkish conquests of more than half India between 900 and 1300 were perhaps the most destructive in human history. As Muslims, the conquerors aimed not only to destroy all other religions but also abolish secular culture.’2 Will Durant, the well-known chronicler of civilisations, is as categorical: ‘The Mohammedan conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history … its evident moral is that civilization is a precious thing whose delicate complex of order and liberty, culture and peace may at any time be overthrown by barbarians.’3 The degree of physical destruction is vouched for by noted art historian Heinrich Zimmer too, who laments that in north India ‘very little survives of the ancient edifices that were there prior to the Muslim conquest: only a few mutilated religious sites remain.’4 Amartya Sen concedes that ‘the slash and burn culture of the Muslim invaders … devastated several cities and ruined many temples, including particularly famous ones in Mathura, Kanauj, and (Somnath).’5 He also acknowledges the account of the Arab–Iranian traveller Alberuni who accompanied Mahmud to India, of this carnage. ‘Mahmud utterly ruined the prosperity of the country, and performed these wonderful exploits, by which Hindus became like atoms of dust scattered in all directions.’6 However, he believes that the Hindutva movement is deliberately highlighting Muslim destruction ‘through motivated selection and purposefully designed emphases as well as frequent exaggeration’.7 He is in a hurry to move away from the barbarism of the Muslim invasion to the undeniable and welcome syncretic elements of Hindu–Muslim culture that developed much later and over time. It is possible that some politically affiliated sections of Hindu society are seeking to deliberately dwell on Muslim atrocities of the past in order to create religious divisions and exploit them for their own benefit. Such an approach is wrong and needs to be countered. However, it is equally wrong to gloss over history and falsify it for present-day ‘secular’ imperatives.

Falwell warned the crowds that nothing was promised to them. America was under assault from secular liberal elites and godless government bureaucrats, and Christians needed to start fighting back. “The nation was intended to be a Christian nation by our founding fathers,” Falwell thundered. “This idea of ‘religion and politics don’t mix’ was invented by the devil to keep Christians from running their own country!

Bangladesh, officially the People's Republic of Bangladesh, is a South Asian nation with a rich history and a rapidly growing economy. It's known for its densely populated areas, vibrant culture, and resilience in the face of natural disasters. The country has made significant strides in poverty reduction and economic development since its independence in 1971. Geography and People: Bangladesh is a riverine country, often referred to as the "Land of the Bengals". It's one of the most densely populated countries globally, with a large Muslim majority. The population is predominantly Bengali, speaking the Bangla language. Bangladeshis are known for their hospitality, resilience, and hard work. History: Bangladesh was formerly part of the historical region of Bengal, and later East Bengal (or East Pakistan). It gained independence in 1971 after a liberation war. The country's constitution outlines its commitment to nationalism, socialism, democracy, and secularism. Economy: Bangladesh is a developing mixed economy, transitioning from a frontier market to an emerging market. It's the second-largest economy in South Asia, with a significant presence in the global economy. The country has seen robust economic growth and poverty reduction. Recent Events: A recent incident involved a Bangladesh Air Force training jet crashing into a school in Dhaka, resulting in casualties and injuries. The country is also bracing for potential unrest related to upcoming elections.

But we were girls on the forefront of a new Iran. The Shah wanted to modernize the country, which some complained meant to westernize it. In our circles, religion was shed. And I came from a secular family to begin with; we didn’t practice.

This structure became formalized in the fourteenth century, reflecting much earlier practice. The document known as the Golden Bull specified all the steps required to elect each new German king – the somewhat restricted electorate being just seven individuals: the three Rhineland ecclesiastical rulers (Mainz, Cologne, Trier) and four secular rulers (in the west, the Count Palatine; in the east, the King of Bohemia, the Margrave of Brandenburg and the Duke of Saxony). With extremely rare changes, these electors remained in place until Napoleon arrived to sweep the whole lot away.

The one example of successful state-sponsored higher education in the country also illustrated the unacceptability of state-sponsored secularism.38

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And the world had its first secular myth. Older readers or those in old-fashioned countries will know the Napoleonic myth as it existed throughout the century when no middleclass cabinet was complete without his bust, and pamphleteering wits could argue, even for a joke, that he was not a man but a sun-god.