Islam could get better
*You say I’m an angry young man
'cause I put severed heads on the sand
Mohammed gave me the word, civilization’s absurd
I’m doing the best that I can
You’ve got to admit Islam’s getting better (Better)
A little better all the time (It can’t get more worse)*
BTW, regarding this National Prayer Breakfast Obama spoke at:
And they were right to be concerned. The Fellowship, a/k/a The Family, is an extremely dangerous organization, based on power worship on the assumption that power is a sign of divine favor. See The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, by Jeff Sharlet (2009).
Sorry for taking a while.
The secularization thesis is the name given to this basic idea that modernity and development bring about secularization, or in other words, the declining influence of religion in society. You have this being a major part of sociological and popular thought that culminated in scholarship in the late 1960s with the publication of several important books on the subject. Declining church attendance, fewer people saying religion is important in their lives, and a sense of religion’s retreat from public life are given as the principle signs of this phenomenon.
More recently, though, this basic idea has been strongly challenged on numerous fronts. The first broad grouping of challenges attacks the conclusion, arguing that the evidence shows that secularization, in fact, does not necessarily follow from development. They point to the flowering of new religious and spiritual movements, the historical issues with saying we are moving from more religious to less religious, the experience of countries not in Western Europe, etc. This avenue has been pretty successful and some big advocates of the secularization thesis have changed their views. However, defenders of the secularization thesis have adjusted and made their counter-arguments, so I wouldn’t call this exactly settled; obviously something is happening.
This is where the other grouping of challenges comes in, the conceptual arguments that question the the premise of the idea, that there is this discrete thing called “religion” that society can have more or less of. Modernity, in this view, is not just “what happens to societies when they grow up” but is something that arose specifically out of a Western European context, defines concepts like ‘religion’ according to that context, and as you alluded to in your OP, pressures society to adopt that definition which includes the adoption of the similarly culturally-specific concept of ‘secular’. So you can say modernity = secularization is true, since secularization is a part of modernity. But modernity, at least as a package deal, is not inherently the destiny of every society.
It’s kind of ironic that when you look at the people joining modernist Islamist groups, they are not really traditionalists, they are people who went through some western-based education system and claim a sense of religious agency.
Well, yeah. You can’t convince people about something without telling them about it. And if you are going to convince people of the superiority of Western secular society, it should follow that you believe Western secular society is superior. But when there are people you can’t convince, then what you also have to do is convince the other people in ‘Western secular society’ about what to do about it. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with handling different cases on a case-by-case basis (the Amish, Sikhs in the military, Catholic pharmacists, Pastafarians and driver’s licenses) but I do think that the inevitable debates about each issue should be addressed openly and honestly, and it should include at least some input from the people who are the subjects of the debate.
This won’t be a surprise but I disagree with most of what is in this article, both the author’s premises and the reasoning that he employs. I actually don’t mind that he dislikes the National Prayer Breakfast or even religion in general, but the way he conceives of things like scripture, religion, and prayer is arbitrary and not very useful for describing how people actually are. He might also do well to consider the negative parts of ‘secular Enlightenment-era civilization’ and why some people might not be too keen about it as a result.
Such as?
Well, put another way: All international pressures tend towards cultural homogenization, within certain limits; that requires no conscious action, it is simply one effect of an information age and a globalized economy where every culture is exposed to every other in countless ways, and influenced by said exposure, and besides it makes it easier to do business. And since different cultures have different religions, secularization is the only thing that provides common ground there. Dar al-Islam is the odd man out in the world in that state-sponsored religion is almost universal there, there is no tradition of church-state separation, and secular law is often identical with or based on religious law; that cannot last forever, IMO.
I’d focus less on new things and more on the new ways that were opened to justify old stuff and transform it. Such as: ‘Scientific’ racism, usingfeminism to justify colonialism, and some of the nastier forms of nationalism. Depending on how much you view communism as the product of secular Enlightenment-era civilization, you can include communism’s faults as well.
This isn’t to say that it’s all bad, or even that anything else is better. Social change, even that which we define as ultimately beneficial, is often really ugly and messy in practice. We might applaud the Iranian Shah’s attempt to promote secularism in Iran, but in practice having his police rip headscarves off of old ladies backfired. Not everyone’s real-world experience with what was presented to them as secular Enlightenment-era civilization has been good.
Technologies also lead to cultural fracturing, as niches can find each other and form transnational networks with distinct identities. I know more people in Tajikistan than I do on my street, because of our common interests and technology that allows us to meet online. Just look at the SDMB 
Of the different countries that are explicitly secular or are often seen as secular (like many Western European countries), whose system fits most closely to the secularism that you see as being a common ground?
I missed the edit window.
I would say the negative parts in any civilization has come from how people have felt justified in forcing other people to do stuff or just straight up killing them off/discriminating against them. Secular Enlightenment-era civilization has provided its own justifications that people can appeal to, and in practice this has led to lots of people feeling aggrieved.
Check out this video of Nassar making fun of the Muslim Brotherhood. Things change a lot.
Yes – but we’re not talking about niche cultures, we’re talking about the shared cultures of whole countries and regions. You have to get up from the computer and go outside sometimes, and when you do, you cannot escape from your local culture. But it can change, is always changing, and partly in response to the pressures I have described, despite a lot of very conscious backlash against same.
Well, I don’t think of it that way. The U.S. is less secular than Europe in some ways (more religiosity, evolution an actual political issue) and more so than others (no state churches). Secularism itself as such is the common ground between the two.
I think Christian efforts to suppress abortion rights are a good thing. As for homosexuality, opinion polling about homosexuality in Latin America is not really that different from North America. (Latin America is a more religious place than north America in general, which implies that Latin American christians are actually more liberal on homosexuality than north American Christians.)
As a Mexican-American I take some pride in my cultural distinctiveness from most of my neighbors, even when I am quite similar to my neighbors and am influenced by them. Identity is more important in this case, what we choose to value. In my personal experience, the backlash against pressures to assimilate is not always just the death throes of an old way. Look at Egypt now versus the Egypt in that video I put up before. Egypt in 50 years will certainly be different from now. Trends are hard to predict. The kids who run away from Europe to join ISIS are very Western in many ways, but it doesn’t help much.
I disagree that the secular common ground is whatever is left over when religion is taken away. Secularism can only be a common ground if everyone agrees to its definition, and the incredible variety of definitions in practice of secularism (and religion, for that matter) shows that they don’t. The history of these terms that have them coming out of a specifically Western Christian context and used just as often to colonize (intellectually or physically) as to liberate is further evidence that they are not objective and that they are not used neutrally.