“secularism” –
“Secularisation, the argument goes, leaves a vacuum which could be filled by something particularly intolerant: extreme nationalism, perhaps, or radical Islam.”
On the one hand, I think the article’s a little bit daft, hysterical, and intolerant of reasonable religious behaviour which doesn’t actually bother anyone. On the other hand, it makes some good points.
I can only speak about the UK and maybe Western Europe.
I don’t think that Christianity is the enemy of humanism, at all, even if there is a substantial reactionary, regressive element. The humanist element is prominently right there, ready to be deployed.
Frankly, the main real problem in the UK is certain people bending over backwards to appease Muslim restrictions on human rights which are alien to humanism; and smilingly taking the communities at face value when they flatly deny that anything’s wrong. For example, the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn’s disgraceful refusal to admit that there’s a problem with gangs of Pakistani and other Muslim men up and down the country raping, abusing and trafficking vulnerable teenage white girls in their thousands. Apparently, political correctness is more important than addressing mass rape. This is clearly ridiculous, and also, sinister. That’s the point where any remaining respect I had for that idiot evaporated.
We also have the undercover Jihadis like Linda Sarsour, whose job is to stamp on any criticism of Islam, by crying “racism”. Again, the regressive parts of Islamic culture are taken at face value when they claim to be “nice”, when in actual fact they’re lying through their teeth about their real mission: to allow intolerant Islam to flourish within the West, and there’s also a mission statement in existence from the Muslim Brotherhood which talks about exploiting free speech laws in the West in order to attack it from the inside. So that’s all pretty nasty.
We also have the noisy Left dissolving into complete cultural relativism, for some bizarre reasons of their own which speak more to the dark irrational side of human nature than to actually wanting to change things for the better. Accordingly, they just make everything worse, and are a problem for the rest of us.
However, I’d see this situation as more of a potential threat than an actual real take-over of the culture. But a potential threat is still something we need to worry about.
I think the solution has to be to present a robust case for humanism, and to do that, it is necessary to put it on a rigorous philosophical footing. At the moment, everyone seems pretty vague about what it is.
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