The Holy Wars - are they continuing?

[Pah]

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My first impulse upon hearing the reason for this turnout was despair. I am on the side of the "culture wars" that believes that morality exists outside of religion, and that most religions, when literally followed, have little relevance in the modern world. I think many Europeans (and a little less than half of my fellow Americans) believe this, too, but we are minority in the world.

I believe, and dread, that we are on the cusp of the last of the religious wars that tore Europe apart from the 16th to the 18th centuries. Those wars were so horrible that a handful of thoughtful men and women finally came to the realization that church and state did not belong together. The period known as the Enlightenment was born, an aristocratic movement that gave rise to the United States of America, the banning of judicial torture in all the major European states, and religious toleration. Of course, religion is best tolerated when a state takes no sides, and when all the religions involved reciprocate.

As slow as we in the United States are to be truly enlightened, we are light-years more advanced in our thinking than the Muslim world, most of Africa and at least half of India. Until 9/11, I regarded this backwardness as something that would gradually yield to time and globalization. Now I don’t have this view. I see us — and the other advanced nations — in a religious war with Islam, a religion that claims one billion followers who live all over the world.

If we fight them as Christians (as the "moral issues" people would have it), it will be indeed be the last of the religious wars. If we fight them as modern, secular people with a sure grip on the values of our culture, it will be a war against darkness.

I hope that in this struggle, all enlightened people will see what an evil thing it is to believe in some ancient text to the point that it justifies murder, mayhem and the enslavement of women. This is what we are fighting, and perhaps at the end of this destructive war, we will have a new age of enlightenment for the world. If we survive this war, it will be time to put "belief systems" on the shelf of history where they belong. They don’t belong out there, armed and dangerous.


Dr. Laina Farhat-Holzman is a historian, writer and lecturer. You may contact her at [email protected] or www.globalthink.net.