Ongoing divide: religion & secularism

A good news story. (No doubt, it’ll be ignored.)

Back in 1994, Conor Cruise O’Brien gave the CBC Massey Lectures, during which he suggested that Pope John Paul II was reaching out to Muslims in search of allies against secularism and the Enlightenment. It was an interesting argument, if sometimes over-the-top. It also ignored the positive aspects of such an alliance as a bulwark against state power & policy.

[quote=“NYT: French Muslims Find Haven in Catholic Schools”]The bright cafeteria of St. Mauront Catholic School is conspicuously quiet: It is Ramadan, and 80 percent of the students are Muslim. When the lunch bell rings, girls and boys stream out past the crucifixes and the large wooden cross in the corridor, heading for

“There is respect for our religion here,” said Nadia Oualane, 14, a student of Algerian descent who wears her hair hidden under a black head scarf. “In the public school,” she added, gesturing at nearby buildings, “I would not be allowed to wear a veil.”

In France, which has only four Muslim schools, some of the country’s 8,847 Roman Catholic schools have become refuges for Muslims seeking what an overburdened, secularist public sector often lacks: spirituality, an environment in which good manners count alongside mathematics, and higher academic standards.
[…]
“Laïcité has become the state’s religion, and the republican school is its temple,” said Imam Soheib Bencheikh, a former grand mufti in Marseille and founder of its Higher Institute of Islamic Studies. Imam Bencheikh’s oldest daughter attends Catholic school.

“It’s ironic,” he said, “but today the Catholic Church is more tolerant of — and knowledgeable about — Islam than the French state.” [/quote]

I have a number of Turkish clients who also attended Catholic schools. There, too, such private institutions provide a higher standard of education, and an important window into a different culture.

I’m looking for other examples of significant, but largely overlooked areas of cooperation/accommodation against state power/policy. Got any?

Well, you do have people like Dinesh D’Souza suggesting co-operation with the decent conservative Muslims who are rightfully disgusted with our evil Hollywood decadence and its feminism, homosexuality and generally loose morals.

I think the Pope has chimed in on this one or two times as well.

Charles Martel, arguably the most important European in history, must be rolling in his grave.

But despite his reservations on Turkish membership, Jean Monnet may well be smiling. And he’s far more relevant to today’s Europe.

Not true, Martel is more relevant simply because without him there would be no Europe. If the Franks had lost the Battle of Tours, there would have been no significant state in Western Europe to prevent a complete Muslim conquest of half the continent. Everything that followed in the development of European culture and thought turned on that battle.

Why don’t you just be honest and name this debate, “Medieval Barbarism & Scientific Rationalism” and get this over with?

That’s you you really feel, so don’t be so mealy-mouthed and phonily MOR and just state how you really feel.

I think, in this case, you don’t genuinely understand what is feels like to grow up under a theocracy. I grew up in the Bible Belt. You didn’t. I hate phony Puritans more than you can ever understand what hatred is. I notice that the most “religious” fanatics on this board all grew up in such fanatically religious places such as Philadelphia and LA and Vancouver and Johanessburg and Sydney and London. Try growing up in a genuinely religious corner of the universe. You’d be whistling a different tune. The Christians always have been and always will be the opressors. Everywhere they go, they try to destroy anyone who disagrees with them, with violent force. You try growing up in the Bible Belt and telling me what it feels like. If there’s any sure way for converting a child to atheism, it’s immersing the child in the American Midwest or South.

Which “you” are you addressing? Me? I grew up in the Bible belt – hometown held some record for some time… greatest number of churches per capita – and am quite familiar with many of the less pleasant aspects of religion; the less pleasant, and the better.

Religious constituencies form a significant political block and often – for better or worse – pursue issues with greater fervor. Doesn’t have to be a hot-button issue like communism in Poland or abortion in the US; could be smuggling refugees across the border in the trunk of one’s car, offering sanctuary to those facing deportation, opposing corporations that exploit the ignorant (ie Nestle’s powered-milk scheme), supplementing state welfare programs by running soup kitchens, the Plowshare’s movement… I could go on. This story interests me because it deals with a) France’s secular religion, b) a seemingly unlikely alliance, c) a kind of cooperation between religious communities seen back home, where well-established communities (Christian, Sikh) have been making their places of worship available to less wealthy, less well-established communities, and thereby building bridges and relations that will go a long ways towards counter knee-jerk clash of civilizations claptrap.

Another (perhaps fanciful) example of a religious community inspiring moves against state power recently appeared in The Walrus, suggesting that Doukhobors in the BC interior inspired Aleksandr Yakovlev’s part in perestroika.

Sorry Q, I understand and appreciate where the indignation comes from, but the notion that “the Christians always have been and always will be the oppressors” displays as much ignorance as any holier-than-thou yahoo on a wrongheaded crusade is likely to muster.

[quote=“Quentin”]Why don’t you just be honest and name this debate, “Medieval Barbarism & Scientific Rationalism” and get this over with?

That’s you you really feel, so don’t be so mealy-mouthed and phonily MOR and just state how you really feel.

I think, in this case, you don’t genuinely understand what is feels like to grow up under a theocracy. I grew up in the Bible Belt. You didn’t. I hate phony Puritans more than you can ever understand what hatred is. I notice that the most “religious” fanatics on this board all grew up in such fanatically religious places such as Philadelphia and LA and Vancouver and Johanessburg and Sydney and London. Try growing up in a genuinely religious corner of the universe. You’d be whistling a different tune. The Christians always have been and always will be the opressors. Everywhere they go, they try to destroy anyone who disagrees with them, with violent force. You try growing up in the Bible Belt and telling me what it feels like. If there’s any sure way for converting a child to atheism, it’s immersing the child in the American Midwest or South.[/quote]

Firstly, it’s worth pointing out that the invasion of many Christian lands, including the Iberian Peninsula and France happened long before the responding Christian invasions of Muslim lands. Spain was invaded in 711. The Battle of Tours (invasion of France) was in 732. The First Crusade wasn’t until 1095.

Secondly, this has nothing to do with me being a religious fanatic. If you must know, I’m quite militantly atheistic and see the Dark Ages as just that. I don’t see Christianity’s history as anything particularly noble, which is why I’m a fan of the Age of Englightenment and later traditions that shrugged off the Church. However…Western civilisation has grown out of the merging of two intellectual traditions. The first is the principally Athenian tradition that began in the classical world and was later re-discovered and expanded. The second, as much as I don’t like to admit it, is the Judeo-Christian tradition. My comments about Martel are simply to point out that the whole of Western European thought that has followed hinged on him. You could put others such as Jan Sobieski or Flavius Aetius in the same category in that they preserved the core of Europe. Without these kind of figures, we wouldn’t be talking about the merging of the Athenian and Judeo-Christian as they would have been swept away.

While we are at it though, yes, I would like to talk about Medieval barbarism. It took the West a millenium to finally shrug off one mouth-breathing world view formed when people were scratching rocks and herding goats (Christianity). We don’t need to en masse adopt another mouth-breathing world view formed when people were shovelling sand and herding goats (Islam). In the past five centuries, since Europeans really got their acts together and started abandoning their own arse-backwardness, what exactly has Islam achieved of note? Where are its Newtons, Rutherfords or Darwins? 1.4 billion followers and you can count on two hands the number of Nobel Laureates. What good can allowing this idiocy to flourish in the heartland of the Englightenment possibly do, other than to serve as to a wakeup call to Europeans as to how decadent they have become and how they need to start breeding again?