Societies don't have to be secular to be modern

[PDH]

Doubleplusgood!

[Admiral Yi]

@Valmy: How do you have a secular society if you make laws based on religion (non-rhetorical)?

By making the laws subject to the will of the people and not a self-appointed mullahcracy.

[Pat]

I wonder about the perceived automatic disconnect between reason and religion when we have such things as the scholastics (for instance) re-introducing and refining reason in the West (and given Averroes, attempting the same in Muslim Spain) who were both philisophically aimed toward Aristotelian Rationality and their own faith.

I agree. I'm as secular as one can be, but as a student of history it irks me that people bash the medieval Catholic Church like it was the root of all evil and ignore all its contributions to scholarly thought.

It is true that there are some contributions to scholarly thought from within the catholic tradition, just as there are contributions to scholarly thought from within the muslim tradition. It's also true that the catholic church made as their enemy contributions to scholarly thought from without the catholic tradition, and would burn the books of Spinoza and others. Look at the development of the muslim world as a good example of what happens when scholarly thought only comes from within the religious tradition.

[Razgovory]

In a sense you are saying to be secular you have to ban religious thinking and politics...which is not secular but totalitarian atheism.

Well it is familiar to him.

[Valmy]

@Valmy: How do you have a secular society if you make laws based on religion (non-rhetorical)?

By making the laws subject to the will of the people and not a self-appointed mullahcracy.

Exactly.

[Martinus]

Well, even well-meaning, religion is a fallacy. It relies on false information. It supports lies about reality. Even if these lies are used for a good purpose, they are still lies, which may have - and often does have - negative long term consequences.

Are you familiar with informatics and programming? There is a concept called GIGO - garbage in, garbage out. If you feed false premises to a reasoning process ("There is a judge in heaven." "We will live after death." "This life is not important") this will lead to all kinds of fallacious conclusions ("Why bother saving human lives? It's important we save souls instead." "There is no point trying to improve out lot here - justice will be served in the afterlife." "The earth is just a short stop - no point to save it from ecological oblivion then.") 

Well I am in Voltaire's camp that a true religion cannot have claims that cannot be arrived by rational thought.

What does it even mean in that context? I am talking about truth and facts, not about rational thought, in any case. There is nothing rational in stating that we will go to heaven after we die, or that Jesus resurrected on the third day, or that God created the Earth 6000 years ago. These are statements about reality, and they are false.

Alot of your claims in the second paragraph are pretty ridiculous even by religious people.  Your fallacy is to take the most ridiculous ideas and claim that they are held by all religious people.  Also the fact that people, millions if not billions, of people cling to such beliefs supports my point that there is something about religion that satisfies very deep human needs and it will always have an important place in society.

I was just using these as an example of how the religious thinking can go awry. However you failed to address at all my general point about the "garbage in garbage out" principle.

[The Brain]

@Valmy: How do you have a secular society if you make laws based on religion (non-rhetorical)?

By making the laws subject to the will of the people and not a self-appointed mullahcracy.

So every democratic society with separation of state and church is secular?

There seems to be different versions of "secular" floating around. A society where I cannot eat pork because a law based on the words of Allah forbids it may not be very secular to some observers.

[Martinus]

@Valmy: How do you have a secular society if you make laws based on religion (non-rhetorical)?

By making the laws subject to the will of the people and not a self-appointed mullahcracy.

That's a definition of democracy. Are you saying that any democracy is by definition secular? This is a rather unique view, I must say.

[Martinus]

@Valmy: How do you have a secular society if you make laws based on religion (non-rhetorical)?

By making the laws subject to the will of the people and not a self-appointed mullahcracy.

Exactly.

So a country with an overwhelmingly muslim populace, where the democratically elected representatives of the people pass laws that penalize apostasy, adultery and homosexuality with death, and forbid drinking wine and eating pork, would be "secular" to you? 

Seriously, you are the best example of the GIGO principle. You are a smart and decent guy, who has right ideas on most of things, but because your reasoning process is contaminated with religious falsehoods, you end up saying things like that.

[Eddie Teach]

@Valmy: How do you have a secular society if you make laws based on religion (non-rhetorical)?

I think there's an important distinction to be made between laws based on doctrine and those based on morality. The great majority of people, both religious and non-religious, will support some laws based on their own moral code. These tend to have much broader similarities among a wider variety of people than those simply following one particular faith.

Frex, only Muslims will have a problem with blaspheming the Prophet Mohammed. But a law against prostitution will get support from Muslims, Christians, Jews, Feminazis and others. The people are basing that law on their (often religiously-inspired) morality, but having such laws certainly doesn't make the state non-secular.

[Neil]

So a country with an overwhelmingly muslim populace, where the democratically elected representatives of the people pass laws that penalize apostasy, adultery and homosexuality with death, and forbid drinking wine and eating pork, would be "secular" to you? 

I would say that it would depend on how the laws were arrived at.  As we know, it is possible for secular societies to have religiously-derived laws.

Seriously, you are the best example of the GIGO principle. You are a smart and decent guy, who has right ideas on most of things, but because your reasoning process is contaminated with religious falsehoods, you end up saying things like that.

You and that principle.  You're even worse than Malthus and Kohlberg.

[Admiral Yi]

So every democratic society with separation of state and church is secular?

There seems to be different versions of "secular" floating around. A society where I cannot eat pork because a law based on the words of Allah forbids it may not be very secular to some observers.

You're right.  Fukayama is using secular in the sense of absence of religious belief.

[Viking]

Frex, only Muslims will have a problem with blaspheming the Prophet Mohammed. But a law against prostitution will get support from Muslims, Christians, Jews, Feminazis and others. The people are basing that law on their (often religiously-inspired) morality, but having such laws certainly doesn't make the state non-secular.

The thing I find really strange about this is that the ban on the depiction was to prevent idolatry of mohammed. Now it seems to be idolatrous to consider mockery of mohammed to be blasphemy.

[grumbler]

Half of the Polish catholic priests are antisemitic plebeans. The other half are former commie agents.

Unlike in any other communist country, the Catholic church in Poland (as a whole - I am not talking about some individual priests who got involved in anti-communist politics) had a rather comfy relationship with the communist party. After all, it was allowed to practice freely; churches were not turned into warehouses like in Czechoslovakia or the Soviet Union; etc.

And after the fall of communism it took the full advantage of the "to the victor go the spoils" rule and claimed a number of privileges (e.g. it is tax-exempt, it holds vast property, only catholic priests can give religious marriages that are automatically recognised by the state - everybody else needs to go before a civil official to have their marriage formally conducted; only catholic religion is taught - alternatively to "ethics" - in public schools - no other religion is being taught as a school subject) that now make even actual devout catholics resent its influence.

It also had at least three situations (since 1989) that could possibly blossom into a Boston-style pedophiliac abuse scandals, but each case was hushed up, since the catholic church in Poland is much MUCH more influential than it is in the US.

Ah.  Earlier, I thought you were talking about the US being the country where p[eople were surrounded by the symbols of religion.  Now I understand that you meant Poland.

Ditto, I suppose, for your contention that the US Catholic and Mormon churches are in lockstep on social issues.  You meant Poland and just, again, wrote "US" by mistake.  I was wondering how you could be so positive a(nd yet erroneous) on issues in a country about which you know so little, but that was because you confused me with your typos.

[Barrister]

Well, even well-meaning, religion is a fallacy. It relies on false information. It supports lies about reality. Even if these lies are used for a good purpose, they are still lies, which may have - and often does have - negative long term consequences.

Are you familiar with informatics and programming? There is a concept called GIGO - garbage in, garbage out. If you feed false premises to a reasoning process ("There is a judge in heaven." "We will live after death." "This life is not important") this will lead to all kinds of fallacious conclusions ("Why bother saving human lives? It's important we save souls instead." "There is no point trying to improve out lot here - justice will be served in the afterlife." "The earth is just a short stop - no point to save it from ecological oblivion then.") 

Well I am in Voltaire's camp that a true religion cannot have claims that cannot be arrived by rational thought.

What does it even mean in that context? I am talking about truth and facts, not about rational thought, in any case. There is nothing rational in stating that we will go to heaven after we die, or that Jesus resurrected on the third day, or that God created the Earth 6000 years ago. These are statements about reality, and they are false.

While there's quite a bit of evidence showing that the earth is not 6000 years old, I would challenge you to show any evidence  that proves Jesus was not resurrected, or that we do not go to heaven.

Most atheists would only argue there's no proof either way on those points.  But you went the extra difference to say that things like heaven and the resurrections aren't just unknown, but false.  Which must means you think you have some evidence on those points...