The Enlightenment philosophers had tried to counter the intolerance and bigotry that they associated with “religion” by promoting the equality of all human beings, together with democracy, human rights, and intellectual and political liberty, modern secular versions of ideals which had been promoted in a religious idiom in the past.
– Karen Armstrong in “The Myth of Religious Violence” 

I am reminded of a talk by William Cavanaugh at a Chicago gathering of theologians called Ekklesia,  about 10 years ago (I didnt go there,  but heard a recording of a speech entitled “The Empire of the Empty Shrine: American Imperialism and the Church” links and commentary on it provided here, by my friend Eric .

As to the placing of origins of violence upon religion in general and fundamentalism in particular,

What we call “fundamentalism” has always existed in a symbiotic relationship with a secularisation that is experienced as cruel, violent and invasive. All too often an aggressive secularism has pushed religion into a violent riposte. Every fundamentalist movement that I have studied in Judaism, Christianity and Islam is rooted in a profound fear of annihilation, convinced that the liberal or secular establishment is determined to destroy their way of life. This has been tragically apparent in the Middle East.

Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who founded the secular republic of Turkey in 1918, is often admired in the west as an enlightened Muslim leader, but for many in the Middle East he epitomised the cruelty of secular nationalism. He hated Islam, describing it as a “putrefied corpse”, and suppressed it in Turkey by outlawing the Sufi orders and seizing their properties, closing down the madrasas and appropriating their income. He also abolished the beloved institution of the caliphate, which had long been a dead-letter politically but which symbolised a link with the Prophet. For groups such as al-Qaida and Isis, reversing this decision has become a paramount goal.

So are these acts of barbarism, the fruits of “the secular mind”?  What it seems to reveal is that the roots of violence are in a cultural narrative that specifies a certain approach to order,  often resulting,  in  the hands of the powerful prone to extreme measures to both justify and maintain such power,  perceive an “evil” that must be stamped out before it threatens them.  Seems to happen with regularity to “the religious”  and “the non-relgiious” (assuming that can be clearly dileneated,  as the opening of this post suggests it CANNOT).

Secularising rulers such as Ataturk often wanted their countries to look modern, that is, European. In Iran in 1928, Reza Shah Pahlavi issued the laws of uniformity of dress: his soldiers tore off women’s veils with bayonets and ripped them to pieces in the street. In 1935, the police were ordered to open fire on a crowd who had staged a peaceful demonstration against the dress laws in one of the holiest shrines of Iran, killing hundreds of unarmed civilians. Policies like this made veiling, which has no Qur’anic endorsement, an emblem of Islamic authenticity in many parts of the Muslim world.

So the veils,  one of the most derided symbols of female subjugation identified as typical of the fundamentals of Islam,  did not even originate with them.  It became a “matter of faith” only under secular persecution.

No,  the “atheists” and “secularists” are really neither. They “roll their own”guiding narrative and then proclaim their Kingdom of Values,  and enforce it with that force for destruction and evil that they blame on “superstition of religion”.

I am looking forward to seeing the upcoming Armstrong book  Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence