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POLITIQUE The war against Modernity - David Kelley "The hijackers' target was a Temple of Modernity" According to Yossef Bodansky's Bin Laden, 'What [Islamism] primarily contests is the Western Democratic and Secular ideology. It wants to appropriate Western Technology without embracing its Ethos'. In sum, Islamist hatred of the West is not directed at Christianity as a rival religion but at Modernism as an alternative to religion as such. Modernity was born in the West in a radical transformation
of its past. The world of the Middle Ages, built around the world-view
of Christian Scholasticism, was a society of religious philosophy,
feudal law, and an agricultural economy. Out of this soil, the Renaissance
and Enlightenment produced a substantially new society of Science,
Individualism, and Industrial Capitalism. When we examine the wider
context of Islamic terrorism, it is clear that a hatred of Modernity
is its driving force. The cultural foundation of this new society, if we state it as a set of explicit theses, was the view that Reason, not Revelation, is the instrument of Knowledge and arbiter of Truth; that Science, not religion, gives us theTruth about Nature; that the pursuit of Happiness in this life, not suffering in preparation for the next, is the cardinal value; that Reason can and should be used to increase human wellbeing through economic and Technological Progress; that the individual person is an end in himself with the capacity to direct his own life, not a slave or a child to be ruled by others; that individuals have equal rights to freedom of thought, speech, and action; that religious belief should be a private affair, tolerance a social virtue, and church and state kept separate; and that we should replace command economies with markets, warfare with trade, and rule by king or commissar with Democracy. It is therefore misleading to call our civilisation Christian, even though that remains the largest religion in terms of adherents. The West may still be a culture of Christians, by and large, but it is not a Christian culture anymore. It is a secular culture. And that is what the Islamists hate most about us. |
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