Or was it the case that the “secularism” of Saddam’s Iraq was just another story told us by the CIA and State Department?”

The secularism of Saddam’s Iraq was true, as far as it went–It was just that the regime remnants which comprised most of the “resistance” elements found it useful to suborn and coopt the religious revival that was taking place at around the same time.

For a period, in Iraq, it was positively dangerous to be a religiously observant Sunni Muslim, because they were seen by Saddam and the Ba’ath Party as being unreliable and untrustworthy. The Ba’ath Party was a classic 20th-Century totalitarian package, much like the Communists or the Nazis, who were what they modeled themselves after. It was initially pan-Arabic, and modernist. After that didn’t solve their inherent cultural problems, the populace said “Screw this… We’re going back to that old-time religion…”.

And, that’s how we got where we are.

An awful lot of the issues we have within the Muslim world stem from the essentially cargo-cultish way they tried to modernize; they copied the forms and the fashions of the West, expecting power and change, but were unwilling to adopt the actual features of the Western cultures they were aping in order to make fundamental changes. When the surface Westernization didn’t produce immediate results, they felt betrayed and humiliated, and, again, here we are.

Fixing the Arab and general Islamic world isn’t something that’s going to be imposed from without, and probably won’t be fixed from within until they have no other choice. My guess is that they’re eventually going to drive their neighbors into committing acts of near-genocide, and then, maybe, they’ll start asking themselves “Why…?”, doing the necessary self-reflection, and then fix what needs fixing. How many people die before that happens…? Ya got me, but I don’t see it ending well for anyone. Self-delusion is a common human problem, and it’s probably at its worst in the Islamic world.

Or was it the case that the “secularism” of Saddam’s Iraq was just another story told us by the CIA and State Department?

The ancients contributed; the Jews and the Christians rewrote, overlaid, and virtually transformed the landscape, for good or ill. Making believe that didn’t take place and hasn’t had strong residual effect? Insane.

The basis of the argument the pagans and their sympathizers make fails on the analysis of what remains of their cultural contributions and thought, which if it isn’t in accordance with Judaeo-Christian values and mores… Well, it’s gone, isn’t it? Human sacrifice as a routine part of daily religious life? Where’s that, in modern Western practice? The Christians somehow managed to make even slavery go away, which is a fairly unique accomplishment in the history of the human race. What remains of that rather lengthy and well-embedded tradition? Very little, by comparison to what it once was.

The whole thing is much like air; you don’t notice it while you’re breathing it easily, and times are good. Take it away, and you’re suddenly going to appreciate what all you once had, and all too many of our “intellectual elites” are on that road of discovery, which ain’t going to end somewhere pretty.

Respectfully, the Western world is built on a pagan substrate. The pre-Socratic philosophers did more to build the West than Moses.

This is deep topic, but the vultureofcritique blog has some permanent pages dedicated to criticism of Judeo-Christian allegations. I tried to link one such page in the “website” field of this comment, and the comment gave an error… possibly I am being filtered.

People who decry the influence of Judaeo-Christian values on our civilization know not of what they speak–What went before? LOL… Those old stories of people masturbating as they watched the killings in the Roman gladiatorial “games” were, shockingly, actually a bit toned down, in order to make them more believable. There’s stuff in the literature that most don’t see, and thus never get to make a comparison with modern times, values, and mores.

I generally identify as a sort of low-impact non-believer but I quite agree.

It is impossible to understand Western Civilization without the combined Athens/Rome/Jerusalem axis, so to speak, combining the three traditions as Christianity in all its forms kept doing and recombining. Our philosophy, ethics, political modes [good and bad ones, depending on everyone's mileage] cannot be independently derived from observation of the material world. Not that I claim to be an expert on Kant or such, but there always seems to be some assumption built into even the most secular-leaning Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment philosophy that , on being found, smacks one in the face with the author’s basically Christian assumptions.

Of course, even the smart ones who disliked and disbelieved in Christianity, and denied it on every level, are its children. What is Marxism [in its original, theoretical form] but an attempt to apply carefully selected Christian dreams and assumptions about Man to the creation of a real-world utopia without need of salvation? With, inevitably, ghastly consequences, but still.

I see plenty of deleterious consequences of Christianity as we glide through our civilization’s possibly terminal phase, and wonder whether they were inevitable or avoidable features of its teachings.

I even wonder what the art, literature and music of a never-Christian West would have been like, not least because that likely means there would not have been any Islam to take us over either. It would have been a quite alien world, presuming anything like a comparable successor to classical civilization would have taken root in Europe.

But what a catastrophic cultural loss it would have been to lose all that Christianity did inspire.

What this means? In essence, religion–and, a specific religion–informs everything about our shared culture and civilization. Remove it, and you cut yourself off from the wellsprings of it.

Even an atheist should be familiar with everything about Judaeo-Christianity, because that’s the foundation of it all. To question or deny that fact is to follow the same path as many others who have tried to supplant or replace it all, whose track records ain’t notoriously good. Stalin, Hitler, et al.