Word: seculare
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...wars arise in part from very secular fears about identity and survival. Two factors, sometimes contradictory, are at work: 1) deep, real, material interests lie just beneath the surface of most of today's ostensibly religious conflicts; 2) religion, not as a doctrinal crusade but as an identifying birthright, a heritage, is persistently present to complicate every issue, to enforce an "us-them" hostility. Religion, always a receptacle for ultimate aspirations, can enlist the best and worst in its congregations. In conflict, religion can be used-or perverted-to call up supernatural justifications for killing. In 1915 the Bishop...
...expression of a resurgent Islam. Says Duke University Political Scientist Ralph Braibanti: "This may be the moment in history when money, diplomacy and strategy join together in providing a new context for the renaissance of Islamic identity and perhaps of Islam itself." Islam makes no distinction between the secular and the religious. The Moslem doctrine of jihad (holy war) has an immediate, literal significance. As the Vatican's guidelines on Islam observe, "Islam is a religion, yet it is also inextricably bound up with the notion of community, culture and civilization...
...struggles involving Moslems are more complicated than that intransigent doctrine. Arab leaders like Egypt's Anwar Sadat and Syria's Hafez Assad are not encouraging the rhetoric of holy war. Arabs are not theologically blinded to the larger secular issues of international power. In Lebanon, for example, a tangled social history has preceded what might seem at first glance an essentially religious struggle. The roots lay in the creation by the French in 1920 of a greater Lebanon from the remnants of the defeated Ottoman Empire. This Lebanon combined a predominantly Maronite Christian area, which...
Other conflicts involve longstanding secular grievances. They are perhaps primarily not religious so much as they are exertions for recognition and even survival. Yet the element of religion gives all these wars an odd phosphorescence. What is important is usually not a deep spiritual faith but rather an intense loyalty to the religious community. The phenomenon has something to do with a clinging to identity, especially in such enclaves as Northern Ireland and Lebanon, whose national identities are fractured and cannot in themselves command patriotic followings. One of Egypt's leading intellectuals, Political Scientist Magdi Wahba, sees signs everywhere...
...Locke carried Tyrrell's idea much farther in his Two Treatises of Government, written partly as a refutation of Filmer and published just after the revolution in 1688. In the Second Treatise, Locke based all political theory upon a rationally ordered universe. The thought was not impiously secular but in fact was the re-verse?a conception of human order deriving entirely from the infinite and infinitely discoverable mind of God. Yet, in effect, Locke burdened man's intelligence with an absolute freedom that implies absolute responsibility...