Word: secularists
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...affable academic Cass Seltzer, one in his present, the other in his past. Presently, Seltzer is contemplating an offer to assume a post at Harvard University, having achieved unexpected fame with his book, “The Varieties of Religious Illusion.” The combination of this secularist tract—and its appendix refuting 36 arguments for God’s existence—with Cass’s clear-eyed empathy for religious belief has turned him into an overnight celebrity, dubbed by Time Magazine as “the atheist with a soul...
...situation is further complicated by questions surrounding the motivations of the AKP. Erdogan has yet to answer critics who say that the government's two-year investigation into the other suspected plotters is partially aimed at settling old political scores against secularist journalists and government opponents who have been rounded up in recent months. "This government has done nothing in the name of democratization except to rein in the military. That's why I see this process not as one of democratization but of substituting military tutelage with a form of civilian tutelage," says Cuneyt Ulsever, a liberal columnist...
...have published a revisionist book on the history of Partition and, in particular, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the founding father of Muslim Pakistan who Indians of all political stripes have often blamed for the violent sundering of the Subcontinent. Singh's Jinnah: India, Partition, Independence portrays Jinnah as a secularist and a great statesman, an image that would make members of India's ruling, secularist Congress party squirm, as well as Islamists in Pakistan. But Singh's book seemed to pose the greatest threat to the BJP, a party struggling to find its political relevance since its thumping defeat...
Silence is hardly the word to characterize the matter of France and professions of religious piety. Last year the country's highest administrative court denied the naturalization request of an otherwise irreproachable Moroccan woman on the grounds that her wearing a burqa was incompatible with French secularist statutes. On Tuesday, French Scientologists raised complaints of religious intolerance when state prosecutors wrapped up their arguments against the church on charges of organized swindling by requesting that the organization be disbanded and barred in France. (Read an argument against the veil by Azadeh Moaveni...
...observers point out, however, that most of these types of decisions actually came out in the BJP's favor. If the past is any indicator, Modi and the BJP may yet use this latest judicial blow to their advantage by painting Modi as a victim of a Congress-led secularist inquisition, designed to amass larger shares of the Hindu vote. (See pictures of the tempestuous ruling dynasty of India...