Word: secularity
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...survey also showed that some Berkeley students had their doubts about the validity of established churches. In listing their affiliations, they created some brand-new sects, most of which sound suspiciously secular: The Holy Order of Our Lady of Perpetual Motion; Southern Pedestrian; New Emeryville Church of Voodoo and Imported Beer; Polyester Pagota of the Palpitating Pulpit; Born Again Atheist. Says the Rev. Gustav Schultz, a Lutheran minister who helped take the survey: "There are a lot of things in religion that ought to be laughed at. This is the students' way of expressing that. We think...
...some Muslim leaders know), Communism is far more inimical to Islam than capitalism. But in the past 30 years, the U.S. has been a chief participant in a cultural encounter that is in some ways even more traumatic to the world of Islam than colonialism: the full onslaught of secular, materialist modernization, 20th century civilization sweeping into the timeless Muslim villages. The vast apparatus of Western progress, a machine overwhelmingly vigorous, profoundly tempting and yet decadent by all the disciplines of the Prophet, has threatened Muslim identity...
...Berkeley Historian Peter Brown, "the emergence of [the West] as the temporary master of the world remains an anomaly in the natural unfolding of the course of history." Muslims have recoiled from modernization in exact proportion to the force of its temptation for them. They have been attracted by secular materialism, have tried it in the guise of both capitalism and Marxism, but they have often been disappointed by it, have associated it with the colonial masters who introduced them to it. They have found it dangerously, almost radioactively, corrupt...
...their staggering and sudden wealth to buy the machines of progress without the devils that often inhabit them. Conservative Saudi leaders, for example, a pursue a selective strategy regarding the technological riches of the West: they seek to modernize without the garish libertine free-for-all that Western secular individualism has promoted...
While leaders in other Muslim states (Saudi Arabia and Libya, for example) have moderated Western influences, the Shah embraced the West with (as it turned out) a heedless enthusiasm. He set up a secular state, destroying the classic and crucial unity in Islam between church and government. Under the Pahlavis, women were liberated from the traditional chador, permitted to vote and divorce their husbands. The Shah made the mistake of ignoring the mullahs (priests). The U.S., in turn, embraced him, and even had the CIA engineer a coup to restore him to power in 1953. Corruption, dislocations of life...