Word: secularization
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...must refuse to bow to our culture’s false idols. Science will not benefit from canonizing Darwin or making evolution an article of secular faith. We must reject intellectual excommunication as a valid form of dealing with criticism: the most important question for any society to ask is the one that is forbidden...
...Ayatullah Khomeini seized power in Iran in 1979 and raised the specter of a radical, anti-American Islamic nation with messianic impulses for the region. Over the next decade two Presidents, anxious for a counterforce to Iran's fundamentalist ambitions, gave diplomatic, financial and military assistance to the secular, "modernist" regime of Iraq's Saddam Hussein. By 1990, with Saddam in Kuwait and threatening the Saudis, the U.S. realized the error of its ways and dispatched half a million troops to help free Kuwait from the grip of its neighbor Iraq. Surely, we assumed, the response among Muslims would...
...Babylonian captivity, and Saladin, who retook Jerusalem from the Christian Crusaders. He wanted to fulfill the modern-day promise of Egypt's great nationalist Gamal Abdul Nasser, restoring Arab unity and the greater Arab nation to its rightful place in the world. In recent years the standard-bearer of secular Baathism even turned to prayer to exploit Islamic ardor, building gigantic mosques and lacing his speeches with the language of jihad...
...Kurdish groups, the PUK and the Kurdish Democratic Party, have co-existed uneasily, even though both despise Saddam. After Sept. 11, several Taliban-like groups also emerged. They mostly blended into Ansar, which, with help from Baghdad, has used brutal tactics to try to impose Islamic fundamentalism on the secular Kurds. There are no noncombatants here. One morning, while in a position being bombarded by mortars for six hours, one of the local fighters known as peshmerga told me, "These bombs don't recognize your identity." Territory shifts frequently. The day before the blast, the checkpoints were manned...
...place where freedom was said to ring. The place's existence stirred hope in the most hopeless circumstances. And millions emigrated and found better lives there. Some religions allow the earthbound to imagine a heaven that might one day welcome them into its splendor; so, too, did America?a secular promised land?allow the world's dispossessed to believe its liberty, and its prosperity, could one day be theirs as well. They forgave or overlooked U.S. foreign-policy sins such as a coddled dictator in the Philippines, illegal invasions in Cambodia or deadly subterfuge in Laos. The stirring ideals...