And recently, Phillip Tang, a group of Christians invaded Iraq and the death toll now totals about 1.2 m. Plus 500,000 the Christian nations' sanctions killed in the ten years or so before the invasion. Your god presumably knows how many the Christians are killing and have killed in Afghanistan.

Yet still the Christians haven't won and won't. Whose side is your god really on in Afghanistan and Iraq?

I can only conclude from all this Christian inspired barbarism (now and over the last 1700 years or so)that Christianity and democracy are incompatible. Hence the need for a secular society. A good start would be to stop funding Christian schools and any other religious schools. If religions want to inculcate propaganda into the minds of defenceless kids, let them pay for it without support from the representative state.

I forgot to add to my list of Muslim majority countries earlier that Turkey is a democracy.

Passy is confused between Christianity and the unholy trinity of Bush, Blair and Howard who started the unprovoked war in Iraq. I partially agree with Mahathir, the ex-prime minister of Malaysia, in calling for the three to be tried. However, they are not responsible for ‘war crimes’ as alleged by Mahathir.

The carnage in Iraq (thousands killed and not 1.2 million) is inspired by Islam in that Muslims kill fellow Muslims for religious reasons. Shias are killing Sunnis. Sunnis are killing Shias. Sunnis and Shias are killing Christians and there is an exodus of Christians out of Iraq.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/.stm

Islam was held in check by Saddam, a secular Muslim. With him out of the way you get to see what true Islam does to Muslims —chaos and carnage in the country. This is what is happening to Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sudan, Afghanistan, Somalia.

Secular Muslim, Hasan Mahmud from Bangladesh explains what the agenda of classical Islam really is. He helped prevent shariah law from taking root in Canada.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQ6WL8xtGtk

The author of this article is herself sending mixed messages. On one hand she says secularism is about neutrality in public institutions including education. On the other hand she finds difficulty in funding Christian schools. Yet if we are talking about true neutrality, then don’t Christian families (or anyone else) have a right to an education they deem appropriate?

The first schools in this country were church based. The government systems were then set up to compliment or perhaps strengthen what was already there, but not to oppose or undermine it. The goal being that all kids across the land would be able to read and write.

As a believer, I am grateful to live in a (supposedly) secular country where the government has no business in the persuasion of my core values and beliefs.

Yet government funding to private schools is not breaking the principles of secularism. Anyone can apply for such funding. If such funding is denied to Christians on the basis that they are Christian, then that is religious persecution.

Despite our author’s protests that her secularism is not a form of atheism (like the numerous protests I read in this forum saying that atheism is not a religion) I have reason to be suspicious of this author’s educational agenda.

Dan S de Merengue: "The author of this article is herself sending mixed messages. On one hand she says secularism is about neutrality in public institutions including education. On the other hand she finds difficulty in funding Christian schools. Yet if we are talking about true neutrality, then don't Christian families (or anyone else) have a right to an education they deem appropriate?"

No.

They have a right to education, absolutely. But the principle of religious neutrality in education doesn't mean that all religions should be able to conduct schooling as they see fit. It means education should be neutral. Without religion, and certainly without preferring one religion to another. Secular.

After that, freedom of religion means that Christians have a right to teach their children about Christianity and commune and go to Sunday school and proselytise and dance in the streets.

Of course, in practice, the secular state permits religious schools. But if Christians or Muslims or whoever want to send their children to religious schools, then they need to found these schools, and fund them, and adhere to a standard national curriculum. I see no reason why taxpayers in a secular state should help fund religious people who choose to give their children religious educations.

The secular state is not a free for all. Secular values are often misinterpreted as permissive. In fact they are fierce values, values that — inter alia — ensure the state is not corrupted by the church, that a variety of people can coexist. We should fiercely defend those values.

I just read this article again and found it interesting all over again. Although, with the GREATEST GREATEST respect, I think the author needs to reread George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language". This is not an academic publication, and all those "in relation to"s and "posit"s make the prose remote and academic without adding to the argument.

Vanilla,

I agree 100% with your post.

Stevenlm and Vanilla,

Perhaps one of you could try and define what you mean by secular. As Paulr has pointed out, defining the word secular is tricky, and people have been sliding between different definitions in this thread so far. But it seems that your version of a secular state is not much different to an atheist state. If one of you could explain how it differs, I would appreciate it.

My understanding is that the idea of secularism is more a tradition that has developed over the years, but is not anywhere defined in law. The closest we might come in the constitution is the guarantee of freedom of religion, in which the government is restricted from prescribing or proscribing any religious preference.

My other understanding is that the notion of secularism is a Christian invention, and the idea was not that the state won’t be corrupted by the church but that church won’t be corrupted by the state.

To continually ignore God, and in such manner demonstrate that he has no valid place in society or in the educational sphere, is the philosophy of the atheist. The government cannot mandate such an educational preference, and tax paying Christians won’t suffer it either. They have the freedom in our democracy to demand that some of their tax dollars go in a proportional manner towards educating their kids also.