In the West, we are blinded by our secularist world view. In particular, we are unable to understand other societies that reject our own way of understanding. In particular, we are confronted with two major adversaries, the Islamic world, and Russia, which reject our secular materialist liberalism. We completely misunderstand them and their cultures, and they resolutely criticize and reject ours, especially when it is imposed upon them. We are unable to understand why they don’t want our values. We don’t realize that it’s all about religion.
Some State Department official was recently quoted as saying that no one could be so powerfully motivated by religion as the Islamic Jihadis claim to be. It had to be money, power or the like. Sadly, he is gravely mistaken. Even worse, there are many in American officialdom, all of course pristinely politically correct, that share the same point of view: that religion is basically irrelevant. What they are doing is projecting their own culturally specific world view on people of other cultures, who regard us as completely corrupt and decadent.
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