Hussein Ibish

There is huge scope for the secular and the religious to work together! We are currently missing far too many of those chances. Believers and nonbelievers tend to look down on and mistrust each other. The emphasis on belief, creed, and ideas — the ways we understand and describe our experience of the world — tends to overwhelm an emphasis on our actual shared experience, and on ways we could care about and for each other, and pursue shared goals.

Look at how various atheists have been promoting Islamophobia. Some secularists are so overwhelmed by fear and distaste for Islamic beliefs and for existing Islamic states that merge religious with political power, that they cannot conceive how to make common cause with the uncountable millions of Muslims who are simply trying to lead good lives in peace.

Maybe it’s obvious that secular ex-Muslims might be the ones who could teach secular non-Muslims how to do this. But how many prominent people have come out in public as secular ex-Muslims? Here’s one, and a very interesting and eloquent one at that, and my thanks to Danny Postel for sending me the link.

Check our Hussein Ibish’s post yesterday: “Why an agnostic and secularist fights for American Muslim rights and against Islamophobia.”