One could argue, based on the Christian experience, that Islam is in the throes of reformation. Just as in the Christian reformation, the established faith hierarchy was challenged aggressively by radical extremists, with more than a century of bloody warfare before the force of reason came to bear, the current radical explosion may have to reach the point where reason begins to hold sway in Muslim society.

Not entirely true. Christians Brought reason and science forward a thousand years ago, partly because they wanted to recognize and explain their creator, and define it. Albeit, at times against a "christian" oligarchy, in the Catholic Church, that was driven as much by tradition as superstition as religion. This quote is not a statement of indictment, but in context, a statement of faith. If you do not use faith, you take it as a negative connotation.

Wow, that is not the brave goody two shoes Martin Luther I was taught about in an Alabama elementary school back in the 50s and I cannot recall anything else taught after that.
I grew up as a Catholic minority kid. Three or four nuns would come the church's adjacent Sunday school house and teach the Catechism for a couple of weeks every summer.
The one who said Martin Luther burns in hell may have been right.
I kinda doubted it at the time.
An elementary school teacher had already pointed out there is no Purgatory in the Bible for medieval people to buy your way out of.
So did Martin Luther.

LOL but of course irrationalism leads to the sad points you make at the end.

The couple I was talking about hated the christians coming in a preaching. I pointed out that rieki was exactly like christian laying on of hands. The contradiction escaped them.

I can imagine the ending. A lady friend of mine in Raleigh Hills, Or (Portland) hosted a get together for a Reiki group in the early 90's. They'd invited a 'Master' from Africa and were presenting him all around. I came in early, not knowing about the group. Before I could even be introduced to the group, the 'Master' came running across the room nearly bowing, exclaiming that my 'aura' gleamed like a "multi-hued spot light" and that my energy flow was the most powerful and balanced he'd ever encountered.

Not being quite as brusque as I am now, I kind of played along as if, of course I knew this, even telling the 'Master' that it often interfered with my ability to perceive others auras. I couldn't manage to escape him for the rest of the evening, and I really wanted to--his BO vastly overcame his 'aura'. But at the end of the evening, to the applause of his disciples, he proclaimed me a natural "Master", much to the amusement of a couple of my friends that had also stopped by.

I spent the next 6 mos passing on invites from the rest of the Portland Reiki scene and turning down several opportunities to 'adjust the energy flows' of several of the single ladies in the group and others that heard of this "miracle man". The really sad part was calls from one lady with terminal cancer and another in the final stages of HIV/AIDS.

I nearly had to fire my Office Manager for the hilarity she found in not side railing the phone calls. The humor quickly faded on my part.

K & I had some casual friends down here and right after we had published POJ we had dinner with them. The woman in this couple was a yoga instructor and they ran a restaurant together. I knew she was also a reiki masseuse, but we seemed to have truce not to talk about it. Well K started talking about reiki to her, we also had a friend of K's there. K said her purpose was to show her friend that this was all nonsense. I walked away from the conversation, but about 15 minutes of trying to ignore this BS and I had enough. It did not end well

Yep, that fits.

Or reiki

The West is certainly not free from the battle for reason over Biblical interpretations, or reading the entrails of chickens, or the thinking of the Fed, or the financial history charts of Wall St, or the emotional appeal to 'It's for the Children' or the dogs and cats, etc., etc.. .

We often talk about the 'Battle for the Minds of Men', but I'm convinced that we would be better off battling for the survival of 'Men with Minds. Few of us really grasp who the enemy really is that we face on a daily basis, or that we can't educate mankind in total out of the battle. We must retreat into a defensive stance that may well take generations to come to even a stalemate, but as long as we think that the rest of mankind can be led out of or even pulled out of the quagmire of living without their minds, attrition will destroy us. There is no realistic path towards winning this battle. There is only getting out of the way of the train wreck, whether it's Islam, Christianity, or care for your fellow man.

Yes, I agree with every part of the article: Galileos, Lockes, and Voltaires; NOT Luthers and Calvins.

When people want to dismiss Enlightenment values, they talk about "Western medicine" or "Western" notions of liberty, as if to say people on one side of the world push their regional preferences on others. But developing models to understand the world based on reason and observation is not a preference.

Thank you, Mr. Stephen Hicks.