Quote Originally Posted by thir View Post
One thing that has educated me about other countries is the fact that for so many people religion is for real. I grew up with the notion that religion was not something anyone took seriously, plus the whole topic was more than a little embaressing.
That was the attitude in my circle of society. One was in favour of the Church (meaning that big place with the tower in the middle of town, not the organisation, which was a bit of a joke) because it was part of tradition, like morris-dancing and easter-egg hunts; but people who made a fuss about their religion were, as you say, embarrassing. Even Tony Blair's supporters were mostly apologetic about his open religiousity: it sounded, well, un-British.
It took a long time for me to take in that religion is a reality for a big part of the world, and that in all the really dogmatic countries it determines people's fate.
We had to face it as part of practical politics, because the Northern Irish religious divide was a major issue for most of my life. As Americans have recently discovered, you have to pay some attention to people who are blowing up your towns for their beliefs
But it is also noteworthy that the run-away materialism eventually lead to new kinds of religions and spiritualism. Well fed and free people who simply found something lacking.
Most of the new leaders of Muslim fundamentalism (and terrorism) are not poor and uneducated, as Thorne would argue: they're from the upper-middle class of the oil-rich nations (and of Europe's Muslim immigrants). They argue that they've been offered Western-style materialism, and found it worthless.

Myself, I suspect this has more to do with politics than religion. They remind me most of all of the UK's last lot of home-grown terrorists, the Angry Brigade and other anarchists of the 1970s. They were mostly militant atheists, but their language against Western capitalism and materialism was almost identical to that of today's Islamists; they even shared the Palestinians as a cause celebre.