Joan Scott

 On a review regarding Vexed:

"Sexularism"? Ha! Ha! Neologisms do not a philosophy create. For millennia, diverse societies have ever so painfully devised  cultivated ethical  systems (e.g.the 10 Commandments) to diminish mere animal intincts and habits to make common life more civilized.

Great innovators like Erasmus reasoned that human beings can collectively achieve effective behavioral systems such as secularism. Most thoughtful people would agree that rational sexual behaviour is far superior, for example, to the Roman Catholic puritanism that recently resulted too often in pedophiliac abuses.

Sharia laws even persecute women who have been raped--because "they" have brought dishonor to their families. (The woman can even save herself by marrying the rapist!) Secular societies have the right to make such irrational "legislation" unlawful, and punishable by secular laws. EuroAmerica has been more and more openly threatened by invasions of Islamic congregants who would destroy our secular laws by their theological commitments.

Sharia law is not only brutal and sexist in sexual relations, but punishes thieves by chopping off their right hand! Or stoning an adultress to death. Christian theology is no less uncivilized with its punishments of eternal hellfire. BBC radio has been reporting lately of Iraqi "justice"  murdering gays. Such pathologically insane behavior would rule by fatwa. By secular reasoning I believe that dope addiction, irrational sexual freedom, pornography and other commercialized evils are destructive of families and societies.

But only reasonable improvements are acceptable to the thoughtfully secular. So many of these aberrations result from commercial greed that it is plain stupidity to punish the victims by Sharia laws. A thousand years ago Christianity burned heretics at the stake. Reason allowed us to extricate ourselves from such intellectual slavery. In the last century Naziism tried to eliminate the Jews, just as Christians tried in the Middle Ages to eliminate Muslims. We all have been irrational sinners. We must thank God for giving us the power to think our ways out of such dead ends.