But Reich concludes his article with a stunning and surprising paragraph, which I'll cite here verbatim:

The great conflict of the 21st century will not be between the West and terrorism. Terrorism is a tactic, not a belief. The true battle will be between modern civilization and anti-modernists; between those who believe in the primacy of the individual and those who believe that human beings owe their allegiance and identity to a higher authority; between those who give priority to life in this world and those who believe that human life is mere preparation for an existence beyond life; between those who believe in science, reason, and logic and those who believe that truth is revealed through Scripture and religious dogma. Terrorism will disrupt and destroy lives. But terrorism itself is not the greatest danger we face.

Via Mark D. Roberts

I got this link via Donald Sensing. I have been personally questioning the validity of the secular viewpoint as a primary foundation of public policy. I do not think this was the intention of the founding fathers. The Protestant Reformation was still vivid in their minds. I continue to think that our “enhancements” to the secular viewpoint would not be appreciated by the founding fathers and are not the basis for good public policy. I do believe in the separation of Church and State but not when it encourages bad public policies. In this case Robert Reich attempts to argue the case for an increased secularization of the government and public policies. In reality when reasonably open minded people read his words and begin to understand the superficiality of his arguements, they see why the secular viewpoint is not popular with the common folks and makes for poor public policy. Public policy derived from this increasingly secular viewpoint just do not seem to work.

I think one of the most obvious failures of this increasingly secularized public policy is genocide. In this information age it is hard not to know when your brother is suffering and yet we do nothing. It is hard to find the moral high ground in arguing for science, reason, and logic when a couple hundred thousand people are massacred in Rwanda. Unfortunately this scenario keeps repeating itself. Science, reason, and logic are important but not sufficient to deal with the various human tragedies. Ignoring these tragedies is our greatest danger because they provide the breeding ground for the next civil conflict and the next group of desperate people.