It is certainly true that people who believe that radical solutions or the application of force can solve systemic problems are setting the stage for immeasurable suffering and loss of life. That’s what the 20th Century in Europe was all about, and, to some extent, how the WOT has been conducted as well.

In the religious context, a key term is “humility”: if you do not accept your ability to “change everything for the better” then you are less likely to implement radical solutions. But another part of the question, from the religious POV, is how much material improvement is enough, i.e., is material comfort the reason we are alive? Not to put too fine a point on it, the trend in our civilization has moved almost entirely to the “purpose of life” being the acquisition of wealth, power, and things; which, if you think about it for two minutes is an endless and ultimately fruitless treadmill, and therefore a waste of time.

If, for the sake of an example, we had a civilization that saw progress in the elevation of mind and spirit, and charity towards others, as the greatest good, which was humble, not arrogant, and not greedy, we would be having the kind of civilization that both Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn idealized. Of course there never has been such a society …..

We are following a typical curve for civilizations that succeed in solving the problems of material want. As material needs and human tragedies from want vaporize, the need for either religion or a selflessness that comes from that also dissipates. We become hyper-individualized, and forget that our individuality doesn’t really amount to much. For this reason, we lose our taste for sacrifice, because “it’s about us”, and we lose any reason to restrain our wants and appetites.

There is no question that the prevailing ideology in the US, Europe, and perhaps other countries as well, has become so self-centered and so “what’s in it for me” that such nations never would have been able to successfully fight, let alone win, either of the World Wars or our American Civil War.

In a way, that’s good, because it ensures we have no appetite for war. But it also means that we have lost the appetite to give up our lives for our way of life or our civilization, preferring, when fighting is necessary, to do it remotely by air (which doesn’t work), or even to conjure fantastic scenarios of distant, and therefore theoretically safe for us, nuclear detonations.

Neither the one nor the other will save us. It’s not a question of our willingness to kill others. There’s indeed a great willingness to do that, or see it done (read the blogosphere.) There is a lack of willingness to give it all up, all of it, for our common culture, and unless we recapture that — and it can’t be recaptured by force, and maybe not even by rhetoric — we are toast. Simple as that.

In order for the parallel between jihadists and the “religious right” to work, you would need multiple examples of militant Christianity, coupled with an overarching goal of bringing down some or all of the structures of modern society. Individual idiots who bomb abortion clinics do not have a strategy, and groups within the pro-life movement do not intend to destroy society in order to rebuild it.

I am a scientist, and I consider myself something of a fundamentalist, since I believe in the Bible (the hard part is determining what is meant to be taken literally, and what is allegorical) explicitly. My faith is not threatened by my belief in science, or vice versa.

Sergey, you were correct about not seperately discussing the continental enlightenment vs british/scottish. I was going to make the distinction (hence the qualifier after Rousseau’s name), but neglected to.

Scientism is an ideology of science which holds that science has primacy over other interpretations of life (e.g., religious, mythical, spiritual, or humanistic explanations).
More about it:
An exaggerated trust in the efficacy of the methods of natural science applied to all areas of investigation, as in philosophy, the social sciences, and the humanities.
I happened to be born in a country where scientism was not simply an ideology, but The Only Officialy Permited Ideology (under name of “dialectical materialism”); any deviation from this Party Line was a criminal offence punishable (sometimes) by death. So I have studied it in university, twice sat for an examination in it and know it fairly well.
It is also quite popular amongst western leftists of all stripes; most famous exponents of it were SF-writers such as Isaak Azimov and Artur Clark.
Google search on “mathematicism” gave following result from “Enciclopedia Britannica”:
“mathematicism the effort to employ the formal structure and rigorous method of mathematics as a model for the conduct of philosophy”. So, it is also an ideology.
Find what “chemicism” means I leave to you to improve your information retrival skills.

Woot, you can turn anything into a religion by adding three letters! At least, if you have no idea what either science actually is (or religion, for that matter).

Whatever you might label Darwinism, it doesn’t change the fact that the Theory of Evolution is, in fact, science.

Yet it is Richard (Belmont Club) which identifies the key issue:
“principally the idea that freedom divorced from some deeper purpose was possible.”

Only when one has a “meaning for life” is freedom meaningful.

For me, I see the current world as inter-related struggles of Modern (tolerant) Christianity against 3 fundamentalisms:
against Christian fundamentalists, against Secular fundamentalists, against Islamic fundamentalists.

With two more struggles:
Modern Islam vs. its fundamentalists, and Modern Communism vs. Chinese Communist fundamentalists.

The Dems who fear pro-life Christians more than head-slicing Islamic fascists (perhaps many of Neo’s friends?) seem to me to be fighting the Secular fundamentalist struggle.

Finally, one of the answers to excessive materialism should be: ending “intellectual property rights”, which act as a highly efficient “innovation tax”, as well as “information monopoly protectionism.”
— because much advertising is based on this protectionism and its promotion of meaningless, but pleasurable, sex & violence (& drugs & rock ‘n roll).