.... back in August, a row has been raging among practitioners of English law over how far they should go in accommodating the desire of Muslim clients to handle and bequeath their property in accordance with the strictures of Islam.
Secularists were horrified when the Law Society (a prestigious professional body for solicitors) issued a guidance note to its members designed to help them formulate an Islamic will.
The note recalled, for example, that in many circumstances a male relative can expect to receive twice as much as a female, and that non-Muslims cannot inherit at all.
The objectors insisted that they were not trying to overturn the cherished English axiom of testamentary freedom, the right to leave your property to anybody you please; but they felt it was wrong for lawyers to be put in the position of offering "Islamic" advice.
[TOP RATED COMMENT] The question is simple: do we wish to live in a society of superstition and primitive ideas or do we want to live in an evolving society that increasingly respects individual rights and responsibilities in a humane manner?
You can either have enlightened secularism or you can have regressive superstitious primitivism; you can never have both for they are fundamentally opposed. Unfortunately we see a rise of superstitious primitivism all around the world and European countries including the UK need to be clear about the heart of the problem and formulate adequate approaches to resolving the conflicts that will increasingly occur as superstitious/religious dogmas are imposed upon others by religionists who are intellectually and emotionally unhappy with the idea of human-centric ethics and principles.
[SECOND] The irony is delicious; the left has been up in arms for decades over Christian sidelining of secularism (often real enough in US, mostly imagined in Europe), only to find out that their pet minority - Muslims - are the real threat.
[THIRD] .... The only real hope for the decline of fundamentalism is the steady discrediting of religion in general.
Although Cameron is a Christian (at least, he says he is), Milliband and Clegg are self-declared atheists. At some point, there will be a majority of atheists in the Commons and then we may hope for the disestablishment of the Church of England and the abandonment of religious teaching in schools.
Only when the West has comprehensively abandoned official support for superstition can we seek to dissuade those places that are currently fundamentalist to develop into modern secular societies. [The Economist] Read more
