The end of religion?

[Watch this first..hilarious!]
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I was sent this.

Not really my cup of tea (Charles Taylor's online 'Social Imaginary' is so much better than this plodder's crab-like thoughts)

Claim: secularization means the devaluing of religion and a religious mentality (perhaps even a contempt for it). Liberals in the States or Pakistan think of religious folks as backward, simple, naive, and/or fanatical. They don't even understand the modern world or science.

Revisionist claim: Well, no, actually, religion hasn't gone away. Look at America and the growth of conservatism everywhere (Iran, Pakistan, Algeria)

Here's what Habermas calls the resurgence of religion:
a) missionary expansion (tablighis and the Protestants are everywhere)
b) a fundamentalist radicalisation
c) "the political instrumentalisation of the potential for violence innate in many of the world religions"

This was such utter crap that I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. Since when are those things religion? Are we to say that the Taleban or the God-forsaken Saudi expansion, or the evangelical movement is a resurgence of religion? God forbid!!

a) these missionaries are laughed out of town when they go to the rural areas. Most of them are modernists anyway with their half-baked notions of science and modernity.

b) As many others have argued, the fundamentalists are actually just a reaction against modernity and in that sense are also a part of it. I mean, their critiques of the West -to the extent that they even have them- are just re-hashed versions of the counter-Enlightenment.

c) The "mullah regime" and violent extremists are denounced by ordinary muslims so does it make any sense to say they -and only they-define what is meant by religion?

More crap by Habermas: "In fact, Muslim immigrants cannot be integrated into western society in defiance of their religion but only with it"

What bollocks! Most of the muslim immigrants I know (my parent's generation) never even thought in those terms, nor did the majority of the people I grew up with or know indirectly. And the same holds here, in the land of the pure: identity is a mix of all sorts of factors: class, education, ethnicity, language, local religious affiliations, tribal or feudal cultural practices, etc. It's ridiculous to assume that immigrants or 'muslims' should, or can only, be thought of exclusively in terms of their 'religion'.

Does Habermas even know what religion is?

Kumayl said:

"I asked my master Ali (RA): Is there only one soul? He replied: O Kumayl, there are four souls: the vegetal, nutritive soul; the sensitive, animal soul; the rational, holy soul; and the universal, divine soul."