Those who take religion at face value are finding the world a very confusing place.
You have all these Catholic priests (and occasionally, nuns) getting accused of sexual harassment of minors of both sexes; then you get the Pope resigning. Then you get conservatives who seem hardly religious in their personal lives suddenly coming out as religious fundamentalists. You have the Italian prime minister who took the place of the corrupt Berlusconi threatening to resign (or being forced to resign), and Berlusconi reluctantly offering to run for election again, supposedly in a fit of religious altruism. Google "bunga-bunga parties."
On the other side, you get all these corrupt Islamic regimes being confronted by what appears to be the common people of those countries: popular revolt, it seems to us. Then you get confusing signals from the CIA about which regimes WE (the USA) wants to support, or ought to support. And then, once some of the Arab Springers get into positions of power, they turn around and pass laws and regulations that almost make us want to wish the crooks back in power.
Who are the good guys, for heaven's sake? What do we want to happen out there in Not-America-land? [Added later: what do we want for these places, leaving out our self-interest for a moment?]
Well, let's take the Islamic business first: Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Egypt, Morocco, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, in no special order. If you read the detailed historical chains of events, you lose all ability to figure out anything, for the mass of detail. Too much information is a modern problem that we must all deal with, and most people deal with it by Googling a question, to which any joker with an Internet Service Provider can give an answer that can be
Fortunately for you, this particular problem is not difficult to understand, if you make a few easy mental adjustments. OK, here's my warm-up to the Big Point.
Many of these Islamic countries used to be governed by figureheads on behalf of the religious leaders of the countries concerned. After World War II, however, the British (and to some extent, the French and the Americans, and the Russians) put in place truly secular (non-religious) governments that were favorably disposed towards the good guys who put them in place. Initially, the good guys were Britain, the USA, and France, but later there were a few
Over the decades, however, these leaders of Third World Governments, and more significantly, their family members, received lots of benefits from the US, the UK, France, Germany, Russia, and so on. In fact, many of their families actually had homes in New York, Washington DC, London, Paris, Moscow, and so on. It was inevitable that, in order to maintain a Western lifestyle with third-world resources, a certain amount of corruption was necessary. One by one, as the voters in these countries became aware of the contradictions between the rhetoric of their leaders and their lifestyles, all these regimes began to tumble, including Anwar Sadat in Egypt, Shah Pallavi in Iran, and so on. In the West we are more cynical about the altruism of our leaders, and we are not shocked by social inequity. In the Third World, many of the first wave of leaders came to power based on the struggle against Imperialism, and the brotherhood of the oppressed, and so on. (I mean, we did too, but some oppressed are more brothers than others, to clumsily paraphrase George Orwell.)
One of the major complaints against all these leaders is that they neglected the national religion. With clear logic, most of these people considered that they only needed to pay lip-service to Islam, because they could easily see that their Christian friends in the West were only nominal Christians. If you are truly religious, my reader, this is where you should stop reading, because one of my major axioms is that religion is not only a lie and a sham, but a strong negative force, which as an enlightened citizen of the modern world you should abandon as a bad deal.
It was easy, once the conservative (non-government) elements in the Islamic countries were able to generate enough support (through the usual religious blackmail to which any religious fundamentalist organization resorts) to foment revolutions that overthrew these so-called dictators.
These dictators started out being the good guys. They stood for non-religious leadership, which was generally benign to begin with. Women were educated, financial aid was obtained from the West, schools were improved, as were roads, electricity supplies, airports, small manufacturing, etc, etc. But this left out most of the traditionally educated religious males who knew little outside their Koran, and did not want deign to do menial work in some small industry, which was work only fit for, say, a woman. In fact, they observed, the way the women were comporting themselves was positively shameful.
The history of governments in the Third World is the story of leaders who simply could not bring themselves to surrender power to their duly elected successors. (If we're not careful, this could happen here in the USA as well.) So, this gentleman in Syrian, whose troops are murdering civilians, was originally the good guy who kept the religious folks from their stranglehold on Syrian society.
The former communist state of Russia, and (the former communist state of) China have supported Prime Minister al-Assad for years, simply because he was essentially non-religious, and therefore generally speaking a better option than any religious leader, conservative or liberal. Oddly enough, the CIA, which is, tragically, almost the only source of philosophical continuity in the US government (and I'll probably regret having said that) adopts the same view. Make no mistake: if Pat Robertson were to endorse a particular person for President of the USA (and it will more than likely be a male, since women are considered a sinful sex by Christian religious conservatives---though they might pretend to have moved beyond that phase in their evolution , oh, pardon me, I said the E-word. I mean, I wrote it) this country will descend into minor chaos. The only reason we might avoid the horrible fate of Iran is that even a Presidential candidate endorsed by the Religious Right will probably not be a True Believer, but will only pretend to be one, for the votes. But wait: there is Santorum, isn't there?
It appears that much of the Arab Spring has been manipulated by the Islamic Fundamentalists, which are essentially the mighty arm of Iranian Islamists. But the USA cannot, and must not interfere with the Arab so-called Spring. I mean, we've gone that road before, claiming that so many popular uprisings in Central and South America were communist-inspired, and wrong-headedly helping to put them down. What can you do? There is something wrong about stamping out an uprising, as we have found in the Syrian situation.
All we can do is to let it happen, if possible only interfering with obvious and explicit influence from external sources, including all sources, such as the USA and Israel and Iran and Saudi Arabia. Chances are we probably will play favorites, and screw ourselves up yet again.
We can only defend supporting rational, secular nations out there. Every time we go with a religious regime, e.g. Saudi Arabia, what do we get? Al Qaeda.
So, secular leaders in the Third World do often turn bad. But so do religious leaders anywhere. Giving up power is difficult, and absolute power is absolutely difficult to give up. We have to admire the courage of Il Papa Benedict. You can try to portray the weaknesses of particular dictators in terms of their views of what their role in government was: Chief Executive versus Absolute Ruler. But the poverty in the Third World makes giving up power even harder, because dictators of the properly Western stripe are so lionized by Western society that their being in favor in the West are the very seeds of their ultimate degeneration.
Having said all that, here is the Big Point.
In the West, many religious leaders, if not all religious leaders, are strangely rational, and not at all superstitious. They will have explained away all the mythical aspects of their religions, until they have reduced all the miraculous acts of their particular gods as essentially invisible. In other words, all the miracles recorded in their religious texts will have been explained away as mere perceptions brought about by the enormous faith of the witnesses, and the great holiness of the miracle-worker, so that it can be said that it was pure faith that made the apparent miracle take place, and it was not a miracle at all. This is called demythologization of religion. God does exist, dear believer (they would say), but only in your heart. God does act, dear believer (they would say) but only through the faithful. You, dear believer (they might say, in a careless moment) make God exist!! Hah, they would have said a mouthful, if they were to confess that. I strongly recommend a piece of humorous fiction by Terry Pratchett called Small Gods, which will leave you moved, or in stitches, depending on your disposition.
But much of this candid philosophizing is reserved for the cognoscenti. For the masses, who supply the shekels that make the death squads possible, there is a more traditional message: death to unbelievers, or at least, salvation. Some missionaries spread their faith by working for charitable organizations in the field, in painful conditions, but these were few and far between. All the young people volunteering for missionary work are more disposed to preaching to the heathen than working in their hospitals for little or no money, in impoverished circumstances. God's armies of today are well-fed, well funded, and well supplied with pamphlets.
In the East, one never knows. One assumes that, at the very top, religious leaders are far less superstitious than their faithful followers. In any case, the faithful are told what they need to believe, to put forward the agenda of the leadership. God wants the women to take a subservient role is the most obnoxious precept in conservative religions, but there are others, such as God wanting the faithful to remain largely unconvinced about the laws of nature and ignorant of the evidence for scientific theories.
To summarize, we're never going to be happy with any leadership in the Third World that isn't secular, while the stubbornly religious elements in the Third World are never going to be satisfied with a secular leader. Things will always be bad for somebody.
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