The debate over at Muslim Under Progress goes on.... Randy seems to be carrying the banner for "secularists" while Thebit & Haroon march for the intellectual Muslim perspective. And yet, I feel kind of uninvolved at this point because semantic problems seem to be 3/4 of the discussion, and I was turned off a bit by Thebit asserting that: 'By saying that Indian and Chinese civilisations also produced "secularists" and "atheists" is to stifle what they had to say about themselves, under our own ideas of what these words mean. We might give them such labels, but this is different from saying that they were such and such.'

I understand where Thebit is coming from, many people assume that there is a universal currency to some definitions ("We all believe in the same God," is what a jailer told Bertrand Russell during World War I when he put "agnostic" under "religion"). But the other extreme, behaving as if terms are only intelligible in the context of a particular culture seems ridiculous, after all, if that was true, cross-cultural anthropology or history would be ludicrous disciplines (and some do assert this!). My personal opinion, unquantified and without excessive explication is that human universals imply a common lexicon between cultures, though labels and propositional systems might differ, mutual understanding and analogy is possible. As I noted initially on the above thread, the Indian Carvaka tradition, with its materialistic atheism, is an echo of many sentiments expressed by skeptics in the West (and philosophers like Pythagoras and Plontius acknowledged an influence from Indian thinkers, so cross-fertilization falsifies an extreme conception of unintelligibility). To the east in China the great Confucian Hsun Tzu had a habit of mocking spiritualists and mediums that might have made him the James Randi of his day. Granted, skepticism and atheism have found their fullest expression in the modern Western intellectual tradition (the word "atheist" was originally applied by Romans to Christians who denied the reality of all gods but their own), but one should not assume that this is sui generis.