Personally I have respect for secular muslims, even if I do not share the belief in a power higher than human compassion, I can even look up to some of their beliefs and their moral tradition. Helping the poor is an even stronger tradition within Islam than it ever was in Christianity. In Christianity you can MAYBE interpret that Jesus is nice to poor but Jesus is not vocal when it comes to actually helping them out. The Quaran is very direct about helping the less fortunate. Also the muslim rules against drugs and alcohol is missing from the new testament that simply floods with wine. An alcoholic muslim is a rare thing indeed.
What both seminars say to me is that humans have natural instincs that can be triggered if you feed them specific ideas and then push them long enough. Religions and some secular ideologies offers an almost complete world-view and the more you read it, the more you can become convinced it's the real deal.
Regardless of ideology, there's a strong distinction between living in a free country and a country controlled exclusively by an ideology. When everyone in your country are indoctrinated to only see one point of view, society will start to take thoose ideas for granted. When I grew up, two ideologies was spoonfed to me: Christianity and Socialism. I was told that certain things were evil, and I was taught many things that made sense to me then because I knew nothing else. When I started to learn more about the world, I started to see the holes in both, and now when I question them my own family and some of my past friends tell me the same hollow arguments I was taught when I was young. Everybody knows them and some of them are wrong.
But here's the deal: I live in a free country. I am allowed to express my ideas in public and if I do not want to join the march on 1st of may
like this one I wont have to. Neither do I have to go to church and im even allowed to question the bible.
A christian or muslim who lives in Sweden blends the ideas of their religion with the values of the country. Things that are far removed from the values of the country (burning witches or treating non-musslims like cattle) are completely ignored, instead values like compassion to the less fortunate is taught by both religions. Meantime, even them who consider themselves "faithful" have normal lives with normal jobs, living in peace with neighbours from all religions and without religion. Even if they drill themselves with ideas, they pick just the good ones, not the bad ones.
Now think about Iran or Saudi-Arabia, countries controlled by religion. The rules is that everyone have to follow the religion, they are expected by everyone to pray five times per day and the Quaran should be read from cover to cover several times per year. You really have two choices; 1 is to shut up and do what you are told, no freedom to question it. 2 is to believe and get your brain drilled with
every line of the holy book, no matter how outdated it is. I have been in Turkey, and it's not bad for a tourist. You are free to believe what ever you like and run little risk if you express your feelings, even if there are mosques everywhere.
There are one more thing. There's a great difference between Shia, Sunni and Sufist muslims. Shia Islam is sometimes refered to as the "religion of sorrow". Most of, if not all of the suicide bombers are shia muslims. Selfbeating and martyrdom is important. If you live up within a society where such values is expected by everyone, there's no surprise that someone can be convinced that they can kill themselves for "good" values.