I mean, a secular way of life is clearly better though, right? Demonstrably so.

Most obviously because science, which is the secular attempt to make sense of the world, allows us to make useful predictions about the world. Science, not religion, brought us every single technological and medical advance we have today. In fact, often despite the interference of religion.

As a few people have observed over the years, if you took every holy book and destroyed them, and erased the memory of everybody who’d read them, they’d never return. They’d be gone forever. But if you took every book on physics and chemistry and mathematics and destroyed them, it might take a few millennia, but all of those would return, exactly as they are now, because they’re real.

Best of all, secular moral systems can be updated. So now slavery and marital rape and chemically castrating homosexuals is illegal and we didn’t need to wait forever for God to come down from a cloud to tell us.

And even on their first pass, secular systems had the insight not to advocate stoning women who’d been raped to death. Secular morality is, of course, far from perfect. But the sane secular mind at least has to take responsibility for its atrocities. It can’t offload them to an interpretation of a book written by God.

But all that said, I don’t think the West is somehow perfect at all. Not least because Christianity is at least as guilty of atrocities as any other religion. Probably more guilty. But also because, as you say, the West has to take a large amount of responsibility for this mess.

But I’m not the West, just as the innocent Jews massacred by Hamas are not Israel and the innocent Palestinians about to be slaughtered by Israel are not Hamas.