I don't think so. Religion often appears to be a force that divide people, that lead to violence. However if one looks more clsoely then religion is (mis)used to seperate, divide people. The issue is not about religion,but about power, an din case that there is secularism then their is still spece for religion to be misused and if not then I am certain other divisive structures will come up.......

Promoting secularism would likely further divide the world as many religious groups would not react well to such efforts any more than secular people react well to having religious forced upon them.

In this regard, there are three fundamental issues that make the answer problematic:

First, who and why - that is, with what interests - would promote such action.

Second, it is possible that at the level of high political intensity secularism can be interpreted as a "religious" form of action (I think, for example, of faith in science and its supposed salvific role in the West).

Third, ignoring the first two questions, the statement "unity in diversity" is a kind of slogan without a rigorous theoretical dimension because it seeks to subsume the particular identities whether religious or otherwise under the universal "secularism" built as a priori.

I think I agree with many of the points raised above: why would secularism be any less sectarian than religions are and, anyway, who is going to make this drive?

If you think that around 75% of the world's population maintain strongly faith based understandings of the world trying to understand this might be more useful than combatting it, an odd and non democratic way of dealing with diversity I would have thought?

It´s a methapysical question. I think the possibility whole the way trascendental pulcrum

Religion is really a diversion, a sort of excuse to lash out. The West is atheist because it is rich. People don’t need to ask God for things so He gets relegated to Sunday mornings and then forgotten. If every country were rich, religion would mostly decline to remnants. Situations which are both rich and religious (Northern Ireland, Saudi Arabia) probably only crop up if the internal political system allows one religion to permanently subjugate another. Religion is an easy excuse, exploited, as Eberhard Weber says above, for power purposes.

But presumably your global “unity in diversity” means, in practical terms, the absence of war. Being rich and atheist won’t necessarily ensure that—anymore than being poor and religious causes war. The way to ensure universal peace is if every country is a democracy. Democracies never war against each other.

They don’t have to be good democracies. They can be as dreadful as, say, the erratic, corrupt democracies that flower and fade in poor, religious Latin America. All that is needed is sufficient democracy to curb extreme divide-and-rule and render the country irrelevant on the international stage.

This is doable. There are some problem countries but the historically unique peacefulness of the world since 1945 indicates we are moving in the right direction. It will happen someday.

‘Problem countries’?????

‘Problem countries’?????

I was thinking of troublemaker autocracies like North Korea, Syria, Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia. With the possible exception of Iran, democracy is almost unimaginable in them.

Thought that was what you might mean

so what about Trump‘s USA? Pretty much the global leader in terms of troublemaking? And even Brexit UK doing huge self harm to itself and the rest of Europe?

North korea‘s seeming belligerence makes sense actually when you looo at what the US and it’s allies did to Korea not so long ago

Well, Brexit is not war. The USA is a troublemaker but it won’t go to war with another democracy. (It has acted against democracies, perhaps most notably in Iran. If it had not overthrown the government in 1953, Iran would probably be a wealthy, secular democracy today. What a different world that would be.)

By objective democratic standards the US is lowest among the developed countries—indeed, in many aspects it resembles a third world country. Its aggressiveness is in proportion to that democratic deficit. Still, democracy it is.

The US is the only presidential country to have endured as a democracy. There are dozens of presidential countries (where the chief executive is popularly elected and chooses his cabinet) and all but the USA are either straight out autocracies or cycle in and out of democracy according to how fraudulent the incumbent is.

No, it doesn’t make sense for North Korea to be belligerent for this will bring it nothing but grief. It makes sense for Kim Jong Un to be belligerent.

I meant you could understand north korea’s attirude to US given it’s history in Korea

would iran be developed without the Shah? Would Cuba likewise without Fidel? These counter factuals are out there but never proven really

What was it that the US did to Korea? Whatever it did, it did it to the south more than the north and the south is now one of the world's most peaceful and prosperous countries. The North Koreans should be begging the US to do it in their half too.

The cause of their belligerence toward the US cannot be due to anything the US did historically in Korea.

Are you serious?

Remember the recent B1-B sorties over the North?

While the bombers are no longer part of the US nuclear force, they can be loaded with large numbers of conventional weapons – a capability that will not have been lost on North Koreans old enough to remember the Korean war.

North Korea started the conflict when it sent almost a quarter of a million of its soldiers across the 38th parallel and into the South at dawn on 25 June 1950.

But, as Bruce Cumings notes in his book The Korean War: A History: “What hardly any Americans know or remember, however, is that we carpet-bombed the North for three years with next to no concern for civilian casualties.”

Blaine Harden, author of The Great Leader and the Fighter Pilot, said North Korean targets were “mostly easy pickings” for US B-29s bombers that faced little or no opposition from the ground.

In an op-ed for the Washington Post, Harden cited Dean Rusk, a supporter of the war who went on to become secretary of state in the 1960s, as saying that the US had bombed “everything that moved in North Korea, every brick standing on top of another”.

Curtis LeMay, head of the US air force strategic air command during the conflict, would later boast that the US bombing campaign killed about 20% of the population. “We went over there and fought the war and eventually burned down every town in North Korea,” he said.

Cumings said that the public intent was to erode enemy morale and end the war sooner, “but the interior intent was to destroy Korean society down to the individual constituent”.

According to US air force estimates, the bombings caused more damage to North Korea’s urban centres than that seen in Germany or Japan during the second world war, with the US dumping 635,000 tons of bombs on Korea compared with 503,000 tons during the entire Pacific War.

This could make me a teensy weensy bit apprehensive about the US in the Age of Trump.

Yes all right. But not the point. Germany and Vietnam were bombed but are not afraid of the US doing it again. For 50 or 60 years NK wasn’t afraid either.

The real problem is the political structure. If NK were a democracy the US would not be taking any notice of the place. The political structure gives too much power to one individual. The only thing the people of NK would conclude from those bombings (if they were allowed) is that they should surrender immediately and suffer the fate of South Korea.

The bombings in 1953 also hold no lesson for KJU. His lessons are from Saddam, Gaddafi, Mubarak, Assad and probably a bunch of deposed South American leaders.

I don't think so, It will rather bring confusion, in that which culture will be accepted as the global culture. For instance some cultures have been referred to has backward and unacceptable and the accepted cultures to me are very uncivilized( personal sentiment). I for once love to stay in my rural Ghana than urban Ghana. Maintain our various cultures will be better.

In my opinion, it is not necessary to make the world something that it already has. The entity always has those two principles, unity and diversity

This is practically impossible.