The tone of this thread has been on the whole just right but atrocities such as the one on Monday are bound to open up the debate in an attempt to examine what might have caused this and what might be done to prevent it happening again.
The part of your post that I have highlighted is, IMHO, one of the prime motivators for young radicalised Muslim men and women to act in the way that the bomber did on Monday.
You are correct that the enlightenment in the 17th century did, through scientific reason and philosophical thought and debate, compel people, over time, to question certain religious certainties that had prevailed for many centuries as the dominant idea of how things came about and how society should be structured. The most significant outcome of this is what we might now term Western Global Capitalism (WGC).
The reformation and enlightenment rejected a lot of religious authority, however it did not reject it all and gave rise to a number of things we now take for granted all of which are based in a reformed view of Christianity. An example is the protestant work ethic - the idea that a good life is spent working hard and providing for your family etc. Of course through this the worker benefits to some extent (never enough) but the real beneficiaries are those who own the factories or the mills or the call centres and it is the interests of those few that are ultimately being met.
What WGC need is resources that can be capitalised (raw materials, labour etc.) and these need to be obtained at the lowest possible cost to make the most profit. With the raw material this is relatively easy but with labour not so. This is where WGC is so very clever though because it basically promises you what you want (happiness, contentment, fulfillment etc....) but only gives you what you need (shelter, food, security etc...) and it is the promise that keeps everyone engaged with work that does nothing to provide what people really want.
The other thing about WGC is that it uses up resources or they become to expensive. However this is no barrier as it will just move the market to where if can find the cheapest or most plentiful supply. Hence for the last 3-400 years we have been subjugating our own citizens as well as populations all over the globe in the name of 'progress' and 'democracy' (nice ideas that again never fully materialise). What we are seeing on the streets of European cities is a response to that. It is not new in the sense that there have been many attempts over the centuries to halt the tide of WGC or to make the system fairer (revolution) which have resulted in some tweaks to the model (universal suffrage) in some cases and suppression (totalitarianism) in others but most often scapegoating (fascism) where the blame for the failure of the system to deliver what we want is laid at the door of the 'other' (immigrant, Jew, Muslim etc.).
Sorry for the longevity of this but there are no simple solutions and we need to rethink things a lot.
