Bokaer, from a social action center affiliated with Cornell University, was speaking at a conference last weekend that denounced conservative Republicans on matters like mercy-killing, abortion, gay marriage, research using human embryos, broadcast indecency, Israel, Iraq, faith-based charity funding, judicial nominations and church-state relations.

Sounds like their concerns are a little broader than just church-state issues. What is it about being irreligious that turns so many people into raving leftist lunatics?

Matt;

First, these people aren't irreligious, they're anti-religious. Second, the causation runs the other way. People who are raving leftist lunatics are attracted to anti-religious conspiracy theories the way flies are attracted to beef production waste products and for much the same reason.

Evangelically anti-religious. The League of the Militant Godless, 21st century version. Not only are they hostile to people of faith, they simply! cannot! stand! that someone, somewhere, might be praying a rosary or the sh'ma Yisrael.

It is very important to these people that all seriously religious folks are closet theocrats, smiling tolerantly by day but plotting a ruthless Christian Caliphate by night. Even around here, it strikes me how our resident secularists are prone to argue that, while they themselves are far too bright to swallow any of the hocus-pocus, there must be no ambiguities for those who do. It's always undiluted Darwinism or a literal Genecis, free divorce and abortion or enslaved, uneducated women, kill Terri or we all die slow, anguished deaths, etc. (Jeff's taunting of how scriptural moral rules are "faxes from God" and Harry's amusing himself with the thought of idiots who believe in both angels and penicillin are just two recent examples. What wit!)

It some cases, this is just scientism triumphant---their minds have been completely closed to any reality beyond the lab and their reaction to those who assert one is a defensive contempt (or an arms-length bemusement for the more decent ones). They are lost in a prison of logical reductionism and, like modern revolutionary fanatics, they have convinced themselves that their one-dimensional lives equate to freedom and it is the other guy who is in prison. Other more manipulative types like this gang know full well they are on thin moral and political ice with issues like Terri Schiavo, terrorism, unlimited abortion, family, etc., so they have to couch their fundamentalist amoralism in warnings about how Zwingli and Torquemada are just around the corner. Today a school Christmas play, tomorrow the stake.

For about a hundred years, "religion" in the West has been in a self-examining mode in response to scientific discovery, the slaughters of World War 1, the Holocaust, etc., and this did result in a major retreat from the public square. It is ridiculous, however, to pretend that religion was formerly driven by theocratic thinking, of which there are only a few sporadic, very short-term examples in the history of the West. What I think is happening now is many are feeling atavistic rumblings and warnings bubbling up within as they confront the full implications of a society that cannot speak anymore of right and wrong, or even recognize it. That is the thread that ties just about all the issues we've had to confront starkly in the past five years. Many are saying enough and they are darned well going to start speaking about it and voting on it without apology. After so many years of intellectual deference, the secular world is thrown (it has even forgotten the language), so a panicked demonization is all they have to respond with.

In the end, the objective is to directly or indirectly disenfranchise the religious the way one might the mentally ill. That is why the rote, progressive calls for more education in response to just about any issue are usually advanced more in the hope of emptying minds than filling them.