Reply #27: Had to sneak this one in, didn't you?

[onager]

Nor would I want to live in a society beholden to fundamentalists--both religious and non-religious.

Can you point out some of these "non-religious fundamentalists?" Of course not - you and your believin' buddies have been asked to do that repeatedly, and you always respond with confusing bafflegab about Hitchens/Gnu Atheists/bla-bla-bla. Oh, and those awful billboards!

Y'all also complain a lot about the most dangerous non-religious movement in the world today - the dozen or so snarky atheists on DU. That's sarcasm. And yes, I occasionally call myself a "Fundamentalist Atheist." But mostly to annoy the twits who use that term.

I would never want to live in a society where a single religion--or a powerful combination of religions--dominated the landscape.

Well, I hate to break this to you...but assuming you're American, that's exactly the society you're living in right now.

Or would you care to argue that modern American religious society is NOT dominated by Xianity? Hint - turn on your TV set any Sunday morning.

Even as I write this, Congress is trying to eliminate any spending on contraception. How much support for that stupidity is coming from the non-religious?

Oh, sure, at some point in the future, you and your fellow Lib'rul Xians will climb down from your ivory towers and sit around the campfire singing Kum-Ba-Yah with the Xian Fundies. You'll still be blathering about the wonderfulness of Jim Wallis and Karen Armstrong when the Fundies are shoving you into the cattle cars. By that time, we atheists will have already disappeared - if history is any indication, right after the Jews. And you'll probably believe the Fundies when they tell you we were the first groups to be Raptured.

Later you wrote: A society based solely on a secular ethic - that is a non-religious ethic, or a society based solely on a religious ethic, would be equally dreadful. We have examples of both in history. All of them ended in tyranny.

AFAIK, we don't have any historical examples of a "non-religious ethic" competing on level ground with a religious ethic, for centuries, until one or the other triumphed over the hearts and minds of the people.

But none of history's secular societies just suddenly popped up out of nowhere. They came from societies with centuries of national religious belief behind them - whether you're talking about France in 1789 or Cambodia in 1975.

In fact, Cambodia's a good example of a suddenly secular society and how it got that way. In his massive bio of Pol Pot, Anatomy of a Nightmare, Philip Short provided some answers:

Finally, (Short) looked at the national culture. Where Maoism was "colored by Confucianism," he said, in Cambodia Stalinism-Leninism was influenced by Theravada Buddhism, the belief system of some 90 percent of the Khmer people. "This is a religion of compassion, but it teaches renunciation of the material world..." He concluded that the Khmer Rouge were "a violent monastic sect" with similarities to a cult.

http://www.international.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid=21630

Westerners were baffled when the Khmer Rouge emptied Phnom Penh of several million people and banned money. But both of those ideas came straight from their religious beliefs - the belief that cities were evil influences corrupting naturally decent rural people, and renunciation of the material world's most visible symbol - money.

I have written books about this perspective!

Oh! The argument from Personal Authority! With an exclamation point! Impressive!

You've made that claim about writing books many times, so I have to ask - have any of your books actually been published? By someone other than yourself and your printer, I mean.

Well, here's an idea for your next book, and it should be a piece of cake. Just write your book the same way you write your OP's in here - bundle up the most popular complaints about Atheist Fundamentalists from your fellow believers, ruthlessly eliminate any original thoughts, then regurgitate what's left in your incredibly condescending and obtuse style. If you can work in a few miracles, the Oprah Book Club might go for it.