Maggie's Farm

A clever reader coined the term "evangelical atheists" the other day. Yesterday, an opinion piece by Tobias Jones in The Guardian on "secular totalitarianism." A quote:

That is why these (secular) fundamentalists are so in evidence. They're not only needled by their own hypocrisy; they are also furious that believers have broken the old pact to stay out of public debate. Witness, for example, Mary Riddell's astonishing sentence in the Observer last month (try replacing "religion" with "homosexuality" to get the point): "secularists do not wish to harm religion or deny its great cultural influence. They simply want it to know its place." In other words: get back in the closet.

Christians feel particularly aggrieved because we believe that Jesus invented secularism. Jesus's teachings desacralised the state: no authority, not even Caesar's, was comparable to God's. As Nick Spencer writes in Doing God, "the secular was Christianity's gift to the world, denoting a public space in which authorities should be respected, but could be legitimately challenged and could never accord to themselves absolute or ultimate significance". Christianity, far from creating an absolutist state, initiated dissent from state absolutism.

Right. Whole thing here.

That is why Statists hate religion: it competes in significance. Why else would they care so much - or even care at all?  Science is generally and properly humble about its offerings (the global warming scam excepted), but The State is never humble.