God's other politics

Lest anyone be confused, 'No', I haven't suddenly converted away from atheism, but I do see the strong need for connecting the secularist-liberal-humanists with the left-progressive-religous movement (especially in the US).

I maintain that religious freedom is both important and necessary for a functioning democracy. Important because to allow the theocratic impulse of the right wing religious movement to dictate culture, law or politics is to repudiate what a democracy is all about. Necessary, because without pluralistic protection for all religious practices, atheists like myself are left out in the cold just as much as the left wing churchers are.

I support religious freedom (as paradoxical as the words 'religious' and 'freedom' are to each other) for the same reason I support gay marriage. I'm not gay and thus the freedom to marry another man isn't one I'll ever exercise (it's still an open question as to whether I'll ever marry a woman), but the important thing is to defend the freedoms we have even, or perhaps, especially if we aren't using them personally.

I don't want any government, conservative, liberal, or other, to decide to roll-back religious freedoms - to do so threatens me not because I am religious, but because I don't want any government rolling back my freedoms PERIOD.

In this the left-religious types and I are in conjunction. Get the state out of the church, and keep the church out of Parliament - and the two will happily co-exist. Mix them together and you have a recipe for totalitarianism in the name of God.