A chara, – I do not believe in tarot cards, star signs or magic fairies. I do not believe the State should support any such beliefs, but it should ensure people have enough freedom to believe in such things if they so wish.
No-one would call such a stance aggressive or militant because it would be idiotic to do so.
However, when one takes a similar stance toward Christianity, such absurd language is used. – Is mise,
Sir, – Ciarán McCafferty and Jonathan Victory (May 11th) mislead when they depict contemporary western, including Irish, secularists simply as people with various worldviews who want religion removed from the common public life. Predominantly, contemporary secularists are adherents of the reigning ideology in North America and western Europe since the 1970s, namely, American-style liberalism. Their secularism is an instrument of that creed.
American-style liberals believe that the traditional values and moral rules of European civilisation were in various ways oppressive of human beings and created therefore an unjust society.
Consequently, they want to replace that with what they believe would be a just society: freely self-determining and mutually respecting individuals whose right, and rights, to live thus are guaranteed, facilitated and enforced by a state. Hence the familiar liberal agenda or programme of gender equality, contraception, legally enforced PC language, legalised abortion, and same-sex marriage, etc.
Because Christianity gives a sacral quality to the traditional European values and moral rules, it buttresses and underpins them. Logically, therefore, in the liberal view, the old-style secularism of legal separation of church and state – common now in most western countries, including Ireland – does not suffice. As in the one-time communist countries, Christianity must be removed from influencing, directly or indirectly, the common public life. American-style liberalism must prevail there unimpeded. – Yours, etc,