Logic and clarity of thought are not sectarian. And neither are ethics.

The Western world seems to be going through a period of "atheism chic." Given the sexual ethics and attitudes toward the doctrine which defines the Faith currently held by a great many churchgoers, the question of whether the trend hasn't infected the Church to a far greater degree than we realize.

There seems, in fact, to be a trend among researchers to forecast the extinction of religion. Beyond the difficulty a great many secular Americans seem to have even defining religion, assuming as they always seem to that a "religion" must involve belief in a deity and/or an afterlife (Confucianism, for example, posits neither a deity nor an afterlife, and the striking parallels between Marxism and what most people would consider religious belief are both numerous and oft-cited ), these researchers seem to miss the point that human beings seem to be hard-wired for faith.

More subjectively, of course,  the God Who- unlike His human creations- doesn't die (recurrent reports to the contrary) must be chuckling.

Not only are the militantly godless increasing in number, but they are becoming more and more aggressive-and silly in their logic. Not only (as in matters like abortion, fetal stem cell research, and gay "marriage") are they increasingly successful in giving their own belief systems the force of law (often doing an end-round of the democratic process through the discovery of rights and principles in the Constitution which are nowhere to be found in the text, and can be inferred from it only by dubious, subjective, and often imaginative reasoning), but there is an increasing tendency to seek to deny religious believers the right to practice their own beliefs. The argument is that while it's illegitimate for religious believers to use the machinery of government to impose their peculiar beliefs on society, it's somehow OK for unbelievers or dissenters from their own professed religious traditions to do the same thing.

It's worth reflecting, in any case, that the Founding Fathers didn't intend the First Amendment to give atheism or agnosticism a privileged position among possible beliefs concerning ultimate matters. Nor did they even intend to give materialism an advantage over belief systems which include the supernatural. The meaning of the First Amendment is that government must be neutral as regards all metaphysical positions, not that belief systems which exclude or ignore the Deity (or deity, or deities) and scoff at life after death are given any rights whatsoever which belief systems which espouse such notions are denied.

The contrary view seems to be the secularist equivalent of the silly notion (advanced, as I recall, by John Adams at one point, and even on one occasion by the United States Supreme Court) that the United States is somehow a "Christian" nation (I remember once trying to engage the Calvinist author of Caffeinated Thoughts, a popular conservative blog here in Iowa, on this issue; regrettably, he chose to wax snarky and the discussion got nowhere). Ethical, social, and legal principles belong to what Luther called the Kingdom of the Left Hand; they are matters on which Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, atheists and agnostics of intelligence, good will, and good moral character can all agree, and there is nothing specifically "Christian" about them. While Christians may do ethics and legislation, and while the Faith may endorse certain conclusions in these arenas rather than others, even the ethical and political conclusions Christian faith finds congenial are conclusions about which there is nothing specifically Christian. Since nations are not baptized, as a rule (at least these days), nor do nations believe in Jesus as their Savior or- at least as nations- experience His salvation, to speak of a "Christian nation" is rather similar to speaking of a Presbyterian artichoke. You can put the words together, but in the last analysis they don't mean anything coherent.

HT: Real Clear Religion