I have to say that the beginnings of the comments from Peter and Sean to my last post saddened me.

From Peter:

First off, thanks for stating the blindingly obvious. I genuinely mean that: I??ve read all too many blogs and forum posts which say that morality without religion is impossible, so thanks for being reasonable.

From Sean:

I??m glad that you so easily come to the right conclusion here.

The reason it saddens me is that it should be pretty obvious that atheists do have morals. I even posited a number of rules or norms in my last post on which we could pretty much all agree and both Peter and Sean seemed to agree that those were fair game though Peter didn’t like the thought of rules as the basis for morals.

One interesting thing about Peter and Sean being the atheists with whom I am in dialogue is that Peter is in the UK (national church of which the queen is head) and Sean is in Colorado which is home to the Focus on the Family people. I’m in northern California which tends to be a fairly secular part of the U.S. compared to the Bible Belt, the Midwest, and maybe even parts of New England. The UK apparently has had atheist prime ministers and has what I’m guessing is a more secular society than the U.S. does apparently. As far as having a secular society is concerned, I think a problem is that there is division on what would be too secular and what would not be secular enough. An extreme example is Turkey which is a Muslim country but… veiling is forbidden in government and in a university setting. Another example would be the burqa ban in France which wants to make men and women the same… but is disenfranchising a number of Muslim women who want to be niqabis because they view not doing so as being immodest. (Note that this is the women who are making this distinction, not the men.) Of course, you can cite a number of Muslim countries as examples of the extreme of not being secular, the worst offender probably being Saudi Arabia where churches/synagogues/temples are banned.

So what would it look like for the U.S. to be a completely secular country? Things I’m envisioning:

[+] No laws banning homosexuality or abortion
[+] Evolution taught in school instead of the Genesis account or Creation Science
[+] No National Day of Prayer
[+] The Bible not taught in public schools except perhaps as literature

Other than not having laws banning homosexuality and abortion, this is pretty much what I grew up with in California. We *DID* have to read the Bible for Junior Honors English and AP English but that point of that was understanding the context of the literature we were studying, not for the purpose of indoctrination.

OK… ready for comments on this.