Humanism didn't evolve in a philosophical vacuum, it is standing on the shoulders of in opposition to older thought.

FIFY.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

Religious nutters... Well, quite. You have engaged in a spirited and courageous blanket defense of religious-inspired political activism, illustrating it with your personal values of tolerance etc...
The problem is that, worldwide, at a WAG, 90% of religious-inspired political activists are right-wingers, often extreme right wingers, and almost always with a strong authoritarian bent. (The patriarch Kirill, Putin's pal, is a case in point.)

I have no intention of according special political privileges to such people (or to you) because they are religious.

_{It is rightly acknowledged that people of faith have no monopoly of virtue - Queen Elizabeth II}

Er ...
Religion, specifically Christianity, in Western Europe is tolerable to non-adherents because we've had 500 years of telling it to go stand in a corner when it misbehaves.

'fee-market christianity' and 'christian free-marketing' are a frankensteinian hybrid mutant that got out the lab and are now chomping down on anything that we hold dear and sacred moves.

this has turned into a very interesting vintage ET discussion. both katrin and jake are doing an impressive brinking dance around incivility.

elegant calibration...

/meta

religion is the straw man here though, this goes deeper even, to the rights of people to private spaces to gather in, the line between public/private, whether dissent is ever polite to everyone, and the ugly underbelly of soft fascism, 2012 style.

PR serve to show very well how 'soft' that really is.

the older democracies have really screwed the pooch by throwing away so many of our own civil rights, putin's still catching up.

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty