I just want to make a comment about yesterday's TFTD, but I'm arrogant enough to think the point is quite important and deserves to be out here as an entry in it's own right. The thing that most annoyed me about yesterday's TFTD was the reference to the atrocities of "godless secular regimes". Why are they never called totalitarian communist regimes? Why is it relevant that they were "godless" and "secular"? Why do they never point out that they too had a doctrine based on a set of unquestionable writings that gives them far more in common with religion than with liberal secular humanists?

This is part of a widespread pattern among preachers to sully the word "secular", to associate secularism with totalitarianism and with the mass murder of the Gulags and the Killing Fields. It's part of the spin that they want to spread that secularism is a negative thing, a bad thing. Guilt by association - the foundation of many a lie by politicians, with whom preachers have so much in common. They're even hypocritical enough to continue to spin such lies while lamenting the lack of honesty in virtually everyone else. The fact that this type of spin goes unchallenged is one of the more insidious aspects of TFTD.

The irony is that religion flourishes under secular government - look at the United States. It's secularism that guarantees freedom of religion as well as freedom from religion. The alternative to secularism is not the dominance of a vaguely compatible pastiche of nice religions, it's a theocracy, and if we ever get one of those then the Rev. Jenkins had better watch out, it might not be the theocracy he was hoping for.