The Left and the religious right

spiked-essays | Essay | The curious rise of anti-religious hysteria

The link is to a decent essay from Spiked on the Left's anti-religious hysteria. (We're talking American Left verses the Christian Right. Islam does not get a mention.)

The essay touches many topics - the somewhat hysterical reaction to "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" from some quarters, the reaction against Intelligent Design, and how some on the the Left advocate the promotion of a Left-ish morality to assure those on the right that the Right does not have an exclusive hold on the field.

That last point is interesting, because the writer notes the apparent cynicisim of such approach.

"At the end of the day, politically motivated calls among liberals and the left for morality are not so far from the way in which Christians 'use' The March of the Penguins or The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. Both are cynical gestures driven by political calculations rather than by a moral inspiration that comes from the soul. What is particularly cynical is that these attempts to construct a 'moral dimension' are always aimed at others: those who apparently need 'simple' answers and 'meaning'. Such a cynical view of the public was clearly spelled out by William Davies of the London-based Institute for Public Policy research. 'The liberal, secular left has somehow to find ways of supplying citizens with emotional and metaphysical comforts even when it does not itself believe in such things', he warned (6)."

This last point (about the secular left not believing in "metaphysical comforts") seems very important to me, and I will add more to this post later.