When a subject as this raises it's head; secularism and religious tolerance, it always ends up being a discussion and about religion/good people and atheists/bad people and communism.

This whole discussion is quite irrelevant in this day and age in this country. Most people who say they are of religion aren't, they say they believe in god but cannot put into any logical sense what they mean as a god, they (very few) attend a regular religious service.

So my question is why is secularism being discussed anyway? No one that is an atheist,as I am, is going to be converted to a religion and no one who is of religion is going to become more religious or drop out and become an atheist. However, I believe a lot of people are agnostics or atheists but for some unknown reason will not openly say they are. Perhaps they don't know what they are.

Saying more children have been killed in the name of atheism than religion is absurd, the statement cannot be made in any historical vein of facts. Children have died in the name of being freed from religion and fanaticism.

Someone help he out here. What's the point? It always goes around the same circle.

Dear RaeBee,

Secularism does not concern itself with atheists becoming believers or vice versa or whether religion or atheism is good or bad. It is the idea that religious beliefs or lack of same should be no business of government. I am bothered by the number of governments including the Australian government that don't follow that idea. I am also bothered that many people really don't know what secularism is. That is why I wrote the article.

Dear david f,
you are wrong, in large part if not in toto, and your condemnations above lack the relief of historical and rhetorical context they ought to concede. Marx did not have the benefit of hindsight you enjoy, only precedent, and "of course" Marx was a bigot (though I shall look at your link), so was everybody else in his day! Or can you name a few who were not? I will challenge you more fulsomely asap (I have many commitments but this is important).
Given your age and nationality and "structure of feeling", do you really think, even given your breadth of learning and analytical mind, you are unprejudiced in this, that you're fit to be Marx's judge and executioner based on the evils perpetrated in his name? What deeds, or incitement to deeds, do you attribute to him? Have you taken the time to ponder the evils perpetrated in word and deed, overtly and covertly by the system you implicitly defend? And have you read beyond the Manifesto for context, or read it deeply? Can you even think straight when you read anything by Marx? Can you have escaped the indoctrination your generation was steeped in? You are passionate about this, and as has been said elsewhere today, this is a sure sign of insecurity.
I have the advantage of you in this; I am not passionate at all. I see this question as an opportunity to learn. I have no interest in or possibility of defending Marx the man (though I'll be surprised if you can substantiate your innuendos); I'm more interested in his ideas, and whether they have any merit in the context of the manifest evil that runs our lives right now. And whether those ideas are "pure evil" as we have been hyperbolically tutored to believe. I have no idea what you've seen or experienced in the 20th century and I own to my comparative naivity. Yet the challenge is to think dispassionately. If you can make some cogent criticism based on evidence I shall be glad to recant. We shall see.

A very good article it is too, david f, finishing with reference to the constitution of the USA which was fortunate enough to have been forged after the USA had become a refuge for many religious groups that had been persecuted in Europe by other religious groups (eg the Quakers; see below).

""In Europe Christians were killing each other, and the few Jews sequestered in ghettoes were subject to massacre and expulsion. ... The Catholic French king ordered targeted assassinations against the Huguenots (French Calvinist Protestants), during the French Wars of Religion.

"The Thirty Years' War, (1618-1648)... was fought largely as a religious conflict between Protestants and Catholics in the Holy Roman Empire. ...

"Christianity demonised its enemies*, ... Catholics considered it obvious that Luther had been inspired by the devil. Huguenot ministers called the Catholic Church "Satan's synagogue". According to another Lutheran official, the Calvinists "pretend to be bright, white angels of light, even though they are actually ugly black disciples of the prince of darkness". Oliver Cromwell, who ruled England as Lord Protector from 1653 to 1658, called Quakers and the other new sects of his day "diabolical", "the height of Satan's wickedness". ..""

* We saw some demonising this weekend, didn't we ??

A person's religious beliefs can no longer be no business of the government especially if and when it is under threat of subversion. In the interest of Australians protection is the business of the government even should it mean intervening in religious affairs that are proving subversive by fundamentalist isms of all description.

socratease

Here is a link to Marx's "on the Jewish Question" for anyone interested in a fascinating read: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/jewish-question/
And here is a wiki article on it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Jewish_Question
Whether indeed Marx was being a "horrible bigot" is highly debatable and different views are put forward under "interpretations" in the wiki link. I haven't read the whole essay yet, but judging by what I've read so far and by my overall conception of Marx in his methods---in researching, distinguishing materials, synthesising new thought and articulating it---I would suggest the whole is in fact a heuristic exercise designed to throw the so-called Jewish question against a relief of "overall" religious, political and economic entrapment. Indeed, "On the Jewish Question" is highly pertinent to this thread, and to the concepts of secularism and humanism.
To the extent that the essay can be categorised as anti-Semitic or bigoted (which is extremely dubious to say the least), I would say it is more in the historical/literary "given" that Jews were the money lenders, and so served for Marx as personification and trope (indeed cliche) for capitalism; and also in our modern, hypersensitive, post-Holocaust PC and sensitivity that prevents even phrasing such as "the Jewish Question", let alone critical analysis, without incurring charges of racism. Yet the essay is also concerned with Jewish emancipation, and certainly there is no underlying incitement of violence against Jews. Marx was a deep thinker and devout humanist at heart, and the essay is a complex signature text that deserves a close reading.