Oh, you mistake my purpose, I don't want to create a new left in opposition to the 'secular left' as you put it, I want the real left that has always been there, the left that passed the most significant liberal legislation in the past century, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, etc. to realize that it can't afford the baggage that the anti-religious pseudo-left has been pretty much since the late 1960s. They and their agenda have created the conditions that have allowed the corporate fascists to destroy much of the progress that was achieved.
Probably as bad as anything they did was the promotion of a moral relativism that denied either the reality or the possibility of discerning an effective difference between the truth and lies in a political and legal context. The Sullivan ruling is one of the key events in that disaster, as I've mentioned a number of times, it was the product of that thinking. I don't think democracy is possible without people taking both the responsibility of identifying, absolutely, what truths can be known in opposition to what lies can be known and the chance of being wrong on that. Anything which doesn't make a decisive and effective difference favoring the truth over lies, is the death of representative democracy. I don't think we can merely allow the judiciary whose job is, after all, making those decisions, merely saying that either they can't do that easily with scientific precision or that - for whatever insane and irrational reason - that they are barred from doing so because of the desire for the writers of the Bill of Rights to be poetic instead of specific in what they meant by "freedom of speech" and "freedom of the press".
It is one of the things I most disagree with Noam Chomsky about, his position formerly stated that those freedoms must be absolute is incompatible with democracy, it is incompatible with retaining anything like a decent government. When someone is given carte blanche to lie, any lie being permissible, it is a license to construct the most vicious and saleable of lies, the most facilely sold of lies. The evidence of that is abundant in the study of the propaganda of Nazis and fascists and gun nut cults and black helicopter paranoics and the fan base of FOX news and those who have elected a series of some of the worst presidents in our history in the wake of the Sullivan decision and its related ACLU supported rulings and the total absence of presidents and a congress such as the one which was elected in a segregated America but which managed to pass those two landmarks of human progress, both of which have been eviscerated by the governments elected in the wake of that intellectual regime.
The left which elected those members of congress and the president who passed and signed those into law did not do so under the influence of secular or anti-religious pseudo-liberals, they were elected by a mostly Christian electorate who were forced to act under the religiously motivated actions of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, figures such as The Reverends of that movement, others who overtly cited Christianity as their motivation, such as the great Diane Nash, and others who put their lives on the line to end segregation and voter suppression. It was not the atheists who did that, they were, in almost every case, of no importance, whatsoever, in the cultural context of the early 1960s, their taking a prominent role would have certainly been counterproductive in the effort. As, in fact, their presence in the left has been mostly counterproductive in terms of electing people and ballot measures and moving legislation. All you have to do is look at the use of their anti-religious talk by the Republican-fascists for the past fifty years to see that.
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