A few points that I want to clarify regarding my article that were discussed by some of the posters on the comment board:
Q: “Is secularism a religion?”
A: No. You might be able to claim that atheism, as a pattern of (non)belief, might be construed as a religion, but “secularism” is neither a pattern of belief nor disbelief. As I pointed out in my article, secularism is merely the proposition that the Constitution and the laws that derive their legitimacy from it are grounded in popular sovereignty rather than the word of God. Many people who would prefer to see the separation between church and state weakened often claim that the government, by maintaining a secular distinction between the two, is somehow endorsing a religion called “secularism.” This is just plain silly. Read the First Amendment–if the government is obligated to maintain some level of distinction from religious affairs, then it must by definition be “secularist.”
Q: “Evolution has never been proven to have happened to humans…[Are] evolutionists are also acting on faith?”
A: This argument reduces to absurdity rather quickly. As I stated in my article, science is not in the business of “prooving” anything; rather, it seeks to explain and predict on the basis of observation and hypothesis. No proposition of scientific knowledge is “proven” in the sense spoken of here. If you claim that “evolutionists” are acting on faith, then anyone who acts as if they except to fall back to earth when they jump is acting on faith, as gravitation is not something that science has “proven.” At the quantum level at least, our conventional Newtonian understanding of gravity has more or less been DISproven. Our understanding of gravity is incomplete–but no one seriously doubts that the standard account of gravity captures some truth about what’s actually going on in the world. To demand that evolution be “proven” before it be taught is to place a stringent requirement on a piece of scientific knowledge that we do not apply to any other area of science.
“Remember, if the government defined what it considers a religion it is establishing a religion which is a violation of 1st amendment rights too.”
If a legislature takes no action with regard to the teaching of evolution (as indeed it should not), how has anything been defined? Anything can be inferred from a “definition by omission,” which is what makes the whole notion so silly.
It should also be noted that the Establishment Clause is NOT taken to provide for any particular individual right; instead, it places a requirement on the government to conduct itself in a particular way so as to bring about a certain state of affairs (and as such, it is fairly unique among all the clauses in the Bill of Rights).
