catsittingstill

Well, because someone else did first. There is an article on the Newsweek website by a guy named Jaques Berlinerblau asking why secularists are not up in arms over Barak Obama's religious musings.

I'll put most of this behind the cut.

A lot of it is just, in my opinion, poorly thought out. He says:

These pious musings have not aroused as much as a peep of protest from nonbelievers and Church-State separatists. (Compare this to the former governor of Arkansas who enraged Secular America when he suggested that we amend the Constitution to God’s standards).

Well, duh. There's a world of difference between a candidate having personal religious beliefs and a candidate proposing to amend the Constitution to bring it into line with his personal religious beliefs. How did you overlook this?

This absence of outrage goes a long way in demonstrating how thoroughly secularism in this country is entwined with, and supportive of, political liberalism.

Well, if you don't buy into religious conservative arguments in favor of oppressing women and gays, increasing inequality in this country, and using government power (and frequently government tax dollars) to promote religion, um, what other values are there that favor those things? In the absence of many good reasons to be socially conservative, we naturally tend to be socially liberal.

True, Obama did give a fleeting nod to the godless in his address. He urged Americans to “come together as Protestants, Catholics and Jews, believers and non-believers alike.” But anyone familiar with his rhetoric knows that Obama is perennially resolving seemingly insoluble American dialectical tensions (Red States/Blue States, Pro-Choice/Pro-Life, Yankees/Red Sox, whatever).

That fleeting nod to the godless (an indication that he doesn't think we can't be citizens, like, for instance, Reagan did) is far more than we will get from anyone who is polically conservative. And someone who can resolve seemingly insoluble American dialectical tensions is perhaps just what we need after the present administration.

Obama’s speech—it wasn’t his best and much of it was rehashed—was filled with a variety of theological ideas (and ambiguities) that we will be discussing for months if he wins big tonight. One is that God has a plan—a plan that is apparently centered on America (but what about Canada?) Another is that the divine plan only comes to fruition if all citizens pitch in and do their part (but what about nonbelievers who won’t get with the program?).

Well, as a godless person, I am prone to evaluate plans the way I evaluate anything else--on the basis of reason and evidence. If Obama has a good plan that will work, I don't care if he thinks he got it in communion with God, I'll be happy to pitch in and do my part.

So the short version is that the reason secular people also tend to be liberal is that most of the push to be socially conservative comes from a bunch of rules dreamed up by bronze age nomads. If you don't buy into the supernatural nature of the rules, some of them look pretty silly, and some of them look downright mean. Discarding them, however, makes one socially liberal. Social liberals are generally okay with working with religious liberals who have also discarded the silly and mean parts of the bronze age rules to achieve a common goal. Like electing a president whose values come close to coinciding with our own.