Ross Douthat makes an intelligent, well-informed defense of the term using the general framework that I began with (as opposed to some people who simply insist on digressing immediately to forward their own position). There are also intelligent comments below. Instead of responding in a point-by-point fashion to Ross's rejoinder in this post, I'll just elaborate in the comments here and below. Rather, I want to tack to a different issue. My main concern as an atheist who lives in a progressively more religiously pluralist society characterized by liberal democratic values is to turn all religions into operational variants of mainline Protestantism. Implicit in this is that the extinction of organized religion will not occur in the near future, so in a pragmatic sense religion has to be take as one of the parameters which define our society.
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