> Little makes the hearts of the devout go pit-a-pat like the
> excitement of raving
The predictability of lbo-talk carpet-chewing on the subject of religion fortunately detracts not at all from its entertainment value. It's like the old Three Stooges routine: Nii-agara Falls! Slooowly I turned... One never tires of it.
Still, I rather wonder: if one is really "over" religion -- if one really regards it as just folly from start to finish, and has no emotional engagement with it -- whence all this heat? Wouldn't one just regard it the way one regards people reading their horoscopes?
I suppose if you'd been really scarred by early religious training -- brought up in some dour, sadistic hellfire milieu, say -- that might explain it.
But I half suspect that for a lot of lefties hatred of religion is about the only thing you could call a conviction that they've got -- that, and a pleasure in attitudinizing about what fools and gulls the common herd are. Leftism in this country, I fear, is badly compromised by being confined to the National Merit(*) class, with our officially endorsed and scientifically certified sense of superiority.
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(*) To paraphrase somebody: National Merit is to merit as National Socialism is to socialism.