In my recent post on the need to stop giving the ‘benefit of clergy’, I argued that we should not allow the notion of ‘respect for religion’ to be used as a shield to protect religious ideas from the scrutiny that any idea should deserve. For example, I suspect that some atheists, even when the topic of religion comes up, shy away from even saying that they are atheists out of a misplaced sense that this mere statement of fact might ‘offend’ the religious people around them. I know that I used to think this way, but not any longer.
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