Boiling some more blood

My last post didn't play very well to Lancelot's eyes:

His post makes my blood boil, but it's not his fault really: he's just voicing the condescendion towards religion that characterizes broad swaths of the general culure.

After restating his belief that tolerance in Christian countries is due to Christian arguments*, he moves on to my 'condescension':

And of course, failing to control the message the children of the faithful receive is rightly perceived as a threat. Lancelot Finn, for example, worries that merely "conveying a vague sense that the whole world can be explained without reference to God" is sufficient to "turn my son into an atheist".

Failing to control the message? Earth to Nato: no one is proposing to pull scientific books off the shelves, to prohibit atheists from speaking on the radio and television, or even to bar atheists from teaching in the schools. It is not Christians who feel the need for message control here. But we need the resources-- children's time, facilities, personnel, and so on-- to positively instill the message. Christianity may be faith in part but it also involves a tremendous amount of learning.

At this point, I'm wondering if he thinks atheists are attempting to prohibit theists from speaking on the radio, teaching in schools and etc. But moving on, he continues:

"we are afraid that the vast amount of tax dollars and of our children's time that is devoted to constructing this rival, secularist synthesis will leave us without the space to instill a knowledge of what the Christian faith is in our children."

Now I wonder about what secularist synthesis are we talking. A carefully crafted "vague sense that the whole world can be explained without reference to God" that somehow takes up hours and hours and bajillions of dollars? Are we talking about the theory of evolution, the majority of which is accepted even by the likes of Behe? If you cut out only those portions that Behe rejects, you don't save much time or money. Or do we need to cut out more from the secular curriculum? Maybe a little less math, science, history and English? Surely not.

It seems very much that it's the rival "secularist synthesis" itself that's threatening, and the "vast amount of tax dollars and of our children's time" is merely an excuse. Which is fair enough - atheists are operating under the same logic when they complain government funding of religous schooling. The loss of one cent out of our personal budget that ends up funding the opposing message is not the issue so much as we can use the constitutional argument to complain about how the other guys have an advantage and to make it harder for them. I mean, if some atheist parent sends her child to a school and it "makes" her child a theist, then perhaps the child found the school's case for theism more convincing than the parent's case against it. The marketplace of ideas doesn't always spread the truth, but it's the best mechanism we've got.

Really, atheists have a sort of unfair advantage that the founders never really foresaw. By requiring the government to take no positive position, they essentially made the government atheist in the same way private citizens are. Since the government never advises children about God, a child might get the idea that there's no God about which to be advised: the classic null case. Advertisers vie to market their brand of ceareal, but the government must stay out of it, so it avoids showing children eating breakfast. Result: the cereal industry declines altogether and non-breakfast eaters win by default.

Lancelot also links to an article in which the "secularization hypothesis" is "discredited." Unfortunately, it seems to start from the highly tendentious assumption that "human beings are unalterably religious." Well, if that is the given from which the argument starts, then yeah, it's going to be pretty tough to maintain that secularity is growing.

Finally he ends up with what is largely a mirror image of my own discussion in which I claimed that the backlash against fundamentalist resurgence might well prove to be the event that vitalizes the secularist minority. I called one of his posts "preposterous and insulting" and thereafter wrote a post expressing "condescension" that made his blood boil. We have now both predicted eventual victory for our own side. If only both of us could claim God was on our side, it'd be perfectly classic parity.

*One wonders whence comes tolerance in non-Christian countries. Also, one wonders, if Christianity is so good at tolerance, why Europe wasn't more tolerant back when Christianity had much greater relative power.