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Article Excerpt
The Secular Conscience: Why Belief Belongs in Public Life by Austin Dacey. Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2008, 240 pp., $24.95, ISBN: 978-1-59102-604-4
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SECULARISM HAS "LOST ITS SOUL," says Austin Dacey, professor of humanities and United Nations representative for the Center for Inquiry Transnational. Ironically, the modern post-Enlightenment era has seen secularism undermined primarily from within. Although the American model of secular government was premised on open and vigorous competition between numerous philosophies and religious sects in the free marketplace of ideas, Dacey believes that American citizens of all persuasions have since deeply internalized at least two logical fallacies that have prevented them from achieving that ideal.
The Privacy Fallacy, Dacey suggests, decrees that all matters of conscience--secular or religious--are utterly personal and, hence, forbidden subjects for public discourse. So long as beliefs are not "imposed" on others, this hopelessly regressive mantra goes, every person has a "right" to believe as he or she will without interference of any kind. Enter the Liberty Fallacy, which mistakenly concludes that because conscience must not be coerced, it is equally immune to reasoned critique and objective intellectual and moral standards.
But unlimited...
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