You might also direct them toward this article by Jürgen Habermas. It might be pretty complicated, depending on their reading level, but Habermas used to argue similarly to these students and to Locke: Religion is a private affair, and our public sphere should be 100% secular. Now he’s calling our publics “post-secular.”

If it’s all right with you, I would like to share your blog post with them. Neither managed to cite the film which would have been an obvious addition to their argument (and we already talked in class about films as arguments of definition or personifications of terms etc).

Thanks, Michael!

I have been noticing lately all the books published which argue that we need to get rid of religion altogether, and besides of course being an almost childish and simplistic response to the problems brought by religion, it is also a un-charitable and impatient and even hateful response to them. And, as you point out in the case of this film, it’s a response in which one takes on the very characteristics of the thing one is critiquing: an all-or-nothing kind of thinking, an impatience with the complexities of problems, etc… an impatience with other human beings, a judgment of them. And what else is that but the very thing Maher is supposedly critiquing?

Anyway, thanks, Michael. I so very much appreciate your thoughtful review. You are one of those people in the world who… while OF COURSE I don’t always agree with you (again, of course not), I always like the WAY you think. Bravo, Michael.