"We should all be secularists"

From Pharyngula - another essay from PZ Myers on why progressives should get along - the religious and the agnostic/atheistic ones alike. It's longish, and you should probably read it. Here's a bit to whet your appetite:

Here's another important progressive value: tolerance. There is much confusion about what tolerance means. It does not mean that you only allow people whose ideas you like in the party; quite the contrary, if you like and approve of them, it doesn't require the virtue of tolerance to accommodate them. Theists and atheists have mutually exclusive ideas about the afterlife, spirituality, deities, etc.—tolerance means learning to hold your nose and deal with people whose beliefs on intangible and irrelevant issues are incompatible with yours in order to make progress on other matters. Trust me on this, but atheists are quite used to holding their gorge back in the face of the daily, unthinking assault of religiosity we face in this country; it would be nice if the Christian majority would learn to return the favor.

Let's compromise. The liberal religious find our disbelief objectionable and uncomfortable. We atheists find their beliefs in the unseen and untestable silly and baseless. We can agree to detest each other's ideas about faith and an afterlife, and even berate each other publicly for each other's beliefs while still finding common cause in improving the world here and now; while our motives may differ, we all want to protect civil liberties, fight for economic equality, oppose the war, promote conservation and renewable energies, fund education and science, and even oppose religious discrimination.

As I've remarked before, it's hard to tolerate those who want you dead, but we progressives, don't we want the same thing? We ought to be able to get along.

(And to top it off - in case you're worried about elections - running to the right, religously or otherwise, hasn't been working, has it? We haven't exactly been electing Democrats who've rushed rightwards to the center. So there's no reason at all to do it.)