I'm going to step on some toes and slay some sacred cows on this post that I made elsewhere:
Quote:®eligion has never been as much a problem for liberalism as has superstition. The American Revolution, one of the first expressions of liberalism, occurred within a highly-religious, but not superstitious, milieu. Abolition of slavery, female suffrage, conservation, and the effort to get children out of the factory and into school occurred in a religious context. Indeed, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin appeals heavily to Christian sensibilities. The miners and factory workers trying to get dignity and solid pay were surely more devout in their lives than the more secular and amoral bosses and tycoons. And then we have the more recent example of the struggle for freedom for Southern blacks.
The superstitious have been a different matter. They are people behind the witch-hunts, pogroms, and riots. Religious people can accept science as the way in which God does things while adhering to rigid values on ethical pretexts. Superstitious people "don't need no stinkin' science" when they know it all. Religion has often used logic to delineate moral laws and how they apply, but the superstitious prefer magic that exempts them from ethical rules. They are the ones who sacrifice a virgin to the volcano god.
Cartoons may not be high culture, but on occasion one gets a gem. Batman explains why he wears a cape: criminals are profoundly superstitious, and his cape exploits that weakness.
Most secularists recognize that even without religion that they are still responsible for ethical behavior.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.