The recent letters regarding Secular Humanism vs. Christianity have suffered from a basic problem, an assumption that atheists and Secular Humanists are the same thing. They are not.

Being an atheist simply means that an individual refuses to accept the possibility of a supernatural realm. That's it. Period. Atheism cannot, and can never, pretend to be a guide for personal behavior.

Secular Humanism, on the other hand, can most certainly be considered the equivalent of traditional religions, at least in that adherents can effortlessly bend and reshape it to justify all of the wondrous things that they feel that the government should do to promote their pet causes. While there might be exceptions, every Secular Humanist I've met has been a socialist of one stripe or another who claimed that their schemes for raking taxpayers over the coals were based on rationality, not faith. But secular fantasies are just as likely to fail as religiously-inspired ones.

Sincerely,

LF