I cann't compete
Steven Poole in The Guardian writing about Austin Dacey's book, Secular Conscience:
Why Belief Belongs in Public Life. Poole says:
No one expects a combination of JS Mill and Melanie Phillips, but here we are. Austin Dacey attempts to construct a secular ethics that can be "objective", by reference to Spinoza, Kant and Mill, and dubious appeals to things like evolutionary psychology. He also claims to want to invite "faith" into public debate, rather than ignoring it as a matter of "private conscience". (Conscience is not private but social.) It turns out, though, that Dacey has already decided what will and won't count as a proper argument from the religious ("What they cannot do is ... "), so it looks rather like a trap. Not surprising given the reason for the book's sense of urgency, which is the incipient Islamist apocalypse: "In the face of a challenge to the future of European values, the official ideology of multiculturalism has become a pact for mass cultural suicide." By this point near the book's end, those who believe that our civilisation depends on the freedom to publish racist cartoons will be nodding energetically.