Patrol – A review of religion and the modern world: What Really Happens When People Lose Their Religion? http://goo.gl/mag/pG0GlwD

Quotes:

What I converted to was not, as I understood it at the time, some sort of objective “view from nowhere” outlook that only had beliefs to the extent their truth could be demonstrated empirically. It was rather, as Taylor puts it, “a certain package uniting materialism with a moral outlook, the package we could call ‘atheist humanism,’ or exclusive humanism” (9034), or, as we could perhaps even better call it, “dull, platitudinous liberalism.” It’s amusing now how little this new philosophy intrinsically had to do with the materialism I’d become convinced of. Nothing about individual liberty, human rights, or civilizational progress follow automatically from the fact that “God is dead.” The new picture is “shot through with values” (8869), however insistently it takes itself to “emerge out of careful, objective, presuppositionless scrutiny” (8890). There are as many value judgements in liberal humanism as there are in its parent religion, and many people who come to the point of unbelief are happy to accept them despite objecting to the similar ungroundedness of Christianity.