Shut up

Hugo Rifkind, a man whose name I have heard and yet heard without the slightest knowledge of who or what he is, has made a little Vlog about the "moral blackhole of secularism", and how secular campaigns at present are entirely negative, providing no "coherent philosophical alternative". (It turns out he's Opinions leader for The Times, by the way.) I particularly like the way the camera gets bored of his face and ambles along the bookshelf behind him, as if we're interested in what he claims to have read, or that the books provide a summary footnote as per his credibility. Well, as I said, I don't know who he is, nor care what he's read, so I'm taking him at face value. Here's the basis of his opinion:

I'm quite a soft secularist, in that I don't really care about it. This is how I think the world should be, but if it's not, so be it, so long as I don't have to wear a burka.

It doesn't take me to tell you what's wrong with this line of thinking. Then again, it's not so much what's wrong, moreso that it suffers from a severe deficiency. That's like saying: No, I'm not against the Nazi regime, so long as they don't make me exterminate Jews. Like it or not, sonny Jim, there's an argument here and you better be prepared to take sides. The title of his ditty is "Why atheists just need to shut up". Okay, but you can't have it both ways, mate; if the Pope's going to tell me that gay marriage violates Natural Law (something his predecessors just made up), and the Archbishop of Canterbury is going to make headlines with his two-cents on the Chilcot inquiry, then you can bet your bottom dollar I'm not shutting up.