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Don't look now, but your neighbor, uncle, cousin, coworker - or even the person next to you in church or synagogue - might be a (gasp!) secular humanist.

A secular humanist is almost the same thing as an atheist. If there's a difference, I suppose it's that the atheist focuses on the absence of God, whereas secular humanists, if they don't deny the existence of God, simply consider him irrelevant - and get on with the business of improving the world.

To quote Dr. Melvin Shaw, writing in the September 2006 issue of The Jewish Humanist, "A humanist is one who adheres to the principle that all human beings are created equal and should enjoy equal opportunity, and that we are capable of solving our own problems by ourselves with a little help from our friends. We do not ask for divine guidance and do not pray to a nonexistent deity."

Atheism = the new homosexuality

That seems pretty innocuous, doesn't it? Yet today it's not too much of a stretch to call atheism "the new homosexuality." If you think back to the animosity and discrimination - and sometimes outright violence - that was inflicted on homosexuals 50 or 100 years ago, you have some idea of the social disapproval of atheism today.

Shaw notes that because he is a secular humanist - and an American Jewish scientist as well - he qualifies for consideration as "the most hated man on earth." Indeed, a recent Harper's Index, citing the latest figures available as of May 2006, reported that atheists were number one among "minorities who Americans are least willing to allow their children to marry" (Muslims and African-Americans were second and third, respectively).

Owch!

It's not as if animosity toward nonbelievers is anything new. Some of the most eloquent passages in the Torah are descriptions of the horrendous consequences of not following God's commandments. The war between faith and reason has been going on for a very long time.

Disappointing progress

Yet today, after the brilliant humanism of the Greeks and Romans, after the Renaissance, after the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution and the advent of the Information Age, we still have superstition, fundamentalism and fanaticism. In fact, they are on the rise - frighteningly so. Reason is in retreat.

And the fundamentalists have no problem being hypocritical and two-faced about science. Terrorists do not pray for the instructions to make a bomb. They go on the Internet and download them.

But it is a one-sided war. Secular humanists mostly want to be

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