[It is easy] to go from "there is a fixed truth" to "I have that fixed truth."
[...]
Words alone are rarely enough to reassure the uncertain. In fact, the more people rely on faith talk to pursue certainty, the more they may actually reinforce both anxiety and uncertainty. It's a small step indeed to move beyond the issue of individual self-control to controlling others through the passage of laws.
[...]
All too often, [...] the faith-talk view of freedom ends up taking away freedom.
[...]
In itself, faith in politics poses no great danger to democracy as long as the debates are really about policies -- and religious values are translated into political values, articulated in ways that can be rationally debated by people who don't share them. The challenge is not to get religion out of politics. It's to get the quest for certitude out of politics.

This is classic post-modern thought. The only crime worse than believing you are right is trying to get others to believe as you.

Religious thought influencing the political process is not new (a trip to the Lincoln memorial will show that). What is new is the post-modern line of thought that cannot tolerate any absolutes--except of course the absolute that there are no absolutes.

Hi nut72,
are you sure that the leitmotif of pre-postmodern political thinking were tolerance for "any" absolutes?
And are you sure that acknowledging "any absolutes" were per se morally good?
How odd that "modern thinking" culminated (and ended?) in (1) the Holocaust, (2) the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and (3) the cold-war concept of nuclear overkill, isn't it?

Indeed, Johanna. Right-wing religiosity makes a career of expanding the category of "absolute" into the zeitgeist of the culture most recently past. I left right-wing religion not because it was too Biblical, but because it was not truly so. Its insistence on literalism and conservative culture and modernism's win/lose way of seeing everything more resembled the outlook of those who hated Jesus Christ than that of Jesus Christ himself.

I agree.

The recent statements by Republican presidential primary candidate, Huckabee, to change the USA Constitution to incorporate and enforce his concepts of religions are dangerous.

Your whole idea of "religious thinking" is untenable. There is only religious thinking. Does you thinking exist without values and how do you ascribe them.

The left uses political machinery to force their values on others just as does the right.

Is it conceivable that people can be free to live according to their own values and not force them on others? Yes, it is! But in the present system it will not happen. The left wing religiosity has proved nothing great either, check it out.