An excerpt from this week’s column addressing a common misconception and misrepresentation of freethinkers:
I’m onboard with many criticisms of religion and I do sometimes refer to ardent atheist thinkers, yet I grow tired of extremist viewpoints. As I recently told a reader who believes religion offers nothing beneficial, I have little time for debating fundamentalists, religious or atheist. Though some agitated non-god folks don’t like it, I sometimes speak of “atheist evangelists”—these are people who are so anti-religious they can’t see any good in faith, believing it’s merely a disease in the bloodstream of humanity. I find both extreme ends of the spectrum unhelpful at least, hurtful, harmful and even hateful at worst.
Friendly Freethinker 
I agree, we need a religion and a god that is very much in and of this world. Diverse religious people coming into community and doing good. Add to that a philosophical perspective that gives people a home, a legitimate place, in the cosmos and you’ve got a hit, could go to the top of the current charts.
That is a very immanence based theology, god is in the world; it comes up against a staunch opponent (often) in a transcendence based religion.
And rightly enough, you mentioned one of the prime statements of transcendence, good old Martin Luther himself. You said the criticism of humanists is “Being good is never good enough, you need God.” Luther’s thesis—Faith before Good Works: “If we esteem them too highly, good works can become the greatest idolatry,” he preached.
The Protestants then went all out transcendence, at least for a long time. No more papal infallibility, no more giant Church Bureaucracy, no saints, no statues in church not even a Jesus on the cross, and certainly no very holy human woman/mother of god.
And then to raise Revelation to such stature, and have the vast majority of humans condemned to hell! What a sad and cynical view. What is your take on Revelation? I haven’t thought of it in a long while. All this brings out the anti-religion in me.
Oh well, just thinking about your column.
As far as ardent atheists go, there just seems no place for any kind of Spirit God in our world of physics and chemistry! Add to that fundamentalist’s denial of geological history and evolution, and you have some very good reasons for a strong disdain for that willful ignorance. And hypocrisy, when fundamentalists use cell phones and fly in jet liners, and deny the parts of science they dislike.
Agreed, Greg. we need a this-worldly kind of thinking and doing good, without the distractions of “transcendence.”