AUTHOR RECOMMENDATION

Andrew Sullivan recommended Straw Dogs by John Gray and while I have some quibbles with Gray's claims, e.g. atheism needs Christianity in order to have any real significance (think Lucretius), it was thought provoking.   I since gotten  a few of Gray's books from the library and I was struck by the beginning of Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia:

Modern politics is a chapter in the history of religion. The greatest of the revolutionary upheavals that have shaped so much of the history of the past two centuries were episodes in the history of faith - moments in the long dissolution of Christianity and the rise of modern political religion.

Gray claims that this religious approach to politics encompasses both the Left and the Right and I suppose Karl Marx is the exemplar for the Left and the apostles of the Free Market Fairy (von Mises, Ayn Rand, Hayek) are the ones for the Right.

In the early part of the last decade, I began to think that conservatism, at least radio conservatism, was displaced religious sentiment because that would account for the irrelevance of facts in conservative arguments but I am now seeing that this anti-empirical sentiment is more widespread.