Unfortunately, the secular world forms tribes that have their own woo-woo isms just as easily as religious people do. The need to be critical extends to your own in-group as well as to any others, and we need to make sure we're not behaving under tribal or exclusionary impulses either. These impulses come naturally and unconciously to humanity. Getting rid of them is likely to be an uncomfortable concious process, contrary to our emotions and instincts, much like a calculus problem.

In fact, self criticism of the groups we are in is probably more valuable from a moral standpoint than criticism of other groups as woo-woos. After all, we can keep our own groups on track, while we have little effect on others' groups (we're heretics to them). A society full of self critical people will manage to beat back superstitions and orthodoxies of all sorts, while a society full of other-critical people will fragment into mutually hostile tribes that don't listen to each other and don't self-examine. I fear the latter is happening currently, and that there are undesirable tribal aspects to, or at least within, all parties.

Doesn't stop me from having very well-defined convictions about what is right, doesn't make me a reletavist of any sort, but unfortunately political, religious, and other non-immediate thought these days is dominated less by framing a coherent model and giving evidence for it than engaging in tribal mischaracterization and propoganda ploys. The group has slipped the bonds of it's role as an advocate for a philosophy and political model, and the philosophy has been subverted to the existence of group. Now many political or ideological, or religious groups exist only for their own sake, with their model and code of ethics being more of an excuse or a soundbyte for mischaracterizing the out-group than for advocating a course of action.



Of course, examining the politics of previous eras in history, the things that were written by the various parties involved, it seems that nothing much has really changed. The philosophy was always sold with appeals to emotion, the tribe, and popular notions, rather than directly through reason and evidence. Stuff written during the bank wars of the 1800s, stuff written by the various parties in the 1890's ect. So at least we know that we're not doing too much worse in terms of using reason. The golden age where we were all philosophers and all primarily rational people probably never existed, and so it's probably an unreasonable standard by which to be pessimistic about the human race.

But just be warned that being secular, or "rationalist" doesn't make you rational, and doesn't automatically immunise you against tribalism. To guard against that, you have to always make sure you know what you're talking about, not your group.

Enough of my rambling for now...