Canada

The Bill Maher who said Palestine Never Existed?

I'll bite.

Personally as someone who is fairly left-wing, I feel like that religious tolerance is acceptable since around the world we see what religious intolerance tends to lead to. With Islam, it just so happens that a lot of countries that are in crisis currently are countries where there are significant Muslim populations, and that fact can be owed heavily to U.S. interventionism among other things of course.

I grew up in an area where we had a heavy Muslim population. I'm non-religious myself, my direct family is non-religious as well, but I did also have a spot in my teen years where I was very much Christian. While I do have my thoughts on religion and it's place (or rather, lack of place in my personal opinion) in the world, I think forcing people to comply with being secular is just as bad as forcing secular people to be religious.

The path forward I believe is engagement between religions, as well as between the religious and non-religious. Even though I consider myself agnostic, I did go to an Iftar dinner at a synagogue the other day as a special interfaith dialogue event, and it went great. Allowing ourselves to learn about others also allows others to learn about us, to which people can be swayed towards secularism if we respectively bring up why we believe what we do and what we perceive as flaws in religions that we learn about.

This is part of the social justice reforms and movements over the last half century. Equity and diversity? Intersectionality? Tolerance? All that! When was the left atheist? During the Bolsheviks? Being against Christian Fascism in the US hardly makes the worldwide politics atheist!

It varies based on who, when, and where, but I would say that it was probably around the 1960s when the overall narrative departed from "opiates of the masses" to a more nuanced and holistic approach to social reforms. You still have your hardline MLs today too, who believe in class reduction, but that's hardly the dominant worldview