Seven types of deficiency

You know those lines from Tom Lehrer's 'Folk Song Army'?

Though he [Franco] may have won all the battles,
We had all the good songs.

I think of them more or less whenever I see the religious having a go at those of us who aren't. We seem, at least, to have the better arguments. Consider this extraordinary piece of advocacy by Nicholas Buxton in today's Guardian. One:

It is a secularist article of faith to maintain that religion will soon be eliminated as a by-product of "progress".

Nope. If there are secularists who believe this, they are a subset of the set of all secularists. Two:

The atheist's first mistake,... like the fundamentalists they often object to, is that they completely miss the point. Faith has nothing to do with certainty: it is not a set of closed answers, but rather a series of open questions with which to engage.

Even if it is that, this shows no advantage in favour of (religious) faith vis-à-vis secularism, agnosticism and atheism, since each of these outlooks can also be held in the same spirit of 'open questions'. Three and four:

As it happens, I acknowledge the possibility that the universe may be meaningless and human life pointless. But this leads me to draw quite the opposite conclusion regarding religion. Rather than rejecting it - on the basis that it must be manifestly untrue for claiming that, in spite of all appearances to the contrary, life does in fact have a meaning and a purpose after all - I recognise that life's potential for meaninglessness requires us to give it a meaning it would not otherwise have. This is the function of religion... If we truly believed that life was meaningless, we would have no reason to get up in the morning - ultimately, the most rational thing to do would be to jump over the edge of a cliff. In other words, religion is our way of making sense out of nonsense, necessary precisely because life, in and of itself, may well be meaningless. To be religious is simply our way of expressing what it means to be human...

There is a logical elision here: from 'giving it [life] a meaning' to 'religion is our way of making sense [etc.]', as if religious meaning is the only viable meaning one can give to life or have for getting up in the morning. The final claim in the passage suggests, contrary to observable fact, that there are no non-religious humans. Five:

The second mistake secularists make is that they fail to acknowledge the foundational assumptions - "dogmas" by any other name - underpinning their own worldview. As John Gray has argued in Heresies, many secular ideologies, such as Marxism and liberal humanism, are essentially theological narratives in structure and function, though arguably less coherent.

They may be that but they needn't be: there are versions of both outlooks with a non-theological structure. Six:

When it comes to ethics, secularists are forced to assert that we behave morally and responsibly because it is "human nature" to do so. But what do they mean by human nature? This abstract notion is no different from a religious absolute...

Not necessarily. It can be treated as just a matter for empirical investigation and research - covering those features which members of our species have in common. Seven:

Secularism has a more worrying implication, however. Without religion's insight that human beings are essentially flawed, we lose all checks on our hubristic pride...

That human beings are 'flawed' is not the insight of religion alone. You need a certain amount of common experience and the freedom from dogmas to the contrary to be able to grasp this truth. A knowledge of some part of the world's literature also helps.