G.K. Chesterton is that kind of Catholic who Catholics like to quote in defense of their Catholicism more often than even the Bible. But it never seems to occur to those who do, just how much atheists agree with some of the things Chesterton wrote, but just not in the same way he meant it. For example, he once wrote:
"A Catholic is a person who has plucked up courage to face the incredible and inconceivable idea that something else may be wiser than he is."
For any good Catholic who reads this, this statement is interpreted as a compliment. It congratulates the Catholic, basically, for having the good sense to know "that something else may be wiser than he is," and all because he has the "courage" to admit such a "thing" exists; and that thing can only be God, and the Catholic brand of God at that - one that happens to always hate all of the same things that we do.
The Catholic denies that the very "thing" Chesterton is referring to is not a "God" who lives in heaven, but in humanity as a whole, in all of its diversity, under the idea that "none of us is as smart as all of us." For them, such a suggestion is simply atheism worshiping humanity and ultimately itself, even though it is the Christian who worships a "man" named Jesus as a God, and all the senses of beauty, proportion, and logic, which are celebrated by Christians as practically "divine," are actually things that are purely man made, even though most of reality so obviously fails to conform to such human "ideals."
So, out of the fear that he would be worshiping humanity if he were not a Catholic, Chesterton simply choose to ignore the possibility that "All of us" could be the actual source of the "something" he was referring to.
Democracy, then, born always out of some degree of a Liberalism that has always sought to unmoor itself from a devotion to rulers of one sense or another, is the wisdom that suggests that our morality, which time demonstrates operates as an open source code, is something humanity has all been working across time to improve.
And over that same time, no religions can rival monotheism's opposition to allowing those improvements, either in the name of an "ideal" in their own head called "God"- which they only continue to refuse to give a single shred of evidence for - or out of a philosophical necromancy with the past called Conservatism, (that has achieved near cult like status among so many 'Christian warriors" today).
It is religion, then, that confuses humanity's need to ground itself in laws and traditions with its own need to force humanity into serving those laws and traditions, even though Christ said "the law was made to serve man, not man to serve the law."
Instead, Christians "believe" that humanity must serve those laws and traditions first and foremost, for fear of angering a God, rather than learn from the mistakes of our parents and seek always to improve upon them, using science as a guide, as St. Augustine argued we must.
It's just that there are a number of "Christian warriors" out in America today, who seem so willing to treat anyone who refuses to accept their own special version of "Christian morality," preached so often by Duck Dynasty patriarch, Phil Robertson, like the "Christian warriors" who came over with Columbus treated the Native Americans, and the Crusader's treated the Arabs in Jerusalem in 1099.
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