Liberalism as a religion

Thanks to Carnival of the Vanities I was belatedly reading Strat and he refers to the cult of Che Guevera worshippers among those he calls liberals. He is baffled by the double standards that necessarily exist when a "do gooder" liberal concerned about, say, human rights at the same time sees the virtue of "a true totalitarian like Che Guevara" (later in the article):

I am completely baffled by Sundance liberals who puff up with justifiable discussion about stopping human rights abuses around the world and then, in the very next breath, extol the virtues of Che Guevara!

It is actually very easy to understand this duality of THINKING. It is similar to that found among the religious. I consider myself a believer in the Judeao-Christian tenet that God created the earth. However, I have no idea exactly how my "feeling" that God created the earth squares with other knowledge I have about evolutionary processes and the long, long development history of the earth. (Well actually, I do - but that is for another post). When you hold religious beliefs - you take them on faith, they don't always square with beliefs based on the real world.

So liberalism is like a religion in that it is based on tenets that don't necessarily have to fit well into real-world facts. Socialism and communism can be utopian (faith) - despite the fact that no real-world instance of communism has ever been anything but totalitarian. Popular revolutionaries can be heros of a noble cause (faith) - despite the fact that they are real-world cruel and despotic autocrats. This world and the other world just don't have to agree.

This makes it ever-so more understandable why liberalism can adopt secular humanism... It's simply a religion.