I was engaged in a debate recently with an evangelical who made the following claim: "Secular progressives are as much a religion as evangelicals." I ignored the obvious tu quoque and replied with the following:
Actually it is not. And I see that you have conflated two very different terms. If by a "secular progressive" you intended to mean either an "atheist" or "agnostic," you should know that atheism is not a religion; it is a lack of one. Secularism, conversely, is a completely different and unrelated concept; secularism doesn't rule out any religion and is compatible with all of them. The secularist simply says that the proper place for religion is in one's own home and church (or mosque, or synagogue, or temple, or mandir, or ashram, or agiary, or vihara, etc. etc.). Secularism, unlike atheism, is not making any claim whatsoever about god, goddess or gods; instead a secularist seeks merely to comment on the physical world that we all experience and must cohabitate - hopefully peacefully - regardless of our many, varied religious views.
The burden of proof is always on the person making the claim; religious claims are by nature extraordinary claims, and when viewed in totality are highly self-contradictory, each offering competing extraordinary claims that obviously cannot all be true. Depending on which brand of theist you ask, Heaven and Hell has each a completely different census. For example, Catholics are either the only real Christians (according to them) or else they're little better than devil worshippers (according to evangelicals). And this is just the two broadest categories within the definition of "Christian." In a truly open interreligious dialogue, the myriad competing extraordinary claims quickly multiply like rabbits, leaving us hapless to sort them all out. However, the convenience of faith is that the individual can be safely relied upon to believe with certainty that he or she is always on the right side of any given religious debate. There being no more objective means of settling cognitive dissonance arising from the dialogue of two or more competing, irreconcilable religious claims, the resulting clash of uncompromising belief much too often results in individuals of differing religious views experiencing an extreme difficulty of getting along peacefully (read the daily news from the self-described “Holy Land,” for example).
The difference is the secularist does not particularly care how other people believe so long as they treat one another at least a modicum of mutual respect, at least while engaged in the public forum. In a religious society, we must each believe as we are mandated to believe, wither at home or in public. And it is just as likely that I may be imposing my views upon you as you are to be imposing your views upon me. Conversely, in a secular society, in private, you are quite free to believe that I am bound to the everlasting fires of hell. But I am free to do likewise; or perhaps merely to ruminate about the transparent absurdity of such a sinister belief, given your unsupported assertion of the existence of an omnibenevolent god. Religion, conversely, is by its very nature self-righteous (I am saved and you're not, never mind that I cannot objectively demonstrate how I am morally superior to you). Religious zeal, even if weirdly misapplied to the cause of irreligion, and the secularist's desire to separate private belief from public display, are obviously not at all the same thing. Put plainly, the day that secularists, atheists or not, start banging your door, pressing a tract into your unexpectant hand, demanding a little of your time to tell you about skepticism and the redeeming power of the freedom to think on your own - or perhaps merely praying loudly in public, perhaps at a sporting event, beseeching the will of almighty natural law - is the day you will be able to cogently compare religion with a lack of religion.