[robertlagrant]

Fair enough. Separation of church and state has been progressing over the last thousand years. I surmised the only modern thing you could've been referring to was state atheism. Did you mean something different to both of those things?

> Especially when they were one despotic atheist state among countless despotic theocracies.

Not countless. They had plenty of democracies around them as well. And even if they hadn't, Communist China and Communist Russia's death tolls on their own populations make every other despot in history added up look like nothing.

[babypuncher]

Separation of church and state is exactly what I'm talking about. I consider it modern, even though the idea is now pretty old. Throughout most of human history, religion has been a key part of the power structure of most civilizations. In that context, the ideas brought forth and during the Age of Enlightenment are still very "modern".

There are also still many countries that have yet to adopt this ideal, and even within many developed democracies there are still forces that wish for us to regress.