There is a conflict, for those who care to think, between this post by Brad DeLong, and this one commenting on Atrios and his critics.
A religious argument for moral behavior -in the context of democracy- if it is to mean anything must operate on the assumption of a need for positive actions or decisions above and beyond those required by law. Delong's liberal/realist argument is based on something else entirely: an assumption of the inevitability and moral, intellectual and economic value of honest greed.
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Terry Eagleton on Edward Said, this week in The Nation (print only):
If Said can sometimes sound like a liberal humanist, he can at times sound rather more discomfortingly like a radical humanist; but he never sounds much like a socialist, in the style of Raymond Williams and E.P. Thompson. Like both these thinkers, however, he never really takes issue with the suspiciously sanguine aspects of humanism. Is there something in a generous faith in human capacities that is also callow and repressive? Does humanism thrive on a certain well-groomed blindness to our apparently inexhaustible ability to be morally obscene?

I didn't know until reccently that Eagleton came out of the Catholic left.
I'm not much on religion but I'm also not much of a liberal. And there's something to be said for the critique of- directed at- freedom by religious thought. But the religious thought I'm refering to of course is conservative or leftist, not liberal.
Liberal religious thought- as both religion and thought- is mostly crap.