Secularism/Skepticism what are they and what they mean to me

I noticed that I throw around the terms Secularism and Skepticism around without really explaining their meaning (both in the general sense and also what they mean to me). I'm sure this must be annoying for some of you who are reading this blog.

Secularism is the view that a government should not be swayed by religious arguments, use personal beliefs of the members when writing laws, nor should they show any favouritism towards any denomination whether by directly funding a state religion, by mentioning a state religion in laws or the constitution of the country or mentioning personal beliefs of the individuals when representing the state in public speeches or press conferences.

The most common knee-jerk reaction by the very religious upon hearing this is that it means "banning religion or religious expression" which isn't true, it means that the state must be neutral in matters of religion and mustn't show favouritism towards one or the other. Private citizens still have to right to religious beliefs and public gatherings expressing such beliefs , such as going to church, or a mosque etc. as are the members of the government in their private time as private citizens, it just means the government cannot hold a public prayer meeting because then they would have to invite representatives from every religion in the state to conduct prayers for their respective religions. This would be fair but a logistics nightmare so the only other 100% fair option is to simply stay out of the religious argument and if church X want to do a public prayer or fundraiser they are perfectly entitled to do so but won't be getting state funding or a state endorsement.

Skepticism is a movement that mostly (but not always) leads to Atheism but they aren't interchangeable terms or necessarily directly related (but tend to be). Skeptics tend to put quite a lot of weighting, on whether something is demonstrably true or not, on scientific evidence or the general consensus of the scientific community. The burden of proof lies with the individual or individuals who make an assertion and then the cogs of the scientific method and peer review are then set in motion. Some examples of things that have, and continue to fail the burden of proof are Homeopathy, Astrology, Psychics and any claims of a supernatural deity.

To me my Atheism is a natural progression of my scepticism as all Atheism means is "not-theism" or the rejection of the theistic claims. You might ask why would I go to these Atheist Ireland or Skeptics in the pub meetings? Do all we discuss is how we don't believe in god? no not at all, because that would be a bit stupid and awkward. We all have something in common just like if you were to join a book club or a photo club or a travel club, except these are social meetups and a chance to make friends with regular attendees, in fact I'd say it's better than these other clubs because there is simply no restrictions on what people discuss. You could wander from one conversation about what's in the cinema at the moment to whether cloud computing is a viable future to US politics (or even Irish politics) and that is the reason why I try to make events when I can.