I for one am not buying your (circular) arguments, John Hardly.

First off, I would disagree that to be secularist, agnostic, or atheist, is simply a reactionary stance to religion. I'm really not concerned with where I go when I die. I'm pretty into the whole living in the here and now thing. I know I won't live forever. This adoration of the royal/celebrity dead seems to me to be a need for people to believe they WILL live forever somewhere else, though.

Second, no one holds a candle to the religious fundamentalists in terms of zealotry. Nobody. And certainly not Bill Moyers, one of the most soft-spoken intellectuals around.