He is the author of The Secular Conscience: Why Belief Belongs in Public Life,[3] The Future of Blasphemy: Speaking of the Sacred in an Age of Human Rights,[4] and a 2006 New York Times op-ed entitled "Believing in Doubt," which criticized the ethical views of Pope Benedict.
[9] As a young teenager, Dacey became an evangelical Protestant,[10] playing in the Christian alternative rock band, The Swoon, which in 1990 released an EP produced by Charlie Peacock.
[11] While studying music and philosophy at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, Dacey lost his religion, explaining later that "God stopped returning my calls.
"[22] Aspects of Dacey's position have been embraced by religious thinkers such as Richard John Neuhaus,[23] Andrew Sullivan,[24] and Rabbi Marc Gellman[25] as well as secular figures such as Sam Harris, Susan Jacoby, Ibn Warraq, and Peter Singer.
"[2] This confused thinking, according to Dacey, leads to "the conclusion that controversial religious and moral claims are beyond evaluation by reason, truth and objective standards of right and wrong, and should therefore be precluded from public conversation.
"[30] By precluding conscience from public debate, secular liberals had hoped to prevent believers from introducing sectarian beliefs into politics.
He has analogized religious minorities in Muslim-majority countries to dissident Protestant sects such as the Anabaptists who constructed theological arguments for toleration and church-state separation in early modern Europe.
"[37] The conference issued the St. Petersburg Declaration, a statement of principles endorsed by Mithal al-Alusi, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and Shahriar Kabir among others.
[38] Reviewing The Secular Conscience for Asharq Al-Awsat, Amir Taheri wrote, "[m]aking this book available in Arabic, Persian, Turkish and other languages of the Muslim nations would be an immense service.
"[39] As a representative of civil society organizations at the United Nations, Dacey has participated in lobbying at Human Rights Council in Geneva.
The thing that's frustrating for these groups is that while they can record on their Macbook in their basement and share the music with their friends, the government and other powerful forces in society—they control the public spaces.
[51] In 2004 he argued in Skeptical Inquirer that "science is making us more ignorant" by unsettling received cultural understandings of the self, meaning, and morality without replacing them with coherent alternatives.
[62] The Guardian compared Dacey to the British conservative author Melanie Phillips and associated him with the idea that "our civilization depends on the freedom to publish racist cartoons.