Are you for or against the separation of church and state?

[Fidel_Castronaut]

Secular societies that were bad = societies that were bad because they were secular
if
Religious societies that are bad = religious societies that were bad because they were religious

This is false equivalence; theocratic and secular societies are not comparable by any stretch of the imagination.

Do you know what secularism actually is, how and why it was infused into the various European political systems, and what it's main precepts are?

You can be a religious fundamentalist and still be a secularist, in fact, owing to demographics, when seclarism was implemented in reformist states in the 17th century, almost all secularists were most likely Protestant Christians. Secularism doesn't impose a moral or utilitarian constraint on the behavior of the government in power (unlike, say, a theocratic one whose constitution is developed on religious premises); it merely asks for a separation of church and state (among other things, none of which could be credibly argued to justify an attrocity as there is no moral or transcendental foundation behind it!).

I recommended this article by Daniel Philpott for a grounding in the 17th century political context and what the peace of Westphalia actually entailed, and how secularism is actually the only guarantee of religious freedom aside utopia:

http://journals.cambridge.org/action/dis...id=7592472