Very nice little column in the The Times (of London) on “The virus of religious moderation” by Sam Harris (author of The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason). Here’s some snippets, for a taste of it:
…one wonders just how vast and gratuitous a catastrophe would have to be to shake the world’s faith. The Holocaust did not do it… It seems that any fact, no matter how infelicitous, can be rendered compatible with religious faith… religion is as much a living spring of violence today as it was at any time in the past… religion has been the explicit cause of millions of deaths in the past decade… many people of goodwill now counsel “moderation” in religion…. Moderates do not want to kill anyone in the name of God, but they want us to keep using the word “God” as though we knew what we were talking about. And they don’t want anything too critical to be said about people who really believe in the God of their forefathers because tolerance, above all else, is sacred. To speak plainly and truthfully about the state of our world - to say, for instance, that the Bible and the Koran both contain mountains of life-destroying gibberish - is antithetical to tolerance as moderates conceive it. …If religious war is ever to become unthinkable for us, in the way that slavery and cannibalism seem poised to, it will be a matter of our having dispensed with the dogma of faith… Words like “God” and “Allah” must go the way of “Apollo” and “Baal” or they will unmake our world.
Go read it.