The more religious a nation becomes the more radical it is. How many times do we need to experience this and learn about it before we wake up to it? To be a religious nation is by default to be a divisive nation that causes internal and external conflict. It can be no other way, because religion is exclusionary. And the strangest claim to righteousness is based on nothing more than a belief — not knowledge, but belief.

I minored in history and if memory serves me right about the earliest waves of immigration to the Americas, there were several Christian factions unable to get along, and those coming to these shores were doing so because they were unable to practice their beliefs in Europe. So I refer back to my previous comment: religion is divisive and exclusionary.

The so-called Dark Ages, if at all existent, is caused by beliefs to the exclusion of other beliefs; in other words, intolerance. We see this every single day in the free world. And in the un-free world we see this all across the Muslim nations where religious zealots rule with an iron fist. Group think is quite dangerous in too many ways to count.

Good on you, Dr Cain, for parsing out this mess, despite the fact that we are all being carried away by a tide of insanity brought on not by paganism, atheism, or agnosticism, but by belief systems that have caused the erosion of even a pretense of ethics and morality that kept things relatively safe and progressive for a while.