I share your dislike for dogma, LEJ. I think spirituality is usually engaged in moving away from that and you are quite right that the fundamentalists react stridently against such broadening of minds. They are afraid of change. So are most atheists and conventional people of all kinds. People in general, religious or not, tend to resist change.

That's why Jesus got crucified. The fundamentalist-minded and more powerful people in his time were strenuously resisting change.

It the case of Taoism and Buddhism and the more advanced levels of Hinduism, it appears to me that one has spiritual philosophies primarily based ON rationality.

I believe it is mainly the Big 3 from the Middle East: Judeo-Christian-Muslim that you are concerned about when you give examples of fundamentalism. Of those three, they all have much good in them, and they all have some really serious problem areas too. They have conducted themselves in an aggressive manner.

But those Big 3 do not comprise the totality of "religion". There is Native American religion, many Asian religions, the Baha'i faith, the Janes, the Sikhs, the Tibetans, and on and on and on.

The best part of all of them seek to bring forth the finest virtues of humankind. That's why I respect all of them.

Peace: It is the job of spiritual leaders, whether shamans or priests, to instruct people in higher moral concepts and basic virtues, is it not? All primitive peoples appear to have been quite religious or mystical. It seems to be instinctive in humans. I am suggesting that that is where our moral structures, indeed our whole body of law and ethics, sprang from:   The mystical/religious view of life. The instinct in people that there was a greater purpose at hand than mere survival. After all, no one DOES survive in the end! Do they? That made people look beyond survival, and that made them truly human. Animals don't think ("I'm going to die one day"), they just deal with the present. Humans look beyond it. That leads directly to the deeper questions upon which religion and philosophy arose. It is only in an era where people fell into a deep cynicism about man's existence that "modern" philosophers could go so far astray as to come up with the notion that we are just...an accident...in an existence that really HAS no meaning. That is the existential despair of the modern age, when the obviously archaic irrationality of the old churches, combined with the emergence of practical science and industry to produce the new faith (in science and industry alone) that would dominate society and rob man of his soul...and make him just a scrambling little short-lived primate in a world that was ultimately meaningless and cruel. That's a recipe for insanity at least as bad as the worst of religious fundamentalism. That kind of insanity invents atomic bombs, H-bombs, germ warfare, poison gas, and other technological horrors not yet seen or perhaps even guessed at. That's what happens when you decide there is no God, no higher purpose, no sacred meaning behind life, nothing to do but "win" the brief and pointless game of social dominance.

That's what happened when people turned science into a God. It's not a god, it's just a useful method for observing, categorizing, and manipulating the material phenomena of life. Life is about far more than science can ever possibly deliver. People gave up one unreal God for another when they dumped archaic religion in favour of souless materialism. The worst result of that was the horrific excesses of Communism under such leaders as Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot. There you had societies which truly believed that man DOES live by bread alone! And look what they did. They murdered millions in the name of rationality and progress.

Marx called religion the "opiate of the masses". Ha! He had not yet seen television nor had he seen a Walmart...or a Nintendo set in action with a "shooter" game on it.

We ARE living in Orwell's 1984, my friend. It just took 20 years longer to get here. The marketing and media $ySStem IS God in our version of 1984. That's what happens when people functionally lose contact with their own soul and spirit...because they don't even know they have a soul and spirit. All they know is money, material, desire, frustration, loneliness, excitement, and addiction.

That's a way bigger problem than Mr Dawkins has yet seen fit to address in his puny side issue about religion.