Ah, OK, let me explain my moth to the flame response, in your terms (not explain in your terms, Ima gonna splain in my own terms, but the moth-flame analogy was yours). I see it more as a rearguard action, here in these By God Yewnited States.

You see, what I consider the worst enemy of humanity is the *harm* that is done under the umbrella of religion. Cannot recall who said that for good people to do evil takes religion, but what I think is closer to another unattributably (by my memory, try Google if you're curious) quote, that people who will believe absurdities will commit atrocities.

I *know* that Hitler wasn't a statistically normal Catholic, but without Christianity (and Islam but irrelevently here) already teaching to hate Jews, would almost my entire maternal extended family have been mass-murdered only for their *perceived* beliefs (their family was actually secular, candles on the Christmas tree and all), along with tens of millions of other people, so effortlessly?

I repeat: what I fight is the harm.

I know the terrorists who've been slaughtering Americans wholesale overseas since at least Nov. 1979, when some teenagers took over the Tehran embassy trying to commit martyrdom/suicide but the Marines couldn't believe what was happening, through the bombing of all those planes and embassies *long* before Sep. 11 2001, and who've been doing it ever since with no end in sight, weren't average moslems either.

In fact, the individual ones who blew up the Beirut embassy (the first time), killing my pacifist atheist WWII-consciencious-objector father along with 60-odd others, mere weeks before my college graduation ceremony, were Ayatollah-loving, Syrian-trained, moslem Lebanese.

I don't have a problem with Iranians, or with Syrians, or with Lebanese, but without their faith and Dad's *perceived* Christianity, that bombing, the first of its kind, would not have been *motivatable* (at least, not nearly as easily). (As an American it was always assumed Dad was a Protestant, and in fact his family's Quaker -- in fact one of our most beloved cousins, Cousin Mather (Lippincott) just died, you may have heard of him -- nonetheless Dad he always answered "none" to the question of what his religion was.

And where I grew up, in the largest city of barely-post-colonial west Africa, there were roughly equal proportions of (I didn't know they were Sunni but they were) Moslems, Catholics, and animists who didn't consider their various beliefs to be a religion per se, and I had some Jewish relatives. So at home, the moslems would all pray on their little carpets, all at the same time, no matter what else was going on like they were your taxi driver, and on Sundays the christians ate their god. Then when we touristed the girls all covered their heads for mosques, males covered theirs for synagogues if we were in Europe, and throughout the animists could believe, and argue about since there were so many different tribes, way more than 6 impossible things before breakfast. So basically you end up seeing that all these various beliefs are equally worthy of respect, to wit, equally silly, you might say... if it weren't for the harm they can do.

I was occasionally asked "est-tu croyante" meaning kind of Do you believe, but No was always an acceptable answer. I miss *that* kind of tolerance...

Again, what I fight is the harm that only belief in the completely unverifiable can do with the minds of the credulous. I do it mostly to protect the minds of the credulous, in a "teach a man to fish" kind of philosophy, since by getting people to think for themselves means you end up with people who won't be led into incredible nastininess *without good reason* - and "My shaman/priest/imam/rabbi is better than your SPIR" wouldn't be good enough.

Faith, defined by Mark Twain as believing what you know ain't so or something similar, can do so much harm when harnessed by bigots to the believers, that many of us, not only those whose mom happens to be a Holocaust survivor and whose father was blown up by islamic terrorists, have stopped putting up with the whole shebang. I work on one smalal piece of the puzzle: getting really smart people to question their rationales, and to know how to think critically (which is why I so enjoy teaching experimental methodology, but wow, this is getting to be a really long post so I'll shut up now...)

It's The Harm.