How about irradicating religion from the human psyche. Any one that provides a cure for the God Delusion deserves a Noble prize.

A good post Ameer.

I hope that you are correct in your asssessment. I also entirely agree that the availability of information via the Internet is going of make any of these totalatarian isms highly vulnerable to never ending questionining and analysis.

Perhaps it might also lead to the followers of Islam being a bit more productive to the betterment of Human kind.

Their current ranking in terms of Nobel Prizes, patents, literature music, arts and sciences is abysmal. Even their hated enemy the Israelis produce more of the above than the whole 1.4bn muslims by a factor of at least times 30. So there is a long way to go.

I would love to believe this article but brutality - beheading of anyone whether moslem or whatever when they are seen as a threat to the psychopaths or hard-liners - even to the forcing or allowing a twelve year old boy to decapitate an adult "enemy?". The koran demands the death of pigs and monkeys who are mainly Christians/Jews but can include any unbeliever.Then there's another core moslem teaching of- 'taqiyya' this allows/commands moslems to lie to unbelievers so as to placate them as to the true aims of islam. Then there is 'hudna' this is a lot like taqiyya it is a just a temporary truce though the other signers of this truce are told that it is a genuine long lasting truce. But in the eyes of moslems it is a truce to allow moslems to gather strength and when strong enough they resume their attack. (arafat and today's palestinians/syrians et al use this)Then of course the mindless animalistic terrorists and these sub-humans are in all nations where moslems are found including Western nations. There are many many more worries but the last is moslems hatred of democracy and their drive to institute brutal savage barbaric sharia law and a rule by imams in the place of democracy. Moslems will have a hard road ahead to show that they are really for change as every day on TV or in the press we see moslem barbarism and savagery in one form or another. Regards, numbat

Over how many dead bodies? I hope yours is one of the first. Religion is man's worst illness, a plague for the weak minded. Who dominate by numbers.

A very enlightening thesis, Ameer, which one hopes makes clear to many of our contributors, the story many so-called fruitcake academics are trying to get across that us Westerners do owe much to what is known as the early Middle East intelligentsia, comprising Mesopotamia, Egypt, and what is most important Persia, now Iran.

It is still not accepted by our majority, even when told it was the invasion of the said Middle East by Alexander the Great, which besides conquest left the wonderful message of not only scientific reasoning to the Middle but also the philosophical reasoning that is so much needed today to tone down the faith not only of Islam, but also much of our Western Christianity.

Proof of the wonderment is the story of the Great Library of Alexander, later built in honour to Alexander who had also been a pupil of Aristotle, and which according to historians, housed more Jewish pupils than of any other religion. Some philosophers even suggest that even the young Jesus may have studied there.

One could go on about the naughty French monk Peter Abelard carrying the message of academic to the West, later picked up by Thomas Aquinas, who as well as accepting the need for reason as a quietener for faith, was also later made a Saint.

Much much more there is, for people who will humble themselves to listen, because such carries the message both sides so much need today.

Incidently, it was the English philosopher John Locke who made clear, that without reason, religous faith will never make sense. Also Locke still stayed a declared Christain.

The question that I wish to address is how to eradicate religion. Let me appeal to the concept of memes. A term introduced by Richard Dawkins. A meme is a cultural entity, a piece of information that passes from one human mind to another and in the process is associated with other memes and may be passed on as a group or a meme family.

A religion, a scientific theory, a song, an opera, a story and so on can all be considered as meme families. There is a clear analogy here with say a virus which is an assembly of genes. Some viruses such as small pox are highly infectious, and are considered to rank as highly dangerous pathogens. Likewise religion can considered as a pathogenic collection of memes.

Smallpox was eliminated by a world wide program of vaccination. By analogy the tools required to vaccinate against religion are satire, humour, ridicule and intense lampooning. Sometimes in biology the immune system when over stimulated reacts, this is called anaphylaxis. Likewise over stimulated religious zealots too may react badly. The equivalents of anaphylaxis are known in the religious sphere as heresy and/or apostasy. The responses of the zealots are many, including censorship, book burning, human barbequing and death by stoning. The day of the “Auto de fe” must surely have provided dramatic public entertainment, except of course for the victim.

Public health officials sometimes may have to persist in sensible and well thought out measures in spite of a local “set back” or occasional adverse reaction. So too we must persist with the program of religious eradication. At the very least we can aim to control and contain the infestation