Polycarp,

I think you're being a little one-eyed.

1/ "The religion is a dark manifestation of evil" or
2/ "The religion is a shining light of tolerance and peace" or
3/ "The majority of it's followers do not actually follow its
teachings"

I think you could apply these three points to the bible as well. At the end of the day it's all in the interpretation, and whose interpretation you feel is correct. That's why Christianity has so many different branches and has had similar problems to those you are suggesting with Islam. People have used it as a justification for war, for repressive government etc, as well as a tool for carrying many wonderful acts of charity and compassion.

Religion is far more than an idea. It's a tax evasion scheme designed to take money from it's followers and make them into political servants. You cannot question religious teachings, especially those most powerful, if you yourself are religious. This is because that act deprives you of membership to that religion or makes you an outcast, which both cause the person doing so to lose influence.

I agree with the first sentence, however there are no "great religions" just widespread superstitions of various degrees of lunacy and danger to civilised society. What other democracies are there, apart from the Western model?

Jon J
>> This is the problem with religion: once you grant people a licence to behave irrationally you can no longer safely criticise or bring sanctions against them for doing so. Nor can you consistently recommend logical decision making and rational behaviour. <<

This is the problem with secularism: once you grant people a licence to behave immorally you can no longer safely criticise or bring sanctions against them for doing so. Nor can you consistently recommend ethical decision making and moral behaviour.

Unless The West stops tearing itself apart by statements like these - Christians are irrational, atheists are immoral - its demise, not only in the demographic but also in the cultural meaning of the word, seems to be inevitable.

Sells,
I agree, except that interfaith dialogue is to my understanding exactly "trying to find points of agreement between Islam and Christianity" even if there are only few, certainly much fewer than in the ecumenical dialogue between various versions of Christianity. Nevertheless, I think both are worthwhile exercises in tolerance, if nothing else.

The same as Enlightenment was a worthwhile correction to Christianity, as much as it was repudiated at the beginning (and still is by some zealots). It could become an impediment to the cultural acceptability to non-Western civilisations, only if/when this correction turns itself into an "Ersatzreligion" on its own.

George,

"This is the problem with secularism: once you grant people a licence to behave immorally you can no longer safely criticise or bring sanctions against them for doing so. Nor can you consistently recommend ethical decision making and moral behaviour."

What is 'immoral behaviour' exactly? Is it acting against the dictates of your god? But how do we know you have the right god, when there are so many to choose from? Secular rationalists try and act in a way that is empirically likely to produce the desired results. The result is science, civilisation, tolerance and billions of people lifted out of poverty and sickness. Sometimes we get it wrong, so we make a note of it and don't do it that way again. Christians pray, and it doesn't work, so they DO do it again. And again. And again. Isn't that the definition of neurosis?

Jon J,

You object to a sentence that I do not necessarily agree with, it is just a paraphrase of your own sweeping statement.

You also pose a few questions that seem to suggest that you have a somewhat simplified understanding of philosophy of religion and philosophy of science, and what these two realms of human understanding and experience are all about.

One needs to know some non-trivial mathematics to be humble about what science, notably physics and cosmology, can or cannot understand, and probably one needs to have had some kind “limit experience“ (as psychologists call it) to be humble about what religion can or cannot provide.

If you are seriously interested in these kind of questions may I suggest for instance a recent paper, easy to understand (unfortunately, not freely available on the Web) that I also recommended on another thread a couple of days ago: “Variety in Mysticism and Parallels with Science” (Theology and Science, Vol. 6, No. 3, 2008) by V.V. Raman, a Hindu physicist.