The commonplaces of language conceal the vacuity and strageness of many of our beliefs. President Bush regularly speaks in phrases appropriate to the fourteenth century, and no one seems inclined to find out what words like "God" and "Crusade" and "wonder-working power" mean to him. Not only do we still eat the offal of ancient world; we are positively smug about it. Garry Wills has noted that the Bush White House "is currently honeycombed with prayer groups and Bible study cells, like a white monastery".

The should trouble us as much as it troubles the fanatics of the Muslim world. We should be humbled, perhaps to the point of spontaneous genuflection, by the knowledge that the ancient Greeks began to lay their Olympian mythds to rest several hundred years before the birth of Christ, whereas we have the likes of Bill Boyers convening earnest gathering of scholars for the high purpose of determining just how the book of Genesis can be reconciled with life in the modern world. As we stride boldly into the middle ages, it does not seem out of place to wonder whether the myths that now saturate our discourse will wind up killing many of us, as the myths of others already have.

Two hundres years from now, when we are thriving global civilization beginning to colonize space, something about us will have changed: it must have; otherwise, we would have killed ourselves ten times over before this day ever dawned. We are fast approaching a time when the manufacture of weapons of mass destruction will be a trivial undertaking; the requisite information and technology are now seeming into every corner of our world. As the physicist Martin Rees points out, "We are entering an era where a single person ca, by one clandestine act, cause millions of deaths or render a complete city unihabitable for years...".

....

It is imperative that we begin speaking plainly about the absurdity of most of our religious beliefs. I fear, however, that the time has not yet arrived. I hope that we may one day think clearly enough about these matters to render our children incapable of killing themselves over their books. If not our children, then I suspect it could well be too late for us, because while it has never been difficult to meet your maker, in fifty years it will simply be too easy to drag everyone else along to meet him with you.

(Excerpt taken from the book "End of Faith" by Sam Harris.)