As someone troubled by the implications of religious dogmatism and the fundamentalism of many believers today, I offer thanks to you and Dawkins and Harris for challenging the tenets of biblical literalism.

That interreligious conflict has been a profound blight on human history, and that an overly rigid reading of scriptures has contributed to this phenomena in recent centuries can not be argued; but what you do not address in your debates or books is that religion is just a word we have always used for a social organizing principle and an individual developmental framework - something to bond communities together and a system of rituals, practices, and processes by which individuals develop through the stages of life. These are needs addressed by religion, clothed in allegories and myths, but also inculcated as practical living processes.

Marx may have called religion the opiate of the people, but he also acknowledged that you can't do away with it unless you address the framework of society that caused the need for it in the first place (in his view, capitalism - in others' human nature, the innate need to balance community and autonomy). Marx offered socialism as his cure-all, but obviously this has not cured-all...I just wonder kind of debate you and your Bright-brothers would offer up against a Karen Armstrong, say, or the late Joseph Campbell, scholars who recognized the pedagogical, pragmatic, and emotionally nourishing qualities of religious life, emphasizing, in the former case, the practice of "spiritual technologies" like the Golden Rule, inner contemplation, and universal compassion.

I think you lose a lot of credence when you focus only on the mythical nature of...myths, and do not recognize that you are addressing a symptom of the degeneration of religious systems rather than honoring what is at the core of their reason for being - an evolutionary impulse towards greater stages of moral development and collective community.

I think the whole of fundamentalist atheistdom, including Hitchens, would dance in streets when we get to the point where religion can be discussed in the terms in which you have layed out. Because I really think at the end of the day that is the nut of their complaint. It is just those things you stated, and only those things. But what it is not is literally true in any way. I really think the only problem they have is with people who literally think there is a being living in the sky or in some "supernatural" plane of existance and that they somehow have a direct line of communication to interpret the whims of this being, and exercise its will here on Earth.

Nice post, Dervish.

It seems that we create myth and allegory outside of religion, too. From movies 'based on a true story', to the pages of US Weekly, to the heroes and villains of the nightly newscast, we create caricatures for fodder in our debates over morality and purpose.

Although these caricatures do influence our politics, they are not unto themselves a political system (at least for us - we have no equivalent to the 'Dear Leader'). For me, it is when the myth and allegory become the foundation of a political systems that they become frightening. Which is where churches come in.

If state governments define their territories physically, and religions define them ideologically, we're stuck with overlapping political systems whose conflict is both philosophical (legitimacy through common consent, legitimacy through self-declared divine appointment) and inevitably practical (how can people who gather each week to understand how to live their lives not take that understanding to the ballot box?).

As the battles between local, state and Federal authority go on, so do the battles between territorial and ideological government. Territorial government dominated in the USSR. Ideological government threatens in Afghanistan and Pakistan. And, to a much lesser extent, here, notwithstanding Hitchens' claims about growth among the unchurched.

Your comment conflates 'religion' w/ 'culture.' Not all cultures are religious, or "clothed in allegories and myths" that people treat as non-fiction. Examples of non-religious cultures: secular Judaism; the culture of any secular institution (e.g. your local public university, Google). Non-religious cultures may include myths, but the myths would be treated as fiction; so, the cultures would not be considered religious.

Critics like Hitchens are critiquing properties that make a culture seem religious and authoritarian (screwjack2008 and cornholio discuss some such properties). Such critics also criticize non-religious authoritarian cultures, like the cult of Mao.

If you feel that Hitchens should "honor" religion for "what is at the core of their reason for being", then you implicitly assume that cultures should be religious. It is this very assumption that people like Hitchens are challenging. They argue that secular, democratic cultures are better for humans (and possibly other beings) than religious cultures, esp. religious, authoritarian cultures.