My response to a recent article in the Huffington Post about the recent tragedy in Fort Hood:
"If you can get people to believe in absurdities, you can get them to commit atrocities" - Voltaire.

How tragically appropriate these words are today. We need to take this as a lesson that no teaching is above the law of reason. All doctrines held as sacred must be accountable to reality, and we cannot afford to allow the fraudulent teaching of imaginary gods and monsters as literal truth in spite of overwhelming physical evidence against.
The problem is fairly straight forward, in spite of all these mental gymnastics folks are trying to do to justify religion. What it comes down to is the idea of taking instruction from an imaginary being (aka "god") and trying to use ancient books full of made up gobbledy gook instead of reasoned, rational thinking to approach life and wisdom. The only reason this doesnt happen more often is because most people are able to ignore 99% of what these ancient texts teach, and focus on what tiny bits of them actually align with common sense. (the beattitudes in the new testament for example). I cant speak for the Koran, but the Bible is full of violence, anti-humanism, slavery, misogyny, elitism, racism, anti science and learning, all in the name of its twisted version of "justice". Anyone wishing to embrace the entire bible really must become an insane fundamentalist bent on the ultimate destruction of everyone who does not believe like they do. We can keep spouting "tolerance" etc, but in the end, we keep ignoring the elephant in the room, and that is the unwillingness to hold religious teachings to the same standards of accountability and reason we hold all other knowledge. We have legally outlawed slander, libel, and fraud with this approach without stepping on anyone's individual rights. Religion needs to be put in the same category as these things and we need to cease teaching this violent fantasy as if it is actually, literally true. That constitutes fraud, and you can probably trace almost every atrocity committed in the past 2000 years to this root cause.

I am not a fundamentalist atheist, I am merely pointing out that all teaching and knowledge needs to be held to the same standard, the same scrutiny, and nothing is "sacred" or above the law of reason. Once we do that, we will see this kind of attack become a thing of the past. Sorry if I offend, but it is the truth and most of us know it.