This means, for starters, the cessation, in public and private life, of respect for all faiths, including Islam. Nonbelievers should stop pussyfooting around the Abrahamic creeds’ manifold absurdities – including, inter alia, a metaphysical despot siring a kid with a hapless earthling virgin, the notion that our morality derives from a message supernaturally chiseled on slabs of stone, and that a member of our species soared heavenward on a winged ungulate – and let believers know what they really think, recalling, always, that they are helping them become the atheists of tomorrow.
Jeffrey Taylor, Salon
I’ve been insisting for as long as I can remember that most of the turmoil in the world arises from a sort of fundamentalist rebellion against modernity, and that there is no answer to it but the end of deference — the refusal to accord religion any privilege. That is necessary as a matter of survival, for religious fanaticism is an existential threat both domestically and internationally, and it is inherently right; the Abrahamic faiths are false, one and all, and an inexhaustible engine of human misery. Enough.