The world is witnessing a huge explosion of religious conversion and growth, and Christianity is growing faster than any other religion. Nietzsche's proclamation "God is dead" is now proven false. Nietzsche is dead. The ranks of the unbelievers are shrinking as a proportion of the world's population. Secularism has lost its identification with progress and modernity, and consequently it has lost the main source of its appeal. God is very much alive, and His future prospects look to be excellent. This is the biggest comeback story of the twenty-first century.
If you've been reading one of the atheist bestsellers like The God Delusion or God Is Not Great, you may have missed this news. If God is back, you may wonder, why don't I see it? The reason is that many of us live in the wrong neighborhood. "Visit a church at random next Sunday," Brent Staples writes in the New York Times, "and you will probably encounter a few dozen people sprinkled thinly over a sanctuary that was built to accommodate hundreds or even thousands." Yes, I've seen the "empty pews and white-haired congregants" that Staples describes. But then, Staples lives in
Of course my neighbors do not think of themselves as atheist. Very few of them belong to atheist organizations or subscribe to atheist literature. Some of them who are highly educated like to think of themselves as agnostic: they haven't made up their minds because the evidence simply isn't in yet. Others even consider themselves Christian, either because they were born that way, or because they attend church occasionally. The distinguishing characteristic of these people is that they live as if God did not exist. God makes no difference in their lives. This is "practical atheism." We all know people like this. Some of us hardly know anyone not like this. And sometimes we live this way ourselves.
If we live in the wrong neighborhood, we risk missing the most important development of our time-the global revival of religion. It's happening on every continent. In my native country of , Hinduism is undergoing a resurgence. So is Islam. As I have written about Islamic radicalism and terrorism I am often asked,"When will the Muslims understand the importance of secularism? When will we see an Islamic Reformation?" My answer is that Muslims will never understand the importance of secularism. Nor do they need to, because as we shall see, secularism is increasingly unimportant as a global phenomenon.
Moreover, Islam is in the middle of a reformation. We see a resurgence of Muslim piety not just in the Middle East but also elsewhere. At one time Turkey provided a model of Islamic secularism, but not any longer. No Muslim country is going the way of Turkey, and in recent years even has stopped going the way of Turkey.
Some Western analysts describe the religious revivals around the world in terms of the growth of "fundamentalism." This is the fallacy of ethnocentrism, of seeing the world through the lens of our own homegrown prejudices. Remember that "fundamentalism" is a term drawn from Protestant Christianity. It is an American coinage that refers to a group of early twentieth century Protestant activists who organized against Darwinian evolution and who championed the literal reading of the Bible. Fundamentalism is a meaningless term outside this context.
There are, of course, Hindu militants and Islamic radicals, and they are indeed a menace to the world. But the growth of religious militancy and the growth of religion are very different. One may seek to benefit from the other, but the two should not be confused. The resurgence I am talking about is the global revitalization of traditional religion. This means traditional Hinduism, traditional Islam, and traditional Christianity. By "traditional" I mean religion as it has been understood and practiced over the centuries. This is the type of religion that is booming.
Traditional religion is the mainstream, but it is not the only form in which religion appears today. There is also liberal religion. Here in the West, especially among the intelligentsia, we meet liberal Christians. Some of them have assumed a kind of reverse mission: instead of being the church's missionaries to the world, they have become the world's missionaries to the church. They devote their moral energies to trying to make the church more democratic, to assure equal rights for women, and so on. A small but influential segment of liberal Christianity rejects all the central doctrines of Christianity. H.Richard Niebuhr famously summed up their credo: "A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross."
I have met liberal Christians who are good and sincere people. But their version of Christianity is full intellectual withdrawal, and it is also becoming less relevant. The liberal churches are losing members in droves. Once these churches welcomed one in six Americans; now they see one in 30. In 1960 the Presbyterian church had 4.2 million members; now it has 2.4 million. The Episcopal church had 3.4 million; now it has 2.3 million. The United Church of Christ had 2.2 million; now it has 1.3 million. Traditional Christians who remain within liberal churches become increasingly alienated.
Unfortunately the central themes of some of the liberal churches have become indistinguishable from those of the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Organization for Women, the gay rights cause, and the environmental conservation movement. The traditional churches, not the liberal churches, are growing in America. In 1960, for example, the churches affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention had 8.7 million members. Now they have 16.4 million.
The growth of traditional religion and the decline of liberal religion pose a serious problem for a conventional way of understanding religious trends. This is the way of secularization-the idea that as an inevitable result of science, reason, progress, and modernization, the West will continue to grow more secular, followed by the rest of the world. The more confident exponents of secularization believe, as Peter Berger puts it, that"eventually Iranian mullahs, Pentecostal preachers, and Tibetan lamas will all think and act like professors of literature at American universities."
For a good part of the last century, this secularization narrative seemed plausible. Secular people believed it and reveled in it, while religious people believed it and bemoaned it. But now we see a problem with the thesis. If secularization were proceeding inexorably, then religious people should be getting less religious, and so conservative churches should be shrinking and liberal churches growing. In fact, the opposite is the case.
Some scholars put this down to "backlash" against secularization, but this only begs the question: what is causing this backlash? The secularization thesis was based on the presumption that science and modernity would satisfy the impulses and needs once met by religion. But a rebellion against secularization suggests that perhaps important needs are still unmet, and so people are seeking a revival of religion-perhaps in a new form-to address their specific concerns within a secular society.
Of course the secularization thesis is not entirely invalid. In Europe, Australia, and Canada, religion has been expunged from the cultural mainstream. It has been largely relegated to a tourist phenomenon; when you go to Chartes and Canterbury , the guides tell you about architecture and art history and little about what the people who created those masterpieces actually believed. According to the European Values Survey, regular churchgoers number, depending on the country, between 10 and 25 percent of the population. Only one in five Europeans says that religion is important in life. Czech president Vaclav Havel has rightly described Europe as "the first atheistic civilization in the history of mankind."
But if Europe generally supports the secularization thesis, the United States presents a much more problematic case. America has not gone the way of Europe. True, church attendance in the United States has declined in the past three decades. Still, some 40 percent of Americans say they attend church on Sundays. More than 90 percent of Americans believe in God, and 60 percent say their faith is important to them. All of this is a serious difficulty for the secularization thesis, because America is at the forefront of modernity. The thesis would predict that America would be the most secular society in the world. In fact, America is the most religious country in the Western world.
Perhaps the greatest problem for the secularization theory is that in an era of increasing globalization and modernization, the world as a whole is becoming more religious, not less. In a recent survey, sociologists Pippa Norris and Ron Inglehart sum up the evidence. Despite the advance of secularization in the West, they write, "The world now has more people with traditional religious views than ever before, and they constitute a growing proportion of the world's population." Consequently, the West is more secular but "the world as a whole is becoming more religious."
Even more remarkable is that the religious revival is occurring in places that are rapidly modernizing. China and India today have the fastest growth rates in the world, and religion is thriving in both places. Turkey is the one of the most modern of the Muslim countries, and Islam has steadily gained strength there. In Central and South America , the upwardly-mobile classes are embracing Pentecostal Christianity.
The global spread of American culture, with the secular values it carries,seems not to have arrested or even slowed the religious upsurge. The reason is that many non-Western cultures are actively resisting secularism. A common slogan in Asia today is "modernization without Westernization." Many people want American prosperity and American technology but they want to use these to preserve and strengthen their traditional way of life. They want to live in a world of multiple modernities.
We often read that Islam is the fastest-growing religion. Not true. Christianity is the fastest-growing religion in the world today. Islam is second. While Islam grows mainly through reproduction-which is to say by Muslim shaving large families-Christianity spreads through rapid conversion as well as natural increase. Islam has become the fastest-growing religion in Europe, which for more than a thousand years has been the home of Christianity. The Catholic writer Hilaire Belloc wrote in 1920 that "the faith is Europe and Europe is the faith." Belloc was convinced that the future of Christianity lay in Europe.
Ironically while Europe has moved away from Christianity, the Christian religion has been expanding its influence in Central and South America, in Africa, and in Asia . The new face of Christianity is no longer white and blond but yellow, black and brown. "If we want to visualize a typical contemporary Christian," Philip Jenkins writes in The Next Christendom, "we should think of a woman living in a village in Nigeria or in a Brazilian favela." The vital centers of Christianity today are no longer Geneva, Rome, Paris, or London. They are Buenos Aires, Manila, Kinshasa, and Addis Ababa . "The era of Western Christianity has passed within our lifetimes," Jenkins observes, "and the day of Southern Christianity is dawning."
In 1900, more than 80 percent of Christians lived in Europe and America. Today 60 percent live in the developing world. More than two out of three evangelical Christians now live in Asia,Africa, and South America . Here are some numbers Jenkins provides. Europe today has 560 million Christians and America has 260 million, yet many of those are Christians in name only. In comparison, there are 480 million Christians in South America, 313 million in Asia, and 360 million in Africa. The vast majority of these are practicing Christians. There are more churchgoing Presbyterians in than in Scotland.
Oddly enough, this Christian growth occurred after the period of European conquest and colonialism has come to an end. The old boys in pith helmets are long gone, but the faith that first came with them has endured, and now thrives without them. It's just like the early times of Christianity. After Constantine converted and Theodosius proclaimed Christianity the state religion toward the end of the fourth century, Christianity was carried by the Roman empire. Yet the faith spread fastest after the collapse of that empire, and soon all of Europe was Christian. We're witnessing a comparable pace of growth for Christianity in the rest of the world.
A century ago, less than 10 percent of Africa was Christian. Today it's nearly 50 percent. That's an increase from 10 million people in 1900 to more than 350 million today. Uganda alone has nearly 20 million Christians and is projected to have 50 million by the middle of the century. Some African churches have grown so big that their churches are running out of space. While Western preachers routinely implore people to come every Sunday to fill the pews, some African preachers ask their members to limit their attendance to every second or third Sunday to give others a chance to hear the message.
Central and South America are witnessing the explosive growth of Pentecostalism. As David Martin shows in his study Tongues of Fire,partly this is a shift within Christianity: millions of South American Catholics have become evangelical Protestants. In Brazil, for example,there are now 50 million evangelical Protestants whereas a few decade sago there weren't enough to count. The movement of Catholics into Protestant evangelicalism should not be considered purely lateral, however, as the conversion of lackadaisical, nominal Catholics to an active, energized evangelicalism can perhaps be considered a net gain for Christianity.
Even within Catholicism there is an expanding charismatic movement that has grown in response to the success of the Protestant evangelicals. This charismatic Catholicism emphasizes many of the same themes as "born again" Christianity including a personal relationship with Christ. And the Catholic numbers remain huge: Brazil had 50 million Catholics in 1950, but now it has 120 million.
Despite the limitations imposed by the Chinese government, there are now tens of millions of Christians in who worship in underground evangelical and Catholic churches. At current growth rates, David Aikman observes in his book Jesus in Beijing,China will in a few decades become the largest Christian country in the world. In South Korea, where Christians already outnumber Buddhists,there are numerous megachurches with more than 10,000 members each. The Yoido Full Gospel Church reports 750,000 members. The Catholic Church in the Philippines reports 60 million members, and is projected to have 120 million by mid-century.
What distinguishes these Christians, Jenkins writes, is that they immerse themselves in the world of the Bible to a degree that even devout Western Christians do not. For poor people around the world, the social landscape of in the Bible is quite familiar. They, too, live in a world of hardship, poverty, money-lenders and lepers. The themes of exile and persecution resonate with them. Supernatural evil seems quite real to them, and they have little problem in understanding the concept of hell.
This "original" Christianity is coming our way. South Korea has become the world's second-largest source of Christian missionaries, with 12,000 preaching the faith abroad. Only the United States sends more missionaries to other countries. We may be seeing the beginning of a startling reversal. At one time Christian missionaries went to the far continents of Africa and Asia, where white priests in robes proclaimed the Bible to wide-eyed and uncomprehending brown and black people. In the future, we may well see black and brown missionaries proclaim the Bible to wide-eyed and uncomprehending white people in the West.
We might think that this preaching will fall on unreceptive ears. But I'm not so sure. The Washington Post reports that there are 150 churches in Denmark and more than 250 in Britain run by foreigners as "part of a growing trend of preachers from developing nations coming to Western Europe ." Stendor Johansen, a Danish sea captain, seems to reflect the sentiments of many Europeans who are joining the new congregations. "The Danish church is boring," he says. "I feel energized when I leave one of these services." If more people come to share these sentiments then secularization may ultimately be reversed even in Europe.
Peter Berger writes about what he calls "the myth of secularization." He means that the thesis of inevitable secularization has now lost its credibility. In fact, it is going the way of Zeus and Baal. Berger's work points to the reason for this. Berger argues that modernization helps people triumph over necessity but it also produces a profound crisis of purpose in modern life. The greater the effects of modernization, the stronger the social anxiety and the striving for "something more." As Wolfhart Pannenberg puts it, "Secular culture itself produces a deep need for meaning in life and therefore also for religion."
This may not be religion in the same form in which it is imbibed in Nigeria or Korea, but it is traditional religion all the same, no less vital for having adapted to new circumstances. It is quite possible that a renewed Christianity can improve modern life by correcting some of the deficiencies and curbing some of the excesses of modernity.
I have found this to be true in my own life. I am a native of , and my ancestors were converted to Christianity by Portuguese missionaries. As this was the era of the Portuguese Inquisition, some force and bludgeoning may also have been involved. When I came to as a student in 1978, my Christianity was largely a matter of birth and habit. But even as I plunged myself into modern life in the , my faith slowly deepened. G.K. Chesterton calls this the "revolt into orthodoxy."
Like Chesterton, I find myself rebelling against extreme secularism and finding in Christianity some remarkable answers to both intellectual and practical concerns. So I am grateful to those stern inquisitors for bringing me into the orbit of Christianity, even though I am sure my ancestors would not have shared my enthusiasm. Mine is a Christianity that is counter cultural in the sense that it opposes powerful trends in modern Western culture. Yet it is thoroughly modern in that it addresses questions and needs raised by life in that culture. I don't know how I could live well without it.
In the end, though, my story doesn't matter very much and neither does it matter whether the West returns to Christianity. Perhaps the non-Western Christians will convert the Western unbelievers, and perhaps they won't. Either way, they are the future, they know it, and now we know it too. Christianity may come in a different garb than it has for the past several centuries, but Christianity is winning, and secularism is losing. The atheists may continue their fulminations, but they represent not the cry of victory but the cry of desperation. Deep down, the atheists realize that God is winning and atheism has no future.
Excerpted from What's So Great About Christianity, Regnery Publishing, October 2007.
Reader Comments ( Page 4 of 7)
46. My god Dinesh, you continue to baffle me.
Your insistence in defending religion when the world is clearly becoming more secular makes me wonder who you are representing, and why does a so called intelectual continues to embarrass himself like you are doing. Dinesh, thanks to the Internet and the spreading of information your predictions are wrong. Why don't you talk about something else?
GTWiecz at 6:31PM on Oct 22nd 2007
47. Dinesh wrote:
"Christianity may come in a different garb than it has for the past several centuries, but Christianity is winning, and secularism is losing. The atheists may continue their fulminations, but they represent not the cry of victory but the cry of desperation. Deep down, the atheists realize that God is winning and atheism has no future."
I don't know what you mean by that. But the number of atheists in the world is growing significantly each year. Here is that article again:
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/paul07/paul07_index.html
"The evangelical authors of the WCE lament that no Christian 'in 1900 expected the massive defections from Christianity that subsequently took place in Western Europe due to secularism…. and in the Americas due to materialism…. The number of nonreligionists…. throughout the 20th century has skyrocketed from 3.2 million in 1900, to 697 million in 1970, and on to 918 million in AD 2000…. Equally startling has been the meteoritic growth of secularism…. Two immense quasi-religious systems have emerged at the expense of the world's religions: agnosticism…. and atheism…. From a miniscule presence in 1900, a mere 0.2% of the globe, these systems…. are today expanding at the extraordinary rate of 8.5 million new converts each year, and are likely to reach one billion adherents soon. A large percentage of their members are the children, grandchildren or the great-great-grandchildren of persons who in their lifetimes were practicing Christians' (italics added). (The WCE probably understates today's nonreligious. They have Christians constituting 68-94% of nations where surveys indicate that a quarter to half or more are not religious, and they may overestimate Chinese Christians by a factor of two. In that case the nonreligious probably soared past the billion mark already, and the three great faiths total 64% at most.)"
That is an amazing statistic. There are 8.5 million converts to non-religion each year. And there were only about 3 million non-religionists in the entire world in 1800. Now there are over 1 billion! That's incredible. That amazing growth.
Dinesh wrote:
"Deep down, the atheists realize that God is winning and atheism has no future."
I'm an atheist, and deep down I don't believe that atheism "has no future." In fact, with the number of atheists increasing like it is, including converts, I think atheism and agnosticism are going to be in pretty good shape in 50 years. And who knows what the world is going to be like 40 million years. That's a long way away! But I would suspect that if the human race survives until then, there is going to be a significant percentage of atheists around. And by then people might know for certain that no intelligent being contributed to the existence to the known universe.
Moreover, for the sake of argument, let's say that "deep down, the atheists realize that God is winning and atheism has no future." That, of course, is completely irrelevant to whether I know that God exists. You can realize that something isn't going to be popular in 20 years but still be quite warranted in knowing that it is true. For example, maybe in 50 years most people in the world will believe that the earth is less 10,000 years old. But I'm quites sure it is significantly older than that.
Similarly, if nearly every person in the wold believes that one or more Gods exist, that is irrelevant to whether I know it is true.
Wes at 6:27PM on Oct 22nd 2007
48. Dinesh wrote: “The ranks of the unbelievers are shrinking as a proportion of the world's population.”
What do you mean by “shrinking?” Do you mean that there will be smaller percentage of non-believers in 10 years than there is today? I guess that is possible. But, according to the authors of the World Christian Encyclopedia, a mere .2 percent of the globe was non-religious in 1900. Today there are probably over 1 billion non-religionists in the world. I don’t know what percentage of those non-religionists are atheists. But, basically, non-religionists are a much larger percentage of the population now than they were in 1900. I mean that’s a pretty awesome percentage increase. There are 6.6 billion people on the planet right now. So, by my calculations, non-religionists are now up to about 16% of the world’s total population. If we see a similar increase in the percentage of non-religionists over the next 100 years, the non-believers will comprise one-third of the world’s population in the year 2,100. That would be a significant increase in a relatively short time.
Wes at 6:50PM on Oct 22nd 2007
49. =) Thank God there are intelligent people who don't buy in on this crap... The Bear story from one of the commentor shows you the mindset of a religious person... they only know of childish stories to guide their life... but even a naive child eventually outgrows "Santa Clause." In this respect, religious folks are far inferior than most children..
Chinh at 12:49AM on Oct 23rd 2007
50. "The world is witnessing a huge explosion of religious conversion and growth, and Christianity is growing faster than any other religion. Nietzsche's proclamation "God is dead" is now proven false. Nietzsche is dead. The ranks of the unbelievers are shrinking as a proportion of the world's population. Secularism has lost its identification with progress and modernity, and consequently it has lost the main source of its appeal. God is very much alive, and His future prospects look to be excellent. This is the biggest comeback story of the twenty-first century."
Welcome to the new Dark Ages. Here's a mudpit for you to wallow in, and we're expecting a new arrival of Black Death any day now! The Church is having a sale on indulges, but you better move fast, time is running out on this deal!
J Boyd at 7:30PM on Oct 22nd 2007
51. D'Souza presents a perspective shared by other culture watchers. The emptiness of liberalism has been experienced, many people long for more than the tangible. If one gives his highest priority to intelligence, that is his god, and he will worship all that he feels magnifies this persona in himself.
If tolerance is revered as the highest virtue, it seems that tolerance is applied only to areas of life that the tolerance worshipper condones. I find it sad that many seem unable to explore D'Souza's ideas objectively.
Becky Kase at 8:19AM on Oct 23rd 2007
52. Dinesh would paint all atheists as a gaggle of intolerant hayseeds attending atheist meetings planning hate campaigns against theists... controlled by nefarious stalin-worshippers hypnotizing the dupes into giving them power by denying religious beliefs...
"Repeat after me," says the would be religion destroyer, "You think as I do, you think as I do..."
But D'Souza is just imagining that atheism is the opposite (the 'other side'of) of theism... but there IS no such thing as the opposite of theism...
... just like there is no such thing as a negative apple or pear or banana... if religions are like fruits... then atheism is no fruit, not -apple, -pear and -banana...
.... can't let this analogy go by without giving a shout out to the bananas... fundamentalist Christians and Muslims... they gotta be bananas!!!
pboyfloyd at 7:59PM on Oct 22nd 2007
53. ?
pboyfloyd at 7:59PM on Oct 22nd 2007
54. AMEN Bridget
mike at 8:09PM on Oct 22nd 2007
55. I have traveled and lived in the 3rd world for over 30 years, and Mr.D'Souza is absolutely correct.
Gail Jacobo at 8:25PM on Oct 22nd 2007
56. God, what a horse's petoot! Where does one begin with Dinesh: the constant pimping of his book? (I've published 25 books at this point--it sounds cool, but it's not quite as hard as you'd think.) Dinesh's "Christianity is the only way" POV? The idea that there's no such thing as fundamentalism? (That's a hoot!) Or is it his peasant view that you're not a Christian if you don't measure up to his particular (and conservative) brand of Christianity? Are atheists not that bright? Shoot, smarter than Dinesh, clearly, but there's no sport in that; I've known high school grads who were more articulate and who didn't ignore facts so, uh, conveniently.
Dinesh keeps trying to take on big, important issues (well, to him, anyway) in hopes that someone, ANYONE, will take him seriously. I take him seriously enough to have start enquiries about how to get him removed from AOL for being an intellectual lightweight. There are more articulate, more intelligent, and certainly more profound people to represent the far right Christian POV than Dinesh. He's just ordinary. And not very bright, alas.
(BTW, after ~2000 years of seeing Christianity running around and generally making a mess of things, I think the data is in: we can clearly say that CHRISTIANITY IS A FAILED EXPERIMENT.)
JohnHedtke at 8:46PM on Oct 22nd 2007
57. Gail Jacobo wrote:
"I have traveled and lived in the 3rd world for over 30 years, and Mr.D'Souza is absolutely correct."
Absolutely correct about what?
Wes at 8:51PM on Oct 22nd 2007
58. It's kinda funny that he's claiming that the fall of the Roman Empire was a good thing for Christianity. That's as may be--certainly (as Gibbon reports) it was Christianity that caused the fall of the Roman Empire through xenophobia and religious intolerance. The Empire stood for ~1000 years because Rome was unbelievably tolerant of almost anything and anyone (as long as it didn't get in the way of the State). The Christians brought xenophobia and religious intolerance and ~poof!~ no more Empire. If you've got a month, go read Gibbon's "Decline and Fall;" it's a wonderful experience and your life will be better for it. If you've only got a few days, check out "As the Romans Did (2nd ed.)" from the library and have a delightful time reading a very enjoyable book. Don't bother with Dinesh's books; they're all self-fulfilling prophecy and apologia.
JohnHedtke at 8:57PM on Oct 22nd 2007
59. This new rise in christianity may be pushing it's way towards an armageddon of its own making. By focusing on the"book" instead of the message they have become the latest religious extremist fascist group rivaling any islamic group. They worry about the unborn, gay marriage and prayer in schools while ignoring hundreds of thousands being killed and maimed in their name and with their tax dollars.Their narrow vision has caused a threat to mankind not yet seen before. Extinction of the human race maybe all life on the planet is at hand and they worry about whether gays can marry and other such trivial matters. These people have lost the ability to reason and let "Pastor Bob" do it for them. Their quest is to attain that entrance into heaven and to hell with every thing else!
Rick at 9:35PM on Oct 22nd 2007
60. ransomed, you're wrong - Hitler was NOT an "atheist" - actually, he made the following statement: "My feeling as a CHRISTIAN points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them, and who, God's truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a CHRISTIAN and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord as last rose in his might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was his fight for the world against the Jewish poison ... as a CHRISTIAN, I have also a duty to my own people."
Doesnt sound too atheistic, does it? And Lenin and Stalin were no atheists either - communism is clearly a RELIGION - a secular religion! They wanted OTHER religions obliterated and replaced with theirs!
And what has the "explosion" of christianity (and islam) in afraca wrought? Religious wars and conflicts? The bishop in Uganda who thinks gay people should be rounded up and exterminated? The nigerian bishop who thinks the same way? Somehow, the ugly violent side of religion (christianity and islam at least) always comes out sooner or later!
I dont see atheists calling for religious people to be persecuted and killed!
ray at 9:47PM on Oct 22nd 2007