Quoting a post by Ikpo:

"Jesus existed, so did Muhammad, so did the Buddha, and they weren't bad guys. And neither are all of their followers. So let their memories and actual (not revised) legacies live in peace."

Is there any independent proof that Mohammed, Jesus or Buddha existed? I mean all we really have are self-referential stories from believers. As for Mohammed being 'not a bad guy' obviously you are unfamiliar with his life history from Islamic sources (Qur'an, Haadith, etc.). Of course devout Muslims create skillful apologetics (as did Karen Armstrong in her bio of him - see the Qurayza massacre) but Mohammed's life invloved numerous aggressive military campaigns as well as questionable sexual relations (see his marriages to Zainab Bint Jahsh and Ayesha).

Buddhism in contrast would be equally as valid with or without the actual existence of Buddha. The validity of the teachings of Buddha relies in no way on his life. I'm not a Buddhist, just making an observation.

Scientists can be as dogmatic as anyone else? So what! This just demonstrates that scientists are people too... Do an experiment, blow away the orthodoxy - show that Dr. Dogma's ideas don't stand up (or are confirmed...). That's the scientific method, and it works... in fact, it's pretty much the only way we humans have of getting to truth. Not "our truth" - not personal revelation from some unseen force... but truth. This, of course, does not mean that every theory or idea supported by science is "correct" But science is self correcting - and it's all we have. How can you demonstrate that my interpetation of the bible, or the koran are false? What corrective do we have for Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwel, et. al.?

I am in no way saying that non-Christians or people who are irreligious need to "fall in line" with everything people of faith want. That presumption is based on the notion that people of faith all want the same thing -- which they most decidedly don't. There are as many species of Christianity as there are beetles, and they are all different, and they don't all share the intolerant, narrow-minded, misguided view that the GOP plays upon and preys upon to get its base to the voting booth.

What I am saying is that progressives and Democrats have for years let the GOP's fallacious and destructive rhetoric dominate the conversation on God and religion -- this ridiculous notion that one must be a fundamentalist Christian and hate gays and hate women and hate sex in order to claim any kind of faith in God. The political reality of the situation is that when people of faith (most of who are NOT of the fundamentalist variety) come to the Democrats and to progressives, they are bombarded with hateful statements that call them stupid, irrational, deluded, and which try to saddle them with all the evils ever perpetrated in the world in every generation. Many people of faith, seeing that progressives at best have nothing to say to them and at worst think them mentally deficient, choose to embrace the party that at the very least acknowledges that they aren't crazy.

The real truth of the matter is that genocide and hatred and evil schemes existed long before Christ was ever born, and have been perpetrated in every culture on the planet, including non-theist (i.e. Buddhist) cultures. And there is much about Christian doctrine, and the life of Christ himself, that progressives can and should point to and reach out to people of faith. In fact there are plenty of Democrats and progressives who are people of faith, and they shouldn't be made to feel embarassed for being so, as if somehow they don't belong. Those voices should, in fact, be embraced and celebrated, because they are the poeple who are capable of reaching out to those who have bought the GOP lies about "godless Democrats" and show them that they do indeed have a place in the progressive movement.

Unless, of course, you'd like to continue to make all those people who self-identify as people of faith feel unwelcome.....at which point they'll continue to vote for other people on election day.

As for atheism vs. agnosticism -- I think agnostics are usually pretty thoughtful people with genuine, honest concerns about the truth of whether God exists. I think anybody who's being honest has to admit that the question is impossible to answer with any authority. I make no bones about the notion that my faith is based on just that -- faith. I don't know any more than anyone else. The information out there is such that two different people can look at it and come to two different conclusions. Militant atheists, however, have this tendency to assert that their view is the only "rational" one -- when in fact it is no more or less fact-based than anyone else's.

Armstrong has some great insights into how people are "simplistic" in their thinking about god and religion. I usually find her work to be cogent and well analyzed.

So it's distressing to hear her say that Mao, Stalin and Hitler were secularists. While they did reject religion in the theistic sense, they replaced it with worship of the state / fuhrer. Each created their own set of beliefs, dogma and ceremony, inventing a religion except in name.

To define secularism as a rejection of religion is more than a little simplistic. It would be better to define real secular thought absence of a need to believe. This squares with what Armstrong says about Axial Age religious thought: it wasn't about belief.

Unquestioning belief can be corrupted and abused. It is the part of religion, communism or nazism that allows the powerful to control and direct people into the kinds of action that Sam Harris cites. Ironically, belief--in their own superiority--is what makes people like Dawkins sputter with overly emotional hatred of religion.

Morality without belief, from the simple basis of the golden rule, is the only thing that can not be abused. A truly moral person will never need to use the phrase "I believe..." Their morality can not be swayed by changing interpretation of myths, symbols, words and even science.

The first step towards a new Axial Age is for people to say "I do not need to believe." Only then can we step beyond our egos and really discover transcendence.