As I get older, I find myself becoming more conservative.

[Bucky]

80. "too much"

No, seriously, if you know of a large society that has developed a humanitarian ethic (even if, obviously, not consistantly applied) without deriving that humanism from a religious foundation, please name it to me. I teach history for a living and I can think of none off the top of my head.

I of course agere that religion is a source of a lot of conflict in the world--usually needless conflict--and further that it adds gratuitous passions and prejudices to intensify other non-religious conflicts. But religion and religious fervor were also central driving factors in the greatest advances in history--the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, the Civil Rights Movement, the anti-war and many of the anti-colonial movements of the 19th and 20th Centuries, and the sundry Human Rights campaigns in history.