The barbaric side of religion

In a recent New York Times article called “Test Your Savvy on Religion” the columnist Nicholas Kristof was asking a series of questions aimed at testing his readers' knowledge about religion ranging from Christianity, Islam, Judaism and Hinduism. He was responding in fact to a recent poll showing that of all people, atheists were the one best informed about religion! I took the test, missed many right answers, and came to the conclusion that all of these religions were funded on barbarism and might have worked at the dawn of humanity, when our forebears were in fact still barbarian and that the written religious word, that came from oral tradition should never be considered as “set in stone” as many fanatical faithful consider their particular holy books to be.

This exercise in finding out who might have said what, in terms of scriptures, showed me once more that being taking ancient writings litterally shows a retrograde approach and easily paves the way to fanaticism. This entire process confirmed to me that theologies like constitutions should always remain “living documents...”