I don't read AlterNet very often. I used to read it much more, but it started getting a little to left for me. Shocker, right? They just published an interview with Sam Harris, author of "The End Of Faith." He talks about how people need to be more rational and less relgious if we as humans want to overcome our differences. I agree with a lot of what he has to say.
Interpersonally, we don't challenge everyone's crazy beliefs about medical therapies or alien abduction or astrology or anything else. Yet if the president of the U.S. started talking about how Saturn was coming into the wrong quadrant and is therefore not a good time to launch a war, one would hope that the whole White House press corps would descend on him with a straitjacket. This would be terrifying--to hear somebody with so much power basing any part of his decision-making process on something as disreputable as astrology. Yet we don't have the same response when he's clearly basing some part of his deliberation on faith.
