The disbeliever

You really go after Islam and Christianity and Judaism. Why are you especially critical of monotheistic religions?

Part of that is just a matter of how much mad work is being done in the name of those faiths at this moment. I would rank them in order of Islam and Christianity and then Judaism coming up a distant third. But there's also something intrinsic to monotheism itself which is problematic. Monotheism tends to be far more rigid than other approaches to faith and far less able to incorporate the incompatible religious certainties of other groups. The Hindus, worshiping a dizzying profusion of gods, can accept an extra god when they come upon it. And so there are Hindus who talk about Jesus being an avatar of Vishnu, for instance.

You're saying with monotheism, the whole notion of the heretic or the infidel is much more of an issue than it would be in other religions where there is not just one god.

Yeah. When you look at the doctrine of Islam, and you consider the state of Muslim discourse in the 21st century, it is hard to imagine a doctrine that is less susceptible to modernity and pluralism. There are many apologists for Islam saying it's a religion of peace and Muslims are tolerant of other religions. I really think we owe it to ourselves and to future generations to be very clear and rigorous about what is actually believed by mainstream Muslims. What we recently saw in Afghanistan -- this man who converted to Christianity and was up for execution, and then got spirited away to Italy as the only accommodation that could be made -- that really is the true face of Islam. It really is punishable by death to wake up one morning and decide you no longer want to be a Muslim. The crime of apostasy, the disavowal of your religion, is a capital offense. We're not waging a war of ideas that's even addressing issues like this.

But doesn't it matter where we're talking about? I mean, Indonesia, the most populous Muslim country in the world, for the most part doesn't have this more extreme version of Islam.

For the most part. There are cells in Indonesia that are considered al Qaida affiliates. And you'd be hard-pressed to find a Muslim country, even Turkey, that does not have elements that should be troublesome to us. But it's true, the character of Islam is different in different societies. And that's a good thing. I think we can attribute that to the fact that most people do not take their religion as seriously as they might. But when you look at the theology, the truth is, the Quran really does nothing more eloquently than vilify the infidel. It's absolutely plain in the pages of the Quran that the responsibility of Muslims is to convert, subjugate or kill the infidel. This is not a document that's well designed for a pluralistic world or a global civil society. Unless the Muslim world can find some way of reforming this theology, or find some rationale by which to ignore the better part of it -- as Christians have tended to do, albeit imperfectly -- we have a recipe for disaster on our hands.

What about the Bible? Do you see this as a recipe for religious intolerance?

Oh, I do. There's no document that I know of that is more despicable in its morality than the first few books of the Hebrew Bible. Books like Exodus and Deuteronomy and Leviticus, these are diabolical books. The killing never stops. The reasons to kill your neighbor for theological crimes are explicit and preposterous. You have to kill people for worshiping foreign gods, for working on the Sabbath, for wizardry, for adultery. You kill your children for talking back to you. It's there and it's not a matter of metaphors. It is exactly what God expects us to do to rein in the free thought of our neighbors.

Now, it just so happens, however, that most Christians think there's something in the New Testament that fully and finally repudiates all of that. And therefore, we do not have to kill homosexuals. We don't have to kill adulterers. And that's a very good thing that most Christians think it. Now, most Christians actually are not on very firm ground theologically to think that. It's not an accident that St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine thought we should kill or torture heretics. Aquinas thought we should kill them, Augustine thought we should torture them. And Augustine's argument for the use of torture actually laid the foundations for the Inquisition. So it's not an accident that we were burning heretics and witches and other people in Europe for five centuries under the aegis of Christianity. But Christianity is at a different moment in its history.

But isn't this a problem mainly when you read the Bible or the Quran literally? Doesn't the conversation change once you stop reading sacred scriptures literally? If you understand, for instance, the historical context -- when Judaism or Christianity were first emerging, they were religions competing with other religions. Doesn't that free you up to appreciate their spiritual teachings?

I'd be the first to agree that it's better not to read these books literally. The problem is, the books never tell you that you're free not to read them literally. In fact, they tell you otherwise, explicitly so. Therefore, the fundamentalist is always on firmer ground theologically and -- I would argue -- intellectually than the moderate or the progressive. When you consult the books, you do not find more reasons to be a moderate or a liberal. You find more reasons to be a fundamentalist. I agree, it is a good thing to be cherry-picking these books and ignoring the bad parts. But we should have a 21st century conversation about morality and spiritual experience and public policy that is not constrained by superstition and taboo. In order to see how preposterous our situation really is, you need only imagine what our world would be like if we had people believing in the literal existence of Zeus. I defy anyone to come forward with the evidence that puts the Biblical God or the Quranic God on fundamentally different footing than the gods of Mt. Olympus. There are historical reasons why Zeus is no longer worshiped and the God of Abraham is. But there are not sound epistemological or philosophical or empirical reasons.

There's no doubt many awful things have been done in the name of religion over the centuries. But, of course, there have also been many wonderful religious people. I would argue, for instance, that Martin Luther King has been the most important moral leader in America over the last century. And I think it would be impossible to make sense of what he did without talking about his faith. It seems to me his Christian faith compelled him to be an activist and it's what gave him strength in very difficult times. What do you make of those kinds of people who've been inspired because of their faith?

I agree, King was an incredible person who did heroic and necessary work. A couple of answers here. There's no evidence that those things can only be done in the name of faith, whereas there is considerable evidence that really terrible acts of violence are being done only because of what people believe about God. For instance, while there are Christian missionaries working in sub-Saharan Africa doing heroic work to relieve famine, there are also secular people, like Doctors Without Borders, who work alongside them, doing the same kind of work and not doing it because they think Jesus was born of a virgin. They're not preaching the sinfulness of condom use the way Catholics and Christian ministers tend to do. So while Christian missionaries are helping people, they're also helping to spread AIDS with their sexual taboos and their prudery. So that's one issue.

I'm also breaking a taboo. I'm rejecting the idea that all of our religions are equally wise and emphasize compassion to the same degree. This is just clearly not true. Martin Luther King, to some significant degree, was animated by Christianity. But when you look at why he preached nonviolence to the degree that he did, he didn't get that from Christianity. He got it from Gandhi. And Gandhi got it from the Jains. Jainism is a religion of India that preaches this doctrine of nonviolence. To argue that that's the true face of Christianity is really misleading. Christianity also gives you the Jesus of the "Left Behind" novels who's going to come back and just hurl sinners into the pit. And the God who's going to punish homosexuals for eternity.

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