yet ANOTHER great essay

My heroes are driven by God, but I'm glad my society isn't
The evidence is clear that murder, venereal disease and marital breakdown are all more common in religious cultures
George Monbiot
Tuesday October 11, 2005 The Guardian

Are religious societies better than secular ones? It should be an easy question for atheists to answer. Most of those now seeking to blow people up - whether with tanks and missiles or rucksacks and passenger planes - do so in the name of God. In India, we see men whose religion forbids them to harm insects setting light to human beings. A 14th-century pope with a 21st-century communications network sustains his church's mission of persecuting gays and denying women ownership of their bodies. Bishops and rabbis in Britain have just united in the cause of prolonging human suffering by opposing the legalisation of assisted suicide. We know that the most dangerous human trait is an absence of self-doubt, and that self-doubt is more likely to be absent from the mind of the believer than the infidel............