I have noticed before how intelligent people will throw logic to the four winds when discussing their religion. It’s interesting to see atheists doing it too.
I’m quite sure that Hixie would not come within a thousand miles of perpetrating a multiple non sequitur like this in connection to any other topic.
Not that I think that the position of the Catholic Church as represented in the quoted article is reasonable, but where is the genocide? And, even if we agree for the sake of argument that this is the position of the whole institution, from the Pope downwards, how do we get from there to “the concept of religion”? Not “the Church”; not “religious fanatics”; the whole friggin’ concept.
Even if you argue that there is a positive correlation between holding religious beliefs and being dangerously irrational about other issues, which seems to be what Ian is saying (and much the same as what I said in my own opening sentence), how did we get to the concept of religion?
I’m not a great fan of arguments by analogy, but I can’t resist this one in this context: many of the forums where web standards are discussed are infested by a high proportion of annoying and opinionated berks. Is this a reason to reject the concept of web standards?