[Melanie68]

From an interview with Bill Moyers:

You just singled out three groups--Orthodox Jews, fundamentalist Christians, fundamentalist Muslims. Why? What do you see that they have in common?

They have in common a belief that they know the mind of God. The young man who killed the prime minister of Israel said, "What I did, I did for the glory of God." He killed the prime minister of Israel for the same reason that the Islamists want to kill Rushdie. General Boykin has been going around the country in uniform talking about a holy war against Islam. They believe they know the mind of God. And when you believe you know the mind of God, you've got no room for compromise in the United States Senate or the United States House of Representatives or on the street corner. Truth becomes absolute. And absolute truth, like absolute power, is a terrifying sword.

Hovering over the whole series is the general question, is religion a salvation or poison? Ultimately, what do you think?

I would have no way of measuring whether it's been more poison than salvation. You look over the whole span of history, and you see that if it weren't for the Hebrew prophets, Israel would not have been redeemed. You look over the whole span of history and see, nonetheless, that jihadism is part of the Muslim experience and the Crusades are part of the Christian experience and that religion has been used as a heavy bludgeon to compel and kill other people. On the other hand, religious believers fought for justice. Religious believers fought slavery. Religious believers fought for the Civil Rights movement.

Faith and reason are embedded in the basic cells of the human experience and human history. And constantly trying to understand them, trying to come to terms with them, trying to see how they can co-exist together and how they do co-exist together in each and every mind is one of the great experiences of being a journalist.