Now please don't misunderstand me. I am not trying to say that the Bible is evil or that it has no meaning. I am trying to draw a distinction between blind faith and informed truth. One need not be a person of faith to accept the moral veracity of certain parts of the Bible. But taken as a whole it is, to say the least, lacking in credibility.

There are millions of non believers who stick to their religious affiliation for cultural reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with their sense of logic. They are the truly silent majority. They sit through hours and hours of mindless ritual, waiting for church to end so that they can pal around with their buddies. They have learned to sit quietly while the dull witted ones dominate the conversation.

If we could somehow free them up so that they could become vocal within their own communities instead of constantly acquiescing to the dull witted ones, we could spark a movement that would revolutionize religion. It would not be a new religion. It would be a renaissance within the entire religious community. Think about it, a religion that agrees with science instead of fighting with it. Think about what that would mean for progress. Think about the political ramifications if we could stop trying to go in two directions at the same time. All we need are a few Michelangelos or DaVincis to make it happen. Et voila! Synergy!

And there would be no need to destroy the Bible and the Koran. People would finally be free to accept them for what they are; beautiful allegories instead of history books. And people would be free to go back to them and find new meaning, examining them more critically. Instead of dispensing with the myth entirely, we would be placing a new meaning over it. We would actually be adding new chapters to those great books, opening them up to revision, keeping the old while evolving toward the new. The Bible would lose Leviticus and the Koran would lose Jihad. And all the stupidity wrapped in warfare would finally start to dissolve.

Think about it. For the first time in the history of civilization, the religious world would be aligned with the secular and scientific communities. Our progress would be synergistic. We would be capable of vastly more rapid evolution. Our species would thrive on logic and reason instead of myth and hucksterism. Our political systems would become more efficient as we throw aside our more primitive instincts. War would become unthinkable. The capitalist model would be free to evolve into a more compassionate system of checks and balances based on morality and fairness instead of greed greed greed.