For some reason I was thinking of the tragedy at Jonestown today. In November, 1978, over 900 people killed themselves, were murdered by guards or killed by their parents in one of the major horrors of the decade. Bottom line is that religion can be and often is a death cult. This is an observation discussed recently by Sam Harris , who keeps coming back to the fact that crazy ideas lead to crazy behavour and are therefore not to be given the tolerance that liberal philosophy so often grants them. I lament the centuries that philosophers spent in the swamps of Christian "theology", When Christianity married itself to political power, two millennia of religious wars were born. First heretics were stamped out to produce what is now considered to be "orthodox"mythical nonsense like the trinity. Then we had a few centuries of the Crusades to "save" the Holy lands. With the "Reformation", the death cult of religion married itself to the lust for power...