With God on their side

And frankly, they can have him/her/them/it. While we may or may not be locked in a "Clash of Civilizations,"  it certainly isn't the Christian West vs Muslim East one that the right imagines it to be. It is the clash between the secular, logical, reality-based world and the fundamentalist, unreasoning, faith-driven supernaturalists. Personally, I'll take the scientific side - we don't know everything, but we can learn and at least we are willing to live and let live. The other side, eh, not so much.

 The creationists sometimes try to pin the massacres, holocausts and pogroms of Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot on atheism and their own misinterpretation of Darwin's theories as a justification of  "survival of the fittest" -- when the real cause of these horrible events, and indeed most of the evil that men do, is the "true believerism"  the notion that one is righteous that brooks no doubt, no reconsideration in the face of evidence that one's thesis is not airtight. It is that sort of inability to admit errors or tolerate dissent that leads to everything from the Iraq war to religiously driven fatal child abuse and deadly neglect.

And lest you think I am only picking on the Jesus-addled variety of superstitous dumbassery, consider this marvelous little episode and tell me blind belief in obvious chicanery does no harm.

(hat tips to Cat, the General,  MJS,  and David)