The madness strikes

It now appears that the ghastly mass killing in Norway, suspected at first to be the work of fanatical Muslim extremists (not an un- reasonable hypothesis, given their track record of such violence in many countries) was, in fact, the work of a fanatical Christian extremist.

Po-tay-to, po-tah-to. This just illustrates my own long-standing point: religion is religion, and religious radicals are much more alike than different, regardless of the relatively minor detail of which religion they happen to be fanatical about. The Christian Right and Muslim hard-liners are united in their hatred of gays, sexual liberation, science, the Enlightenment, and secularism in general -- and in their occasional expression of that hatred in the form of murderous violence. They are not two different problems competing for our attention, they are two barely-distinct faces of one and the same problem.