This is ‘very’ interesting, as it puts Christians in the awkward position of agreeing with a militant atheist and exposing them to his books on the subject.

The fact of the matter is simple: Virtually every war we have ever fought has its basis in religious dogma, either through direct support (such as our current fiasco) or through social underpinnings.

Here’s an interesting study:

Reading violent scriptures increases aggressive behavior, especially among believers, a new study finds. The study by University of Michigan social psychologist Brad Bushman and colleagues helps to illuminate one of the ways that violence and behavior are linked.

“To justify their actions, violent people often claim that God has sanctioned their behavior,” said Bushman, faculty associate at the U-M Institute for Social Research and lead author of the article published in the March 2007 issue of Psychological Science. “Christian extremists, Jewish reactionaries and Islamic fundamentalists all can cite scriptures that seem to encourage or at least support aggression against unbelievers.”

The researchers found that both the religious and secular students were more aggressive, delivering louder blasts of noise to their ostensible partners, when told that the passage they read came from the Bible. Aggressive responses also increased when participants read that God directly sanctioned violence. The increased level of aggression was greater among believers than among secularists, however.

Wow. Religious people acting out in violence.

Go figure.

In a recent conversation with my 14 year old son, we were discussing how baffled he is by the behaviors of a great many of his piers in the public school system. To quote him, “I just don’t get how so many people can think that what they act like is in anyway correct.”

I explained to him something that Mr. Harris just reiterated quite solidly. We as average people with average pyschological make-ups simply can not fathom how deeply mal-adjusted behaviors and thought patterns run.

Why? Because we do not suffer these same pyschoses. We do not process our reality in the same context and often are either not able to or find the journey beyond those mental boundaries to be so undesireable that we never even attempt a glimpse of it.

Herein lies the danger of which Mr. Harris speaks. We get so wraped up in treating each other with respect and tolerance that we forget to ask the initial question, “Am I giving the respect that is honestly due?”

To be quite frank, that 1% figure made my skin crawl, and there is no doubt in my mind that 1% is an extremely low estimation.