I find the above quite delightful and effective as a rant against the murderous hypocrisy of political and religious leaderships in contemporary society; so please don't mistake me for a Christian apologist in anything that follows; it's intended only as exploration of possible consequences one particular facet in the argument presents. Personally, I think anyone who actually believes an omnipotent omniscient immortal being would be about the business of writing books and then using successive generations of limited mortals as PR flacks to "spread the Word" throughout Space and Time is profoundly deluded. As it happens, however, I've done extensive political work in the US Peace and Justice movement over the years and during that time collaborated with no small number of deeply committed religious people (Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Unitarians, Baha'is, Animists and even Atheists) who were very effective and courageous apostles of pacifism and non-violent political change.
One thing that deeply impresses me about Western monotheisms is the fact that Jesus of Nazareth (and all the later Old Testament Prophets of Israel who inspired him) never hesitated to proclaim the rich and the powerful - including particularly the high priesthood - of their own times as the real culprits in every major social tragedy and the true enemies of God on earth. Jesus' brief career as an itinerant preacher brought him time and time again into direct conflict with "religious authorities" in his own society, and he never failed to call them vipers and hypocrites to their faces, who "devour widows' houses, and for a pretense make long prayer: therefore ye shall receive the greater damnation." [Matthew 23:14] Now many of the so-called religious leaders of our own day - who base everything they espouse on a few shards of verses ripped from the Levitical priestly-conduct codes of the Pentateuch, the neurotic ramblings of the Pauline letters, and the full-blown psychosis (or extensive allegory) of the Revelation of John - are obviously precisely the same sorts of worldly power-mongers Jesus condemned in 1st-century Palestine: and who ultimately delivered him to the Roman authorities for execution.
The scriptures of all major world traditions are enormous, frequently self-contradictory collections, assembled across millennia of fierce struggles and upheavals among, and within, societies. They contain in many passages profoundly silly absurdities; in some places nakedly disgusting calls to supposedly God-ordained genocides and other murders; and in many other places transcendent wisdom of the highest possible order. To throw the whole kit-and-kaboodle out as useless nonsense seems dangerously akin to the ridiculous notion that only one of them, to the exclusion of all others, must be accepted as wholly inerrant "revealed Truth." The long struggle against superstition and error in religion may be better served simply by firmly continuing to point out the contradictions and hypocrisies put forth by many of those pretending to speak in God's name: just as the rant above on pacifism does so eloquently.
That great British-American French Revolutionary, Thomas Paine, said it all quite well on the subject of religious idiocies, over 200 years ago, in The Age of Reason. But years of experience "working in the trenches" of peace activism convince me close alliances between rationalist-atheist-humanists and committed people-of-faith are both strategically and tactically the soundest path to follow; oftentimes the leadership of a Mohatmas Gandhi or a Martin Luther King (or lesser, if no less religiously committed, lights) is a crucial element in the success of non-violent campaigns for social advance. Even Lenin said: "[t]he most important thing ... is to know how to awaken in the still undeveloped masses an intelligent attitude towards religious questions and an intelligent criticism of religions." ["On the Significance of Militant Materialism," (1921), Selected Works, Moscow, Progress Publishers, 1975, vol. III, p.602.] And 'tweren't nobody never no more convinced of the truth of atheism (and the dangerous hypocrisies of modern societies), than V.I. Lenin.
All that aside, the courage, wisdom and necessity of consistent pacifism and internationalism in this nuclear age is so far beyond the so-called courage and realpolitik of jingo-patriotism, that one shudders to think how few people anywhere actually seem to consider the question.
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