The Black Book of Religion: III

[...] struck was this agnostic by the paradox of the godly sanctioning the ungodly that in our spring 2005 Coda we offered a companion to The Black Book of Communism, the Frenchedited survey of crimes perpetrated in the name of Marx, reproduced in English in 2001 by Harvard University Press. The point was learnedly argued by the British author Paul Johnson, whose widely read treatise, Modern Times (1982), opened with this sentence: "The modern world began on 29 May 1919 when photographs of a solar eclipse taken on the island of Principe off West Africa and at Sohral in Brazil confirmed the truth of a new theory of the universe." Given today's realities, the truer source of our disorders can more plausibly be assigned to absolutists, i.e., those who elevate the immemorial collisions of cultures and interests into a combat between Good and Evil, ruling out empathy, compromise, amnesty, humor, skepticism, irony, reason, and tolerance, the behavioral tools essential to persuading allies and nurturing free societies.