Cory Doctorow has an article at boingboing.net about the latest shot in the war on religion:
Atheist Agenda, a campus group at the Universtiy of Texas at San Antonio, has created a Smut for Smut program, where they'll trade high-grade porn in exchange for Bibles and other religious material. The idea is to highlight that the Bible is as full of bad ideas and bad depictions of those ideas ("a woman is worth half a man") as pornography.
Many of my friends espouse some kind of faith, and it's clear to me that they get some good out of it. My feeling is that religion and faith, like music or sports or drugs or creativity, is a way of making parts of your brain light up in a way that is pleasurable and that often encourages you to do good. I think that part of it is good.
But just like all of those things, religion and faith make some people do bad things, as they find pathological ways of evoking the pleasurable sensation in their minds. I also think that the pleasurable sensation that attends the numinous state is a powerful conditioner of behavior, and that it can be exploited to get people to do terrible things (like violent religious extremism), or merely things that are not good for them (like deferring to religious authorities with bad ideas and giving money they can't afford to religious causes).
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