"The issue isn't religion (although that is an issue), the problem is and remains a human need to dominate and control other humans."

Perhaps it is because I am an atheist product of a devoutly Christian home, but I believe that the problem at the root of this phenomenon is not fundamentalism or extreme religion, but religion itself, precisely because religious institutions propagate and sustain themselves by domination and control.

Religion has been the scourge of free thought and free speech for as long as it has existed.  It is a denial of the most fundamental defining characterisitics of humanity; our rational capacity, our curiosity, our desire to create new things, our need for each other. By demanding faith in archaic rituals and systems of faith, the human capacity for intellectual growth is twisted and deformed into a source of "temptation" and guilt when it should be the instrument of our release from the bondage of superstition.

The notion that religion is entitled to special consideration in society's affairs is embedded in Western culture, and most of the rest of the world, as well.  In Canada, while we were finally accepting same sex marriage as a right, churches were assumed to be exempt and are still permitted to collect money without taxation and use the proceeds to disseminate political propaganda advocating the denial of equal rights to gays. The repulsiveness of fundamentalist Mormonism has no excuse, and yet we will be forced to listen to serious-sounding arguments in a court of law and see them on the front page of supposedly enlightened news publications as the Bountiful case is handled with kid gloves by everyone. If anybody but a religious advocate subjected children to the sort of brainwashing that is routinely employed in religious indoctrination they would quite rightly be packed off to jail.

The spinelessness of western intellectuals and institutions confronted by radical religious bigotry is rooted in a sense that placing limits on "belief" for one set of believers will have implications for all others.  When religion held real secular power in western society there would have been no such pussy-footing; the competing bigots would have been denounced as Satan spawn and that would have been that.  It is the creeping marginalisation of religious power has caused Unitarians to leap to the defense of their more extreme spiritual relatives out of a sense of self-preservation. The idea that religious belief is exempt from the obligations attending fundamental rights and freedoms is allowed to prosper because people feel they should "respect spirituality".

Spirituality is dangerous crap in its most insipid manifestations, and outright evil in its worst forms.  I refuse to accept its influence here. I reject the proposition that as a citizen of a western country I have no right to speak against the evilness of mullahs, rabbis, monks or shamans in countries where people cannot oppose them, or denounce the nastiness and stupidity of their beliefs.