The same thing can be said about people in robes and people flashing colored lights

Humans are going to be hard to partition into tidy groups. We are a species of diversity. The religious are not different. But they may be willing to accept false information as they have been taught since birth.

I'm not sure I understand what a 'religious moderate' is. You either believe or you don't in that faith. What is it I wonder that gets moderated ?

Yeah, the hat is a little bit more than is necessary. Do you think there's gold in the embroidery? $$$ And yes I can understand your POV.

They may be less bombastic than their fundamentalist brethren but they're still members of a destructive ideology kinda like being a moderate nazi.

In any religion there can be no moderates!!

The nature of religion is divide and conquer at any cost to induce and control those susceptible to faith control!!!

Moderation will never work for these so called religious leaders whose whole control and profit model has never been built upon moderation!!!

One of the oldest Ponzi Schemes known to mankind!!!

"Compare the "crazy" beliefs of the marginalized with those of the religious. How different are they, really?"

Have you had any success promoting this conspiracy theory, that your average religious practitioner is only in it to provide safe haven for those willing to strap on the explosives? To blithely assume that no one who practices religion is sincerely in it for the reasons they themselves would give is itself nuts. To entertain the notion that no one is sincere is the kind of empathy I would expect from someone so obsessed with rationality that they truly expect science will one day make the arts obsolete. From that frame of mind I wonder how long it will be before all feeling will go out of fashion and we'll all move through life like the character Mr. Spock from the original Star Trek series?

Good point. I would liken it to a pyramid with the religious moderates at the base gradually changing to the dangerous extremists at the top. Without the base the extremists would have no support.

That moderates can create a safe space or provide top cover to the more extreme among them is a well-understood problem. But I am more concerned that these moderates are hypocrites. They’re what we might call, MINOs—moderates in name only.

A true moderate would insist that the scriptures they either respect or casually ignore be redacted, corrected and edited to reflect 21st century knowledge and morality. But these moderates sit in church with a book sitting in the pew in front of them that hasn’t been modified in centuries! This proves that their moderation only goes so far.

The Holy Bible is filled with ideas, and ideas have consequences. Most today would recognize there are ideas found in the Bible that are clearly wrong. But nearly all moderates fail to address this problem, even though they may not even believe that the texts were inspired.

I don’t fault moderates for ignoring their more extreme fellow believers, but I fault them for failing to do anything to change the narrative. Edit the damn book, moderates! Re-write your scriptures!

Only backward areas of the world like Africa and America have a real problem with Christian extremists, Western democracies seem to be immune.

I respect your point of view. However I still think the problem is the extremists not the moderates.

You should actualize the photo, that Pope left on February 2013.

Some humans just cannot understand that they are not that important in the universe, so they have to invent something.

We are all getting slaughtered again because of religious beliefs. The anti-science/pseudo-science attitudes that have allowed Covid to thrive so hard and quickly here in America are very much due to religious attitudes. Even if those playing into it are not all religious, religious beLIEfs laid the fertile ground of idiocy down.

I have long considered myself an Atheist seeing the "A" as a classical "not". And I've just shook my head at the theists silliness, and figured "ah well, they are not hurting anybody". Well, now they are. And that "A" in Atheist is starting to mean *Anti-Theist.

Militant anti-theist.