The believers

What harm do they do, the religious believers?  They threaten the dream of truth, the promise of honesty, the hope of understanding.  They would see society dependent upon a faulty foundation, would have us lie to our children, to ourselves, while demanding concession of their superiority in their retreat from the plausible, their fear of the reasonable. While we all survive on stories, theirs are thin and ugly and desperate.  They proselytize a fable of the defeated, and rejecting it is not enough, it must be condemned.