According to a new poll by the Public Religion Research Institute, 64% of Americans do not want to live in a primarily Christian nation. Instead, they prefer an America of many faiths without a Christian majority.

For most of the last half of the 20th century liberals confidently believed that racism and religious extremism would soon disappear from human society: but shocking they have revived in the 21st century. One reason for this revival is that for more than thirteen centuries most Jews, Christians and Muslims have read each others holy scriptures from an adversarial perspective.

Since all monotheistic scriptures come from the one and only God, we should view other monotheistic scriptures as potentially enriching our understanding and appreciation of our own scripture. But in the middle ages almost all readers thought of revelation as a zero sum sport like tennis, rather than a multiple win co-operative sport like mountain climbing.

In a zero sum game any value or true spiritual insight I grant to another scripture somehow diminishes my own. This was the result of the influence of Greek philosophy’s emphasis on the logic of the excluded middle. Something is either true or it is false. There is no other option. If two propositions contradicted one another, one or both of them must be false.

This would mean that if my religion is true, yours must be false. In modern terms, light could not be both a particle and a wave at the same time. Yet we now have been enlightened and know that light is indeed both a particle........

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