I finished the amazing memoir of Ayaan Hirsi Ali called Infidel. In one person's life, a journey from the horrific misogyny of Islamic life to the freedoms we take for granted. Required reading for anyone who thinks Islam is a peaceful religion or that women are not enslaved in Islamic societies, and a warning about immigration without assimilation.

Andrew Sullivan often blogs about the evolution of religion, and this quote is on his blog. On one hand it's people trying to have it both ways; that is, be rational and irrationally religious at the same time. On the other hand, some way has to be found to accomodate what for a big percentage of people is almost a hard-wired belief in a god. Deconstructionist theory meets Christian mysticism. Cool. Whatever lets us live in peace.

"Fundamentalism can be understood as a particular way of believing one's beliefs rather than referring to the actual content of one's beliefs.
It can be described as holding a belief system is such a way that it mutually excludes all other systems, rejecting other views in direct proportion to how much they differ from one's own. In contrast, the a/theistic approach can be seen as a form of disbelieving what one believes, or rather, believing IN God while remaining dubious concerning what one believes ABOUT God (a distinction that fundamentalism is unable to maintain). This does not actually contradict the idea of orthodoxy but rather allow us to understand it in a new light...
This a/theism is not then some temporary place of uncertainty on the way to spiritual maturity, bur rather is something that operates within faith as a type of heat-inducing friction that prevents our liquid images of the divine from cooling and solidifying into idolatrous form," - Peter Rollins, How (Not) to Speak of God.