On secular violence (II)

The myth of religious violence makes us ignore the idea that there’s a problem with doing violence in the name of secular things. Sometimes people say, well, it’s different – religion is absolutist, you can’t disobey God, and so the violence gets ramped up from what it would be if we were just going to war for mundane reasons such as oil and, you know, free elections and free markets and so on. And I don’t think that’s the case at all, I think that freedom and ideologies like that can be just as absolutist as belief in God. I mean, the real question is not whether or not you believe in God, the real question is, what God do you believe in?