I was reading Pharyngula the other day & ran across a fantastic quote illustrating the differences among atheists, theists, and radicals. In light of recent conversation on this theme, I felt it contributed a very clear argument. However, it also stands alone in the sea of things-we-post-about here at MoF. Here is PZ Myers:

There is a kind of sliding scale of belief: most of us value our lives to some degree, and consider how we spend our three score and ten to be important; then there are people who attach some degree of importance on an afterlife they’ve imagined, and consider this hypothetical eternity to be a matter of concern. Atheists have the scale pegged way over to the left and see this little slice of time we have as all we have, and therefore the only thing we have to make work. Most religious people have the dial turned up a little to the right — they are clearly operationally secular, spending most of their time on work and family, and socking away a little Sunday prayer time for an anticipated and wholly delusional Heaven. We can all live with that.

But then there are these wackos like Fred Phelps who have the dial turned so far to the right that they place a higher priority in their fantasies about what they’ll be doing after they’re dead over what they’re doing with their life right now. That’s where religion becomes a great evil, where it destroys lives and compels people to commit acts that are materially insane, but make great logical sense to people infected with the idea that there is an eternity of consequence for trivial transgressions against a shared belief.

Yes! Exactly! I have virtually nothing to add except that I’ve been thinking similar thoughts regularly & can’t seem to articulate just what it is about fanatics’ belief in heaven that I find so disturbing. Actually, it’s more often their belief in hell that weirds me out. That’s where most of these really bizarre actions come from.