Stern speaks about the dark & light sides of religious behavior.  How religion can get caught up in identity politics, since it tends, sometimes, to set up an ultimate us/them, insider/outsider dynamic (believer/unbeliever). 

This is one of the most important themes in Moby-Dick, Melville's "counter-Bible".  "Ishmael" is the name of the other, the outcast son.  Melville's God is the god of democracy, of equality (the gold doubloon from Quito, Ecuador - equator - nailed to the mast at the center of the ship).

"We hold these truths to be self-evident..."

current reading :  Terror in the Name of God, by Jessica Stern.  published a couple years ago to great reviews.  & it is a remarkable book, written by a Harvard academic who is anything but "academic" (the stereotype).  It's a page-turner.  She traveled the world interviewing religious terrorists of all denominations, at some danger to herself, trying to get into their minds & hearts.  Her style is original, personal - oblique & direct, analytical & anecdotal at the same time.

She describes how terrorist leaders, fanatics themselves, manipulate vulnerable young people (men, mostly), until religious ideology (& its psychological & material rewards in this world) becomes a kind of drug.  The phenomenon of psychological "doubling", whereby a humiliated, lost individual takes on a strong, heroic double identity - in a simplified us/them world which allows the terrorist-double to dehumanize & victimize the enemy, the other.

Stern does this with empathy (not sympathy - & she defines the difference) & insight.

As something of a religious person myself, & obsessed with the struggle with Islamic fundamentalism, it's helpful for me to see the dark side of religion (she interviews Christian & Jewish, as well as Islamic, fanatics).

We who are saying the word "God", who find the reality of God undeniable, had better turn to the light.

This notion of psychological doubling got me thinking about its relation to writing, too.  The idea that we create a "speaker" or narrator-identity whenever we write creatively; that this is, on a certain level, role-playing.  Kentjay is of course very focused on this.

I believe in the writer's capacity to write the truth, at least in a limited sense, imperfectly - that is, to write "with transparency" : though I guess it becomes some kind of "boundary problem" - on the one hand, whenever the writer identifies too strictly with her/his own expression, and on the other hand, when the writer becomes a trickster, a hoaxer, completely unreliable.

To think of Holy Scripture as role-playing.  Book of J, Wizard of Oz.