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(In »Everything is religion«)

Hardly anyone would deny that hideous atrocities and cruelties have been committed in the name of this or that god throughout history: the examples are innumerable and a complete catalogue of all the crimes carried out under a religious banner would require a book of its own. Nor is this in any way a unique speciality of the Abrahamic religions. In Polynesia, prisoners of war and heretics were sacrificed to the gods. The Aztecs refined human sacrifice to an activity that was carried out on a near-industrial scale, administered by the state and clergy in an effective symbiosis. Dispatched soldiers carried out raids on the neighbouring peoples in order to bring home prisoners in great quantities, after which these prisoners, courtesy of the clergy, were sacrificed to the great god Huitzilopochtli by cutting the hearts out of their living bodies, which subsequently, not quite as alive, were rolled down the steps leading up to the altar.