To me, the whole point of life is to have a balanced outlook. If you can`t weigh both sides of a problem, then the chances are you will make errors in judgment. While there is a place for radicals of both ends of the spectrum on an individual basis, irrational beliefs in mass tend to run off the rails.
Militant religions try to steer believers away from examining their tenets in case they see the flaws in dogma. Leaders usually seek an external enemy to keep believers busy. Or crunch any internal dissent. Thus we had Original Sin (still a biggie), heresy (which works till a substantial number break away, when both groups have enemies to demonise), illiteracy (only priests permitted to read the bible, and for centuries it remained in Latin), noxious spirits (a leftover from pagan days), and now evolution.
When powerbrokers in the religion game saw the growing trend to examine the roots of their doctrines (textual criticism, geology, biology, even archaeology), they set out to demonise the new kids on the block. The majority of sheep, oops, believers fell into line without exploring too deeply and followed the party line. Latterly, the focus on evolution (and its partly-masked cousin, science) has become more strident as more evidence (y`know, ugly facts) keeps pointing out the flaws in supernatural voodoo.
Some sections of religion have partly embraced evolution e.g. Catholics, while the diehards refuse to yield an inch (or 25 mils if you are metric). Here we see intransigents gradually being pushed to the fringes as more holes appear in their reasoning. Realising that the strength of evolution relied on dispersing its wisdom via education, diehards have concentrated on blocking or watering down the evo influence. Who will triumph? That depends on whether you want to live in dreamland or find out finally what makes the world tick.
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