From the comfortable vantage of the metropolis, religion today recalls the bumptious, somewhat embarrassing relative one wishes would not show up just when the other guests are arriving. And that's only the charitably culturalist view. For the avidly secular, true believers are a medieval remnant infecting a potentially pacific modernity with intolerant ignorance and deadly brutality. From the urban West, we look down on the backwardness of our own backyards while looking aghast at the slaughter abroad, and we blame it all on a credulity that we find oddly out of place in modern, mainstream life.