From David Berlinski's The Devil's Delusion:
In 2007, a number of scientists gathered in a conference entitled "Beyond Belief: Science, Religion, Reason, and Survival" in order to attack religious thought and congratulate one another on their fearlessness in so doing. The physicist Steven Weinberg delivered an address. As one of the authors of the theory of electroweak unification, the work for which he was awarded a Nobel Prize, he is a figure of great stature. "Religion," he affirmed, "is an insult to human dignity. With or without it you would have good people doing good thins and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion" (italics added [by author]).
In speaking thus, Weinberg was warmly applauded, not one member of his audience asking the question one might have thought pertinent: Just who has imposed on the suffering human race poison gas, barbed wire, high explosives, experiments in eugenics, the formula for Zyklon B, heavy artillery, pseudo-scientific justifications for mass murder, cluster bombs, attack submarines, napalm, intercontinental ballistic missiles, military space platforms, and nuclear weapons?
If memory serves, it was not the Vatican.
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