I am of course open to the fact that a preoccupation with imaginary friends/higher beings and their teachings is an intellectually risky course.

Considering how fragile most people’s grip on reality is (look who’s running for Vice President!), they are easily undone by the contradiction that (from Martha Nussbaum of The New Republic) (http://www.tnr.com/booksarts/story.html?id=511ec724-6299-4bf4-adf7-38059cff16ae&k=76271):

“the fact that some of my neighbors pursue salvation
in a way that differs from my own is hard to contemplate without
anxiety. Could it be that they are right and I am wrong?”

The article, a review of a new book collection of the works of Roger Williams, founder of Rhode Island, is a great survey of the fundamental tolerance required for healthy conscience. My favorite line: “To impose orthodoxy upon the striving conscience is nothing less than what Williams, in a memorable and repeated image, calls ‘Soule rape.’ ”

Williams’ analogy, one that would likely appeal to Maher whether he uses it or not, is that rape is to sex what religious extremism is to faith. Back in the day, Williams was persecuted for critiquing the nominal advocates of religious liberty among the Puritans, on restricting their largesse to white Christians like themselves. Maher’s a tighter writer, but the impulse is still right ~400 years later.

I look forward to Maher’s help in scrubbing the world of those idiots who can’t live with difference, in the words of Roger Williams, between Peace and Truth. I expect it to be a religious experience

It is time for a movement to come together, get organized, and start converting the flock to rationalist positions from their parent-facilitated brainwashing of religion.

Richard Dawkins and a few other luminaries founded The Brights movement (http://www.the-brights.net/) which seek to do exactly what you have said.