re: #4 cat-tikvah

It seems a fundamental (no pun intended) human challenge to live in a free and open society and be able to navigate the cognitive dissonance in saying that your own religious truth is neither negated or threatened by someone else’s different religious truth.

I think this is a byproduct of monotheism. The Greeks and romans, from what I’ve read, were typically more accepting of different beliefs because of the nature of their polytheism. But when you believe in not only the one true god but also the one true interpretation of him, then the idea that someone can believe in something else becomes problematic. If you’re a fundamentalist the existence of other belief systems calls into question you’re own belief system and that is rarely something a fundamentalist can tolerate.