"Moore takes up tools of historical comparison to investigate why groups of people kill and torture each other. His answer is arrestingly simple: people persecute those whom they perceive as polluting due to their "impure" religious, political, or economic ideas.".

"Moore's provocative conclusion is that monotheism - with its monopoly on virtue and failure to provide supernatural scapegoats - is responsible for some of the most virulent forms of intolerance and is a major cause of human nastiness and suffering.

Moore does not say that the monotheist tradition was the primary source of Nazism, Stalinism, Maoism, violent Hindu fundamentalism or ethnic cleansing in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, but he does identify it as an indispensable cause because it justified, encouraged, and spread vindictive persecution throughout the world."--BOOK JACKET.