This is from the introduction to The Case for God, by Karen Armstrong, published in 2009:

“During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a time that historians call the early modern period, Western people began to develop an entirely new kind of civilization, governed by scientific rationality and based economically on technology and capital investment. Logos achieved such spectacular results that myth was  discredited and the scientific method was thought to be the only reliable means of attaining truth. This would make religion difficult, if not impossible. As theologians began to adopt the criteria of science, the mythos of Christianity were interpreted as empirically, rationally, and historically verifiable and forced into a style of thinking that was alien to them. Philosophers and scientists could no longer see the point of ritual, and religious knowledge became theoretical rather than practical. We lost the art of interpreting the old tales of gods walking the earth, dead men striding out of tombs, or seas parting miraculously. We began to understand concepts such as faith, revelation, myth, mystery, and dogma in a way that would have been very surprising to our ancestors. In particular, the meaning of the word “belief” changed, so that a credulous acceptance of creedal doctrines became the prerequisite of faith, so much so that today we often speak of religious people as “believers,” as though accepting orthodox dogma on “faith” were their most important activity.

This rationalized interpretation of religion has resulted in two distinctively modern phenomena: fundamentalism and atheism. The two are related. The defensive piety popularly known as fundamentalism erupted in almost every major faith during the twentieth century. In their desire to produce a wholly rational, scientific faith that abolished mythos in favor of logos, Christian fundamentalists have interpreted scripture with a literalism that is unparalleled in the history of religion. In the United States, Protestant fundamentalists have evolved an ideology known as “creation science” that regards the mythoi of the Bible as scientifically accurate.  They have, therefore, campaigned against the teaching of evolution in the public schools, because it contradicts the creation story in the first chapter of Genesis.” –Karen Armstrong, The Case for God, p. XV in hard back edition

And of course, we now have Islamic “believers” on the other side of the world bombing and  beheading those who disagree with their beliefs. Ouch.

During the recent “Cosmos” series on TV, the narrator pointed out that we are only 400 years away from the first time anyone looked at the stars through a telescope. 400 years. That is no time, evolutionarily speaking, since everyone thought that the world was flat and that a God who lived up in the sky would send them to either heaven or hell when they died (or reincarnate them after death). It’s certainly (and obviously) not enough time for most people on the planet to adapt their thinkings and imaginings to a universe far more vast, intricate and impersonal than their elders could have ever imagined.

Thus we all find ourselves caught in the pincers of a dying scorpion: last-gasp, backward-yearning, earth-centric thinking. And the clearer it becomes that its beliefs are not based on reality, the more violently will this dying scorpion thrash around. Ouch.