In North America we have the issue in which religious fundamentalists want creationism taught as science.

In Canada, in a rugged place northeast of the Idaho-Montana border, a renegade branch of the Mormon church which fled the U.S. when the mainstream Mormon church rejected polygamy, has so restricted education particularly to the girls it grooms for marriage to older, rich men that it is under investigation. Almost all of the 1,000 residents are descendants of about six men.

In Canada, Muslim fundamentalists demanded that Sharia law replace Canadian family court law. (The bid was rejected in quebec and Ontario.)

Europe has a worse problem. For decades, France, the Netherlands, and other countries have allowed millions of Islamic fundamentalists to immigrate. Now these groups are demanding that Muslim Koranic law be applied to their people, replacing the general law for other citizens. When governments have refused, there is an immediate outcry: the government is interfering with religious freedom.

Remember that the 'religious freedom' claimed includes mutialtion of baby girls (clitorectomy, so they cannot later experience sexual pleasure) and the husband's right to beat his wife for any reason.

When one Netherlands government elected official called for a tightening of immigration rules, he was placed on a terrorist 'hit' list. So far he is still alive.

When a filmmaker showed some graphic footage of victims of religiously-sanctioned brutality, he was killed by a Muslim terrorist. The film's writer, herself a member of parliament, is under police watch because terrorists have promised she too will be assassinated.

So here is the question:

Shall we have democracy, with its humanist values, its equal rights, and equality under the law?

Or shall we have a Balkanization, where some citizens by reason of their birth and indoctrination are second-class citizens?

Enlightenment ideals of equality? Or fundamentalist bigotry?

In the UK it's simple enough. You obey the law of this country. If you don't we show no favours and certainly won't allow religious beliefs to be mitigation or justification for a crime. We have had a few horrendous cases of 'honour killings'and 'honour crimes', the most recent being when a father directed his sons to kill the boyfriend of their sister, which they duly did. Both the family and the victim were muslim.

The only indulgence we have allowed is that motorcycling Sikhs need wear no crash helmet. The thinking seems to have been that the rider should be allowed to risk getting himself killed, if that's a risk he accepted as incidental to his beliefs. He wouldn't be endangering anyone else and the cost, to the National Health Service, of treating injured Sikhs was unlikely to be much .

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Enlightenment ideals of equality? Or fundamentalist bigotry?

Not mutually exclusive: You can foster ideals while confronting bigotry. Humanistic ideals that celebrate man's intellect must also recognize the downside of the human condition: we lie, cheat, and hurt each other in some measure that will never be totally eradicated. Tribalism is another human tendency, the root of bigotry and balkanization. These problems (if you agree they're problems!) are known to be somehow "hard-wired" in our collective brains (our DNA for that matter) making them intractable problems.

Overpopulation is the biggest problem facing the world. If we only had to allocate the world's resources among, say, 3 billion people instead of the present 6, then life would be a lot easier for everybody while our species would remain biologically robust.

Overpopulation is overcome by educating people, making them aware. The catch-22 is that good education is virtually impossible in an overcrowded society. Universal public education is a luxury only affordable by industrialized nations, with no guarantee of quality (look at the U.S. in recent decades!). But once you educate children to read and write, reason logically, always remain curious about things, and help but not hurt others, then humanistic ideals will be closer to realization.

Civilized life is tough, and it's keeps getting tougher. Morality is a luxury for people who are not starving -- or under attack. We can try to regulate population size and health, establish economic stability, manage resources, behave by rule of law, and use all the other trappings of modern industrialized democratic nations. Yet overpopulation amidst depleted resources would seem to be humanity's forseeable doom. Kind of a giant stop sign for our big brains.

Religion is a rather seductive "hard-wired" universal social tendency (a highly successful "meme", as Richard Dawkins might say). Karl Marx famously described religion as the "opium of the masses" (or was that Harpo? ) It comforts our fear of death and offers answers to spiritual questions, but is closed to alternatives. Converted masses have arisen many times in history, and presumably always will.

The problem with religion, especially with fundamentalist sects, is its negative effects on education and population control. Education suffers when the collective wisdom of the world, such as science and history, is rejected in favor of holy scripture or other rigid tradition. Overpopulation results from a religious mandate to go forth and procreate (that one's not too difficult to preach ) and an ignorant populace doing what comes naturally.

So if we could break the cycle of overpopulation leading to poverty to ignorance to easy recruitment into large, cultish religious sects to more overpopulation, we might have room for optimism. Today I'm a pessimist.

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Almost all of the 1,000 residents are descendants of about six men.

Popularly known as "the shallow end of the gene pool"

It would seem the survival of civilization depends on the (impossible) complete separation of religion and government. Would that people of faith would find a way to keep it between themselves and their god or gods or goddesses, in the privacy of their homes and minds. Better, would that they would shed the need to believe in the untestable, to retreat from the ability to advance knowledge; and instead to replace mythology with spirituality and the seeking thereof. Yeah, well...