Maybe the best we can hope to do in those cases is to de-fang extremists. To make them as harmless as possible by keeping religion out of politics, helping to de-convert those who are willing to listen to reason and so on.

However, in cases of religious mania (or at least extreme eccentricity) the results could be unpredictable and possibly detrimental.

The irony, of course, is that it’s the extremists whose views are most likely to be detrimental to the world around them, and hence who are most in need of deconversion (if you subscribe to the utilitarian consequentialist (ooh, big words!) view, which it seems you do, Eshu). I don’t labour under any delusion that we can make a dent in the faith of such people, so the whole question is pretty much moot, but as far as this thought experiment goes, I think if anything we’re under more of an ethical imperative to attack such beliefs. Quiet, mousy Anglicans who go to church to sing hymns on a Sunday morning and maybe have the vicar round to tea a couple of times are far less of a threat to society at large than the Discovery Institute or Focus On the Family.

(Sorry to go OT, but you’ve been tagged.)