OK, this is really off-topic, but your remark about "healthy religions" tripped a wire to an odd chain of thought, namely, "unhealthy" religions. I think there has been a lot of very good Science Fiction (back when science fiction was not composed almost entirely of potboiling sword-and-sorcery series) written around the subject, by many authors ... Andre Norton, I think, and Robert Heinlein ... certainly Kurt Vonnegut, and Margaret Atwood MOST certainly. The ones that come to mind most, though, are the novels of Sheri S. Tepper ... a really good writer, and if you haven't read her, stop everything you're doing now, cancel all your appointments for a week, and go out and buy anything of hers that you can find.
And ... can someone help with remembering the title and author of a particularly good story on the subject, featuring a bloodthirsty militant religion that worshipped "The Pale Child"? It sounds a lot like one of Tepper's works, but I can't remember, and I think I read it in one of the mags, probably Analog.
