To say that all religious traditions bear a message of love, compassion and forgiveness is the equivalent of declaring, "There's so much good in the worst of us/and so much bad in the best of us/that it ill behooves any of us/to talk about the rest of us." This is meaningless doggerel, embodying a bland, suffocating tolerance that no doubt plays as well before international bodies as it does at the interfaith prayer breakfasts of which Americans are so fond. Such generalizations ignore the facts of both secular and religious history. What if the Dalai Lama had declared that all secular or atheist traditions carry basically the same message of love and forgiveness? That, too, would be a nonsensical statement, because the interplay of good and evil in secularism is just as apparent as it is in religion.

Is the Dalai Lama suggesting that the Taliban, which reduced ancient Buddhist statues to smithereens, was interpreting Islam in a way that carried a message of love? Is he suggesting that fundamentalist Christians who believe that every non-Christian will condemned to eternal fire on Judgment Day are carrying a message of forgiveness? Is he suggesting that far-right Orthodox Jews are displaying compassion when they deny religious divorces to women whose husbands do not consent and consider children of subsequent marriages bastards (if the women have enough guts to defy the rabbis)? Is he suggesting that a harsh caste system, which still prevails among many devout conservative Hindus, serves the cause of human rights? Does he believe that some Buddhists were right when they blamed Christian and Muslim deaths in the horrific tsunami that struck Indonesia on the fact that Christians and Muslims eat meat?

Of course the Dalai Lama didn't mean any of these things. What he meant was that his ideal of religion embodies mercy, compassion and love. But if the merciful ideal of religion defined all religious traditions, the earth would not be filled with the corpses of people murdered for believing in a different deity than the deity worshipped by their murderers. Yes, people really do still murder one another over differences in supernatural belief. It is indeed a blight on our species that religious warfare is not merely a bad memory from the Dark Ages, but talking as if hatred and cruelty were not still a part of "religious tradition" does not make the hatred and cruelty any less real.

Religion confers no special nobility on its believers or its leaders, and that goes for Eastern as well as Western religions. Many Americans (including secularists) have all sorts of fantasies, originally spawned in the sixties, about the superior virtue of Eastern religions. Look at the inferior position of women in many societies with a strong Buddhist influence, and tell me that this religion has done any better by the female sex than the monotheistic creeds of the West.

Whether people adhere to secular or religious traditions, the dividing line is always between the merciful and the merciless.

Join my discussion about the Dalai Lama. Read the Dalai Lama's message, published in Outlook.